The Mysterious-
Religion-
Animism-
Perhaps the most rudimentary exercise of interconnectedness is the practice of religion. Whether it’s Christianity, Islamism, Buddhism, various forms of Indigenous Shamanism or many others, people have always practiced connectedness with divine. In “Darwin’s Pharmacy,” Richard Doyle cites the Upanishads, which are sacred texts of Hinduism describing the “individual’s place in the universe” and the divine makeup of the world, the Brahman (who “created and is the universe”) and Atman (the individual’s higher self), who will ultimately unite (Mark 2020 ). Doyle cites the Vedic phrase “Tat Tvam Asi” from the Upanishads, meaning “You are that,” to evoke the sacred origins of this concept. In “Darwin’s Pharmacy,” “You are that” is the religious tissue of the argument on interconnectedness, the idea that not only are ecosystems deeply interrelated through the physical processes that take place on a continuous basis, but the interrelatedness extends into the divine as well.
The union between sacred and profane is not unique to some religions. Fundamentally, all religions and spiritual beliefs stem from the idea of uniting human and divinity. Rather, all religions seem to have stemmed from a core concept of universal interconnectedness, which is animism. Edward Burnett Tylor, a 19th century anthropologist who introduced animism in the vocabulary of contemporary anthropology, defined animism as the “animation of all nature.”
According to a study conducted by the Department of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Cambridge, virtually all religions of hunter-gatherer populations that were studied contained the element of animism (Duda, Peoples and Marlowe 2016). Their study suggests that, indeed, the “oldest trait of religion” was animism. From that stage on, religions evolved to contain beliefs in afterlife, then shamanism and then ancestor-worship (Duda, Peoples and Marlowe 2016). One can only assume that, at the root of things, there was the unarticulated human need to feel integral to the environment, a desire of early humans to find divinity in the earth, waters, winds and fires that they originated from. And it was long before agriculture and the resulting domestication of nature ensued, which culminated in the environmental struggles we face today.
Religion Diagram-
Consciousness-
Bardo Thodol & Entheogens-
Meditation-
Self-
Another facet of spiritual interconnectedness that Doyle mentions in “Darwin’s Pharmacy” is that of a continuous existence of consciousness, devoid of the limitations of life and death. This concept is portrayed in the “Tibetan Book of the Dead,” also called the “Bardo Todol” in Tibetan, meaning “Liberation in the Intermediate State Through Hearing” (Stefon). Doyle’s mention is less about personal transcendence than the “diffused, parallel, and distributed” existence of life and death in one continuum (Doyle 101). It is a practice of a rhetoric of diffusion, breaking down borders between concepts, as Doyle mentions (Doyle 101).
In “Darwin’s Pharmacy,” the subject of the transcendence scripted in the Bardo Thodol is Aldous Huxley, author of dystopian novel “Brave New World” and utopian account of interconnectedness “The Doors of Perception.” As Doyle suggests throughout the book, Huxley was an experienced psychonaut, having conducted many experiments with his state of mind while on entheogenic substances. His experience, interpreted by Doyle, with the Bardo Thodol in his last moments of physical life, as well as the entirety of “The Doors of Perception” are instances of interconnectedness, an interconnectedness not religious, perhaps not spiritual, but one that just is. Huxley navigated the intermediate state of the Bardo, guided by his wife Laura Huxley who was reading from the “Tibetan Book…”, as well as the dose of LSD that she injected him with, at his wish (Jones 2018). In “the Doors of Perception,” Huxley witnessed the “miracle of naked existence” with the help of 4mg of mescaline (Huxley 4). Huxley explored many facets of this naked existence, such as the “Dharma body,” which lives within everything and radiates an intensity of existence (Huxley 18). He uses the term “such-ness” to best convey the sensation of the naked existence, a such-ness that melts the perceptions of space and time and renders everything into a continuum. Huxley started identifying with flowers and bamboo chair legs, realizing that he has transcended the boundaries of the “mind funnel” and instead passed into the “Mind at Large” (Huxley 23). He described the experience as a loss of ego, a transformation into a “Not-self,” giving the example of the Cubist art style (Huxley 20). Cubism reduces the subjects of art to simple geometric shapes, to their essence (Tate Museum). Similarly, the psychedelic experience takes the mind back to the essence, that of the naked existence that permeates everything and does not discriminate between subject and object.
An approach that mirrors the entheogenic experience is that of meditation. Interconnectedness, or imbrication, a term used by Doyle in “Darwin’s Pharmacy,” is often a goal of meditation in the journey towards dissolving the ego. Such instances can be found in the book “Miracle of Mindfulness,” written by Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh. In describing various techniques for achieving mindfulness, Thich Nhat Hanh describes that one also needs to experience an interconnection within oneself in order to be mindful.
Interconnectedness within oneself sounds a bit daunting, almost like some sort of enlightenment. How can you be more connected to yourself than you already are? What the text seems to refer to is the power to be aware of your own states of mind, to observe the way you observe things. And according to the techniques in “Miracle of Mindfulness,” achieving awareness depends on contemplating the interdependence of the objects of the mind, the five aggregates, or the dharmas: bodily and physical forms, feelings, perceptions, mental functionings, and consciousness, which contains all of the former (Thich Nhat Hanh 46). Contemplating these parts of out own being, and their interdependence, will then reveal to us the interdependent nature of reality.
The indivisible body of life is what Doyle attempts to attune the reader into. The indivisible body of life, Huxley's "Mind at Large," or Vladimir Verdansky's "noosphere" - the conscious layer of the universe - consolidate the image of a common fabric between living and non-living systems.
These are only a few instances of interconnectedness in works that span the religious, the spiritual, the anthropological, the psychedelic, the philosophical and the mindful. Only a few ways in which one can exercise interconnectedness.
Meditation
“Contemplation on interdependence is a deep looking into all dharmas in order to pierce through to their real nature, in order to see them as part of the great body of reality and in order to see that the great body of reality is indivisible. It cannot be cut into pieces with separate existences of their own.”
— Thich Nhat Hanh, "The Miracle of Mindfulness"