Spooky stuff

I got goosebumps when I read this ancient Hasdidic saying the first time: "When you walk across the fields with your mind pure and holy, then from all the stones, and all growing things, and all animals, the sparks of their soul come out and cling to you, and then they are purified and become a holy fire in you."
Now this sounds weird at first, but I read it 20 or so times - drawn to it like a moth to a flame. I couldn't understand it, but yet I felt it was trying to say something to me about what we were doing on the farm, where we were trying to take the 'conversation' with nature, and how to get there. It made me think of another saying that is popular in some farming circles: "The footsteps of the farmer are the best fertiliser." Here we have the same action - walking across the fields. The walking bringing something good out of the soil. The soil reacting to the presence of the farmer - the mere presence. Both statements say something about the farmer's state of mind.
The act of walking across the fields is unusual today. Mostly we drive or ride across a paddock - fast. You can't get much information about what's really happening down at ground level when you do that. When you walk along, you can see how much of the soil is bare (and unproductive), how much iss covered with weeds, how much is covered by introduced pasture plants like clover (that the white man brought here from over the seas), and how much is covered with native perennials (the type of grasses that grew here and were best adapted to the soil and weather conditions by thousands of years of natural selection). By walking you can get an idea of the insect life that is so vital to the food chain that links the birds with micro-organisms in the soil to provide the complete community of players in Nature's cycle of life. You can also get a much better feeling for the number and diversity of birds when you walk, unlike when you roar across the fields on a 1000cc 4WD bike. Birds are a key indicator of the overall health of the ecosystem which supports your farm enterprise.
Walking is a form of engagement with the soil - a type of communion. It enables the soil to talk to the farmer. (The experts say that you can hear the soil talking just by observing the type of plants it supports. Certain types of weeds, such as Bathurst Burr, will only grow in highly fertile soils. Other weeds indicate by their presence that the soil is deficient in certain minerals.)
At the second session of training in the Central West Catchment Management Authority's Farm Systems program yesterday, an Aboriginal man called Will Burns told us how he detects sites of cultural significance on farm properties. He "listens" with his instincts. "I follow my gut feel and nine times out of ten it will lead me to a site," he said. The Australian Aborigines had a deeply spiritual relationship with the land when they lived their traditional lifestyle - every element of the landscape was a living thing, celebrated in their 'songlines' and incorporated into their mythology.
SO listening to the soil has a long history in Australia. But what about the other side of a conversation? Does the soil listen to the farmer? Sure, it will respond to the things the farmer does. (I was tempted to write "things he does", but many farmers are women these days. My wife Louisa is a farmer. I am a philosopher.) But do the soil and the plants and other living things respond to the farmer in other ways? Do "the sparks of their soul come out and cling to you"? In the book The Secret Life of Plants there is a huge amount of evidence that plants respond to a person's thoughts baout them.... to their unspoken attitudes about them. Rudolf Steiner - the19th century mystic who invented biodynamics and many other branches of science and education - believed that nature was controlled by 'spirits' that could be interacted with (a form of fairies at the bottom of the garden). Now this sounds like crap to most intelligent people. But biodynamics works wonders - and it involves burying cows horns at night under a fullmoon and digging them up at another part of the lunar cycle - weird science, ridiculous. But it works.
New age thinkers like Deepak CHopra and Wayne Dyer teach their followers about the power of 'intentions' in shaping the material world. Quantum physics teaches us that the smallest particle of matter is not solid by a packet of energy and information that exists as a vibration of potential until attention is given to it. (ASk a physicist if I am wrong.) A thought is also a packet of information and energy. If we put our attention on a thought with sufficient regularity, these gentlemen contend we can bring the thought into existence on the material plane... This is one of the technologies taught in the TM Siddhi program, an advances Transcendental Meditation technique taught by the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.
Deepak was once the foremost of the Maharishi's students and today is recongised as the world's leading exponent of the expression of the ancient wisdom of the Vedic masters through the concepts and fidnings of western science - both medical science and physics. The ancient vedic texts called the Upanishads say: "You are what your deepest desire is. As is your desire, so is your intention. As is your intention, so is your will. As is your will, so is your deed. As is your deed, so is your destiny." Now I don't expect anyone to understand or agree with what comes next. i just put it out there as a possibility to be entertained. Deepak Chopra writes, In hsi book Synchrodestiny: "The world before it is observed and the nervous system before the desire or intent to observe something both exist as a dynamic (constantly changing), nonlinear chaotic field of activities in a state of non-equilibrium (unstable activity). Intent synchronistically organises these highly variable, seemingly chaotic and unrelated activities in a nonlocal universe into a highly ordered, self-organising, dynamic system that manifests simultaneously as an observed world and a nervous system through which that world is being observed." (Phew!) That's the theory. He goes on to say: "All learning, remembering, reasoning, drawing of inferences, and motor activity are preceded by intent. Intent is the very basis of creation." (Motor activity does not mean driving a car, though it can. It means any human movement.)
Carlos Castaneda wrote: "In the Universe there is an immeasurable, indescribable force which sharmans call intent, and absolutely everything that exists in the entire cosmos is attached to intent by a connecting link." It gets even spookier. Castaneda says: "Intent is a force that exists in the Universe. when sorcerers (those who live of the Source) beckon intent, it comes to them and sets up a path for attainment, which emans that sorcerers always accomplish what they set out to do." Now we enter Harry Potter territory. Wizards' stuff.
But it can all be reduced to a single thought. "You gotta have a dream, if you don't have a dream, how you gonna have a dream come true?" (from the song Happy Talk, in the Rogers and Hammerstein musical 'South Pacific'.) You gotta plan your work and work your plan, goes the old salesman's self talk. Simply by developing a plan and envisaging it coming into reality, we take the first steps towards changing reality. Here at "Uamby" we have an "Holistic Goal" as part of the Holistic Resource Management system we follow (as taught by Allan Savory). That goal - which we develop between the key decisionmakers - tells us what we want the physical form of the farm to look like in 5 years time, what we want the economics of the farm to be like, what we want the environment to look like, and what we want the community we live in to be like. Once we have set that goal, we 'test' every decision we make after that against the Goal to see if it will take us further away or closer to our Goal. And that is how we move forward. Louisa checked a goal we set for the wool we produce, a goal set several years ago, and found that our latest clip comes in right on that material specification, to within a decimal point.
So when we walk across the fields with our minds pure and holy (our intentions clear and well-meaning), it is true that nature responds somehow, though whether "the sparks of their soul come out and cling to you, and then they are purified and become a holy fire in you" is the best way to express it is something you could question.
But can we dismiss the basic premise?