> [!summary] Progressive Summary # Structured Notes ## Definitions > Gaia theory is a scientific understanding of the Earth as a great planetary organism, as a self-regulating complex system. > Alchemy is the ancient art of personal transformation and nature connection. ## Chapter Summaries ### Foreward Lovely foreward by Stephen Harrod Buhner describing the parallel paths of himself, David Abram, and Stephen Harding. Their work is about cultivating a different quality of consciousness (what Harding calls a "style of consciousness") from the one that is causing our ecological crisis. It is "holistic perception" powered by inner transformation. - David Abram is a philospher and magician. - Stephan Harding is a zoologist and ecologist. - Stephen Harrod Buhner describes himself as an experiential epistemologist - "the exploration of different states of mind and being and their impacts on sustainable habitation of Earth" > Nearly all of us in the Western world (and I suspect many in the Eastern) live now in what is essentially a virtual reality. Over the past several centuries, a global civilization has been constructed on top of the ecological world, the movement toward which substantially escalated during the twentieth century. The ecological world is foundational to all life here. However, the civilizational structure resting atop it is now so comprehensive that many people take it as foundational rather than virtual. It possesses, as all virtual realities do, a series of assumptions that are used to give that civilizational structure form and definition. Regrettably, those assumptions have little to do with the ecological reality upon which the civilizational structure rests. Instead, they are founded upon our constructed beliefs, presuppositions, and untestable hypotheses, which constitute the mental software of this virtual reality. That is where our problem, and danger, lies. > Another way of saying all this is that the climate of mind in here—inside each of us—gives rise to the climate problems out there. To get an experiential sense of the climate of mind that lives inside Western peoples, just visit an ecologically devastated landscape. That is the form it takes in the outer world. The climate of mind always comes first. Then, as it expresses itself through behavior, the outward world becomes its mirror. How do we encourage "the gladness of the world to emerge within the self"? There are parallels here to [[The Biology of Wonder]]. ### Introduction The title *Gaia Alchemy* refers to the book's project: to reunite science and alchemy after a 400-year split. It is a healing journey. > Science and alchemy: both are ways of knowing that are part of us; part of our brain and body structure; part of our human psyche. Both are needed for our wholeness and our planet’s. Every one of us, scientists included, has a psyche that takes part in the much wider psyche of nature, so why not investigate the connections between Gaian science and alchemy? There are delicious fruits here just waiting to be plucked in this marvelous garden of our deeper reality. **The litmus test is how much insight we are given into the nature of Gaia—how much we experience our own life richly entangled within her mysterious coevolutionary depths.** > Using story, science, conversation, meditation, craft work, and time spent in nature, we’ll discover a new yet also immensely ancient way of living well with Gaia. We’ll make moves toward reintegrating ourselves with our living Earth, and we’ll experience intimations of our lost wholeness in this huge gigacosmos of swirling galaxies redolent with meaning and purpose. ### Chaper 1 - First Steps > Perhaps we need, dare I say it, an ancient *sacred* global image to heal a contemporary *secular* global crisis. --- ### What is Alchemy? The seven stages of alchemy: 1. Calcination—burning away the dross in matter and in ourselves leaving behind only what is essential in both 2. Dissolution—dissolving this essence in the depths of the unconscious 3. Separation—allowing the products of the dissolution to separate into their distinctive natures 4. Conjunction—allowing these distinctive natures to come together into a coherent wholeness 5. Fermentation—allowing this new coherence to rot down so that an ever deeper essence can be manifested 6. Distillation—cultivating this deeper essence into a wider style of awareness 7. Coagulation—the products of distillation spontaneously arrange themselves into the deepest meaning and belonging we are capable of perceiving --- ### Archetypal Gaia > The alchemical insight which we are exploring here (much to the disdain of some of my fellow scientists, no doubt) is that Lovelock did not invent the idea of Gaia as a self-regulating living planet. Rather, he received it from the depths of the psychefrom archetypal Gaia, so desperate was she to wake us out of our mechanistic slumber just when the ecological and climate crises were gearing up into a serious intensity. > > James Lovelock knows about regions of psyche that are deeper and more primordial than reason. He knows how to intuit the presence of archetypal Gaia. The importance he attaches to intuition for developing a deep understanding of Gaia came home to me during a conversation I had with him a few years ago. > > In the early winter of 2017, we were walking together along Chesil beach in Dorset, near his new home. He was then ninety-eight years old, as lively in mind and sprightly in body as ever. We talked about the importance of intuition for connecting with Gaia. Even though he didn’t say it in so many words, it seems to me now that he was telling me how he intuitively nourishes his relationship with archetypal Gaia. > > *“The only way to really understand Gaia, Stephan, isn’t through science and reasoning. It’s through intuition.”* > > *“What is intuition, Jim?”* > > *“Imagine we’re deep in the jungle and at this very moment we see a tiger in front of us. We react without even thinking about it. Another part of our mind takes over, a nonrational functioning that guides us to safety. We’d be dead if we had to think: ‘that’s a tiger—hmm, probably dangerous. Let’s calculate its probable trajectory, and so on.’ Some other part of our mind takes over and we know what to do without thinking. That’s what intuition is like.”* > > *“You mean that the mind that reacts to a danger is somehow connected to the intuitive mind that can sense what or who Gaia is?”* > > *“Yes, they are connected. Intuition comes in flash—in a moment of insight.”* > > *“Can we cultivate intuition?”* > > *“Oh yes. It’s best learned when we are children.”* > > *“Did you learn it as a child?”* > > *“From my father. He was deeply connected to nature. He knew how to live off the land, how to catch rabbits. He knew the names of wild plants, and which berries one could eat. He could see the trails of mammals, he knew where birds nested. He knew their names.* > > *“I get it—your father was a tracker! A sort of modern Bushman!”* > > *“And he taught me how to tickle for trout.”* > > *“Tickle for trout?”* > > *“By wiggling my fingers under water in a quiet river’s eddy where trout like to wait for food. If you did it right, the trout would be fooled into mistaking your fingers for worms. But you can only learn it as a child. Only a child is able to evoke an intuitive connection deep enough to attract the fish.”* > > *“You mean that searching for the intuitive experience of Gaia is like tickling for trout?”* > > *“It’s just like that. To sense Gaia we need to be like a child tickling for trout.”* > > *We walk in silence for a while, gazing out over the gentle, sunlit sea. The conversation turns to other Gaian things. We go in, have lunch, then tea. It’s late. The Lovelocks must be tired. Time to go.* > > The image has stayed with me all this while, a gift from the sage by the sea. The river water is the great flowing psyche of nature. Our fingers, they’re our intuitive feelers in this flow. The trout, that’s the world-saving insight that can be granted if we feel our way into the stream of our planet’s vast life with the openness of a child. Science can take us partway to Gaia, that’s clear. But to feel her fully, as fully as we are humanely able, we must be like children, for only then can we dwell in the living sense of archetypal Gaia. > > We must learn to tickle for trout. # Quotes The mystery of life isn't a problem to solve but a reality to experience. – Frank Herbert