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.