More and more scientists now find something like intelligence, the ability to sense, learn and solve problems, far beyond the human brain: in plants, in forests linked by underground fungal networks, in brainless slime moulds and in the cells of our own bodies, whilst others describe the Earth itself as a self-regulating living system. Therapeutic Shamanism goes further, teaching that everything, stones, rivers and mountains included, is alive and conscious in its own way. The question it asks is less whether the world is intelligent than whether we have learnt to notice.
What does intelligence mean beyond the human? #
It depends on the definition, and most definitions were written by humans with human abilities in mind. Plant scientists such as Stefano Mancuso use a broad one: “Intelligence is the ability to solve problems.”1 The biologists František Baluška and Michael Levin go further, treating cognition as the gathering, storing and use of information at any level of life, from cells upwards, and holding that neurons have no unique property that makes them the only seat of it.2
Therapeutic Shamanism starts from a similar place. When intelligence is defined in human terms, humans will always come out on top, which is why the primatologist Frans de Waal‘s picture fits so well: intelligence is not a ladder but “more like a bush, with cognition taking different forms on different branches.”3 Put in terms of consciousness, “things that are very different to us are still conscious, but just in a way that is different to us.”4 See What are the different kinds of intelligence, and how has the list grown?
The case is clearest for animals. Research on birds, apes, elephants, dolphins and many others keeps finding thinking and feeling where they were once denied, and many scientists now regard sentience in mammals and birds, at least, as beyond reasonable doubt. See Do animals think and feel?
Are plants intelligent? #
A growing number of plant scientists think so. Mancuso, a plant physiologist at the University of Florence, describes plants sensing their surroundings, communicating and solving problems, and points out that, having no brain to lose, a plant spreads its abilities through its whole body, or in his words, “Their intelligence is distributed!”5 The philosopher of science Paco Calvo says that we are so used to thinking of intelligence as something that happens in neurons and brains that we find it hard to imagine any other kind.6 Experiments led by Monica Gagliano at the University of Western Australia found that the sensitive plant, mimosa, learns to stop folding its leaves in response to a harmless touch, and learns faster when light is scarce. Calvo reports this, whilst saying that his own laboratory has not yet repeated her more ambitious finding, that plants can learn by association as Pavlov’s dogs did.7 Many plant scientists remain cautious about using the word intelligence at all.8
Therapeutic Shamanism has no such hesitation. Hunter-gatherers saw plants as “conscious beings with their own kind of intelligence”.9 Plant consciousness is collective, so that each plant is like one cell in a far larger body: “Grass is an almost planetary-wide single consciousness.”10 See What are Plant People, and what gifts do they bring?
Are forests intelligent? #
The forest ecologist Suzanne Simard, of the University of British Columbia, found that trees of different species, birch and Douglas fir, pass carbon to one another through the threads of fungi that link their roots, a finding the journal Nature called the “wood-wide web”. Over the following decades she came to see the old trees at the centre of these networks as Mother Trees, linked to their kin, and wrote that the networks themselves “could have the signature of intelligence.”11 The German forester Peter Wohlleben, in The Hidden Life of Trees, describes forests as superorganisms, much like ant colonies, in which trees share nutrients and help neighbours in need.12
Some scientists think that the more popular versions of this story have run ahead of the evidence, and Simard’s own book is careful about how much has been shown; the slime-mould researcher Audrey Dussutour has said that, with the wood-wide web, enthusiasm got too far ahead of the data.13 The research goes on.
The same picture runs through Therapeutic Shamanism: plants “can send nutrients along their roots and along the interconnecting mycelium fungal network, to help neighbouring plants who are struggling.”14 And whole landscapes are alive. “The environment itself is alive. It has its own Soul. The desert is a consciousness. The grassland is a consciousness.”
Can a creature with no brain be intelligent? #
The slime mould Physarum is a single cell containing many nuclei, with no brain or nerves, and yet in a famous experiment by the Japanese scientist Toshiyuki Nakagaki it found the shortest route through a maze to food. Studies of creatures like this have led some researchers, among them the philosopher Pamela Lyon, to suggest that the abilities we call cognition belong not just to animals but to all life, and Lyon believes we are on the brink of a Copernican revolution. Some of their critics complain that it verges on animism.15 Michael Levin’s work on the cells of the body points the same way. See What does Michael Levin’s work say about intelligence in cells and bodies?
Some biologists tie knowing to being alive at all. Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, in The Tree of Knowledge (1987), describe living beings as making themselves and their own boundaries, and see cognition not as a copy of a world ‘out there’ but as “an ongoing bringing forth of a world through the process of living itself”. One of their sayings is “All doing is knowing and all knowing is doing.”16 Building on their work, the biologist and philosopher Andreas Weber, in Biopoetics (2016), describes every organism as a subject that meets its world as good or bad for its own life, so that feeling comes first. In his words, “Subjectivity is felt concern.”17
Where does consciousness stop? “A slug? A blade of grass? Bacteria?” In shamanism it does not stop anywhere: “everything is made of Spirit, and Spirit is conscious, and so everything is conscious.”18
Is the Earth itself intelligent? #
The scientist James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis describes the Earth’s living things and their surroundings as one self-regulating system that has kept the planet fit for life for billions of years. Lovelock spoke of “the living Earth”, but did not mean the Earth is alive in a sentient way.19 Others go further. The handbook Cocreating with a Living, Intelligent Earth states that “The Earth and all life is intelligent, sentient and able to communicate and act with purpose.”20 See What is the Gaia hypothesis, and who was James Lovelock?
For Therapeutic Shamanism the Earth is our Mother. Every being is the tip of a twig, going back to a branch, and ultimately to Mother EarthMother Earth. The sacred Feminine pole: pure potential, from whom all the Peoples arise. The Lower-World is her realm, and she is all the realms: “The Earth is indeed our Mother.” More about this: “The Earth is indeed our Mother.”21 The Stone PeopleStone People. All physical matter: mountains, sea, rivers, clouds, sun and stars: the oldest and widest of the Peoples. As some animist cultures put it, ‘we are just the Stone People, dancing for a while’. Read the full answer are “the closest thing to Mother Earth herself”, meaning more than the planet we live on.22
What about stones, rivers and mountains? #
Some philosophers hold that mind goes all the way down into matter itself, a view called panpsychism. Panpsychists differ about how far this reaches. Some, as the writer Matthew Adams explains, think of consciousness as a spectrum, in which “a rock might have a very basic form of awareness”;23 many others, according to the philosophers Godehard Brüntrup and Ludwig Jaskolla, give a mind only to genuine individuals, not to “mere conglomerates like a rock formation”.24
Others find matter livelier than the modern West allows, whilst stopping short of a mind or a soul. The political theorist Jane Bennett, in Vibrant Matter (2010), describes things such as food, storms and metals as able to “act as quasi agents or forces with trajectories, propensities, or tendencies of their own”, and is clear that this vitality is not a spirit or ‘life force’ added to matter.25 The philosopher Timothy Morton, in Realist Magic (2013), agrees with Bennett that it might help “to inject a little bit of animism into the discussion”, but goes the other way from mind, imagining how being mindful of something is like being a cinder block, not claiming that cinder blocks have minds.26 The artist and researcher Robert Pepperell, in What Matter Feels (2024), proposes that every portion of matter has an inner side, which he calls Experience, though in his view it becomes consciousness only in complex brains.27 And the philosopher and anthropologist Bruno Latour, in An Inquiry into Modes of Existence (2013), holds that matter as the modern West pictures it is itself a product of thought, “the most idealist of the products of the mind”.28
Not everyone accepts this. Josephine Donovan objects that new materialist accounts such as Bennett’s, with their world of lively but impersonal things, still leave no one there to meet. In her words, “There is no Thou there, no subjectivity”.29 Weber, for his part, sees the self-making of organisms as probably “the true boundary that separates the organic realm from pure matter”.30
Therapeutic Shamanism teaches that stones are alive and conscious, and calls them the Stone People. In fact, all physical things are Stone People, whatever else they are as well. They are “themselves conscious and alive, just in a way that is very, very different to us. Way more different to us than Plant is. Off the scale different.” Our animist ancestors knew that “the mountain was alive and had to be treated with honour and respect. So too the rivers, the rocks and the waterfalls.”31 Hunter-gatherers regard the Stone People as the oldest and wisest of all the PeoplesThe Peoples. The Animal People, Plant People, Standing People (the Trees) and Stone People: our elder kin, of whom the Human People are the youngest and least wise. A family, not a hierarchy. Read the full answer, which “is not about hierarchy, but about family.”32 “A mountain has a consciousness you can talk to.” See What are Stone People, and what gifts do they bring?
How does Therapeutic Shamanism see all this? #
As a widening of what science is willing to notice, towards something animists have always known. Therapeutic Shamanism speaks less of intelligence than of aliveness and consciousness, each being having its own kind, and of persons, beings to be in relationship with, not objects to be studied. See What does it mean to say the world is alive and full of persons?
Two things set it apart from the science. The first is that there is no ranking. Even Mancuso, who speaks against using intelligence to divide humans from other beings, describes the difference between human intelligence and a bacterium’s as one of degree, “only quantitative, not qualitative”;33 whereas “in animism, there is no hierarchy.” The second is experience. Animism “is far more than just a belief, though, for animists actually experience the world in this way.”34 One exercise asks the reader simply to look around, and to notice which things they find it easy to accept as alive and conscious, and where their edges lie. On why this matters for how other beings are treated, see Does it matter whether an animal is sentient?
