Trust Your Inner Plant, As The Mystics Say

Psychedelics dominate vegetal spirituality. But there is another herbaceous tradition

Image: Vegetal detail from Songs of Innocence by William Blake

Devotion to shrooms, communion through imbibing, enthusiastic psychonauts preach. But I can report on an alternative spiritual intimacy with plants, thanks to a wonderful talk, based on her book, by the scholar-practitioner, Simone Kotva.

We were speaking at a symposium in Oslo, entitled Being Human Otherwise, and Kotva’s presentation was about a form of verdant connection that turns not to trips and consumption but that most ancient of pursuits: contemplation. It took me quite by surprise.

This sacred association is not binary, between plant and human, but triangular, reflecting the manner in which all beings participate transcendently in the immanent divine. But wait; my discursive mind rushes ahead. First, to what Kotva offered in her talk.

Minds are plants, she said, deploying a metaphor. Though is it? Because the phrase highlights something profound, a realisation threaded through mystical writings, if, like a mycelial network, often unnoticed. But perhaps for not much longer.

That would be, in part, because vegetal life and intelligence has surfaced as a matter for widespread consideration in recent years. Thanks to bestselling books and authors, readers now know that trees run wood-wide webs; grasses broadcast warnings across fields; fungi enjoy a complex, smart, multi-species “entangled life”, to cite the title of the wonderful account of it by Merlin Sheldrake.

Researchers also note that plants move not by traversing but growing; that their life course is marked by organic transformations rather than steady aging.

The plot thickens with the question of consciousness. The speculation here is that awareness might not be exclusive to animals, if agency need not be brain-led. That would be merely a zoophilic prejudice bolstered by the mechanical model dominant in modern science, which seeks discrete sources for the material causes presumed to run effects and behaviours.

Kotva extended matters further, explaining that the awareness of plants, in whatever mode it manifests, would be mediated differently from humans and, in a way, more directly. The experience of presence for our species is shaped by language; even a meditator letting go into a unitive state will have been influenced by the discussions of such experiences as oceanic, so vast, or blissful, so supremely desirable.

But plants don’t live in a world highlighted by abstractions. Rather, hormones and proteins, cells and stomata, capture their basking in the divine Sun, say, whilst the leaf and flower display a quiet, heliotropic longing. As Kotva remarked: a human person may display their love of a field of flowers in verse or image. The flower will just be the field.

That contemporary theme, again: the burgeoning multiplicity of modes of participation. So much, so familiar.

But then came a remarkable twist. There is, in fact, Kotva explained, a human tradition that has long turned to plants to understand unitive states of mind: the mystical contemplative. Writers on bare attention, sacred dissolution, divine “oneing”, to use the Middle English word, have long recognised a kinship with plants. This kind of communion is not initiated by imbibing but by celebrating a quality of soul shared by humans, animals and plants alike.

So discover your inner plant, Kotva invited us. I was more than intrigued.

One parallel with the vegetal reaches back at least to Aristotle who noted that the basic soul of all animate beings has the quality of abiding in existence. Plants offer the quintessential example, with the plant soul also present in animals, including humans.

The link is maintained in language. Plants move by growing and humans, too, will describe their growth as a path they are on - not meaning the track that falls beneath their feet, but the developmental course with which they are engaged. Participation is another capacity humans and plants share, though that mode of knowledge is often lost in a culture that prioritises possession - the type of engagement that feels natural to the submission-wary mind.

Plant-inspired practices are, therefore, plentiful in Christian mysticism, as Kotva examines in her book, Ecologies of Ecstasy: Mysticism, Philosophy and Vegetal Life. There is the notion of turning to God, like a plant to the Sun, or becoming fire, like a leaf absorbing the light. Contemplation is said to be as innate and easy as breathing, not an exercise of will but a spontaneous activity - again as the plant naturally lives.

The fool sees not the same tree that the wise man sees, averred William Blake

After her talk, I turned to one source text for the tradition highlighted, found in Plotinus’s Enneads, 3.8.1.

The great reviver of Platonism argues that all creatures thrive in contemplation be they plant or animal: even the Earth. Indeed, Plotinus envisages asking Nature why her works come forth, Nature replying:

“It would have been more becoming to put no question but to learn in silence, just as I myself am silent and make no habit of talking.” “And what is your lesson?” “This; that whatsoever comes into being is my vision, seen in my silence, the vision that belongs to my character, who, sprung from vision, am vision-loving and create vision by the vision-seeing faculty within me… I gaze and the figures of the material world take being as if they fell from my contemplation. As with my Mother, the All-Soul, and the Beings that begot me so it is with me.”

Plotinus’s insight is that Nature creates not by producing creatures, but by contemplation itself. Flowers and trees are the emanation of an inner delight; Nature produces not by action but by resplendence - which is, of course, how nature seems. The green effulgence is particularly evident in the month of May.

The view can be likened to the old distinction between Natura naturata and Natura naturans, naturing nature and natured nature, the being and becoming. Divine Nature is the free power from which the variety of visible bodies follow.

This immanent unfolding has been eclipsed in the modern Christian tradition by the tendency to opt for an alternative model for creation: ex nihilo. The out-of-nothing version stresses the objective gratuitousness of life, also conveying a sense of precariousness, as if the gift of existence might be withdrawn at any moment. But panentheism, as the plant mystic’s perception might be called, is different.

“The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed”, Jesus taught - saying elsewhere: “I am the vine”. Maybe he was speaking of sympathies, not in analogies; not so much consciousness of Christ, as Christ consciousness.

For Plotinus, the difference between plant contemplation and human is one of degree. Whereas contemplation is of itself anoetic, or non-reflective and implicit, and so plant-like in its silence, human beings do try to talk about such modes of consciousness and act on them. That reflects being awake to the awareness, Plotinus suggests, whereas for plants, contemplation is real but more dream-like.

Dante’s struggle to describe the culmination of his journey/growth in The Divine Comedy comes to mind. Whilst he is quite clear that his imagination, memory and understanding failed him as he was drawn into the “love that moves the Sun and the other stars”, that failure was not a fall into unconsciousness. Rather it is what is sometimes called the binding of the faculties or darkening of the powers, a liberation that allows the soul to rest in the aboriginal movement of God.

Similarly, reports of unitive states often include the indescribable recollection that the individual experienced as a super-sensible, hyper-reality, not some dulled or fudged version of things.

Kotva suggested one exercise to align with the plant-like within us. The practice requires little curation and no expense. The light of “grace energy”, as she calls it, can be received by sitting comfortably, smiling at the cosmos, and offering heartfelt gratitude for presence.

Or as Jesus put it: “Consider the lilies of the field.” They will then be your teachers.

IN OTHER NEWS FOR MAY:

The latest Philosophy Slam! the podcast features flying carpets.

Listen to Sharon Blackie to get a taste of the Realisation Festival in June, where she will be speaking, and consider joining us.

I’m off to Art for the Soul at Saltaire, Yorkshire on Sunday, to talk about William Blake.

Towards the end of the month, I’m in conversation with the great illustrator of Dante’s Divine Comedy, Monika Beisner, at The King’s Foundation School of Traditional Arts.

And May’s events conclude for me by chairing another evening with Martin Shaw at The Temenos Academy. You want to come to The Merrie: Adventures in Christian Mythopoetics.