Remembering How to Know

I’ve written about my garden many times before because it’s always been a source of great lessons for me. The fires that took my house burned most of my garden as well. My giant orange tree, my newly planted olive tree, and many bushes and hedges are forever gone. About a month after the fire, once I had moved into a temporary place with a small concrete outdoor deck, I decided to bring some of my burned, but still alive, potted plants with me.

What happened next was remarkable. The first night I arranged the pots outside, a large group of birds moved into the tree directly in front of them. They sang loudly in unison every night, for hours, for several weeks. During that time, the plants began to recover. Then, once the healing was substantial and they were visibly thriving again, the birds left and never returned. Their job was done.

I had heard before that birdsong is healing to plants. Research shows that plants respond to acoustic frequencies. Sound can influence growth, germination, gene expression, photosynthesis, immune responses and resilience under stress. Researchers have also found that damaged plants release chemical and acoustic information into their environments that other plants, insects and animals can receive and respond to.

The most interesting part to me is that the birds knew to come. Somehow, they accessed the information that these plants were damaged and needed help, and they knew how to respond and when their job was done.

We see this kind of intelligence throughout nature. Trees connected through root and fungal systems exchange nutrients and signals, and when one is under stress, others can respond. Our own bodies do the same thing constantly. Something is damaged and, almost instantly, the whole system knows, producing what's needed to restore balance. Most of this happens completely outside our conscious awareness. Other species seem to remain much more connected to this larger flow of information than we do.

About a month ago, I took a friend out to dinner for her birthday. I was having a very difficult evening, and my body had reached a state that I could no longer change through thought. My mind was preoccupied and I was tense with stress, while doing my best to be cheerful and present for my friend. I may have fooled her, but I definitely did not fool her dog.

The dog made contact with my body and stood pressed firmly against my leg for 30 minutes. Eventually, it sat upright on my lap at the dinner table, something it had never done before. During the next 20 minutes, I felt this dog regulating my nervous system. It sat completely focused, it didn’t want to be petted or need attention. It was “working,” and I could feel it. It didn’t jump back down until its job was done. After that interaction, I was calm and felt completely peaceful, safe and present. The shift was physical and unmistakable.

There are many accounts of animals knowing things about their caretakers that were never communicated through ordinary means. There are stories of dogs anticipating when their people are coming home and of plants changing their growth patterns when their primary caretakers travel. I’ve experienced that with my own plants over years of travel, even when they were watered and cared for in my absence.

An episode of The Telepathy Tapes podcast called “Telepathy Between Species” features Anna Breytenbach, a South African interspecies communicator who describes telepathic communication with animals, insects and plants. She speaks of other species knowing details that were never communicated through ordinary physical channels. They know about the people around them, events occurring beyond their immediate location and the larger condition of the Earth. Many appear to be watching humanity with far greater awareness than we have granted them.

The episode stayed with me because it places the exchange somewhere deeper than advanced animal senses. The animal is receiving meaning: a question can be understood, and an image, feeling or knowing can pass between species without spoken language. The communication happens through a shared space of consciousness. She doesn’t “talk” to the other living beings; she accesses the information already being exchanged.

Everything that exists in the universe is part of the same field of information. Every form is immersed in it, contributing to it and receiving from it continuously. Nothing in creation exists outside of that field. All of it is made of the same underlying substance, and all of it has access to the whole. That means knowledge is everywhere.

What’s striking is that humans consider ourselves the most intelligent species, yet we seem to be the ones who have lost much of our access to it. We rely heavily on the senses and trust that we can see, hear, touch or eventually measure with an instrument, even though our senses perceive only a tiny fraction of reality. Human eyes see only a narrow band of the electromagnetic spectrum, our ears hear a limited range of frequencies, and our noses detect a fraction of the chemical information that many animals experience continuously. We built our model of reality around what we can perceive. Other species appear to remain tuned in to much more.

Still, humans have access to this kind of knowing. We feel it in moments of deep presence, intuition, meditation, silence or time in nature, when the mind becomes quiet enough for something deeper to come through. We sense that something is wrong before we can explain why; we feel when someone we love needs us; we know when to move and when to wait, and we sometimes receive ideas that seem to arrive whole. We’ve just become extremely good at overriding that information.

One of the things I promised myself after the fire was that I would never again allow a persistent feeling of uneasiness, anxiety or discomfort to sit quietly in the background of my life without giving it my attention. If something inside me keeps speaking, I stop and listen until I understand what it’s trying to tell me. When I can’t stop immediately, I return to it as soon as I can.

We have normalized moving through life while ignoring the information coming from within us. This is where meditation becomes practical. More becomes available when the mind quiets and the sensory world recedes. We can feel what’s happening in the body, notice energy, receive ideas and recognize patterns, accessing a kind of knowing that gets drowned out by constant thought and stimulation.

The advantages are huge: better decisions and timing, more sensitivity to our own bodies and to other people, more creativity, and greater trust in what we know before we can fully explain it.

But there’s another, larger consequence to all of this. Humanity declared itself the most intelligent species using a definition created from human abilities. We value language, analytical reasoning, technology and the power to manipulate the environment. We excel in those forms, so we placed ourselves at the top of a hierarchy, and that gave us permission to conquer.

Our hunger for knowledge is one of humanity’s most beautiful qualities. We want to know what lies beneath the ocean, beyond the atmosphere, inside the body and behind the visible world. Curiosity has generated science, medicine, philosophy, art and extraordinary exploration.

The Tree of Knowledge makes me think about the quality of that seeking. Once we imagine ourselves separate from creation, knowledge easily turns into possession. We study something, name it, extract from it, control it, then claim ownership over what we find.

We have repeated this movement across the planet. We’ve entered forests and converted them into timber, explored oceans and filled them with plastic, oil, industrial noise and abandoned equipment, studied animals and built cages around them, and found medicine in plants only to patent a version of it and establish ownership. We went into outer space and began surrounding the Earth with debris. More than 17,000 metric tons of human-made material now circle the planet, including nonfunctioning satellites and countless other objects and fragments of debris.

There’s another quality of seeking available to us. I think of it as a more feminine quality of inquiry. It's receptive, relational, intuitive and present; it observes long enough for something to reveal itself, pays attention to the effect of its arrival and understands that entering another system means becoming part of it. This kind of seeking could change how we explore everything, from another person to the deepest parts of the ocean.

I thought about this recently while watching A Life Illuminated, a documentary currently in theaters about marine biologist Edie Widder and her lifelong exploration of bioluminescence. I highly recommend it. Her passion, determination and devotion to her work are incredibly inspiring. She spent decades exploring one of the least understood places on Earth, following a mystery almost no one else was studying.

The film filled me with wonder. Bioluminescent beings communicate through light in a world that appears completely dark to us. Entire exchanges are taking place in the darkest parts of the ocean that we barely understand.

At one point, while watching a submersible descend into that darkness with bright lights and collect some of these creatures for study, I suddenly imagined the scene from their perspective. It looked like a UFO arriving on Earth. A glowing machine, brighter than anything you’ve ever seen, appears from another realm while strange beings inside observe you, reach into your world and remove a few of your kind to study somewhere else.

What if those creatures already know we exist? What if they perceive our presence long before we perceive theirs? What if their awareness of the ocean, the Earth, energy and the larger field of information is far more sophisticated than ours?

I loved the documentary, and I hope the exploration of the deep ocean develops differently from the way we have approached so many other frontiers. If we truly understood ourselves as participants in one interconnected field, we would approach other species, ecosystems and even unexplored worlds with a very different quality of attention.

Coming back to my temporary concrete garden, three of the succulents that remained burned much longer than the others have finally begun growing new arms. When I look at them, I think about the birds that arrived the first night the plants did, sang for weeks while they healed, and then left.

I find that interaction incredibly hopeful. There is far more intelligence, communication and knowledge moving through the universe than we have allowed ourselves to perceive. We belong to it and have access to it. We just need to remember how to tune in.

Paula 
Founder, INEMERGENCE