Gap-crossing
“If we examine what living beings do from a very general perspective, we can see that every form and scale of Life is constantly engaged in a mutually stimulating game involving crossing gaps. At its foundation, this playfully purposeful game is about sharing and acquiring character and resources. The field of play can be seen as a dimension in which seemingly discrete participants communicate — the dimension of relation or connectivity — which comprises the complement of their separateness. Like the Universe they are founded with(in), the character and activity of living planets generates profound diversity, and as a result of this, gaps emerge all over the place — between beings, moments, resources, circumstances, relations, and experience. Evolution is the epic story of organisms bridging these gaps in ever more complex, complete and often miraculous ways. But it’s not only organisms who are adept at this game — in reality, everything is — from the smallest and most specific scales to the vastest and most general. Organisms are just expressing the very general character of their Universe in their own peculiar ways.
Stars cross the gaps between worlds (and other stars) with light, a reality you experience on any clear night when you gaze at the sky. Although it is expressed in different forms and speeds, a star’s luminous song ceaselessly communicates its status, activity and character much like the unique music of your own voice does. Of course, light isn’t the only way a star talks, but it’s one of the most impressive and obvious transports of its elementally powerful expressivity. On Earth, things are very generally similar to how they are in the larger and smaller scales of the Universe, and like stars, living worlds also ‘advertise their character’ in many modes and terrains at once. Of all the available ways of talking, one of the most commonly optioned is light (whether generated or reflected). Light is understood by everything — and planets take advantage of this preexisting transport through reflection.
Somewhat like a language, the expressions of stars and worlds reach across countless sizes and forms of gaps at an incredibly high speed (i.e: the speed of light), creating a whole spectrum of effects in all recipients. In the case of Sol and Earth, the incredible energetic fertility of Sol’s light crosses the gap between him and Earth, and the joining of his energetic character to her material character results in an explosively fertile fomr of celestial marriage. The progeny of this marriage are us: their organismal children. And like our parents, these children are gap-crossers. The shape and character of their children, like your own children, is actually a direct expression of the shape and character of the two parents. Not surprisingly, almost all of their children have flowers. In fact, most of their children are flowers. There are just a whole lot of ways to make flowers, and any specific expression is at once generally like these ways, and a very unique instance of them as well. There are also ways to make flowers in multiple dimensions simultaneously, such that a flower in the physical dimension can be uniquely embodied in dimensions like cognition, emotion, metabolism or expressivity.
But the beings you specifically call flowers are particularly interesting, in part because their favorite game is to attract pollinators by adopting enticing forms, colors, and fragrances. Their incredible and elemental attractiveness is no, accident, and neither is the profound and common reference to it in your literatures. They change the basic character of the reflected light you see on your world, and are amongst the most ardently and passionately colorful beings of any you may encounter. Plants that produce flowers cannot actually travel across the gaps between them and their mates, so they do the next best thing — they hitchhike. In order to accomplish this feat they need either wind or pollinators, and thus their form, fragrance, and color are organized to broadcast a ‘very attractive’ signal to any creatures who may be able to carry them across the gaps. The form and color of flowers speak into the ocean of light by reflection, stimulating the visual senses of pollinators, while the fragrances they exude into the atmosphere speak to their olfactory senses. These two transports represent unique modalities of a flower’s ability to attract ‘rides’, and although they cannot ‘travel’ they are staggeringly adept at attracting creatures who can do their traveling for them, and benefit in the process.[1]
Like stars and planets, the conversations of flowers are addressed to a very general audience — potential pollinators. Though there are exceptions, their evolutionary prowess doesn’t usually limit itself to attracting a single bee, or just a single type of bee, or even a single kind of pollinator. This would unnecessarily squander their exceptional communicative skill and reproductive opportunities. Flowers are so generally attractive that even large animals like humans are seduced into cultivating and transporting them all over the place. This attractiveness isn’t entirely unlike what we call gravity, but it expresses itself in a cognitive dimension rather than a mechanical one. They advertise in reflected light partially because almost everything that’s anything recognizes and understands this language. Like flowers existing at another scale of size, speed and complexity, stars and planets don’t bother with speaking in only a single dimension, or to only a single other star or world, primarily because it’s far easier to speak so generally that every possible recipient is included —in reflected light, in the case of planets, and expressed light in the case of stars.
The wonderful and astounding features of this situation are revealed only when we realize that all things and beings in the universe are playing such a game, in a way that continues to grow ever-more diverse as it grows ever-more complete. Your own consciousness is a symphonic cascade of gap-crossing in many simultaneous dimensions. The neurons in your brain are profoundly proficient at this activity, and they form a hypersystem in which your relational awareness and intelligence emerge as side-effects of the explosively connective functions and activities of their conversations. In truth it is not merely ‘neurons’, but all of your unique constituents and participants who are involved. Outside the tiny scale of the cell, at the scale of animals, human language and communication are all about crossing gaps between individual minds, and in this way are akin to the conversations of stars — but perhaps more interestingly they can be seen as living expressions of ‘what stars and planets are, and are doing’.
All of the amazing features of character and activity of Life on Earth are actually the result of the incredibly robust skills of organisms and their collectives at this very general game. And the best way to play is to experience ever-more diverse relationShips, because the more relations you have to learn from, the more the experience and potentials of the participants are radically and continuously enriched by the inflow of new ways of knowing, being, conversing, or acting. As an added bonus, great connectivity insures that everyone will have to spend far less effort and time attempting to re-invent what’s already been accomplished by other members of the game.
If we realize that stars are energy-flowers and planets are organismal flowers, we are approaching a place where we can begin to explore and appreciate the amazing character and activity of new kinds of bees.
starFish
There’s no doubt that interstellar and even interplanetary space appears extremely inhospitable to Life as you know it, the cold is uninviting as the threats of vacuum and hard radiation. Without an atmosphere, which can lens sunlight into a reasonably nurturing form, the expressions of Sol, for example, are deadly to terrestrial organisms — they’re simply ‘too energetic’. But suppose that through an unexpected set of circumstances, a form of very sophisticated tinyLife — cells of some sort —either evolved on, colonized, or became trapped on a small object flying around in space. Perhaps they existed in dust exuded by a living world, and were gathered into a near-passing cometary mass, or are encased in a crystal filled with water, inside a stone. Over millions of years, their microculture evolves to allow them to at least survive this dangerous and apparently limited circumstance. With a bit more time, they find ways make use of solar expressions that terrestrial life could not withstand contact with.
Due to the limited nature of their environment and circumstance, there isn’t a lot of room for complex physical adaptations — like generating animals, for example — but there is a great deal of potential for working together, with and for each other. The vector into which these tiny creatures pour the full measure of their evolutionary momentum and prowess is simple: they start lensing each other’s sentience, in the same way a school of fish do. The sum of their lensed sentience, which is immediately available to all who are members of such a field, vastly supercedes anything a given individual might experience or know, and yet the knowledge and skill of each individual is similarly valued because it is a unique instance of what the whole knows, as well as a constituent. This game is so easy to play that even a seemingly ‘primitive’ cellular culture in a very inhospitable situation could definitely play and benefit from it. Their way of gap-crossing becomes one where the cognitive bridges connecting them are always renewed and more expertly re-woven according to even the slightest changes in their environment, understandings, and relations with each other.
As countless eons pass n their little rock, or chunk of ice, they continue to grow more skilled at conectivity-games, not only with each other, but with the Universe in general. Eventually, this leads to an incredible revelation and they acquire the ability to cross seemingly impenetrable gaps — such as those between their world and other worlds where Life exists. They have grown so profoundly adept at sentience-lensing that they can now lens the biocognitive experience of distant worlds, in a way not dissimilar to how your species lenses light with telescopes, but rather than seeing light, they experience knowledge — the knowledge held in the histories, evolution, biology and activity of every scale of Life on any world they can touch.
This radically alters the course of their evolution — they have discovered another kind of star — a learning star. (explain)Access to this impossible library allows them to resolve evolutionary problems in a rhythm of vast leaps, whereas previously this activity was like trying to move a mountain with a tweezer. In the beginning they find that the great intensity of this ‘knowledge light’ can also be deadly if received without proper preparation, and thus they dip into it only briefly so as not to get burned by the incredible speed of its growth and change. Each dip results in a long period of adaptations to the new potentials created by the abundance of what is learned, and this becomes like the rhythmic pulse of their evolutionary heartbeat.
[1] This gap-crossing is recalled in the human tradition of the groom carrying his bride ‘across the threshold’, and, for flowers, this from of travel is synonymous with sex.