The Evolutionary Mind

And each leaf is still an oak leaf; but if you look at the pattern of veins in a leaf, this is literally a primordial image of bifurcation.

RS: David Bohm, the quantum physicist, proposed that behind the world that we experience, the explicate order is an invisible, unmanifested source: the implicate order.

All the multiplicity of forms is a manifestation of the one formless reality.

Perhaps, as there’s an increase of complexity in our culture, as we approach the Eschaton, there’s an accompanying decrease as fractality actually vanishes at an alarming rate. This is what’s meant by “the death of nature.”

The idea that modern science is so objective and unbiased in these areas seems to be based on the notion that, by putting on a white coat, one becomes completely objective, and is not subject to the biases that everybody is.

The method of statistical analysis has produced general formalizations of nature’s mechanisms, and wonderful products that can be sold and patented, but it’s a coarse-veined view of nature.

But Ralph, the most intelligent entities we know are plants.

If you perceive time in this a-historical mode, then what returns to you is a nature become alive, full of intent, intelligence, and information. If you don’t have that view of time nature becomes dead, a resource for exploitation. Don’t you think?

TM: One of the most frightening trends I think in modern culture is the wish to build shopping malls everywhere. There is a mentality that would like to turn the entire planet into an international airport arrival concourse.

The reason the nonflowering plants conquered the planet, if you think about it, is because the planet was like Hawaii. It was new lava, it was covered with lava flows, and the ferns could get hold. We think of ferns as soft, somehow spoiled plants. Actually, they’re the toughest plants there are.