Your Mind is Part of the Ecosystem–Nautilus

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THere is a really deep reason why, when you examine things from an unusual point of view (to man), they become strange in such a way that you should include your own perspective in your description, as if you were like Neo in The matrixTouching the mirror only to see that it sticks to your finger and moves away from the wall while you try to remove your hand.

It’s like what’s going on in a dream. When you dream of bad scary fears that fall on you from the ceiling, you also have a certain feeling or a certain attitude (or as you want to call it) towards insects, perhaps horror or disgust, perhaps mixed with a strange detachment. It is the same thing as in a story, there is what is happening (the story) and how it is told (the narrator, whether singular, plural, human or not, etc.). These two aspects form a collector. When we look at a “thing”, we forget that the “thing” is only part of a collector. It is not true that there is “me” and then there is a “thing” that I hold my hand with my perception, like reaching my hand towards a box of beans in the supermarket. But perhaps we have tried to design our world to look like a supermarket, lots of things that we can reach out and grasp.

The result of living as if you believe in subject-object dualism, which is our usual way of thinking about the world (even if we do it unconsciously), is that it becomes difficult to accept what is in fact more logical and easier in the mind at the end. When you analyze a nightmare, you discover that the insects and feelings you have about them are the two aspects of your own mind. Perhaps insects are unacceptable thoughts that you feel aware of. What is so powerful in psychoanalysis and certain spiritual traditions such as Buddhism is that they allow you to entertain the idea that thoughts and thus are not “yours”, which can be very liberating: what matters is not exactly What you think, it’s how You think. You know that the facts are never “there like soup cans waiting to be picked up neutrally.

You know the code of ideas for attitudes, since ideas always involve a way of thinking They, an attitude, and that explains how propaganda works. Take a very simple example: the term well-being evokes the contempt of his recipients in a way that the word benefits doesn’t. Since 2010, the British conservative party has managed to make say that almost everyone in the media called “well-being” and not “advantages”, with the obvious repercussions to make the cuts more acceptable. Reading a poem is a wonderful exercise to learn not to be connected by propaganda, for this very reason. It is because a poem makes it very uncertain exactly what kind in a way you are supposed to have the idea that it presents. If I say “Come here!” Reading a poem has a room for maneuver between ideas and ways of having them. Propaganda closes this space.

Being in good mental health could mean that What you think And How do you think are intertwined.

Something fascinating happens if you start to think how the biosphere, as a total system of interactions between life forms and their habitats (which are mainly only other forms of life), is also like the interior of a dream head. Everything in this biosphere is a symptom of the biosphere. There is no “far” which is not simply relating to a certain position within it. I cannot delete my thoughts without appearing as unpleasant insects in my nightmare. I cannot get rid of nuclear waste simply by hiding it in a mountain. If I widen my spatio-temporal scale enough to include the moment when the mountain collapsed, I don’t really hide waste anywhere once and for all. You cannot sweep things under the carpet in the world of ecological consciousness.

And this biosphere includes all the thoughts (and nightmares) that we also have. It includes wishes, hopes and ideas on biospheres. It is not exactly physically precisely located on earth. It is phenomenically Located in our projects, tasks, things we do. Let’s say that, for example, we decide to move to Mars to avoid global warming. We will have to create a biosphere that suits us from zero – so as to have exactly the same problem as we have it on earth, perhaps worse, because we must now start from the start. Experiential, which is a sloppy and biased way of saying the philosophical word phenomenicallyWe are still on earth. Emplized and biased, because this implies all kinds of things that must be proven in turn, as the idea that there is a certain type of “objective world” and that “subjectivity” is different.

The phenomenology of something is the logic of her apartment, how she surge Or occurs. If we move to Mars, the movement will appear in a land -shaped way, whatever the coordinates of our space painting. It is therefore not correct to say that the biosphere is “in” a preexisting space. The biosphere is a network of relationships between beings such as waves, coral, ideas on coral and oil spit, a network that is a full -fledged entity.

Like the theorist of the systems, Gregory Bateson, indicates this when he wrote on “the ecology of the mind”, mental problems are in a way ecological in this sense. The way your thoughts are linked is equal to what is called “the spirit” and the mind is like the biosphere. Even if it is made up of thoughts, the mind is independent of these thoughts, it affects them causally. If you are afraid, you will think of frightening things. This is what some people call “causality down”. Something like the climate can affect something like time. It is not true that the climate is only a graph of how weather events are linked. There is something real there.

You can’t reduce The biosphere to its components, just as you cannot reduce your mind to its component thoughts. And you cannot reduce your thoughts to what thought is, or the way you think of this thought: you need both, because a thought is a multiple. And it leads to a very interesting overview: perhaps Everything is a variator. Or to use the language of Bateson, a “system”. The system is different from the things it is done. Being in good mental health could mean that What you think And How do you think are intertwined.

It’s not exactly What you believe but how You believe it could cause trouble. In other words, there are beliefs on belief. Maybe if we change how We think of things such as coral and white rhinos, we could be more in good ecological health. And maybe mental health and ecological “health” are linked. I believe that humans are traumatized by having broken their links with non -human beings, connections that exist deeply inside their body (in our DNA, for example; the fingers are not exclusively human, nor lungs or cell metabolism). We separate these links in social and philosophical space, but they always exist, like the thoughts that we consider as unacceptable and which appear in nightmares.

Part of our growing ecological consciousness is a feeling of disgust that we are literally covered and penetrated by non -human beings, not only by accident but in an irreducible way, a crucial way for our very existence. If you didn’t have a bacterial microbiome in your digestive system, you couldn’t eat. Perhaps this feeling of disgust will decrease if we get used to our immersion in the biosphere, just as our neurotic feelings decrease as we become more user-friendly with our thoughts-perhaps by psychotherapy or meditation. There have indeed appeared forms of ecological psychotherapy, and a branch of psychological studies calls ecopsychology. And many Buddhist meditation teachers also write about ecology, looking at some of the easily available magazines such as Shambhala sun will show you.

This extract from the ecological of Timothy Morton is reprinted with the permission of Mit Press Reader.

Image of lead: Earth seen as seen by the crew of Apollo 17 heading towards the moon. Credit: NASA.

• Timothy Morton

  Published on June 27, 2025

  Timothy Morton is the president of Rita Shea Guffey in English at Rice University and the author of many books, including Dark ecology (Columbia University Press), Ecology without nature (Harvard University Press), and Ecologicalfrom which this article is extracted.