Exopermaculture January 4, 2013 by Ann Kreilkamp
This is the kind of piece that sets off alarm bells in me. The author is a philosopher of science, something that I studied in graduate school as well. Then I evolved into an astrologer, and spent the better part of twenty years nudging people to learn how to speak this symbolic language, since it’s one that we can all appreciate, no matter what our cultural differences. Why? Because astrology is based on the changing configurations in the sky above. So, I’d say that Abrams might have mentioned that just the sky itself, with the sun, moon, and stars, is also “equally true for every person on earth.” If we would only look up!
Moreover, I question the idea of utilizing a single story to help shape us up into some kind of form that may or may not (actually, of course does not!) exhaust the possibilities of which we, and the universe, are capable. Stories seem to “make sense” of the phenomenal flux; to that extent they feel good. In order to “make sense,” they must necessarily leave out everything except that which fits the narrative line. Like a path that leads through the forest without ever really bowing to the forest. That’s why we call stories, or any mirrors or other theories that we construct to help us see and understand, “pale” reflections, not, or not quite, as real as the original.
I’d rather see us learn how to live between the lines, below or within any of our stories; I’d rather learn how to abide in the spacious present that allows for infinite possibilities.
And then there’s the near-buried, and likely unnoticed scientistic assumptions that humanity is perhaps the only really really intelligent life (“We are alone in the universe”), that life and intelligence evolved up from matter (the reductionist, materialist hypothesis), and that “space” and “time” as we conceive them spread into the universe as a whole (rather than being an earth-encircling matrix).
Finally, I wish Abrams had penetrated more deeply into the “double dark” metaphor as it effects us, our understanding of ourselves. For one thing, it suggests that we can’t see most of what’s real! That our five outer senses are useless here. That within us lie mysteries beyond imagining . . . That recognition alone might make us get off our high “scientific” horses and realize that whatever we think we know is necessarily sooner or later and probably sooner swallowed up in something much, much larger that is way beyond our ken, no matter who we “think” we are.
Even so, despite all these caveats, I do very much appreciate this and any attempt to nudge us into thinking beyond the next cheeseburger or hedge fund or political argument to the awe-full immensity in which we “live and move and have our being.”
