Sympatheia-the cosmic consciousness
When 19th-century Scottish-American glaciologist John Muir visited Glacier Bay, Alaska, he noted down the following in his journal:
“We feel the life and motion about us, and the universal beauty: the tides marching back and forth with weariless industry, leaving the beautiful shores, and swaying the purple dulse of the broad meadows of the sea where the fishes are fed, the wild streams in rows white with waterfalls, ever in bloom and ever in song, spreading their branches over a thousand mountains; the vast forests feeding on the drenching sunbeams, every cell in a whirl of enjoyment; misty flocks of insects stirring all the air, the wild sheep and goats on the grassy ridges above the woods, bears in the berry-tangles, mink and beaver and otter far back on many a river and lake; Indians and adventurers pursuing their lonely ways; birds tending to their young — everywhere, everywhere, beauty and life, and glad, rejoicing action.”
The feeling that John Muir described is what ancient Stoic philosophers called sympatheia or connectedness with the cosmos. The feeling of immense euphoria in realizing we are part of the ecological niche larger than life, and witnessing our vanity and narrow-mindedness disappearing into the thin air. In the infinite expanses of cosmos, we, humble human beings, are mere infinitesimal points. I had a similar feeling aboard an aircraft flying above Russia a decade ago from Tokyo to Paris; all I can see for hours was twilight, silhouettes of major rivers and snow-capped peaks. So hard to imagine that in between those prominent geological features and sublime landscapes amidst tranquil-almost hypnotizing- twilight, there lives millions of mortals in perpetual states dictated by one’s emotions quarrelling for ludicrous personal grudges, self-conceit, political vendetta, office politics, gossips, religious dogma, honour, recognition, reputation, valour, obsession, wealth, pride and so on. Inventor Elon Musk said: “Life is too short for long-term grudges”. Author Yuval Noah Harari wonderfully illustrated in his book ‘Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind’ various kinds of myths hardwired in the minds of all of us (and we believe them to be true); religion, nationalism, judiciary, freedom, human rights and so on. “If your reputation can’t absorb a few blows, it wasn’t worth anything in the first place,” wrote Ryan Holiday in ‘Ego is the Enemy’.
Have you ever visited a seashore? In a sense, I am blessed to have chosen to be a marine biologist as I could get many opportunities to visit rocky shores throughout my life. Looking at the ocean stretching out to horizon and its marvellous surf beating the shore (and swaying seaweeds ‘purple dulse’ as noted by John Muir) , most of us would have had similar feeling; the feeling that we are not quite important, the feeling referred as ‘oceanic feeling’ or The Cosmic Consciousness by French philosopher Pierre Hadot. We might even ponder about the purposes of our life then, or its deeper meaning, or values; the existential crisis. Hadot wrote:
“…an exercise intended to make us transcend our biased and partial point of view, to bring us to see things and our personal existence in a cosmic and universal perspective, to resituate us within the immense event of the universe, but also, one might say, in the unfathomable mystery of existence.”
It is essential to have such a zoomed-out perspective of our life in order to get rid of ego, identify things that truly matter us, recognize what we want to do with our lives and relish the present moment as it is. We should come to terms with the realization that there is no such thing called deep-meaning of our lives. In search of finding such a purported deep meaning of our lives, we pick clusters of coincidences from random patterns of our lives thereby falling prey to a cognitive bias called ‘Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy”. Zooming out and realizing the impermanence as well as unimportance of individual life is, in a way, de-dramatization of our perspectives. All of us have a tendency to cherry pick only positive attributes from our past, bury all the negativity and assure that we are important persons and our lives matter. Our memories are mostly fictions; we subconsciously rewrite it (through confabulations) to appease the version of us we want to present the outside world; referred ‘hindsight bias’ in psychology. Read any autobiographies; chances are high that those would be avenues for shameless self-promotion to create lasting legacies for author’s life and works, a medium for the author to thank people who helped her or him, and will not mention any critical aspects of author’s personality or behaviours. Overnight success stories are all myths as they present only a filtered, selective version obscuring all the negativities and the countless number of past failures; we get nothing out of reading those works other than the illusory perception that path to success is straightforward. A great metaphor is an image of a duck smoothly sailing on a lake; what a magnificent sight it is. However, underneath the surface, the duck is deliberately persevering; flipping its flippers rigorously. We should rather acknowledge the fact that failures are normal; we should rather endure the failures treat them as inflexion points to learn, improve, and leverage towards our goals. It is for this reason that “what is your biggest weakness?” remains one of the toughest interview questions for most of us. Zooming out is also a technique to enhance charisma, advocated by Olivia Fox in The Charisma Myth; closing our eyes, focusing on an imagined empty space in our vicinity, then focusing on the immense space filling the entire universe, the so-called ‘soft-focus’. Upon the request of Astronomer Carl Sagan, NASA took the farthest image of earth from space yet, a famous photograph called The Pale Blue Dot.
Spacecraft Voyager 1 took this in 1990 at a distance of 6 billion kilometres, outside the solar system. In this picture, our planet occupies merely 0.12 pixel, an infinitesimal speck. This pale blue dot is our only home where we all live, fight and think so great of ourselves. Look at our body; we are all made up of trillions upon trillions of atoms, all of which were formed in different parts of the universe-different galaxies for sure- 13 billion years ago. ‘Stardust’, that is what we are all made of. Do you have a gold jewel? Look at it right now; each atom of gold was formed in supernovae (neutron star collisions) billions of light years away and billions of years ago. Savour this William Blake’s stanza:
“To see a World in a Grain of Sand,
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand,
And Eternity in an hour.”
Looking at a night sky would also open up such a perspective; we would feel small compared with all those stars totalling septillion (1 followed by 24 zeros), both in space and in time. Most of those stars we see are so far away that it takes millions of years for the light from them to reach our planet; by now many of the stars, we see today would have been died and disappeared. A galaxy named GN-z11 is 13.6 billion light-years away; the galaxy as we see today is an ancient image, similar to time travel. When the light was emitted 13.6 billion years ago, our universe just formed in the big bang. In the immensity of space and time, a human life would feel like a wormhole! Contrary to our deeply-held perception, you or I are neither someone special nor smart. There are hundreds of cognitive biases, heuristics and logical fallacies at play during each decision we make in our life; an accessible overview that I highly recommend is “You are not so smart” by David McRaney.
Another way to travel back in time is by visiting any good museum. All those amazing sculptures and exhibits that I rejoiced at Copenhagen’s Carlsberg-Glyptotek kept on amusing generations of human beings. At the British Museum, I saw curated exhibits of Egyptian mummies who lived more than 2000 years ago (and bemused more than 30 generations of human beings into the past). Today we see old photos and videos mostly in monochrome (or sepia or grained technicolour), but indeed those are mere technical artefacts; the world was as much colourful as today back then. Those mummies when living would have had worries of themselves and might even ponder over deep meanings of their lives. At the London’s Natural History Museum, I saw fossils from hundreds of millions of years ago and I realized that my own brief existence on this planet won’t have any deeper meanings, after all. All these exhibits will continue to exist after my death. The world would be just normal, there won’t be any perceivable effects of my death. I am one among 7 billion human beings currently inhabiting the planet earth; everything about me is insignificant. Memories of my own mediocre life would be quickly forgotten.
A zoomed out perspective is also indispensable in academics as well as research. Considering knowledge as a semantic tree it is important to have solid grasps on the trunks and main branches-the fundamentals, before studying the super specialities-its leaves. Unfortunately, this ‘holistic’ approach is missing in today’s academic philosophy. Today’s academicians deeply pursue their own super special discipline and confine scholastic reading in that discipline. How many of today’s science professors or scientists read papers from economics, politics, languages, history and philosophy? Very few. The situation had been different till a century ago. Famous Scottish morphologist D’Arcy Thompson said:
“if you dream, as some of you, I doubt not, have a right to dream, of future discoveries and inventions, let me tell you that the fertile field of discovery lies for the most part on those borderlands where one science meets another. There is a cry in the land for specialization… but depend upon it, that the specialist who is not reinforced by a breadth of knowledge beyond his own specialty is apt very soon to find himself only the highly trained assistant to some other man…”
Zoomed-out perspective is also important in research methodology, albeit not many understand its significance. For example, in history; the traditional methodology had been longitudinally (chronologically) documenting the major events and detailed analysis of such a timeline. It was only recently that the importance of cross-sectional analyses of historical research came into existence. For example, who were the contemporaries of Plato (to deduce mutual influences etc.), what were the contemporary events happening elsewhere during the French Revolution and so on. In Historical Linguistics, a shift from traditional diachronic assessment — the longitudinal analysis of language change- to synchronic assessment- cross-sectional assessment of many languages at one point in time- is a recent phenomenon. To deduce inferences on human migration we should assess evidence from vastly different disciplines including palaeontology, archaeology, historical linguistics, comparative folklore, mythology, cultural landscapes, DNA haplotyping and so on. Today we do not consider human beings as isolated species, but as a node in complex ecological niche and as a home to trillions of bacteria -the gut microbiome; modern research has only recently begun revealing impacts of microbiome on our life (for example, its link with diseases such as diabetes, cancer and heart diseases, depression, efficacy of drugs, diets and so on). In biology, there is a gradual shift recently from one-species zoomed-in studies to multi-species zoomed out holistic research. Today’s bacteriologists study microbes in biofilms- complex multi-species communities. Instead of culturing individual bacteria to identify and study the biodiversity, bacteriologists increasingly rely on the culture-independent metagenetic assessment of complex communities using environmental DNA sequencing as we now know a vast majority of bacterial species could not grow in culture media and therefore could not be cultured. Instead of monoculture that is having dramatic impacts on biodiversity (especially that of insect pollinators), modern agriculturists are turning into polyculture where many species are being cultivated together (companion-planting). In aquaculture too, the current standard is Integrated Multi-Trophic Aquaculture (IMTA) wherein waste of fish and excess nutrient becomes food for the seaweeds, benthic gastropod molluscs and so on.
An old adage “if you want to live happily, live hidden” is very apt in today’s egocentric world. Living a life as an unpretentious, insignificant mortal is far better than somebody who is striving to appease people around him/her whom she/he do not like. Austrian novelist Hugo von Hofmannsthal said:
“Most people do not live in life, but in a simulacrum, in a sort of algebra in which nothing exists and in which everything only signifies. I would like to profoundly experience the being of each thing…”
Oscar Wilde’s famous quote goes:
“To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.”
But, consider Theodore Roosevelt’s equally persuasive quote from “Strenuous Life”:
“Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat.”
To live a life of fulfilment, we should be lesser, but do more! Actions and facts are better than passions and dreams. Instead of being passionate and believing in illusory abilities of ourselves, we should embrace certain elements of uncertainties, negativities, randomness and plan for contingencies. As Maya Angelou said: ‘Hoping for the best, prepared for the worst, and unsurprised by anything in between’. Instead of validation and status that today’s egocentric work-culture demands, we should strive for action and education. Double Nobel laureate Marie Curie said: “Be less curious about people and more curious about ideas.” An excellent metaphor is like a hike towards the goal. Instead of walking like a robot dreaming of goal alone and asking themselves like kids on a long road journey, ‘are we there yet?’, we should enjoy the path, live in the present fleeting moments and relish it mindfully. Let new ideas overwhelm you, let you change the path, or create a new one. Another metaphor is life as a long stroll; immense iterations of two steps, learning (left leg) then growing (right leg). Learning-Growing-Learning-Growing ad infinitum; the process repeats till eternity. Low-IQ people usually feel overconfident in their abilities and ignorant of their own ignorance; this illusory feeling has a name in psychology: Dunning-Kruger effect. The more smart you are, the more would be your intellectual humility and the lower would be your self-esteem. Newer research bolsters the idea that self-compassion, honest acceptance of our own limits and forgiving ourselves, is far better than self-confidence and self-esteem. After all, we are human beings; we should recognize our failures and learn from those experiences to not make mistakes in future. Many creative geniuses of the past are known to have fantastic libraries at their homes with many of the books they barely touched. A famous example is Charles Darwin’s library with a copy of Gregor Mendel’s ground-breaking article which was later found to be uncut with its pages sticking together as a proof that Darwin never read it. Surrounding oneself with the books (or frequent visits to massive libraries, or filling Kindles to the brim with wonderful books) is nevertheless important; it reminds us of immense things that we don’t know and instils a feeling of intellectual humility. Humble acceptance of “I don’t know” is truly splendid; after all it only hurts your false pride that need to be curtailed. Isaac Newton said:
“I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”
That humility is what is missing in most of us today. Always stay a student by cultivating diligence, humility and self-awareness, and let go of ego. Also, beware that you can’t learn what you think you already know; thanks to confirmation bias. Stoic philosopher Epictetus said:
“What is the first business of one who practices philosophy? To get rid of self-conceit. For it is impossible for anyone to begin to learn that which he thinks he already knows.”
A pithy aphorism of unknown source elegantly summarises this thought: “When the student is ready, the teacher appear.”
Felix Bast is a teacher, science enthusiast and science writer based in Punjab. His new book Voyage to Antarctica will be released in 2018
