Birthing into a living world
Birthing into a living world
Meeting the world “inside to inside” within the container of quantum animism, and in other words: how can we use the hammer if we must always be measuring it?
A living, quantum world
A baby is alive inside its mother before it is born, but what about the world that holds them both? Do you feel the universe you inhabit to be a living universe?
Yes, I love Science, and you know this by my use of peer-reviewed citations. At the same time, to me, the modern hypothesis that only humans can bear consciousness seems absurd.
I can only imagine how lonely it must feel to believe one lives in an inanimate world.
To be forced to work from within the assumption that all things are to be considered unconscious until proven otherwise rings loudly to me as false.
By the way, is this livingness any more obvious than with the children, hidden within our wombs?
And this was the wall I often bump into with science as a whole.
So while it may seem obvious there is a materialist premise behind the vast majority of research, I didn’t know that when I started.
Back in 2009 when I was a research assistant in a lab at the USDA, I was surprised to find the experiments I had signed up to help with were conducted at a big sacrifice of (insect) life—deemed humane because the insects we were working with have not been proven conscious.
When I brought up my concerns, I was only informed this disregard for life went much further (most regulations in the US only apply to federally funded labs, as the more broad animal welfare laws specifically exclude the most common research animals).
And this led to the sharing of tales of animal research they had conducted in other labs that were much more gruesome than our sticky tape insect traps and soap cups.
Not only that, but I was informed we have also not yet proven insects can feel pain—therefore we actually need not concern ourselves about what the insects in (and around) our experiments might experience.
It turns out, this is an ongoing debate in entomology: Entomology And The Ethical Treatment Of Insects.
I can only imagine how lonely it must feel to believe one lives in an inanimate world.
It also seems also quite dull compared with the highly social world experienced by those living within the framework of animism—which is the closest thing I can find most true to my own experiences.
According to the Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology:
Animism is both a concept and a way of relating to the world. The person or social group with an ‘animistic’ sensibility attributes sentience – or the quality of being ‘animated’ – to a wide range of beings in the world, such as the environment, other persons, animals, plants, spirits, and forces of nature like the ocean, winds, sun, or moon. Some animistic persons or social groups furthermore attribute sentience to things like stones, metals, and minerals or items of technology, such as cars, robots, or computers. Principles of animation and questions of being are thus key to animism. That said, animism is best understood not only in terms of what it is, but in terms of what it is not. At first glance, animism seems to conjure up a coherent and deliberate ideology of sorts, as it ends in an ‘ism’. But animism is really more a sensibility, tendency, or style of engaging with the world and the beings or things that populate it. It is not a form of materialism, which posits that only matter, materials, and movement exist. Nor is animism a form of monotheism, which posits a single god in the universe. And, it is not a form of polytheism that posits many gods.
Instead, to an animistic person or social group, sentience is often envisioned as a vital force, life force, or animated property that is ‘immanent’, accessible, and ‘ready to hand’ in the everyday world, even if this property is usually latent and not perceivable.
Such a sentient world, immanent, accessible, and ready to hand just feels truer to me than to imagine a construct that the consciousness I experience is some kind of illusion of the flesh.
This is why doubting the existence of consciousness or Soul—or thinking we would need to prove sentience before taking humane precautions in research—seems so absurd to me.
Earlier this year, I shared an interview from Dr. Herbert, who worked (with apparently limited success, partially from his involvement with promoting the cult of hippy) to tie the philosophy of animism with a quantum physics lens.
He explained why Einstein rejected the quantum framework, and exposed how the theories Einstein popularized are actually quite warped in that they reject 3 qualities of the universe quantum experiments have proven true:
Einstein did not like that quantum described the world as governed only by general laws that give the odds for things to happen, but within these odds anything can happen. ie, we can’t always predict the universe
Einstein did not like that quantum described the world as made up of entities that become there when you look, but whose attributes aren't there when you aren’t looking. ie, our attention affects the universe as much, or more, as our touch does
And finally, Einstein did not like that quantum described everything in the universe as interconnected, specifically with interconnectedness that goes faster than light. ie, light is not the fastest thing in the universe after all
Here’s a section from that Herbert interview that struck me as poignant to the whole debate about whether we live in a physical, inanimate world like Einstein and his followers claim, or a quantum, animate world:
HERBERT: OK, well, since physicists don't know much about consciousness, we start with very crude models. So one model was that things have insides and outsides. Your outside is the physicalness of you, and the inside is your consciousness. So we assume everything has an inside and an outside, all the way from atoms to people.
MISHLOVE: You mean atoms might be conscious?
HERBERT: Oh yes. We'd never know it, because I can't find out your insides either.
MISHLOVE: There are some psychologists who think that human beings aren't conscious either.
HERBERT: That's true. What they show is that psychological methods can't show a psychologist someone else's insides. That's what they've proved.
MISHLOVE: You can only know your own.
HERBERT: Yes. So if we can't do it with people, we certainly can't do it with atoms. Atoms, for all we know, could be conscious; there's no way to show one way or another.
-Interview on Thinking Allowed, Conversations On the Leading Edge of Knowledge and Discovery, with Dr. Jeffrey Mishlove.
This is them casually chatting around the ideas Herbert was exploring relating quantum concepts with ancient understandings. In his work Holistic Physics, or, An Introduction to Quantum Tantra, Herbert wrote:
Many
primitivepeoples organized their lives around a doctrine we call "animism", the belief that every object possesses sentient "insides" like our own. The quantum consciousness assumption, which amounts to a kind of "quantum animism" likewise asserts that consciousness is an integral part of the physical world, not an emergent property of special biological or computational systems. Since everything in the world is on some level a quantum system, this assumption requires that everything be conscious on that level. If the world is truly quantum animated, then there is an immense amount of invisible inner experience going on all around us that is presently inaccessible to humans, because our own inner lives are imprisoned inside a small quantum system, isolated deep in the meat of an animal brain. We may not need to travel into outer space to inhabit entirely new worlds. New experiential worlds of inconceivable richness and variety may already be present "at our fingertips"--worlds made up of strangely intelligent minds that silently surround and interpenetrate our own modes of awareness.
Beyond a trope for sci-fi, the concept that quantum consciousness can be tapped into at any time will sound familiar to anyone already attuned to the animistic worldview.
The theories Einstein popularized are actually quite warped and ignorant of quantum realities.
As I have shared, so much of this circadian and quantum science I like to write about is just giving new words to the age old tales of how we humans get along in this unpredictable, co-creative, fast-moving and ever-transforming world.
For example, in the tale of Thor and Utgard-Loki told in the Prose Edda, the magical giant proved nothing can move faster than the speed of thought.
Presumably, that also means (sorry, Einstein worshippers) not even light can move faster than thought.
Quantum consciousness in the birth space
That same viewpoint from materialism that “the universe must be inanimate because we haven’t been able to prove otherwise” informs modern obstetrics, and even much of midwifery, just as it does the science we use to inform our “evidence-based” decisions.
So where I broke from most of Science fifteen years ago, I am now discovering how opposed I actually am with most paradigms informing materialist maternity care, too, which exemplifies the problems inherent to most of the greater field of modern healthcare.
Too much of the care we get in pregnancy is lacking in the deeper elements that affect our experiences.
I now believe this inadequacy, at its core, is due to the grand rejection of the livingness of the universe.
Without that living connection, we cut off huge amounts of the human experience—transcendental and miraculous parts that should absolutely be included in birth, this most mysterious of life’s gateways.
But you don’t have to be a quantum scientist or cultural anthropologist or traditional shaman get the benefits of the wisdom of animism, or to help women access its help in pregnancy and birth.
Because all systems are quantum, these truths we have discovered through quantum science are themselves intrinsic to reality.
It’s more a matter of reminding yourself that other aspect of reality is there.
Remember and remind of the truths about reality we deeply know and feel, like:
the existence of instant communication of a nonverbal, nonphysical nature
that connection with Nature makes us healthier and feel better
and healing and birth can be spontaneous, irrational, and miraculous
Accessing the animistic or quantum communication levels of reality simply involves relating with people and things as though they are sentient.
The three qualities of sentience according to animism
To experiment with the animistic worldview today, just start interacting with the sentience of the people, creatures, and yes, even things as though that sentience is:
immanent: inherent, indwelling, present
accessible: something you can easily reach
ready to hand: useful without need of being examined or understood
I particularly love the use of the phrase ready to hand here.
The philosopher Heidegger called our general state of being ready-to-hand (ie, we use hammers to build homes—and when we use the hammer, we are thinking of our home at the time, not the hammer because the hammer is “invisible” to us as we are using it; that the movements flow and there are no squeaky wheels to grab our attention is another way of describing this natural flow state).
When things stop flowing smoothly, we enter the unready-to-hand state, where we shift from being and doing things in the natural ready-to-hand state (ie, using a hammer), to examining in the third present-to-hand state (ie, describing the qualities of the hammer instead of using it).1
Thus, so much of all the work by the Einsteins and Herberts of the world can be summarily categorized as present-to-hand.
They have stopped using/doing, and instead have found the world frustrating and in need of examination.
This angst-inspired science moves us forward, sure, but at a terrible cost to our flowing, easy connection with sentient wisdom: immanent, accessible, and ready to hand.
Interestingly, in the world of AI, preventing the shift from ready-to-hand to unready-to-hand is key to keeping the continuity of the AI experience intact.
It’s only the change of states that causes us to doubt and examine—and so this is again so relevant in the birth space where women and practitioners are constantly presented with interruptions to their natural flow states.
How can we use the hammer if we must always be measuring it?
Updates from Nikko
New podcast interviews!
The Rooted Remedies Podcast about oral health:
Leap of Health Podcast about Optimal Health:
Replay of Online Research Methods for Quantum Practitioners will be out soon, along with some other exciting interviews and podcasts.
Dotov, D. G., Nie, L., & Chemero, A. (2010). A demonstration of the transition from ready-to-hand to unready-to-hand. PloS one, 5(3), e9433. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0009433