Do You Hear the Stars?

In The Lost World of the Kalahari, Laurens van der Post writes about living among the Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert and describes how shocked they were that he couldn’t hear the stars.

At first they thought he must be joking or lying. When they realized he really couldn’t hear the stars, they concluded he must be very ill and expressed great sorrow. For the Bushmen knew anyone who can’t hear nature must have the gravest sickness of all.

For nearly all of the time humans have been on the planet, regular conversations across the species border were an everyday natural part of life.

Sadly, this seems like a strange invitation in our world today; most people have difficulty initiating such a conversation. Perhaps this is because we’ve been taught from a very young age to perceive nature as separate, a life-less object, a commodity. This mistaken perception seems to be at the foundation of our cultural ills.

Humanity’s ability to perceive the sentience of Earth is critical to our survival and to all life on earth.

Longing to be in conversation with nature can catalyze us. And perhaps the natural world longs for this relationship with us too...

~ Rebecca Wildbear, the Animas Valley Institute

You do not understand the dimensions into which your thoughts drop, for they continue their own existence, and others look up to them and view them like stars. Now I am telling you that your own dreams and thoughts and mental actions appear to the inhabitants of other systems like the stars and planets within your own; and those inhabitants do not perceive what lies within and behind the stars in their own heavens.

~Seth, The Early Sessions 9, Session 453 December 4, 1968

Probabilities may be swirling everywhere, yet remain of course unperceived in any given instant, so that you might in this odd strange analogy (pause) hear a dim brief whirr, as in the whirling of winds, and think it unimportant—while what you heard instead was an entire world of probabilities speed past where you stood (intently).

~DEaVF2 Chapter 12: Session 939, January 25, 1982, © Laurel Davies