June/July 1983 RAIN Page 21 Instead of inflating our human consciousness to fill trees, we must let the trees, into our mind. spirits but as beings in their own right, beings that are infinitely more mysterious and wonderful than the nymphs and sprites of the old myths. Science has raised the possibility that there are as many different consciousnesses in the world as there are organisms capable of perception. It also has raised the possibility that consciousness may arise in ways that seem very alien to us. The symbiotic superconsciousness I vaguely sense in forests is not outside scientific possibility. The age of myth is not dead; it is just beginning, if humans can survive to inhabit it. Only, instead of myths peopled with talking trees, we must begin to create the opposite. (The fact that such myths—inhabited by “treeing talks"—aren't fully expressible with our present syntax and vocabulary is one measure of the magnitude of the enterprise.) Instead of inflating our human consciousness to fill trees, we must let the trees into our minds. It is not a sentimental undertaking. When science found that we don't have thoughts and feelings in common with the nonhuman, it also found we do have something equally important in common— origins. We are very different from trees, but we also are like them. As we learn how they live, we learn a great deal of how we live. Learning does not occur only in the mind. High towers of intellectual learning require deep foundations of emotional knowledge, or they lack stability. The more we know about trees, the more we need to feel about them. The human element has grown too large and powerful for petty or trivial feelings about the nonhuman. What we feel about pettily, we begin to destroy, as we are destroying forests to produce junk mail and other trivialities. Future myths will.be different from past myths, but their function will be the same—to sustain life. When the human element was small, when there were billions of trees and only thousands of people it was sustaining to imagine that trees contained spirits humans could talk to, propitiate, befriend. It gave proportion to the world. Now, when there are billions of people, and not so many trees, it is sustaining to imagine what it might be like to open one's flowers on a spring afternoon, or to stand silently, making food out of sunlight, for a thousand years. It gives proportion to the world. Of course, imagination can only go so far. The incompleteness of scientific knowledge also limits emotional knowledge. We can't fully imagine a tree's existence because we don't know how, or if, a tree experiences its life. So something of the old mythological imagination probably will linger for a long time. We will continue to project our human feelings onto other orgamsms, as we try to imagine their nonhuman experience.^ ^
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