To disregard other-than-human intelligence is no different than disregarding the intelligence of another person. Have you ever ran into someone that speaks broken English, perhaps someone who looks very much different from you? Did you get mad at them and raise your voice when they made that really awkward look that was kind of a smile and kind of concussion? Have you ever heard someone yell when someone doesn’t understand (because raising your own voice will definitely make a foreign language more intelligible)? Maybe that unintelligible person was a doctor, or a university student and you just couldn’t understand one another because your mode of communication was different. The frequency was off a bit.
Just because we don’t understand something that isn’t exactly like us or because our view of it doesn’t conform to biased litmus tests doesn’t mean that intelligence doesn’t exist, moreover that it isn’t more ubiquitous than it is exclusionary.
No philosopher, scientist, preacher, or artist can articulate Tao (The Way) in a way that encompasses all intelligence; more aptly described as ultimate awareness. That is why music, art, mathematics, all find in themselves a common vibration which more closely resembles a universal language. Suffice it to say, this is why music and art can be appreciated by such a diverse catacomb of people.
Good art and good music are interpolations of that language. This is why words do not carry the same rhythm into your bones by saying the word “Gong” as it does to make the sound of the gong… gong…. gongggggonggggggggonggggongg…. and see where it goes from there. And that is what the great poets and orators have attempted to encapsulate. The words point to the thing, they are not the thing. So in that way, the words to describe intelligence are not the thing they are pointing to.
So then what is intelligence? Is it the ability to adapt to new environments? To form social bonds and share a network of information across a universal platform? Is it the ability to recognize threats and respond for means of self-preservation? Or is it perhaps the ability to grieve and experience emotional range?
These are all observations that have been proven to occur outside of the hierarchy of humans. As a species we anthropomorphize our perspective of intelligence and we see, experience, and intellectualize it through the equipment that is our body, brain, and ego, evidenced by your own place in time relative to mine, relative to your own in a younger version of you. It’s all different and it all changes. Intelligence through another living being cannot be expressed as it is through your own subjective aperture. These characteristics of sentience, of undifferentiated consciousness span the animal, plant, and fungal kingdom.
Such is the case with a tree which has been demonstrated to hold within its root structure the very same neurotransmitters which innervate the very brain tissue that is said to generate consciousness. What’s more and what shouldn’t be underappreciated is that the root structure of a tree, unlike the human brain, isn’t limited to the growth of the skull.
This all seems plausible in the intellectual but beyond abstract reasoning, in the subjective experience do we see trees as sentient beings capable of mass communication and information transfer comparable to the internet? I certainly did not. I was raised a good Puritan and through agents of the cycle of socialization I was reeled in early on to refrain from such ideations.
I read the works of Arthur Haines and Stephen Harrod Buhner and was consumed by their details of plant intelligence and ancestral memory; it made sense, but there was an emotional disconnect that just didn’t leave it feeling real. It felt like everything I knew came from a book. And we can imagine all day about our feelings and what we think sounds right, but experiential knowledge is what grounds the intellectual to reality. Otherwise, we spend all day in our head working out solutions for which there narrowly was a problem to begin.
For my own sake, the arbiter of the tree’s sentience was a breakthrough dose of DMT. My old house, like the others in my neighborhood, was cut out of an old oak forest. 75 foot trees towered in my back yard with their distinctive lobed leaves that filled the canopy. In the fall the acorns drop from the trees and little oaks grow from the earth.
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The oak tree is so very interesting in the way that its fruit - the acorn - is truly a complete food. The meat found within its shell contains proteins, fats, and carbohydrates and by way of a process called leaching, harmful tannins are removed in changes of water baths rendering a completely edible and nutritious wild food. The acorns that remain on the ground and are not eaten begin to germinate and form new trees. The oak tree grows in every continent except Antarctica; the oldest living one found in California and estimated at over 2,000 years old. Hardly a lightweight. They really are amazing trees.
One spring morning I lay in my hammock strung between two of these behemoths. I was alone and would be for a few hours. Up to that point I had limited experience with N,N-dimethyltryptamine (DMT) but I had done extensive research on it followed by experimenting with some low sub-threshold doses. It has been said that DMT is the most powerful hallucinogen known to man. It is also the shortest in duration, lasting anywhere from 5-20 minutes. This abbreviated half-life is due to the drug being broken down by the body in short order. It cannot be taken orally in fact because of monoamine oxidase (MAO) in the digestive tract which metabolizes DMT before any of it can reach the brain.
In South America, the shaman medicine-men introduce an MAO inhibitor to the DMT containing plant bark of the acacia confucia and mimosa hosistillis trees to produce the psychedelic tea called Ayahuasca. The MAOI extends the duration of the DMT from minutes to hours. The ceremonial and religious use of Ayahuasca has been as much the way of life as anything else in those parts of the world for thousands of years.
I opted to smoke the white crystalline stones. As its vapor filled my lungs a loud ringing noise, not unlike that of acute tinnitus (absent of pain) filled my periphery. I took another deep inhalation and what was ringing gave way to an intense buzzing that first encircled me and then penetrated into my bones, as if to shake me loose from the bag of skin which I occupied. At that point there was a period without time wherein I a was floating above my body and was without form…
We put thirty spokes together and call it a wheel,
But it is on the space where there is nothing that the usefulness of the wheels depends.
…the space between the spokes. I could see, but from all directions and with the most intense brightness and hue that seemed otherwise impossible for human eyes to interpolate. This was further evidence that my eyes - that which is recognizable to myself and others as me - weren’t doing the seeing. There was no smell, and in a way I don’t know how else to describe, sound innervated movement.
That is to say that as I could look upon my body and see it breathe, I could at the same time look at the oak trees and see them breathe. And they did. I could see my carbon dioxide floating through the nothingness - me - and enter the leaves and bark of the tree. The trunks would swell with the exhalation of my breath and - almost akin to the weather maps the meteorologists point to which denote air current - would release fresh oxygen and like a pump, I was enveloped in this happening of synergy.
As I looked to the sky it had taken on a geometric pattern of intense colors and rhythms, as if the very electrical particles of the sky were isolated and illuminated. (If you were a kid in the 90s and ever watched the show “Reboot,” it reminded me of the sky as it would change colors; right before a new game would drop.) It, too, would ebb and flow with the breath of the trees as my body was swaddled between them.
And in that moment, I felt an intense sense described in no other way than I am home. And in a voice that was not my own, but not a voice, I was answered: Yes, you are home. No audible words were spoken. I could simultaneously see my own body paralyzed as if there was no one at home [citation needed discuss this ubiquity among users of DMT]. It was a telekinesis of sorts, and the air was innervated with this intelligence that emanated from the oak trees. The best parallel I can think of that relates this experience is the the telekinesis described the book series Animorphs: thought-speech. This is a subject that deserves its own chapter into exploration, but it best summarized by thinking through how you would communicate with someone in lieu of having a mouth… thought speech.
The first sensation my body was able to intuit was the breeze against the hairs on my body. And though the words were not articulated, I was enveloped with a love that was nothing short of parental love, or of what it can be on its best days.
As my body began to “turn back on” as it were, I began to get upset. I wanted to stay in this place that seemed as though it was created just for me. My protestations were quickly stymied however by a warmth that penetrated into my bones and my heart, the only comparison I can make is when I was a kid and I would put on pajamas fresh out of the dryer. On cold winter days it felt like I was getting the warmest hug all around my body and for an eight-year-old on a Saturday morning it doesn’t get much better than that (perhaps wrapping the blanket around the register and filling it with hot air).
The last thought-transmission was more direct this time. I had access to my body and it seemed as though I was quickly forgetting the magical place for which it felt I had spent an eternity. It was a voice in my head, not the internal chatter of the ego, but this time directly from the tree. As I locked gaze with its massive limb system, I heard We’ll be here, and any longing that may have been remaining was replaced with an overwhelming sense of gratitude. It was like how PTSD patients describe acute flashbacks, but in the opposite. I could not control what was happening to me, only respond, my body still paralyzed. And I lay there for an indeterminate amount of time, weeping from the impossible experience that would underwrite and presuppose my understanding of intelligence from then on.
So as not to confuse the food for the menu, each time I returned to that tree, weeks and months later, the feeling of associative synesthesia (feeling a very strong and involuntary connection between the stimulus and the sense that it triggers) remained. Though I could not access the visual and perceptual fields that cascaded my subjective reality whilst in the DMT realm, the relationship - the feeling you get when you see an old friend, one who always said the right thing and could calm your soul - was as real as my experience was at its peak.
To explain this all away by suggesting that the Serotonin agonist flooded by brain with the neurotransmitter that caused me to have intense euphoric hallucinations - well that is certainly one opinion. My opinion - for which I believe doesn’t assume we know more than ancient technologies that have existed longer than humans - is that this was a direct link with an intelligence older and farther reaching than our own. Older than time itself.
Suffice it to say, at the end of the day I do not know either. The only difference, to quote Socrates is that after that experience “I know that I know nothing.” Such is the case in the dialogue between Tommy Lee Jones and Will Smith in the movie Men In Black:
Fifteen hundred years ago everybody knew the Earth was the center of the universe.
Five hundred years ago, everybody knew the Earth was flat,
and fifteen minutes ago, you knew that humans were alone on this planet.
Imagine what you'll know tomorrow.
What’s more pressing in this discussion, I believe, is the way we are informed by our opinion on these interpretations. To say that what I experienced is no more than a chemical imbalance caused by an illegal drug suggests that my reasoning for doing so does not extend beyond that for recreational entertainment. I can attest that in my own experiences with DMT and other psychedelics, “recreation” does nothing to describe the emotional, physical, and psychological gauntlet that takes its place alongside the euphoria for which its recreation is ascribed.
Moreover, and far more egregious of a criticism is that by framing this experience through the lens of reductionist scientific labels (which inevitably take on and replace the meaning they attempt to describe) there is no relationship beyond the drug and the drug user. The tree becomes no more than a mirage, its imparted wisdom delusions of grandeur, and the takeaway I received becomes baseless, suspect, and spurious at best.
And in the absence of that relationship therein lies no implied reason to advocate for not only the intelligence of the tree but also for its protection and management. To do so is an inherently human trait. Hunter-gatherers have historically managed forests by the controlled burning of dead fall and other fireloading, as to protect new growth and steward its propagation.
When the relationship was broken, the cutting of the forest continued but now motivated by human interests and material gain. Conservation though use.
It was only when science convinced us that nature was dead that it could begin its autopsy in earnest.
-James Hillman
An example of a modern intact relationship is the hunter’s advocacy group, Ducks Unlimited. Its membership is made up of mostly hunters and outdoor enthusiasts who work through lobbying, fundraising, and boots on the ground action to restore and protect the wetlands of North America. At the heart of this organization which has influenced and conserved more than 243 million acres, there is a accord with the ecology that is not found in many environmental groups (Please understand I realize that I am painting with a broad brush here and not describing individuals but movements at their organizational core).
Hunters are intimately engaged not only with their prey but with the habitat of their prey. This is a symbiotic relationship wherein the hunters steward the habitat that the foul depend upon for their nourishment and protection. Hunters often spend hours behind blinds in cold and rainy climates waiting for a flock of ducks or geese to come close enough to call in.
Set-up and break-down of hunting areas builds an awareness of season, ecology and co-habitating wildlife. Time waiting means time observing and what comes from that? Experiential knowledge that cannot be obtained by reading this or any other description and can only be felt by being there. And why are you there? The task at hand: to take the life of something living so that you and your family and your friends might eat and live another day - a heavy burden indeed.
Hunters who understand this symbiosis carry inside of them reverence that can only be garnered from a relationship with the natural world and with the death of everything in it. They understand that death feeds life, but that it is not a chicken or egg scenario so much as it is a cyclical pattern; one that does not have a determinate beginning nor end point.
Whether foul, fish, or tree, this understanding presupposes the “treeness of the tree” insofar that it acknowledges the intelligence of other-than-human lifeforms. This is not to say in a way that anthropomorphizes animals wherein we pretend the bear wears a tie and goes home in his car to his bear cubs and bear wife or to the doctor to find out that he has bear diabetes (such is the undertone that pervades groups such as PETA and prominent vegan organizations). This is a human-centric interpolation that is as naïve as it is arrogant.
No, to see the “chickenness of the chicken” is to recognize the patterns and strategies which optimize that which brings the chicken into its optimal form. And when you stop trying to supplant your own interpretations about what intelligence is based on an impossible litmus test, you can see intelligence manifest in the animate lifeforms it innervates. The Native Americans recognized this and saw everything in the world as animate relatives, but also as themselves. They referred to the rivers as “Long Persons” whose job was to feed everyone to was fortunate enough to find themselves downstream. With the connection severed, the water runs with poison and the fish become unfit to eat, as in the time of the Anishinaabe Seven Fires Prophecy, what I have begun to call “The Warring States Period of the Early Anthropocene...”
This is the consequence of disregarding the intelligence of other-than-human lifeforms. In the absence of such heart-based cognition for those we share this planet with, it becomes easy to abstract them into numbers, and with that logic make it emotionally inconsequential when they cease to exist. They are, after all, catalogued away. We know what there is to know. And just like that, the world is robbed of its magic.
Knowing is the destroyer of worlds through its associative obsolescence. Learning takes from us what we already knew by way of robbing us of our unexamined assumptions. Learning animates the world through insatiable curiosity. Knowing explains it all away, or attempts to.
So how do you or I know the happiness of fish? Best I can assemble it plays out as it did in a story from the Chuang Tzu, the old Taoist story from The Warring States Period of Ancient China:
Zhuangzi and Huizi were strolling along the bridge over the Hao River. Zhuangzi said, “The minnows swim about so freely, following the openings wherever they take them. Such is the happiness of fish.”
Huizi said, “You are not a fish, so whence do you know the happiness of fish?”
Zhuangzi said, “You are not I, so whence do you know I don’t know the happiness of fish?”
"I'm not you", said Master Hui, "so I certainly do not know what you do. But you're certainly not a fish, so it is irrefutable that you do not know what the joy of fishes is."
"Let's go back to where we started," said Master Chuang. "When you said, 'How do you know what the joy of fishes is?' you asked me because you already knew that I knew. I know it by strolling over the Hao."
You know by NOT trying to know. Where the primary senses find their limitations, the environment will extend those sense’s reach. Understanding and articulation are not mutually exclusive and this is why we can not posit the nature of intelligence within the diaphragm that is the human physical body.