Writer Peter Reason explores the possibilities of learning to unhook ourselves from taken-for-granted perspectives, finding ways to invoke the living presence of a sentient world through co-operative inquiry with humans and waterways as participants in a kinship ecology.
1,890 words: estimated reading time = 7.5 minutes
How can those of us enculturated into a Western worldview engage with our world as sentient, as responsive, as kin? This is the question we address in Living Waters, our series of on-line co-operative inquiry workshops involving both human and River persons; the next workshops run online from 11th March to 29th April 2025 and usually attracts an international participation (see below for registration details).
In these inquiries we have been asking questions of the kind:
What would it be like to live in a world of sentient beings rather than inert objects? How would we relate to such a world? And if we invoke such a world of sentient presence, calling to other-than-human beings as persons, might we elicit a response?
These questions focus our attention on whether we experience our world as something ‘out there’, which however wondrous and valuable is nevertheless separate from humans; this is the taken-for-granted perspective in Western society. Or is the world an animate presence, experienced as kin, as “all our relations”?[1] as do my Indigenous and Settler colleagues in Western Australia, who write in ‘Seeing, feeling, and hearing the world’:
… the ways we see, feel, and hear the world is associated with how we relate to and respond to our places. If we see the ground we walk on and the places we live in as animate, responsive, and relational, we are highly likely to care for Country with love, gentleness of spirit and fullness of heart. We are all able to hear and participate in the music, the soundscape of our places – to honour and celebrate the lyrics of life’. [2]
This way of seeing allows Indigenous people in their traditional cultures to experience the places they live – places their people have inhabited for tens of thousands of years – as living and responsive, with the whole community of beings as participants in a kinship ecology. These Indigenous elders draw on words that don’t translate easily, if at all, into English – pirlirr in Walmatjarri, liyan in Nyikina, and wirrin in Noongar – words that refer to a visceral way of knowing shared by people, all beings, and land itself. Through this way of seeing, feeling, and hearing Country, people know that “when you care for Country, Country will care for you”. [3]
When we use the terms Country (capital C), Land (capital L) or River (capital R) we refer to a broader, stronger, Indigenous use of the English language concepts of country, land, and river. These terms refer to places as relational, animate socio-ecosystems that are living and responsive. Country, Land and River include people as participants in a kin-centred ecology of being.
Beyond brute matter
Those of us socialized into a Western way of being have been taught to think of humans and nature as separate and mutually exclusive opposites. In Western culture, although some of the ‘higher’ mammals are credited with intelligence, by and large the other–than–human is experienced as brute matter, only of value in so far as it serves human purposes. This perspective is clearly in error, as it has proved to be astoundingly destructive of the quality and complexity of the planetary ecology. Can we Westerners find this quality of relationship, can we learn to see our world in the way of kinship? Writer Amitav Ghosh entreats us to listen once more to the voices of the more-than-human world:
Voices that have stubbornly continued to insist, in the face of unrelenting, apocalyptic violence, that nonhumans can, do, and must speak. It is essential now, as the prospect of planetary catastrophe comes ever closer, that those nonhuman voices be restored to our stories. The fate of humans, and all our relatives, depends on it. [4]
Living Waters inquiries are based not only on Indigenous perspectives but are rooted also in Western philosophy, specifically contemporary ‘living cosmos panpsychism’ which has its roots in the writings of Spinoza. We understand our world not as inanimate ‘stuff’ but as imbued from its origins with some kind of innerness – call it mind or sentience. Everything is integral to the fabric of the living cosmos, all of the same sentient cloth. And from this we see that all beings form a communion of subjects, reaching out to each other in mutual contact and communication, co-creating a ‘poetic ecology’: the fundamental erotics of being touched by the world and touching it in return. If we invoke a world of brute stuff, as is normal in Western society, then that is what we will experience. If we invoke the world as sentient presence, we may be graced with a response – as the living world configures itself on poetic, metaphorical response to our invocation, a process Freya Mathews refers to as ontopoetics.
Co-operative inquiry with the more-than-human
The point of our inquiries is to learn to unhook ourselves from taken-for-granted perspectives and to explore ways of invoking the living presence of a sentient world. This is where Cooperative Inquiry comes in, a profoundly democratic approach to learning about and making sense of our world. This approach to living inquiry has three central characteristics that make it profoundly suitable for panpsychic inquiry because it treats all those involved – human and more-than-human – as subjective self-directing beings and therefore as equal participants in the inquiry process. It also emphasizes the experiential ground form of knowing, and it asserts the primacy of practice.
In orthodox scientific research the roles of subject and researcher are mutually exclusive, the researcher contributes the thinking that goes into the project, the subjects contribute the action to be studied. In co-operative inquiry these exclusive roles are replaced by mutual relationships. All involved work together both as co-researchers and co-subjects. Everyone is engaged in the design and management of the inquiry; everyone contributes to the questions to be asked and how to go about exploring them; everyone participates in the experience and action that’s being explored; everyone is involved in making sense and drawing conclusions; everyone draws on the learning from the inquiry in their future practice.
So how does this apply to the Living Waters workshops? We start with each participant identifying a River or waterway near where they live which they can engage with as a living, sentient being. They may sit with or walk by River, offering it quite simply attentive love. This can evolve into ceremony, gift-giving, song, prayer, always addressing River as a living being, always attentive to River’s response. We ask participants to compose accounts of their experiences and share these with an inquiry group of about six of their fellows; and periodically through the eight weeks of the workshops we work as a whole community of about twenty human persons to identify themes and shared questions. These cycles of inquiry are punctuated by seminar sessions at which the faculty offer perspectives on a view of the world as sentient – living cosmos panpsychism, biopoetics, place-based ecology, Gaia theory – which may inform the inquiry process.
Personal encounters – towards a sentient world
About one hundred human and River persons have participated in this inquiry process over the past four years. Our encounters with Rivers drew forth a wide range of responses, both inner and outer.
- For many co-inquirers the initial challenge was to get over the internal voices that questioned the whole activity – this even though they joined the inquiry sympathetic to its aims. We all needed to quieten our minds and hush our expectations sufficiently to give fuller attention to River. Many found themselves at first distracted and self-absorbed.
- Once inner voices were somewhat quietened, it was still easy to drop into a traditional subject-object relationship, to look at the river as still ‘out there’.
- However, with persistence, practice, and support from the human inquiry community, most were able to sustain a feeling of sentient presence, and then move into what one group called ‘getting in the zone’. This is the experience of a sentient, embodied world, and of one’s own animal body as part of it; usually accompanied by intense feelings of pleasure and gratitude, maybe wonder and enchantment at the sheer beauty of it all.
- Going deeper, there sometimes arose a curious juxtaposition of the ordinary and the extraordinary; and close to that a profound feeling that the ordinary is all extraordinary.
- Some inquirers also developed a complex imaginative or psychic response, as if the world is somehow ‘speaking’ directly in words and images. In time, many participants found themselves ‘slipping under the psychic skin of the world’ or ‘lifting the veil’, with the illusion of separation slipping away.
- Finally, there are on occasion active ontopoetic responses, ‘moments of grace’ when the world and its beings actively gesture back in response to invocation: animals and birds appear; there is a gust of wind or a shower of rain; leading to narratives of experience incontrovertibly linked to one’s invocation.
Many participants report experiences of a sentient and responsive world that are deeply felt, unassailably authentic. Such experiences have an authority of their own. They offer intimations of a world quite different from the materialist, brute world into which we moderns are socialized. As an outcome, our metaphysical assumptions are radically re-arranged. It is evident that experiences of a sentient, communicative world are available not just to Indigenous people living in traditional cultures, but to all human persons willing to put in the time, the attention, to risk their taken-for-granted sense of self, and to open themselves to that possibility.
Notes
[1] Linda Hogan (1995), Dwellings: A spiritual history of the living world (originally published by Simon and Schuster, 1995; 2007 edition by W. W Norton & Company. )
[2] & [3] Kankawa Nagarra Olive Knight, Anne Poelina and Sandra Wooltorton, Seeing, Feeling, and Hearing, and the World.
[4] Amitav Ghosh (2021, John Murray. P.57), The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a planet in crisis; italics in original.
Find more
The next iteration of the online Living Waters co-operative inquiry runs from 11th March to 29th April 2025.
Peter mentions several perspectives on the living world that the Living Waters inquiries draw on in their Cooperative Inquiry seminars: living cosmos panpsychism, biopoetics, place-based ecology, Gaia theory, Ontopoetics and narratives of experience. Peter has written extensively on these approaches, including Learning How Land Speaks and at his website.
In Peter’s previous post for us, Bristol Climate Writers Presents … ‘Desert Island Books’ — a collaborative piece with fellow members of both ClimateCultures and BCW on fiction and non-fiction books they discussed at a public event — he talks about – Learning to Die: Wisdom in the Age of Climate Crisis by Robert Bringhurst and Jan Zwicky, and The Overstory by Richard Powers. He also contributed Lines Written While Reading Hunger Mountain to Day 4 of our Quarantine Connection series during the first UK lockdown of the Covid-19 pandemic. And with his Songs for Earth, featured in our Creative Showcase, he asks: How does one sing in the face of the ecological crisis — the disruption of the process of life itself, permanent loss of evolutionary complexity, permanent endings of patterns of being?”
Peter Reason