Johnny Crow’s Garden

Michael Nagler

MANY OF YOU will remember this children’s book, which I often read to my kids. It was clever and fun (which was a relief from much of that genre), and there was a line that still makes me smile when I think of it. There’s a big philosophy mash-up with all the animals, and when it’s gotten rather tedious:

Said the hippopotami, “Ask no longer, what-am-I!”

Of course, it was the incongruity of one of the most profound questions in philosophy, the question which in one way or another we all have to answer, posed by nature’s most ungainly creatures (not to mention the hilarious rhyme) that made this line so memorable 𑁋 at least for me.

That said, it’s been increasingly urgent for me, whose kids now have kids of their own, who have kids of their own, to get a handle on that very question. I strongly believe it lies at the heart of the great shift that I see trying to effect itself in the world; a shift in what’s known variously as our paradigm, or ‘story,’ or worldview 𑁋 the way we understand ourselves and others, and our relations to others.

It’s common knowledge now (in the subset of people who think about such things) that history is an ongoing process of paradigms breaking down in favor of new ones that seem to explain things better, until they don’t.

Very simply put, the old story was intensely focused on material reality. In it, we are thought of as bodies. But that’s not what we are. That’s a travesty. And it’s breaking down.

In Edenton, NC yesterday, a man set a brush fire, and when the responders showed up to put it out, he shot two of them dead and wounded a third (who’s recovering). The Sheriff of the small town stated, “I cannot fathom why anyone would want to commit a crime like this.” I think he used a very apt term, ‘fathom,’ because it’s really a deep issue: when the world order is breaking down and you don’t have anything to replace it, you can get very deeply frightened. You can lose your sense that life has any meaning. And this is happening now, on a big scale. The twelve-year-old who killed himself in England around the same time, taking up a “challenge” on social media to strangle yourself almost to death, was responding to the same crisis of meaning in his own way 𑁋 and these are just two cases, two of the many lives adrift.

There is a new story. In it, the question “who are we” gets a much richer answer, more befitting of our human being: simply out, we are body, mind, and spirit. And this is an exponentially ascending hierarchy: as bodies, yes, we ‘are’ material 𑁋 the old story was right that far. As minds, there is rapidly accumulating evidence that we are potentially not separate from one another, that Einstein’s scorned “spooky actions at a distance” actually happen. One morning while I was still asleep, I heard my son saying, ‘Dad, I’m in trouble, I need you.’ Josh was studying in London at the time, 6,000 miles away. At first, I tried to brush it off, but it was unlike my normal dreams, which are usually weird, so after a while, I sent him an email asking, “Josh, are you all right? I had a funny dream about you last night.” “No, I’m not all right, Dad,” he replied, “Yesterday I stepped off a curb and broke my ankle.”

Trust me, I am not a psychic, and neither is Josh. I don’t have any capacity that you don’t. The point is that somewhere between ‘mind,’ which uses language, and ‘spirit,’ of whose operations we are normally not aware but which, according to the sages, is the element by virtue of which we are alive, is a zone of reality not confined to the ‘normal’ limitations of spacetime.

Mapping this onto our ontological hierarchy: as bodies, we are separate; as minds, we are occasionally in sync; as Spirit we’re one. Spirit, aka consciousness, is not defined in spacetime. Today, there’s a raft of experiments demonstrating this, though scientists are still pretty much at a loss for how to explain it.

It’s because our culture in general is stuck in the old paradigm today, our ‘creed outworn,’ that we imagine ourselves as material entities separate from each other. The frustration caused by this misunderstanding, generating the illusion that you can hurt others without harming yourself, opens the door to violence. Neither scientific evidence nor direct experience has been able to close that door for a majority of us. If educators had the permission to impart this truth, and advertisers did not have permission to smother it, we would soon have a society much freer than we are now from the plague of violence.

Fathom it.