Events

Do plants have feelings? How blind are we to their own internal experiences? Perhaps they offer an untapped opportunity to reconsider how we understand ourselves. What about bees? Do we appreciate their unique cognitive abilities, both as a group and as individuals? Their brains may grant them a kind of consciousness akin, or not, to ours. And, what about cells? How does bioelectricity contribute to their collective problem-solving?

This talk is about the radical idea that if there is anything uniquely human about our minds, it doesn’t actually matter. Our desire to feel special, better-than, and different-from other forms of intelligent life is not inspiring, beneficial, or supportive of transformation or self-transcendence. In contrast, the ability to love all that is, exactly as it is without suffering is rare among humans and apparently more common among non-humans.