plants' purpose dream

Plants' Purpose Dream
I had this dream last night about this gardening book. It listed plants and our scientific knowledge of each one. Then it had a section immediately below the scientific section which read "missing: DENIAL". Then it explained how the scientific definition actually contains and conceals a tacit denial of deeper, more accurate realities of plants, particularly the idea of purpose – that plants participate in life from a deep sense of purpose rather than the scientifically sterile idea of matter-of-fact purposeless existence.

Aristotle's scientific understanding (which is still a founding element of modern science) included the principle of purpose; everything in nature exists for some reason: the sun shines to give life to plants, the rain falls to supply water to terrestrial life, etc. The current scientific worldview vigorously denies this sense of purpose while today’s philosophers consider the argument from purpose a logical fallacy.

When we accept that plants have a purpose and that all of life does, too, we will begin to understand the true nature of existence. Until then we will be operating at a very narrow band of understanding and a very shallow level of reality, missing the infinitely deep richness of life playing all around us.

It's like only knowing the skin and not realizing it to be a covering for a whole universe of coursing, surging vibrance just below the surface. We do not yet have true sight. Rather, we have sight, but not the vision to see life beyond its very periphery. We see the bare surface of life, which, in relation to life, is a relatively moribund existence. In many ways, we do not yet know life itself, though, ironically, it is all around us, in us; it is everything yet we can see almost nothing and call what we know science. We tend to believe ourselves to be an advanced species only because we lack the clarity of vision to see where we are in relation to the universe of living life.

One of the cornerstones of scientific methodology is the principle known as Ockham's razor, which states that the simplest explanation is usually the best, or some variation of this idea of economy and simplicity of explanation. It has never sat right with me and this dream triggered it astir once again. The richness of life's purpose (which, as far as I can put those dream-feelings into words, is to joyously BE, to experience the variety and infinitude and beauty of itself) can in no way submit itself to Ockham's or anyone else's razor. Quite oppositely, nothing so severe as a razor could ever comprehend the overflowing plenitude of reality itself.

I've never been able to understand why the razor has had such appeal when it is patently false as we currently employ it. Our own lives are so replete with contradictions to the razor, that we often comment on fact being stranger than fiction. We've all recounted stories that, though true, seem so outlandish that we have to almost beg our audience to believe us. We realize that if we'd made up a story, it couldn't have been so full of coincidences and improbabilities. The richness of our experience defies the razor. Historians tell us without prompting that there is never a single cause for an event. Rather, each historical event is the result of a very complex interplay of circumstances. Same with the weather, which meteorologists pretend to predict even 24 hours in advance with clown-like clumsiness.

The razor is an excellent and useful tool for scientific problem solving: why not try the simplest explanation first? But when it is wielded as a blind, ideological weapon against the very real richness and complexity of the universe, it clatters against our subtler senses that are in touch with the infinite nature of reality. We are ever at the beginning of the immortal ocean of beginninglessness and endlessness. We do not yet know what we will become. When we are willing to put down our blunt instruments of apparent logic and reconnect with the ever-living universe of life that is us and surrounds us, we will see that we are seeds to what we already are, if that makes any sense. As the Hopi elders say, the time is now; we are the ones we have been waiting for.