Intuiting Wholeness

some reflections on farming and cognition

Imagine a great pile of millions of dots, but forget it is a pile. See instead only countless points. The modern way of “knowing” tends to aggregate disparate points, like stippling in art. Or a great pile of crystalline snowflakes.

Our idea of science as a unified whole is not scientific in a purely materialistic sense because we always use spiritual ideas that intuit wholeness. Fortunately, materialists cannot be consistently materialistic. To see everything as radically separate and without meaningful relationships would remove all impetus for action and eliminate the basis of scientific inquiry. We couldn’t even accurately or meaningfully call such a thing “materialism” except that we rely on the spiritual, cognitive world to make such generalizations. There is something in human beings that fundamentally opposes the conclusions of materialism. Materialism is impossible to implement perfectly.

The one-sidedness of data points with an agenda billowing like snow around a tree.

When we see a pile of snow, we immediately perceive the mound, not the countless parts. We don’t have to think about it; we see the unifying wholeness in front of us. This automatic proclivity in human beings prevents materialistic science from being as damaging as it might be. Within each human being is a divine ember, no matter how heavily burdened it may be by their prejudices. Within each of us is a soul spark that can be fanned into a great flame of enthusiasm. 

The modern materialistic mode of knowing only forms shapes around things, as snow drifts around various obstructions. Dead thinking is as useless for entering into objects as frozen snow is useless for entering into the plant.  

When thawed, snow becomes water, which the tree can draw up and express as living leafy forms.

Snow must be melted with warmth and cohere as water, and only then can it enter into the plant and rise throughout its form. With more consistent warmth, the leaves of the plant transpire the water that had entered them and exhale what was once solid and then fluid as a gaseous vapor. As the cloud of airy humidity accumulates from out of the tree around itself, so living thinking not only permeates the form of the object itself but becomes subtlized, feeling out not just the contours of a particular form but also extending out into the surrounding space.

Tree exhales water vapor through its leaves into the greater connections of its wider environment.

For solid objects, one might conceive of projective geometry — lines extending outwards in all directions that articulate the perceptible shapes in front of us by their distinct intersection. For living things, this is the entire surrounding environment. As Steiner says, a plant does not end at its visible edges — its “contours” — but belongs to the entire cosmos. A plant is truly and fully a plant in its natural environment. If you rip a plant out of the soil, it quickly ceases to be a living plant. Likewise, a human being estranged from nature is only half a human being, though a human being estranged from himself — even amid nature — is a beast.

True living knowledge is inextricable from the environment in which an organism is embedded. This is true of a plant, but it is also true of everything else. Everything is embedded in the universe, an inextricable part. One could almost say that if you understood a single living thing perfectly, you would also understand everything else because a perfect understanding of the environment of a single tree would present you with outlines of the spaces that other living things occupy. Of course, “perfect” knowledge is not possible for us, but it is enough to say that whatever we learn in this living way about one thing also informs all other things.

Yet beyond its earthy solidity or fluid forms or the surrounding airy exhalation, there is always a permeating warmth. Without introducing warmth to what we observe, everything we know is frozen. Without loving what we observe, we cannot truly enter into it or know it. To know something, we must experience it from within. This is the mystery of incarnation, the heart of human existence. If we rely exclusively on cold skepticism, it is like studying trees only by snow drifts that accumulate around a forest or on its branches. Such knowledge is not false, but it is only “around” life, not in life. If dissolved, external knowledge can still nourish life. Likewise, material sciences, thawed by love, can still nourish life. Ice cannot nourish life in itself, but warmed into the water, it can. 

Warmth around the tree draws out the breath, stirs the plant to mobility, and thaws ice into water useful to life. Without warmth, everything we know as supple bodies would be frozen solid.

When we bring the warmth of enthusiasm into our observations, we enter the object in front of us, and the object enters us in return. “Dead” knowledge is like snow piled up around the trunk of a tree but still has a vague resemblance to the tree around which it is formed. If you know which way the winds of materialism blow, you will understand the irregular shape it forms around the object of its study. There is a willful assertion in materialistic conclusions, namely, the desire to prove the nonexistence of the spiritual world.

We have made a materialistic world in which our lives have lost meaning. A dead soil behaves in materialistic ways because life has been killed out of it. This makes NPK numbers perfectly accurate for deadened soils. But part of us knows that this loss of meaning in itself has meaning, but we don't know how to reclaim it, so we must prove that our meaninglessness is an inextricable part of the world. In a word, materialism is the projection onto the world of our own spiritual deadness. Under a mechanistic gaze, life is reduced to deadened processes. In agriculture, when we treat living organisms as dead systems, they truly become dead systems. If I treat an animal as if it were a dead machine, it will become alienated from its nature and a stranger to its own instincts, as can be seen in overbreeding and CAFOs. Such animals behave as if they are in an agitated stupor. Unfortunately, this is because we human beings have been like this in the first place. We cannot blame animals for becoming what we make them any more than a potter can blame clay for becoming an urn in his hands. This is why plants must not be planted in dead soil, or they will really become like stupid machines. 

But the snow more resembles itself and the direction from which it blows than the tree around which it is formed. Sometimes, when there is light snow with little breeze, you get the most beautiful presentation of the form of the tree as a dusting of snow, almost like confectioner sugar. This delicate empiricism does not ask the tree to be other than it is and does not overburden it with wilful, blustery inquiries seeking to prove a pre-formed doctrine. When science begins with the presupposition of materialism, it billows great mounds of statistics that do little to reveal the object of study but instead bury it in countless frigid data points. Unfortunately, the more uncorrelated data that accumulates, the more persistent warmth is required to melt it all into something that can fluidly enter the living form of the tree.

A “delicate” empiricism that knows its own limitations can give us the gestalt of the object observed without overburdening it with our own presuppositions. You, for example, don’t see random dots in the image above; you see an implied tree.

The intimate knowledge of a tree may even sometimes appear to contradict the form of materialism around it — and it must. Materialism asserted in research is a militant projection of its own premises, not an impartial search for the truth. Invariably, it is in the interpretation of scientific results where the pitfalls arise if we set aside the misleading interpretations and instead see them as the accumulation of snow that they are, there is no obstacle between seeing the tree itself in spite of the snow. There is nothing wrong with studies in themselves. Even though most studies are discarded because of technical flaws, those undertaking the studies clearly show remarkable technical prowess.

The trouble is there is no such thing as a neutral stance. The human gaze is either absorbing warmth or giving warmth. What is lukewarm is spat out entirely. But there should be no torrential “wind” on our part. A mild breeze is fine, even good, to see who a tree really is, but whiteout conditions of a blizzard obscure the tree. When materialistic science insists on demonstrating its assumptions and brings that willful petulance into its observations, it corrupts otherwise could have been good results.

If we really treated plants like they were machines, it would be disastrous. Yes, we speak of biological dynamics in terms of “mechanisms,” but they aren’t mechanical at all — each aspect of a living thing is irreplaceable. Nothing like a machine at all. Fortunately, even when we call something a “mechanism” there is an automatic recognition that a plant is not a machine but is a living thing with sensitive and changing needs. This is a contradiction in materialism but also one of its saving graces. If we had completely consistently applied materialism, the Earth would have already perished and humanity as we know it with it.

Skepticism keeps knowledge “outside” the object observed with many points of cold, isolated knowledge. Even when it performs vivisections, what is studied is surface upon surface, easily alienated from the whole. This can be done with clinical detachment, as Descartes cut open live conscious dogs and would cut away pieces of their hearts bit by bit. Yet, somehow this same man asserted that animals do not feel pain. The absurdity of claiming that animals do not feel pain goes against every empirical observation. We know animals can feel, or we couldn't deter cows with an electric fence.

Intuiting wholeness is a living experience, one which we can all aspire to cultivate within ourselves day by day within the miracle of ordinary experience.