We, as do all animals, evolve with our landscapes. Our understanding of them is entirely enmeshed with our perception of them. We notice certain landmarks and pathways because we have inherited them, and they work. They lead us to gifts.
“Where do these gifts come from?” asked early sapiens. And the answer came to them as myth. What happened — why have we lost the myth? And was this a loss?
Our ancestors saw the qualia which guided them to the matter; modern man sees only the matter. The more we learned to use reason to justify things — to explain myths, to make sophisticated arguments, to move from rhetoric to science — the more we lost sight of qualia. Qualia informs all matter, giving it its shape, holding it together, allowing it to endure, and turning it into a whole which is greater than its parts. This is what our ancestors recognized, that we miss. They may have described it in ways upon which we pass judgement — myths and magic — but they were on to something important: the qualia of it all. We still have a vague sense for qualia — the un-measurable and immaterial “something” which informs all landscapes, which is why we, today, can’t let go of religion.
But it has become next to impossible to credit religious stories, myths and dogma. We have lost touch with the source of our gifts.Fortunately, our quest need not go further than our own planet. No distant or invisible Gods need be conjured up. The source of our gifts is, and always has been, ecosystems.
Ecosystems, like all qualia, can’t be measured, for they have no material existence. Like ideas in the mind, or hexagons in snowflakes, no scientist has ever seen an ecosystem. Scientists only see neurons instead of minds, frozen water molecules instead of snowflakes, and landscapes instead of ecosystems. But ecosystems are more important than the landscapes they inform, just as ideas are more important than the brains in which they reside.
Acknowledging a gift is recognizing that we are just a part of something greater than ourselves.