This is a retrospective of week 52, 2024 (2024-12-23–2024-12-29).
This week I’ve listened to interviews with Penelope Smith,1,2 James Cooke,3 and Elaine Pagels.4,5,6 I’ve also started reading Animal Talk: Interspecies Telepathic Communication by Penelope Smith, The Dawn of Mind: How Matter Became Conscious and Alive by James Cooke, and Why Religion? A Personal Story by Elaine Pagels.
Below are some highlights from my listening and reading (my emphasis in italics):
Penelope Smith
With humankind, a lot of times there is a desire to analyze, analyze, analyze. I do think that we are the most analyzing creatures, although other creatures definitely analyze for their survival, for their enhancement of what they need to do. They’re pushed to analyze, but not to the extent of about ideas that people do.
—Penelope Smith https://youtu.be/Vx_zVHYulJI?t=2109
Basic to all of us is an appreciation, I think, of emotions, and also the higher truths of life, love, honor, respect. A lot of times people ask me, what are they thinking? I go, nothing. And they don’t understand that. How can they not be thinking something? And it’s really just being. It’s sort of like a meditative state of just being there with the environment, being quiet, fully experiencing, just experiencing.
—Penelope Smith https://youtu.be/Vx_zVHYulJI?t=2153
Many animals will respond incredibly to music, to art. …people are finally catching up to what animals have been doing for years. Elephants have been creating art with their trunks, they have very vassal trunks like our hands, and they can actually create designs and drawings, which people are now recognizing. And they’ve been doing it for thousands of years. Whales sing and do complicated songs. Dolphins also communicate in a way that people are just beginning to understand. Bees dance. They have incredible harmonies, rhythms, sharing of aesthetics, not necessarily the exact same way that we express it, they express it their own ways, but it’s still beautiful. [43:20] And they understand beauty, and they understand truth, and they understand companionship, and love, and all the things that we regard as real basic, and when you come right down to it are the real fundamentals of life. I don’t feel that any being is complete without awareness and connection with other beings. On this planet are all kinds of beings, animals, plants, minerals, the earth. [43:45] The more complete we are, the more we communicate with other beings. The more aware we are, the more expanded, the more we extend to all of life. And I think your joy of living goes up in accordance with how much you are in touch with everything around you, how much you sing, as the canary is singing, with the rest of life. So I find the more I communicate with animals, and trees, and rocks, believe it or not, and the planet earth, and everything around me, the more a life seems full, rich, deep, loving, kind, wise. And the animals share that with you. They share it on a very intuitive basis. You don’t have to talk about it, you don’t have to intellectualize about it, you just feel it. You feel the vibrations of it, you feel the energy, you feel the connection, you know it. Find if you can express it verbally, or intellectually, or analyze it, but that doesn’t, that isn’t the experience, that’s an expression of the experience. And the more you experience other beings, I feel, the more wise and loving being you become.
—Penelope Smith https://youtu.be/Vx_zVHYulJI?t=2557
Feeling is essential. Without feeling you won’t get it, because if you just get thoughts, the tendency with humans is to get lost in their own thoughts. And if they…try to do it only on an analytical level, they’ll often get their own thoughts confused in it. But feeling, connecting with all your senses. So telepathy is like extended senses, finer tuned senses, internal sensing. We all have it. We’re born with it.
—Penelope Smith https://youtu.be/kie8OW5OOx8?t=752
Speech is fine, if you’re also getting the feeling behind the words. If you’re getting what a person feels, what they really mean, then you can understand them. But with animals, it’s direct. So we can get what they think, what they feel, what they taste, what they smell, what they see, all the senses. And that’s what telepathy is. And, yeah, that’s how it works.
—Penelope Smith https://youtu.be/kie8OW5OOx8?t=802
You need to get quiet. People are often so much in their heads… You simply have to get quiet enough, breathing deeply, connecting to the earth, centering your body with the earth, feeling your own body here, present, then you can be present to another.
—Penelope Smith https://youtu.be/kie8OW5OOx8?t=850
All beings have the inborn ability to communicate with and understand each other. All, or most, young children can experience mental. or telepathic. communication with others of any species. It’s the main way, along with physical gesture, that they communicate before they learn language.
I never lost the ability to communicate with animals. When adults or other children invalidated my experiences of telepathically receiving messages from animals, I decided that it was best to keep these things to myself.
I did not want to lose the trust, warmth, and understanding I had with my animal friends, or to betray our mutual awareness of their intelligence and shared communication. This was too precious to me to let it be spoiled by others’ unawareness.
—Penelope Smith, Animal Talk: Interspecies Telepathic Communication
James Cooke
What this whole awakening thing is about is the non-conceptual nature of reality—reality as it is, but when our ideas are not coloring it and shading it. I’m very skeptical, or very wary, of becoming attached to any system, because any attachment in that space, in the space of ideas is the obscuration of the non-conceptual radiant nature of reality.
—James Cooke https://youtu.be/yoFL1WAQ_jc?t=617
The organism isn’t something separate to the rest of the universe. It’s like a wave forming in the ocean of the universe.
—James Cooke https://youtu.be/yoFL1WAQ_jc?t=860
Science is storytelling. It’s very rich, detailed storytelling that’s coupled to the world through feedback, but it’s still storytelling. And this comes back to the kind of non-conceptual nature of reality. Reality itself is always beyond our ideas of it, no matter how refined and sophisticated they are.
—James Cooke https://youtu.be/yoFL1WAQ_jc?t=1216
I think a lot of time people respond from a gut instinct level and then rationalize it afterwards.
—James Cooke https://youtu.be/yoFL1WAQ_jc?t=1875
Imagine if you lived in a culture that was disconnected from nature, that wanted to dominate nature and extract from it, and wanted to not empathize with other living things, wanted to not see them as our kin, as our relatives, but instead as as unfeeling things…to be exploited. It would make a lot of sense for that culture to tell a story in which they were just…mechanical robots, and they don’t feel. They’re not like us, so we can do what we want with them. And I think that’s the culture we live in.
—James Cooke https://youtu.be/yoFL1WAQ_jc?t=2099
We are the universe, we are a kind of emergent phenomenon that’s fully grounded in the unfolding existence in a kind of bottom up way. So this is again, the mystical experience. The awakening shows you that you are fully coincident with the unfolding of reality, the kind of lawful expression of the universe. And so what becomes clear when you’re no longer taking your thoughts to be real is that it becomes really clear what’s the map and what’s the territory, what’s an abstraction and what’s not.
AI is just very complicated abstractions. And so it’s not grounded in the unfolding existence in the same way [as we are]. It’s not that reflexive knowing of the universe knowing itself when it’s happening through current AI. It’s a bit like, if I wrote these equations down on a napkin, you wouldn’t think that napkin was now conscious, you would understand that…those are symbols, that’s an abstraction, that’s a map. … Now, [if] I put it on a computer with transistors turning on and off, [then] It’s still just like a very complicated napkin when you have AI. And so it’s still an abstraction. If you were to embody it—say out of silicon and…non biological matter, [if] you coaxed [it] into existence [with] the same dynamic, so it was a genuine bottom up kind of emergent phenomenon—then that would be conscious. But what you’d have then is actually artificial life. You wouldn’t call it artificial intelligence, it would be an autonomously evolving thing that was [alive]. You’ve just recreated the phenomenon of life. So I think artificial life would absolutely be conscious. But any abstraction, kind of by definition, can’t be.
You’d have to kind of coax [it] into existence, by which I mean, you can’t design it. … If you want to create a whirlpool in some water, you could fill up a bathtub with water and then pull out the plug, and the combination of the gravity and the water and the space underneath creates this emergent structure… You wouldn’t be able to design it, build it, and set it going in the same way that if you try to arrange all the particles, if you try to arrange all the molecules of the water, and then push them all at the same time to create the whirlpool. It’s just not going to work. That’s not what a whirlpool is. This is the interdependence. The whirlpool can only exist because of how everything else is in existence around it. That’s relevant in the same way that the flower can only be a flower if the sun exists and if gravity exists.
—James Cooke https://youtu.be/yoFL1WAQ_jc?t=2517
Autopoiesis is the self-perpetuation and self-organization of life. He [Francisco Varela] argued that that entails cognition, that entails the parts of the mind that we can observe objectively…
[Francisco ] Varela and [Humberto] Maturana were very influenced by phenomenology… And Evan Thompson [is] someone who’s continued this work. And so, they have really important critiques around understanding that science is actually kind of extension of our experience of the world. It’s a very refined form of experiencing and coming to know the world. It’s not that the world is just given and we can study it. Consciousness is really important in that picture.
So, Varela argued for what he called a program of neuro-phenomenology, where you study the brain on the one hand, and you study experience on the other hand through…meditation. They allow you to get inside the nature of experience, and then you see how those two things cohere… You accept them both. It’s kind of [a] dual aspect picture where you don’t… reduce one to the other…
But I do think that you can tell a story which explains why consciousness exists… So, it’s definitely…a parallel view that explores the same intersection of life and consciousness, but with a slightly different bent coming from that phenomenological tradition…
—James Cooke https://youtu.be/yoFL1WAQ_jc?t=2724
[47:54] I mentioned Evan Thompson… He had a book that came out a few months ago called The Blind Spot. … if we use what he calls the Blind Spot worldview… In that view, …physical matter is what’s most real. And then experience is some kind of…illusion, consciousness doesn’t even exist. … A proper phenomenological understanding of science begins with the fact that there is conscious experience, here, now. Everything I ever know arises within… the horizon of consciousness. And there’s also the phenomenon of embodiment…
I do science and it becomes very refined. And I come up with very complex maps of the world. And then…you forget that you began with experience, …and you think, no, no, what’s really real is the world that I’m studying. You forget that you get confused with the maps and the territory. You think your maps of the physical world really is the physical world. And so it gets philosophically confused. …
The core issue is that we seem to be in a situation where there is being and knowing. … So the game is one of being and knowing. … You need to accept that we’re in… this strange loop of being and knowing. … You don’t need to emphasize the being or the knowing, you can flow between the two. And you can be okay with this kind of ungrounded, very freeing flow… in this groundless being knowing situation, that seems to be what’s going on. And I don’t need to emphasize one or the other.
—James Cooke
Elaine Pagels
When you come to know who you are, really, on the level of the heart, you come to know God as the source of your being. And the Gospel of Truth…says…in you dwells the unfailing light. Now, from an Orthodox point of view this is heresy.
—Elaine Pagels https://youtu.be/ZAQ8DsXDxQ0?t=3175
If you read…the Gospel of Truth, there’s a different version of the story of Jesus—not that he came into the world because…a loving God would not forgive your sins unless an innocent man were tortured and killed, but that Jesus came into the world to show us who we are, to show us that we belong to each other, and to this source from which we come. And the price for coming into the world…is that we suffer and die. That’s just the kind of creatures we are, but it’s not a punishment. That’s a different reading of the crucifixion story, and it’s a beautiful text, it’s a poetic text. And it says, and so he discovered us in himself, and we discovered him in ourselves, and led us back into the Father, into the Mother. The Mother is the Holy Spirit here.
—Elaine Pagels https://youtu.be/OJheSPkNJhA?t=2323
It’s the degree of involvement, it’s the degree of commitment, it’s the degree of practice [that matters], right? … How does this affect everything in your life? That’s the question, much more, than do you believe in this or that?
—Elaine Pagels https://youtu.be/ZAQ8DsXDxQ0?t=1928
I love Christian tradition, a lot of it, but some of it, we need to recognize, can be very harmful, can be lethal. … Other parts of it can damage people in other ways. And it’s sort of important to know that because we get influenced by this unconsciously.
—Elaine Pagels https://youtu.be/ZAQ8DsXDxQ0?t=3141
Now we understand a lot more about how what we call Orthodox Christianity emerged, and from what, and who was on the other side, and what things they were saying, and what things they weren’t saying. So I think it’s wonderful to have this amplify our understanding of these traditions. It certainly helps me.
—Elaine Pagels https://youtu.be/ZAQ8DsXDxQ0?t=3271
Questions make people heretics. I love that! They do, and I don’t think that’s a bad thing. The word heresy in Greek means choice, and heretics are people who’ve made certain kinds of choices.
—Elaine Pagels https://youtu.be/ZAQ8DsXDxQ0?t=4406
…everything we experience shapes what we are capable of understanding…
—Elaine Pagels, Why Religion? A Personal Story
What matters to me more than whether we participate in institutions or leave them is how we engage the imagination—in dreams, art, poetry, music—since what each of us needs, and what we can engage, obviously differs and changes throughout our lifetime. What fascinates me most are the experiences that shape, shatter, and transform those who initiate or engage them—experiences that precipitate us into new relationships with ourselves and with others.
—Elaine Pagels, Why Religion? A Personal Story
Notes:
1. Penelpope Smith Animal Talk Animal Communication, Telepathic Communication with Animals – the classic video on the subject with Penelope Smith, 2021-06-10, 48:19, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vx_zVHYulJI.
2. Penelpope Smith Animal Talk Animal Communication,How to Know if Telepathic Communication with Animals is Real, 2021-05-28, 41:28, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kie8OW5OOx8.
3. New Thinking Allowed with Jeffrey Mishlove, How Matter Became Conscious and Alive with James Cooke, 2024-12-17, 55:11, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yoFL1WAQ_jc.
4. Kaufman Interfaith Institute, Elaine Pagels – What do “secret gospels” suggest about Jesus and his teaching?, 2019-11-13, 1:21:03, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZAQ8DsXDxQ0.
5. Kauftman Interfaith Institute, Elaine Pagels – Why Religion? – 2019 Interfaith Academic Conference, 2019-11-12, 1:26:50, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nROIfIK9csU.
6. Politics and Prose, Elaine Pagels, “Why Religion?”, 2018-12-21, 59:02, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJheSPkNJhA.
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