The title of this post is taken from a comment upon an article on self medication among animals that appears today in the New York Times. It is a response given by a Native American elder to a person asking how to choose wild plants for their medicinal properties, specifically how to choose the right plant for a particular ailment.
For anyone with a materialist view of the world, the recommendation immediately poses a problem. How does one talk to a plant, since they do not appear to speak and listen in the same way that humans do? That is, they do not seem to have the ears and tongues and other parts that we usually associate with the verb 'to talk'.
In the kind of late night rumination to which I am prone, I arrived first at the phrase 'self reciprocating mutualism' and then 'self-reflecting symbiosis' to describe how a materialist would have to consider most if not all forms of interspecies, not to mention cross-kingdom, communication in which there was any hope for an equal exchange of information. In other words, the conversation would have to occur principally if not exclusively in the mind of the approaching interlocutor, at least if one were to adhere to a materialist understanding of communication as a mutual exchange between or among all participants that occurs through vocalizing the the reception of vocalizations with organs that are sensitive to vibrations carried through air or water. In this sense, the phrase 'go ask the plant' becomes something like 'be open to what the plant is telling you' by way of its silent presentation.
But just as most people would agree that animals, particularly pets, speak to humans in their own way, through barks, twirls, head tilts and other forms of nonverbal communication, with no vocalizations, with a little contemplation, I think they would agree that plants do the same thing, with open flowers, drooping leaves and other manifestations. After all, even communication between two human beings has a large and important nonvocal component.
These displays would not seem to offer the specific medical information that would be needed, however, so perhaps the essential communication would come through means other than hearing or sight, specifically through taste, scent and touch, senses that have been greatly diminished in humans, at least through cultural neglect and degradation. This would be a form of communication but not what we would consider to be talking. If we engage Sheldrake's idea of morphic fields, the conception of communication opens even more, even radically so.
Considered in this way, the communication between humans and plants is not contained at all within the mind of the human being, but is a truly mutual activity. This idea of mutuality figures prominently in my ongoing meditation upon the nature of host-guest relations, which will be the topic of a future post.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/18/magazine/the-self-medicating-animal.html?comments#permid=22577805
For anyone with a materialist view of the world, the recommendation immediately poses a problem. How does one talk to a plant, since they do not appear to speak and listen in the same way that humans do? That is, they do not seem to have the ears and tongues and other parts that we usually associate with the verb 'to talk'.
In the kind of late night rumination to which I am prone, I arrived first at the phrase 'self reciprocating mutualism' and then 'self-reflecting symbiosis' to describe how a materialist would have to consider most if not all forms of interspecies, not to mention cross-kingdom, communication in which there was any hope for an equal exchange of information. In other words, the conversation would have to occur principally if not exclusively in the mind of the approaching interlocutor, at least if one were to adhere to a materialist understanding of communication as a mutual exchange between or among all participants that occurs through vocalizing the the reception of vocalizations with organs that are sensitive to vibrations carried through air or water. In this sense, the phrase 'go ask the plant' becomes something like 'be open to what the plant is telling you' by way of its silent presentation.
But just as most people would agree that animals, particularly pets, speak to humans in their own way, through barks, twirls, head tilts and other forms of nonverbal communication, with no vocalizations, with a little contemplation, I think they would agree that plants do the same thing, with open flowers, drooping leaves and other manifestations. After all, even communication between two human beings has a large and important nonvocal component.
These displays would not seem to offer the specific medical information that would be needed, however, so perhaps the essential communication would come through means other than hearing or sight, specifically through taste, scent and touch, senses that have been greatly diminished in humans, at least through cultural neglect and degradation. This would be a form of communication but not what we would consider to be talking. If we engage Sheldrake's idea of morphic fields, the conception of communication opens even more, even radically so.
Considered in this way, the communication between humans and plants is not contained at all within the mind of the human being, but is a truly mutual activity. This idea of mutuality figures prominently in my ongoing meditation upon the nature of host-guest relations, which will be the topic of a future post.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/18/magazine/the-self-medicating-animal.html?comments#permid=22577805
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