April 30th 2010    Tim Candler

     Mostly it is others that provide comparisons.  If I lived only amongst rabbits I would become more like one.  I might hop around and nibble on things in my attempt to gain understanding.  Amongst plants however I could only chatter aimlessly because our communion belongs to a different order.

    Consciousness in plants is not seen by a majority as remotely associated to the real because plants are in too many respects a more ancient and a more apparently mechanical form.   Consciousness tends in its definition to belong to a particular human preoccupation with existence, and with the experience of existence or 'being'.   'Being' is better understood in this definition of consciousness as the 'Why Me Of Being'   A question that wanders toward an answer in a manner that becomes demanding.

    If I were an Eggplant there would at no time be a question.  I would live my life from seed to seed subject only to mechanical estrangements that might one day turn me from Black Beauty into Purple Haze.   If I were actually a rabbit I would look at the Grey Cat and while I might say "yes" or I might say "no".  I do not believe I would ever ask "why me."

    In my view without the question mark we people have so awkwardly and so mechanically inherited from the material of consciousness we would fall easier into more accurate understandings of ourselves.  Which is not to say that this question fails, or is unproductive.  Nor is it to say that we would be less clumsy without it.  But I do suggest that in us the answer is too often more pressing upon our sense of being than the question, and it is this that makes us so often subject to wackiness of behavior.

     As for wishes, I hope Delphinium survives predicted weekend storms and here I am quite convinced I do not stand alone, un-staked and isolated.  But why I wish this for Delphinium, I have no clue.  Yet there will be so many others ready with an answer for me.

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