Termites and their collective consciousness raise some thought provoking questions about humanity. If termites can only express their true genetic identity in the amassed presence of their numbers — only then are they able to form complex social structures, build architecturally sophisticated mounds and endure eons of changing environmental conditions — what does this suggest of us? Is our character, with its complex impulses, motives and behaviour, shaped by the amassed numbers of us, just as with termites?

We, of course, are comparative biological youngsters without the long evolutionary experience of termites. But we do exhibit their essential characteristic of purposeful social behaviour when we gather together in small and large groups. Indeed, the larger these groups, the more complex our behaviour as tasks are invented, compounded and subdivided to fit escalating levels of intricacy. Hunters and gatherers evolve into priests and judges, patriarchs and elders into presidents and parliaments, caves and huts into palaces and skyscrapers, sandals and boots into cars and aeroplanes, berries and beads into money and banks, clubs and spears into rifles and bombs. As a species, we and our ancestors have outstripped the amazing accomplishments of the termite.

But do we have a comparable sense of collective consciousness? The answer requires that our awareness reflect on its own awareness, an exercise of self-inquiry that is always difficult because it requires making oneself into an object — just as a mirror reflecting another mirror conveys only the image of mirrors. Our sense of collective consciousness may be such an integral part of our human character that we would be the last to discover it.

We do, however, get some hint of collective consciousness with the so-called “Hundredth Monkey” phenomenon. The process was first observed in 1952 when a single female on the Japanese island of Koshima began washing the gritty sand from the yams she wanted to eat. Others began to copy the practice. When about 100 of the monkeys on this one island were washing yams, other monkeys on other islands apparently began washing their yams, too. The spread of this behaviour has be attributed to a kind of collective consciousness that is comparable to that in termite behaviour.

But we humans may have our own direct expressions of collective consciousness. Art seems to be a universal communication device that bridges the difference between cultures. Primitive images have a creative power that seems transcended place and time by connecting to the aesthetics of modern civilizations. The common heartbeat of all humanity’s biological heritage expresses itself in drumming and rhythm, a universal medium of communication. Music from diverse cultures seems to link on a shared plane of understanding. Dance “talks” via the movements shared by all human experience. Colours, shapes and sounds often have universal meaning, as if they were all connected to a common symbolic language.

But a more ominous example of collective consciousness is the way history keeps repeating itself. Variations, of course, always exist from one civilization to another. But the pattern is disquietingly the same. Rising complexity is followed by unheeded warnings of vulnerability, then by collapse and radical reorganization. This pattern occurs so often that it suggests we are regularly victimized by a mass mentality that fails to recognize the fatal momentum propelling our behaviour. History fails to teach us because each civilization is so engrossed in its own collective consciousness that the lessons of the past fail to elicit a corrective response.

Unlike termites that seem to have no obvious means of reflecting on their collective consciousness, we do have language and mass media to build a common awareness. But this does not explain all human behaviour. Stock markets are notoriously irrational. Economic health moves in strangely rhythmical cycles as if all commercial activity were responding to some subliminal force that refuses to recognize the stabilizing effects of reason. New ideas grow slowly to a critical mass, after which they are impossible to suppress. Cultures and civilizations seem to move through periods of calm optimism and then anxious despair, as if these changing moods are uncontrollable and contagious.

So collective consciousness raises the more ominous question about who we collectively are as a species. Do we have a pooled intelligence that commits us to certain inevitable and unavoidable courses of behaviour, certain strategies that we repeat over and over again because it is in our nature to do so? Just like termites, this nature is our source of success and failure, salvation and undoing. If we were perceptive and attentive enough, we would notice the same patterns repeating themselves in different variations throughout history. Persian, Egyptian, Mayan, Khmer and Roman, even on remote Easter Islander, all rose and fell because the momentum of who they were carried them to their prescribed demise.

Could we be conscious enough of the warning signs to avoid a collapse of the global civilization we have built with our commerce, industry and technology? We have indications that this whole structure of human creation is under stress. The wall of limits looms. The general optimism of a few decades ago is shifting toward skepticism, with growing traces of pessimism. War is always present as a haunting and perennial human folly. And the environmental problems rushing toward us are large, ominous and inadequately addressed — amplified versions of the same ones that past civilizations repetitively neglected.

A review of history should cause us to wonder if we are programmed by our collective consciousness to continually repeat the same pattern of mistakes. Perhaps, however, the simple act of noting this repetition raises us above the level of the termite. Perhaps.

A sense of the sacred can arrive unexpectedly. Perhaps it is created by a mirror-calm lake enclosed by rocky hills all bedecked with the orange and yellow of autumn colours, where the profound silence of wilderness is only filled by the lonely call of a loon. Or perhaps it’s a mountain top where the assembly of nearby peaks tower upward in a crescendo of gravity-defying exuberance, and the snow-lined ponds far below radiate the same azure blue as the cloudless sky.

But anything natural can trigger this sense of the sacred. It could be an open meadow softened by morning dew, as the slow rise of silver mist frees it from the cool shiver of night. Or it could be a single tree when its great height and girth boggles an imagination trying to comprehend how a little seed is capable of orchestrating such astounding complexity and intricacy. But it could also be a delicate blade of grass curving into a gentle arch, bedecked by a necklace of raindrops hanging from a spider’s web. Both the small and the big can create a sense of the sacred, that moment in time and place where the world flashes its beauty and all the countless pieces of it each declare they are in exactly the right place.

No one should then be surprised that some aboriginal cultures speak of “power places” where the wisdom of Earth’s intelligence seems to shout rather than whisper. Regardless of season or weather, these places were recognized as sacred — even when native cultures were usurped by Christian ones, these “power places” often became the locations of churches. The Shinto tradition of Japan venerates special stones and natural settings that seem to resonate with special communicative strength. And the Gaia Theory — heavily supported by scientific evidence — echoes the notion that all the natural components of Earth combine to form a collective intelligence that regulates and stabilizes the conditions that permit life to survive and flourish.

This idea may seem foreign to a materialistic Western culture that venerates the importance of the individual, discourages the diminution of self, and doubts the validity of the mystical experience. But the Gaia Theory has its living parallel in bees, ants and termites. Termites, for example, can function viably only as a collective consciousness. As individuals they are totally lost and useless. But a critical mass of them coalesces into a whole awareness able to function as a purposeful community that can build superbly designed mounds — complete with air conditioning — and sustain orderly and complex societies. The famous American biologist, E.O Wilson, referred to this phenomenon of collective consciousness as one of the science’s most important but unexplained mysteries.

If insects can do it, and the same is possible for the entire fabric of Earth, then we should be capable of experiencing it in special places during special moments of receptivity. We just need to open and receive what is bigger than the confines of self, larger than the limits of purposeful objectives, and greater than any sense of human time. One of these moments has to expand beyond the narrow confines of individual knowing to receive what is greater than thoughts can think. Bewilderment has to be trusted if wonder is to coalesce into the sacred. Certain places activate this process, so they are deemed sacred because no other designation fits their informative power.

The sacred is not religious. It is not doctrinal. It is not belief. Rather, it’s more like an inner emptiness that has been waiting for a special kind of filling. And, in response to a silent calling, the natural world rushes in to fill a void left by our disconnection from our origin.

The mystical experience of wholeness transforms everything into the sacred. All the disparate parts and pieces of distinctions meld into a unity that seems to exude contentment and completion. And the imagined tensions between conflicting differences balance into a stillness that lives and changes without disturbing a pervasive sense of immeasurable calm.

This is why those who experience a sense of the sacred can’t explain it — their epiphany can’t be rendered into separate components without destroying the sense of wholeness that pervades it. So those with a sense of the sacred seem to be motivated by a force outside the linear thought and logical reasoning that tries to connect individual pieces into conventional understanding. When separate parts keep dissolving into a wholeness that is bigger than explanations and even self, then the mystic has experienced the sacred. “To see a world in a grain of sand…,” wrote the 18th century English poet William Blake, “and eternity in an hour.”

Nature is most likely to elicit this sense of the sacred because it is the most consistent, authentic and ancient of all human experiences — we grew out of nature as a child grows out of its mother so the connective roots even precede our origin as a species. This is why the forests, lakes, rivers, stones and mountains of wilderness can elicit such powerful responses in some people. Their collective wholeness is a glimpse of the intelligence and wisdom that is our earliest beginning, our timeless history and our uncertain future.

The sacred that is experienced at one place on one occasion can dissolve obstructions and so allow it to happen anytime, anywhere. Differences disappear. The blade of grass becomes as large and miraculous as the mountain; the slow time of silence becomes as symphonic as the thunder of waves on beaches. The world sings and sighs its orchestral beauty just as it flashes and dances its exquisite shapes and forms. In moments of profound insight, we call it the sacred. But it’s really just the astounding beauty of ordinary nature that we have failed to notice.

A writer and thinker of substance should leave more questions than answers. This is the case with Robert Bringhurst, the author of The Tree of Meaning: Language, Mind and Ecology (Counterpoint, Berkeley, 2008). Some of his questions are explicit and obvious, easily and quickly answered after moments of consideration. Others are implicit and subtle, reverberating silently and unanswered beneath the surface of the reader’s consciousness. But all these questions are relevant because each one is personal.

Even if these questions don’t have answers, they are still important in clarifying, growing and refining who we are. Do I understand these new ideas? Are they credible? How do they compare to what I already know? Do they make me feel comfortable or uncomfortable? How are they meaningful to me? How do they define me? How might they change me? These are some of the questions that arise from reading Bringhurst’s book.

Bringhurst is a linguist, typologist, poet, philosopher, historian and academic who thinks and writes in a crisp, insightful and precise style, a man who invariably leads readers into new and challenging but rewarding territory. This happens with particular poignancy in one chapter of The Tree of Meaning, “The Persistence of Poetry and the Destruction of the World”.

Bringhurst posits that a world war has been raging for two millennia. This war, which reached the New World with the arrival of the European colonialists, is between two kinds of people: “…those who think they belong to the world and those who think the world belongs to them.” The former are the polytheists, the poets, the native and pagan cultures that perceive the world as complex, organic, changing and mysterious. The latter are the politicians, bureaucrats, industrialists and theists, “all the devotees of the number one — one empire, one history, one market, or one God — and who nowadays insist on the preeminence of everyone for himself: the smallest number one of all.”

Everyone who encounters this idea should be asking questions — many questions about our personal values, our culture and our relationship with the natural world. Even more questions should arise from Bringhurst’s assessment of the essential problem confronting the world today. “The great danger is single-mindedness,” he writes, “reducing things to one perspective, one idea, one overriding rule.” Such a malaise is the systematic process of “reducing the world to human terms.”

This is our conquest of nature, the imposition of a single purpose in which the gods of complexity and mystery are displaced and replaced by the “homes and garages of human beings” — US housing starts fell from 2,000,000 in 2006 to 430,000 in 2012, the measure of a worrisome recession which fails to consider that all these homes mean occupied landscapes, levelled forests, consumed resources, and evicted species of resident plants and animals.

The etymology of “humanism”, Bringhurst points out in the chapter “The Vocation of Being”, seems to have come from “an archaic Indo-European word for earth. Latin humanus is related to English humus. A human is an earthling.” Bringhurst notes, “We are not the centre of the universe,” as we like to think, but are “earth-surface people” in the Navajo language. In Haida, we are also “surface people” and in their poetry become “ordinary surface birds”. If we were capable of diving beneath our surface understanding of nature by shedding our superficial capabilities and our self-centredness, we would “enter the world of myth,” writes Bringhurst, “and come back speaking poetry.”

Many may remember the question, “If a tree falls in the forest with no one there to hear it, does it make a sound or not?” Bringhurst’s answer is unequivocal. “The question is demented. If a tree falls in the forest, all the other trees are there to hear it. But if a man cuts down the forest and then cries that he has no food, no firewood, no shade, and that his mind can get no traction, who is going to hear him?”

“Poetry,” Bringhurst reminds us, “is the language of being: the breath, the voice, the song, the speech of being. It does not need us. We are the ones in need of it. If we haven’t learned to hear it, we will also never speak it.”

This poetry is the magic of life, the unanswered and unanswerable questions that are the mystery of being alive in the most incredible place in the universe. “And what does this poetry say?” Bringhurst asks. “It says that what-is is: that the real is real, and that it is alive. It speaks the grammar of being. It sings the polyphonic structure of meaning itself.”

Bringhurst quotes William Faulkner, the American novelist who, in his address upon receiving the Nobel Prize for literature in 1949, noted that, “Mankind will not only survive, he will prevail.” Bringhurst respectfully begs to differ. “I think that his prediction is logically impossible. I think that if humanity survives, it can only be because it does not prevail, and that if we insist, like Ozymandias, on prevailing, we will surely not survive.”

So we return to Bringhurst’s statement about the world war that has been raging between two kinds of people for two millennia. Do we think we belong to the world or do we think the world belongs to us? Our answer to this question is becoming increasingly obvious and crucially important. Every time, without exception, that we have attempted to cast nature in our own image and turn it into the exclusive service of our needs, we have failed miserably — causing ruin to our surroundings and to ourselves. Or, to reiterate Bringhurst’s words, “reducing things to one perspective, one idea, one overriding rule” has invariably been a strategy for disaster.

Any questions?

Behind the questions that people ask are assumptions that are often more revealing than the questions themselves. One of these revealing questions appeared in “Collected Wisdom”, a weekly newspaper column in which readers ask questions and various experts attempt to answer them (The Globe and Mail, Aug. 25/12). A certain reader named Adam “wonders how much mass the Earth has gained over the past 100 years through increased human population.” The question was answered by Dr. Scott M. Ramsay of the biology department at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario.

“Assuming the average mass per person is 65 kilograms,” explains Dr. Ramsay, “the total mass of the human population [of seven billion] is about 455 million tonnes.” Since the population 100 years ago was 1.65 billion, their total mass of 107 million tonnes would have to be subtracted from the 455 million tonnes. “So the total mass of people on the planet has gone up about 348 million tonnes” since 1912. (A related but unasked question could be posed about the volume occupied by everyone on the planet. An unconfirmed statistic calculates that every human being in the world could be stacked like cordwood within the Grand Canyon — a troublesome species, when all gathered in one place, doesn’t actually occupy a lot of space.)

As for the direct answer to Adam’s question concerning the contribution of people to any increase in Earth’s mass over the last 100 years, Dr. Ramsay gently reminds him, “The answer to that is zero.”

He patiently explains that “the 348 million tonnes of new people came from an equivalent mass of food, water, oxygen and minerals that were already present on the planet.” The only relevant input from outside Earth has been sunlight. This solar radiation has been “captured by plants to convert water and carbon dioxide into carbohydrate for usable energy and other functions, which together with minerals (mostly nitrogen and phosphorus) combine to build proteins and other necessary components of life. Everything else was already here; it has just been relocated into the bodies of people.”

The revealing assumption underlying Adam’s question is the notion that we could have come from someplace other than Earth, that we are materialized here from another realm of existence. The assumption has a religious overtone, a suggestion that we expect ourselves to be different and more important than the ordinary dust and clay that lies beneath our feet. The assumption hints that we are not the same as all the other animals and plants with which we share a planet, and that humans are somehow exceptional, bestowed upon life’s living fabric as a special contribution.

Of course, Adam’s question could have been a simple mistake of scientific logic. It could have been a thoughtless and ill-considered impulse based on an innocent lapse of judgment. It could also have come from an assumption derived an ordinary ignorance. Except that such a faulty assumption resonates with so many other things we do on the planet that it seems to be more than just an innocuous slip. We often think of ourselves as different from the rest of life on Earth, as superior to nature’s ingenuity. And one powerful religious tradition does defines us as the divinely ordained custodians of Creation.

Underlying this elevated self-assessment of ourselves is the more basic attitude of detachment, the view that we are “in this world” but not “of this world”. This is an old argument first posed by early Christian theologians. Each person comes from Jehovah as an eternal soul, is implanted at conception in a temporal body, and lives there in confinement until released to Judgment at death. Arcane as this may seem from some modern perspectives, it is still alive in the subconscious of our culture, expressing itself as attempts to weigh the soul — how much weight does the body lose at the moment of dying — and as the essential theological justification for those opposing abortion and assisted suicide. Human life is controlled by a higher force than mere mortals and their imperfect laws. Adam’s mistake — that additional people on Earth actually increase its mass — is a logical extension of the assumptions rooted in this Christian perspective. It is also rooted in classical Greek philosophy, of which most Western thinking is a footnote.

The subterranean currents that move us to think and act in particular ways are actually much deeper and stronger than we usually realize. They reside in the complex, subliminal networks of our theology, philosophy, psychology and sociology. Nothing in human behaviour functions at face value. This is why the faulty assumption about more people increasing the mass of Earth is so revealing. The flawed assumption about the way we occupy Earth suggests that we are quite capable of assaulting our planet’s ecologies without noticing, acknowledging or even being capable of arresting our destructive behaviour.

The operative word is detachment. Too many of us think we are “in this world” but not “of this world”— it is also the failing of a wholly intellectual mind. We don’t consider that we are extensions of the world and, therefore, it is an extension of us. Instead, we think of the world as a place we visit but not as a place where we belong. Nature, like our physical bodies, is interpreted as inferior compared to the standards of perfection that exist in some theological and philosophical models. Consequently, what we do to the Earth has little moral significance if we are only passing through on our journey from one absolute to another. So we are not compelled to regard the destruction of our surroundings as a violation of something sacred. To think that we have an identity separate from Earth could be a fatal failing.

The historical undercurrents of theology, philosophy and their companion forces move so invisibly within us that they shape our deepest perceptions, our fundamental assumptions and finally our thoughtless behaviour. Sometimes, however, a patiently given scientific answer to a seemingly innocent question can move us to conscious awareness.