A CONTEMPORARY SPIRITUALITY

The mystery about all these other worlds is even bigger, and its right under our noses. Read this long quotation from ‘An Immense World’ by Ed Yong.

“Imagine an elephant in a room. This elephant is not the proverbial weighty issue but an actual weighty mammal. Imagine the room is spacious enough to accommodate it; make it a school gym. Now imagine a mouse has scurried in, too. A robin hops alongside it. An owl perches on an overhead beam. A bat hangs upside down from the ceiling. A rattlesnake slithers along the floor. A spider has spun a web in a corner. A mosquito buzzes through the air. A bumblebee sits upon a potted sunflower. Finally, in the midst of this increasingly crowded hypothetical space, add a human. Let’s call her Rebecca. She’s sighted, curious, and (thankfully) fond of animals. Don’t worry about how she got herself into this mess. Never mind what all these animals are doing in a gym. Consider, instead, how Rebecca and the rest of this imaginary menagerie might perceive one another.

The elephant raises its trunk like a periscope, the rattlesnake flicks out its tongue, and the mosquito cuts through the air with its antennae. All three are smelling the space around them, taking in the floating scents. The elephant sniffs nothing of note. The rattlesnake detects the smells trail of the mouse and coils its body in ambush. The mosquito alluring carbon dioxide on Rebecca’s breath and the aroma of her skin lands on her arm, ready for a meal, but before it can bite she swats it away and her slap disturbs the mouse. It squeaks in alarm, at a pitch that is audible to the bat but too high for the elephant to hear. The elephant, meanwhile, unleashes a deep, thunderous rumble too low-pitched for the mouse’s ears or the bat’s but felt by the vibration sensitive belly of the rattlesnake. Rebecca, who is oblivious to both the ultrasonic mouse squeaks and the infrasonic elephant rumbles, listens instead to the robin, which is singing at frequencies better suited to her ears. But her hearing is too slow to pick out all the complexities that the bird encodes within its tune.

The robin’s chest looks red to Rebecca but not to the elephant, whose eyes are limited to shades of blue and yellow. The bumblebee can’t see red, either, but it is sensitive to the ultraviolet hues that lie beyond the opposite end of the rainbow. The sunflower it sits upon has at its centre an ultraviolet bullseye, which grabs the attention of both the bird and the bee. The bullseye is invisible to Rebecca, who thinks the flower is only yellow. Her eyes are the sharpest in the room; unlike the elephant or the bee, she can spot the small spider sitting upon its web. But she stops seeing much of anything when the lights in the room go out.

Plunged into darkness, Rebecca walks slowly forward, arms outstretched, hoping to feel obstacles in her way. The mouse does the same but with the whiskers on its face, which it sweeps back and forth several times a second to map its surroundings. As it skitters between Rebecca’s feet, its footsteps are too faint for her to hear, but they are easily audible to the owl perched overhead. The disc of stiff feathers on the owl’s face funnels sounds toward its sensitive ears, one of which is slightly higher than the other. Thanks to this asymmetry, the owl can pinpoint the source of the mouse’s skittering in both the vertical and horizontal planes. It swoops in, just as the mouse blunders within range of the waiting rattlesnake. Using two pits on its snout, the snake can sense the infrared radiation that emanates from warm objects. It effectively sees in heat, and the mouse’s body blazes like a beacon. The snake strikes … and collides with the swooping owl.

All of this commotion goes unnoticed by the spider, which barely hears or sees the participants. Its world is almost entirely defined by the vibrations coursing through its web- a self-made trap that acts as an extension of its senses. When the mosquito strays into the silken strands, the spider detects the telltale vibrations of struggling prey and. moves in for the kill. But as it attacks, it is unaware of the high frequency sound waves that are hitting its body and bouncing back to the creature that sent them-the bat. The bat’s sonar is so acute that it not only finds the spider in the dark but pinpoints it precisely enough to pluck it from its web.

As the bat feeds, the robin feels a familiar attraction that most of the other animals cannot sense. The days are getting colder, and it is time to migrate to warmer southern climes. Even within the enclosed gym, the robin can feel Earth’s magnetic field, and guided by its internal compass, it points due south and escapes through a a window. It leaves behind one elephant, one bat, one bumblebee, one rattlesnake, one slightly ruffled owl, one extremely fortunate mouse, and one Rebecca. These seven creatures share the same physical space but experience it in wildly and wondrously different ways. The same is true for the billions of other animal species on the planet and the countless individuals within those species. Earth teems with sights and textures, sounds and vibrations, smells and tastes, electric and magnetic fields. But every animal can only tap into a small fraction of reality’s fullness. Each is enclosed within its own unique sensory sensory bubble, perceiving but a tiny sliver of an immense world.”

Ed Yong goes on to write that:

“Our human world is limited; it just doesn’t feel that way. To us it feels all-encompassing. It is all that we know, and so we easily mistake it for all there is to know. This is an illusion, and one that every animal shares. Even when animals share the same senses with us, their worlds can be very different. Each species is constrained in some way & liberated in others.”