That sense of wonder

Yesterday evening as we were playing tennis I looked up to see the arc of a beautiful rainbow in the sky. I can't look at rainbows anymore without thinking of a video I recently saw on Youtube of a man viewing a double rainbow near his home on the edge of Yosemite National Park. The video has gone viral on the internet because of the man's extreme ecstasy at viewing this phenomenon. It is funny and also heart-warming to see someone, particularly an adult, with so much wonderment and joy in the world. The man in question uses the name Mountainbear on Youtube, and he looks a bit like a bear too. Just like my bear does. It makes me think of animals and how we have such an affinity with them sometimes, or see in ourselves characteristics that we see in them. Empathy with other creatures. Which reminds me too of another video I watched on Youtube, produced by the Royal Society of the Arts, which was about empathy and how if only we could develop our sense of empathy with all things the world would be a much better place.

On my other blog I've been working on a piece about knowledge vs belief. And the rationalistic attitude that pervades modern life. Modernity. The idea that some things are known and others are merely believed. This distinction is at once liberating and enslaving. We are liberated by the ability to perform experiments and to devise ever more detailed and careful methodologies to examine phenomenon and to try to understand them and their causes, and this allows us to use all kinds of things in new and creative ways to accomplish things we'd like to accomplish. And yet we are enslaved by this too, enslaved by having to communicate in the language of knowledge, a language that draws lines between knowledge, belief and imagination. And yet of course all knowledge is based on belief, but that belief has been informed by observations and interpretations of them. So, if you drop something and it falls, and it always seems to fall, we believe that there is such a thing as gravity, which draws things toward the earth. Our observations as well as the explanations we have been given for them seem to fit with our reason.

What I'm trying to get at here is that the way in which knowledge is created in our modernist system, leaves no room for say, spiritual beliefs. Spirit and imagination and fantasy are seen as having no space in the world of science and rationality. And that is where I think the world of knowledge is missing a trick. Maybe missing the trick.

Knowledge tells us that animal spirits and that strong affinity that a person can feel with an animal or animal spirit is the product of imagination and therefore unreal. And yet, such affinities are so important. If we feel close to our fellow creatures we will treat them differently, with deference and understanding. Without a feeling that we are separate from them. Instead with a feeling that we are just one species among many and rather than being the center of everything we are simply a part of it. It would give us a different sense of valuing things, an enhanced sense of empathy for our fellow creatures and for our surrounding. If we could acknowledge the spirit in things, in all things, we would find ourselves appreciating more our position in relation to them, within the complex, interwoven fabric of life.

Along that line, this morning I went for a walk down to the seafront and sat on a bench for a while watching waves break. A longboarder came along to ride them. And at the same time I saw a dolphin (or perhaps two or three) playing not far away, surfacing in graceful arcs then disappearing. I watched them for maybe half an hour like that, their glistening gray bodies breaking the surface of the waves while not far away a person surfed the same waves. I left with such peace and joy in my heart. Sometimes I feel like Mountainbear seemed to feel on seeing the double rainbow, just full of wonder at things, and full of love.