This is a very brief essay so I would refer the reader to the Wikipedia articles on idealism and panpsychism, which are the two main ways of understanding the universe as basically mind-like rather than thing-like: yurl.com/y6qy8lhm and yurl.com/a5lvmx2. Idealism and panpsychism are overlapping concepts, and there are a variety of flavors for each.
A Different Way of being open to reality.
Perhaps we need to set aside technological language and turn to poetry and theology in order to gain at least an initial intuition of what an alternative to the modern project might be.
In his poem, There Was a Child Went Forth Every Day, Walt Whitman suggests that there is a different way of knowing reality, a way that is not alienating. It is a way, he believes, that is natural to children. In this way of knowing we become the other. His poem begins with these verses:
There
was a child went forth every day;
And the first object he look'd
upon, that object he became;
And that object became part of him
for the day, or a certain part of
the day, or for many years, or
stretching cycles of years.
The early lilacs became part
of this child,
And grass, and white and red morning-glories, and
white and red
clover, and the song of the phoebe-bird ...
Something very similar is suggested by the the Jewish philosopher and theologian Martin Buber. He wrote a book entitled "I and Thou." In it he suggested that there are two distinct ways of relating to an entity, which he called "I-It" and "I-Thou." In an I-It relationship we relate to an entity other than ourselves as an object. In an I-Thou relationship we relate to the entity as a subject. In the I-Thou relationship the other is recognized as having its own goals, wishes, modes of experience and agency. In an I-Thou relationship empathy takes us literally beyond the boundaries between us and another entity. We are in that paradoxical relationship upon which all mystic experience is based--that of being simultaneously one-with and separate-from the other. This enables us to see the other from the inside, because of our oneness. In an I-It relationship, we are completely other than the other. We know it only from the outside, and our relationship with it is generally instrumental. If we have any interest at all in it; it is only to use it.
An I-Thou relationship is not limited to people. Nor is an I-It relationship limited to what we would normally calls "things." I can have an I-Thou relationship with my back yard and and I-It relationship with my neighbor. It's a matter of how I open myself to the encounter.
Perhaps a few examples will both clarify what I mean by the concept, and show that it is much more common than one might first suspect. It turns up in the most unlikely places:
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Entanglement. Physicists describe a situation in which two or more particles become very much like one particle while remaining distinct.
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The Birth of the Self. The birth of the self as a process that begins with the symbiotic oneness of the infant with its mother, and proceeds through the first year of life to separation and individuation.
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Sheldrake's Dog-and-Master Experiment. https://youtu.be/9QsPWitQovM This experiment is virtual proof of telepathy. But how do we understand telepathy, except as the two entities (dog and master in this case) being entangled, being both the same and separate.
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Grief Work. Throughout life we grow through a process of taking others into ourselves. Once again we see that the boundaries of the self are semi-permeable. People interpenetrate each other, are a part of each other. This process of taking the other into the self has a special significance in the process of grief when becoming one with the lost entity takes on a special significance.
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The Nicene Creed. During the first five centuries of the Church, the movers and shakers of early Christianity engaged in a great debate about the identity of Jesus. It went from, " He was a great man and and a prophet" to "He was God walking in the earth." Both were declared heresies, and the orthodox position became the paradoxical position that he was "Fully Man and Fully God."
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The Upanishads. The well-known metaphor of the drop returning to the ocean can best be understood not as a process in time (though it may be manifest that way) but as a paradox: Atman is Brahmin. The drop is both drop and ocean at the same time.
We find the idea cropping up from physics to theology. From two sub-atomic particles to a person and the absolute. It seems to be a both/and sort-of world: we are both the same and separate. We could call this the "I-thou effect."
Modern physics tells us that all of reality is wave-like. If we accept the panpsychic view that all of reality is also experiential, we are brought to a somewhat astonishing realization. Wave-like forms of experience are music. Thus it would appear that the universe exists to make music out of itself, and that we are its songs. I offer this not as a poetic metaphor but as a literal description of reality. Mathematics, mechanics and technology tell us something about how an orchestra is made. They may even help us make the instruments. But when we can no longer hear the music we have lost the whole point of it.
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