One of my favorite authors is teacher and herbalist Stephen Buhner. Some of his books include: Sacred Plant Medicine and Sacred Healing Herbal Beers. But it is in his book, The Lost Language of Plants, that he takes Descartes to task, and I couldn’t agree more.
Under the heading of “Turning the Universe in a Machine”…”The journey from sacred intelligence at the center of the Universe to a generally accepted belief that the Universe is a great machine devoid of spirit occurred over a number of centuries…and emerged as the new ‘epistemology of reductionism’ through Rene Descartes…Prior to the rise of Christianity, the Romans believed, like most historical cultures, that sacredness and intelligence were present in everything.”
In other words, that which was esteemed with ‘sacred significance’ previously, was now subject to ‘scientific scrutiny’, devoid of the historical respect and the context within which to be understood. All of the material universe, was broken down into its respective parts, and relegated to its empirical place, relative to everything else. The whole lost it’s meaning, compared to the detail of its parts.
So, the problem is, that we as humans now so many centuries later, still live culturally within the inherited context that Descartes created for us. Never mind that his was a highly idiosyncratic perspective, and not even particularly correct of one; but, it is one that has stuck with us as a race. And even though, quantum physics has long ago disproved the mechanistic perspective as inaccurate, still it is held by many to be the pinnacle of truth and so continues to inform and direct our communal reality. The real question is, just how long will it take for humanity to embrace the quantum reality of what is, with all it’s ramifications? Are we ready to embrace that truth? Time will tell…
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