Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature as the Avatar of Spirit James Lawler The title of the film Avatar specifically refers to the transfer of the consciousness, the spirit, of a human individual into the body of a member of an extraterrestrial race, the Na’vi. But there is a more general conception in the understanding of the Na’vi people themselves. The whole of their planet, its precious minerals and all its plants and animals, as well as the native peoples themselves, is the body, the avatar, of a higher consciousness, a divine Spirit presiding over the entire planet, the goddess Eywa. Providing philosophical and scientific grounds for these central ideas of the film, the nineteenth century German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Gottfried Hegel (1770-1831) argues in his Philosophy of Nature that Nature in general is the embodiment or “avatar” of what he calls the Absolute Spirit, or God. Contrary to the standard Christian orthodoxy regarding the relation between God, the Creator, and the world He created, Hegel does not regard the natural world as separate from the divine Spirit. Nature, for Hegel, is this Spirit itself in a state of unconsciousness. The evolution of nature leads to the emergence of self-conscious beings who can become aware of their identity with Absolute Spirit by recognizing their unity with one another. Thus Hegel defines the divine “Spirit” as “‘I’ that is ‘We,’ and ‘We’ that is ‘I.’” What this means is that the spirit or consciousness of the individual human being achieves full awareness and realization of itself only through overcoming her separation from nature and from other human beings —a separation that arises in the course of the evolution of human history, including the development of science and philosophy. Hegel argues that science itself, when its basic laws are properly interpreted, requires this understanding of nature as the embodiment or avatar of “Spirit,” in connection with the unity of “spirits” or individual human beings in a community in which individuals support one another. But to reach this understanding it is necessary to criticize the inadequate form of science of modern times called empiricism. Does Jake Drive His Avatar? The scientists in the Avatar exemplify the inadequacies of their empiricist understanding of science when they describe the avatar as a remotely controlled body grown from a mixture of human and Na’vi DNA. According to the scientists, Jake’s human body, sealed in his link unit, “drives” the avatar wherever on the planet it may be. The avatar is thus understood as a kind of external vehicle manipulated from afar by the human driver. But the experience itself is not like that of operating a remote control device. In his avatar, Jake, whose human legs are paralyzed, can feel “his” legs again, wiggle his toes. He can walk. Warned to take it slow at first, Jake is unable to resist the exhilarating experience of physical wholeness, his new-found ability to dig his feet into the soil and run in his Na’vi super-charged body. Who is right, the scientists with their conception of remote control from afar, or Jake’s experience of presence in his body? For this experience to be real, Jake’s consciousness, or spirit, must be capable of moving from one body to another. But for the scientist, the concept of a spirit capable transferring from one body to another, or even being present in the entire planet, Pandora, in the case of the Goddess Eywa, is part of the “pagan voodoo,” connected with the native belief in the Goddess Eywa, as Grace Augustine, the chief scientist, puts it. Such spirit is not “something real, something measurable in the biology of the forest.” For empiricism, what is real consists only in the physical bodies capable of measurement, whose movements can be explained by causes from other, separate bodies. But Jake’s consciousness seems to be a potentially independent spirit since it is able to move from one body to another. This does not mean that his spirit is separate from the body in which it provisionally identifies itself. Consciousness, spirit, requires a body to fully realize itself, just as it requires the natural world to realize its goals. Fundamentally, Hegel argues, the body and nature as a whole, are extensions of Spirit itself. Jake eventually sides with his direct experience. Back in his crippled human body, in the metaphorically crippled human world of advanced science and technology, he is overcome with a sense of unreality: “Everything is backwards now. Like out there is the true world, and in here is the dream.” Jake Is No Scientist, Fortunately Early in the film, as Grace and her scientific entourage explore the jungle of Pandora through their digital probings into the microstructure of the plants, Jake wanders off to do some exploring of his own. Jake’s acquaintance with science is limited to having once dissected a frog in high school. He later describes himself to the “Tsahik” or Shaman woman, Mo’at, as an empty cup, unbiased by science. Since the scientists she has encountered seem incapable of learning the ways and understandings of her people, Mo’at decides to give Jake the benefit of the doubt, especially as Eywa Herself has apparently given a sign that Jake is someone special. Jake is fascinated and delighted with the awesome beauty of the planet’s life-forms as he wanders around absorbed by the breath-taking scenery, exploring its behaviour by playfully interacting with it. In the contrast between the scientists and Jake, we see two different theoretical approaches to nature, one reflecting the scientific mind with its narrowed focus on the microstructure of “samples,” on which they attempt to build up an understanding of the larger whole, the other involving direct sensuous experience and astonishment. According to Hegel in the beginning of his Philosophy of Nature, the theoretical approach to nature contrasts with the practical approach. While the practical approach consists in utilizing the natural world for one’s own purposes, seeing the world as something for us, the theoretical approach consists in standing back and looking at nature as it is in itself. In this respect, Jake too is a theoretician, like Grace and the other scientists. But while they attempt to build up a concept of the whole on the basis of the microstructure of the parts of the planet, in the framework of empiricism, Jake never leaves the surface phenomena, the minerals, plants and animals in their wholeness. Jake therefore is open to a reverse orientation to the bottom-up approach of the scientists—a movement from top to bottom, allowing for a descent of spirit, whether the Spirit of the planet as a whole, the Goddess Eywa, or the particular spirits of individual beings, into the bodies in which they incarnate themselves. I See You Brother Avatar begins, as Hegel does in the beginning of his Philosophy of Nature, with two approaches to Nature: practical and theoretical. And within each approach we find two contrasting tendencies. The invading humans are primarily motivated by practical concerns. They are bent on conquest and exploitation of the planet Pandora’s precious commodity, unobtanium, which, according to the head of the mining operation Parker Selfridge, “sells for twenty million a kilo.” But there is a more fundamental practical motive based on the needs of survival. The native people too have a practical approach to their planet. Hegel first describes this more fundamental pragmatism, which is the primary standpoint of human beings in the earliest period of human history, the time of hunters and gatherers living from nature in tribal communities. In the practical approach, the individual first senses her dependence on nature. She is hungry. She needs something that exists outside of her. Nature supplies what is needed and she reaches out to appropriate it, to use and consume it. This utilization of nature for conscious purposes goes further, as people shape nature into tools for their own use. The “cunning of reason” consists in the ability of intelligent beings to turn nature into means for achieving their own purposes. The Na’vi spectacularly tame, and bond with, large winged “ikran” as means of aerial transportation. In this way the initial sense of dependence on nature is surmounted. The needs of individuals are satisfied through their own purposive activity, resulting in a sense of fulfillment and self-realization. Hegel succinctly puts this complex interrelationship of the individual with nature in the terms of his “dialectical logic.” The negation of myself which I suffer within me in hunger, is at the same time present as an other than myself, as something to be consumed; my act is to annul this contradiction by making the other identical with myself, or by restoring my self-unity through sacrificing the thing. By “dialectic” Hegel refers to interactions based on oppositions or conflicts between the interacting elements. The Na’vi have their own way of understanding the dialectic between self and other, People and Nature. Everything for them is interconnected in a circle of life. There is nothing fundamentally dead, expendable, exploitable. Parker Selfridge, the head of the mining operation, complains about this holism: “You throw a stick in the air around here, it’s gonna land on some sacred fern, for Christ’s sake.” In the preceding citation, Hegel analyzes this holism in abstract logical terms. The hunters implicitly experience themselves negatively, as lacking what they need to survive, and recognize Nature as supplying what they lack. Nature is at first something other than themselves, an animal or plant existing outside of them. Through their activity they negate their separation from these natural beings. They “sacrifice the thing” by appropriating it to themselves, using it for their own purposes or killing and consuming it. In so doing they negate the original negativity that they experience in themselves, for example in hunger. In this way, through “the other,” the rock or tree they use, the plant or animal they consume, they overcome the negation in themselves, realize themselves, and so achieve their “self-unity.” The killing or “sacrifice of the thing” is not a simple destruction, but is done with the intention to preserve and respect the spiritual essence of the natural world, the source of its endless renewal in the unity of the planet as a whole, regarded as a singular being, the body of the goddess Eywa. Neytiri teaches Jake to pray over the body of an animal killed in the hunt: “I see you Brother, and thank you. Your spirit goes with Eywa. Your body stays behind to become part of the People.” It is the alien Sky People who destroy without renewing, out of an unnatural thirst for money, aware of no connection or bond between themselves and the natural world. Science: A Northern Fog By contrast to the practical approach, the theoretical approach ostensibly leaves nature alone and treats it as something simply “in itself.” This is Jake’s, and the audience’s, pure wonder at the beauty of the planet. But empiricist science, which seeks to build up a concept of the whole out of the microstructure of the parts, resists sheer admiration for the myriad individual beings of the natural world as these present themselves to ordinary sensuous experience. In attempting to penetrate to the intelligible, universal features underlying these appearances, modern empiricist science, Hegel argues, implicitly transforms the natural world into something “for us,” substituting its own inventions, such as the computerized representations of microstructures, for the things themselves. In this way, on a theoretical level, they kill the living spirit of the natural world. Hegel puts the matter as follows: The more thought enters into our representation of things, the less do they retain their naturalness, their singularity and immediacy. The wealth of natural forms, in all their infinitely manifold configuration, is impoverished by the all-pervading power of thought, their vernal life and glowing colors die and fade away. The rustle of Nature’s life is silenced in the stillness of thought; her abundant life, wearing a thousand delightful shapes, shrivels into arid forms and shapeless generalities resembling a murky northern fog.... In thinking things, we transform them into something universal; but things are singular, and the Lion [or Hammerhead] as Such does not exist. While Jake is naively admiring the beauties of Pandora, before confronting its beasts, Grace and her cohorts are busily transforming the sensuous individualities in their 3D splendour into abstract patterns on their computer screens. Rather than recognizing the strangeness of their fascination with a computer screen in the midst of the radiant spectacle of nature, they are convinced that they are grasping the very reality, the secret core of the thing itself. Grace argues that she has discovered a biological mechanism that would give scientific support to the native belief in the interconnectedness of the planet as a whole. Grace attempts to explain this to Selfridge: [T]here’s some kind of electrochemical communication between the roots of the trees. Like the synapses between neurons. Each tree has ten to the fourth connections to the trees around it, and there are ten to the twelfth trees on Pandora.... Selfridge: Which is a lot I’m guessing. Grace: That’s more connections than the human brain. You get it? It’s a network. It’s a global network. And the Na’vi can access it.... Selfridge: What the hell have you people been smoking out there? They’re just goddamn trees. Selfridge sees only the trees, but the scientist sees the molecular structures which in the multiplicity of their staggering numbers constitutes, they suppose, the real mechanism of reality. But aren’t they just as guilty in their own way, on the theoretical level, as their corporate employers are on the practical level, of destroying that which they touch, negating it by producing an artificial substitute of human creation? While Jake is dumbfounded by the splendour of the nature that surrounds him, the scientists regard him as simply dumb. They are the ones who, in their digital readouts, really know nature. But aren’t they, in their theoretical reconstructions, killing nature by their dissections, by their digitizations? Hegel gives an example of such an approach, followed by a citation from the popular culture of his own time, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s (1749-1832) play Faust: If we examine a flower, for example, our understanding notes its peculiar qualities; chemistry dismembers and analyzes it. In this way, we separate color, shape of the leaves, citric acid, etheric oil, carbon, hydrogen, etc.; and now we say that the plant consists of all these parts. If you want to describe life and gather its meaning, To drive out its spirit must be your beginning, Then though fast in your hand lie the parts one by one The spirit that linked them, alas is gone ... as Goethe says. Spirit cannot remain at this stage of thinking in terms of detached, unrelated concepts ... The living reality of the flower is an interconnected totality whose parts are bound together by a unifying principle, which Hegel and Goethe call its “spirit.” Hegel argues that Nature itself is more than a multiplicity of elements. It is itself a unified whole in which the rocks, the plants, and animals are organically connected parts. It must also have a unifying principle as the embodiment, the avatar, of Absolute Spirit. Who then is the better scientist in the sense of appreciating the natural world as it is in itself: Jake with his admiration of the infinite variety of its sensible forms, or Grace with her miniscule samples, her digital reductions and mathematical formulas? How can these abstracted elements be said to plumb the natural world in itself? It seems that real Nature exists precisely in its irreducible sensuality and multiplicity, while science inevitably transforms all of this wonder into abstract thought, into intangible generalities and simplifications. Under the guise of attaining Nature as it is in itself, empiricist science in fact turns it into something it is not. Such science too, like the practical exploiters seeking to mine the wealth of Pandora, inevitably changes Nature into something for us, into thoughts or ideas, even as it pretends to grasp Nature as it is in itself. Empiricist science is therefore incapable of achieving its goal of understanding reality as it is in itself. The Romantic Alternative Recognizing the fact that scientific knowledge involves changing the world as it is in itself into abstract forms of thought devised by the thinking mind, Kant concluded that it is impossible to know things as they are in themselves. In his summary of the history of philosophy, Hegel argues that Kant correctly recognized that the empiricist approach to science leads to an impasse. The reduction of reality to the bits and pieces of knowledge into which empiricist science dissolves the world makes it impossible to grasp the living reality as it is in itself. Replying to Kant, Hegel argues that there are two possible ways to solve this problem. One way is to adopt the standpoint of intuition and feeling and to reject abstract thinking as a kind of Fall from Grace, a theoretical Original Sin. In this perspective, which was popular in the Romantic movement of his time, as seen in Goethe’s Faust, there was once a fundamental unity of the conscious beings with Nature, an original Paradise in which human beings were one with nature, before the separation or alienation from nature, and the egotism in which individuals are separated from one another, that characterizes the culture of modern scientific and technological society. Science is an expression of this loss of connection with nature that characterizes developed technological and egotistical civilizations intent on regarding nature not as a unified whole, but as an assemblage of materials for exploitation by humans—as if we somehow existed apart from nature. Scientists with their reductionistic models of nature are therefore essentially in league with the practical exploitation of the earth. By their arid abstractions they turn nature into something other than what it truly is, and so abet the arrogantly reductionist approach to nature of commercial interests that declares, “They’re just goddamn trees.” The romantic approach replies that to return to nature as it is in itself we should give up taking empirical science as our guide and instead adopt an unthinking, a feeling approach to nature. The adoption of such a feeling approach to nature is suggested in Avatar. Neytiri teaches Jake to bond with the Direhorse by weaving the tendrils of his queue with those of the animal’s antennae. Something happens, a powerful connection between the man and the beast. “This is tsaheylu—the bond,” Neytiri says. “Feel her heartbeat, her breath. Feel her strong legs.” There is something lofty, Hegel writes, in the romantic conception with its insistence on the primacy of intuition and feeling in relation to nature, rather than abstract knowledge. Of course it is important to feel our bonds with nature, as Jake connects with the Direhorse and the winged wonders of Pandora. But regarded as a general framework for understanding nature, this leads to fanciful inventions of all sorts, to the belief that there are favoured ones, seers to whom God imparts true knowledge and wisdom in sleep, or that man, even without being so favoured, can at least by faith in it [i.e., in our immediate oneness with Nature], transport himself into a state where the inner side of Nature is immediately revealed to him, and where he need only let fancies occur to him, i.e., give free play to his fancy, in order to declare prophetically what is true. The Alternative of Dialectical Science There is another way to surmount the difficulty posed by the abstractions and reductions of science that does not involve abandoning science altogether. An authentic philosophy of nature begins with the achievements of empirical science, but then seeks to transform these scientific results by means of a deeper form of comprehension which Hegel calls dialectical reason. Dialectical science, Hegel argues, involves the critique of the standard philosophy of science of empiricism. Most scientists, he says, think of the world as consisting of discrete objects or elements that can be directly or indirectly observed and measured, then represented by abstract ideas, and finally correlated or connected with one another according to various patterns of thought that are regarded as approximations of reality. In this way they implicitly engage in a philosophical mode of thinking involving a certain metaphysics or general conception of reality—what Hegel calls the metaphysics of abstract “understanding.” In this metaphysics, reality is held to consist of discrete, separate entities whose movements are caused by other discrete, separate entities. This perspective is epitomized in Newton`s first law of physics, the law of inertia: nothing moves itself; everything moves in a straight line unless something else causes it to change its motion. Normally, however, scientists have little or no awareness of their implicit philosophy as a philosophy. They think it is obviously true of the way things are: there are just goddamn trees, and birds, and rocks, etc. Science analyzes these objects of direct experience into their underlying parts: leaves, and branches, and roots, which in turn are composed of even more fundamental components—cells, molecules, atoms, quarks, etc. Each of these microscopic entities is then explained by other entities acting on it according to laws, epitomized by the law of inertia: one thing only moves because something else moves it, in endless chains of causes that science must identify. Hegel recognizes that at a certain stage in the development of knowledge, it was necessary to isolate objects and concepts from one another, to break the living whole into its parts and examine these parts one after another, e.g., to dissect the frog. But this exemplary act of empiricist science kills the spirit of the frog that makes it a unified, living being. As science progresses beyond a certain level, scientists inevitably become more and more conscious of the interconnectedness of things. But as long as they remain within the implicit metaphysics and methodology of abstract understanding, they are incapable of adequately comprehending this interconnected reality. To make this transition to a higher stage of scientific thought it is necessary to adopt the dialectical conception of reality and the related dialectical logic proposed by Hegel. Grace attempts to defend as a novel idea, scientifically speaking, the notion that the planet Pandora consists of an interconnected living network. This is her way of giving scientific support to preserving the integrity of the planet and the outlook of its people. Thanks to her empiricism Grace thinks she simply perceives something different, some new phenomenon that is peculiar to the ecology of Pandora. What she really perceives, Hegel would tell her, is the inadequacy of her own empiricist method of thinking according to which reality consists myriad microscopic elements, i.e., that reduction of the whole to its parts which, as Hegel cites Goethe, kills the spirit, the living unity, of the being. The logical basis of empiricist thinking is the principle of identity, A = A, a thing is itself. The corollary of the principle of identity is the logical principle of non-contradiction, A is not not-A, a thing is not some other thing. Parker Selfridge understands this standard logic perfectly clearly. A tree is just a tree. It’s not something else. And for Grace and her colleagues to suggest something different, that trees are somehow more than trees, suggests they have been smoking too much of the local weed. But Grace can only defend herself by appealing to large numbers of trees. Somehow introducing large numbers of trees significantly changes their nature as trees. What has to be changed to make Grace’s argument convincing, Hegel argues, is the underling logic that consists in defining reality by separate identities, each of which is what it is, and not something else. Reality does not correspond to the logic of the abstract understanding. It involves the dialectical relation as we described this previously. The hunter does not have an identity separate from that of her prey. By herself she is a negativity, a non-being, who only becomes herself by negating, by sacrificing, the animal on whom she depends for life. Hence, from the perspective of dialectical logic, A is A, i.e., she is herself, only through what she is not, through the not-A of the plant, or animal, or planet on which she depends. The human being realizes herself and achieves “self-identity” only through negating the world which she is not. But this negation is not the whole of the matter. In negating the thing she negates her separation from it. The body of the animal becomes part of the People. She has no identity apart from this vital connection with the natural world. The Concrete Universal It is possible, Hegel says, to remain on scientific grounds, while at the same time recognizing the truth of the nature religion of early peoples. The philosophy of feeling and intuition promoted by nineteenth century (and contemporary) romanticists only superficially resembles the nature religion of early peoples, while giving license in its name to eccentricities of various kinds. The romantic turn to intuition or feeling is the perspective of alienated modern individuals seeking to recover the perspective of people bound together in tightly-knit, tradition-based kinship societies living in a state of dependence on the natural world. The modern world has irrevocably transcended this stage and form of social life. What is needed is not a return to the pre-modern past, or the imitation of such societies that have survived to the present, but an advance to a new relationship between society and nature in which the findings of modern science are incorporated into a more adequate metaphysics, a holistic metaphysics in which the phenomena of nature are dialectically understood in their essential interconnectedness. Grace’s announcement of the universal interconnectedness of the life forms of Pandora thus requires the Hegelian dialectical understanding, which gives her findings a more adequate logical formulation. It also justifies a discovery that Grace only makes at the moment of her death, the discovery that there is something more than what can be measured in the biology of the planet, the reality of its over-arching Spirit: “I’m with her, Jake,” she says as her spirit passes from her body to join the Spirit of the planet, the Goddess Eywa. “She’s real!” To ground this final discovery in intellectual terms, however, it is necessary to rethink the entire procedure by which Grace has pursued her science. The universals that the scientist abstracts from nature need to be reconnected to the individual realities of direct sensuous experience and practical engagement with nature. The universal must be recognized as an individuality in its own right. In this sense, the planet, Pandora, is both a universal whole, and an individual reality in its own right. It is a concrete universal which gives rise to internal differentiations, more particular universals that constitute the qualities and organs of the larger whole. Involution and Evolution With this notion of a “concrete universal,” we return to the original mode of thinking of early peoples, but in a way that incorporates the achievements of modern science. There is originally an instinctive metaphysics of interconnectedness and a spontaneous form of dialectical thought that recognizes this interconnectedness—the natural mode of thinking of early peoples. Jake learns from Neytiri about “a network of energy that flows through all living things.” This stage has been followed by a period of scientific thought within the framework of the metaphysics of abstract understanding. The third stage of the history of knowledge returns to the early intuitive understanding of interconnectedness, but in a thinking manner that incorporates the findings of modern science. Modern science itself provides the keys for making this advance. In addition to the law of inertia which divides reality into separate entities passively moved around by others, Newton recognized a universal force of interconnectedness or attraction. The law of gravity implies that everything in the universe has an inner power of acting on everything else. Hegel underlines the difficulty of connecting these two fundamental laws of early modern science, using the formulation of dialectical logic: “Gravitation directly contradicts the law of inertia; for, by virtue of the former, matter strives to get away out of itself to an Other.” The separate element of matter that is focus of the law of inertia negates its separation, getting out of itself by attracting to itself, and being attracted by, something it is not. Newton himself recognized this contradiction between the law of inertia, which explains motion by the action of one body on another, and the law of gravity which seems to imply that objects act on one another across vast stretches of empty space. Perhaps, he suggests, the cause of this attraction is not a material process but a universal spirit that binds the universe together, i.e., God. Returning to the philosophical position of the Greek philosopher Plotinus (204/5-270), as well as adapting Hindu panentheism to the findings of modern science, Hegel interprets the scientific laws of his own time as implying that the universal whole of the macrocosm, which Hegel calls Spirit, “emanates” or expresses itself in the form of matter. Matter is therefore Spirit itself, but externalized and dispersed, descending into apparent inertness. But the microcosm of the tiniest particle of matter remains connected to every other particle and to the universal whole through the all-pervading energy of attraction or gravity. Hegel uses dialectical logic to explain how it is possible to reconcile the law of inertia with the law of gravity. The elementary particles of matter, taken separately and in isolation from one another, seem purely passive, with no source of motion in themselves. But this way of looking at the isolated part as passive and moved only by outside forces involves an abstraction of the part from the whole. The law of the whole is one of the mutual attraction of all things, as formulated in the law of gravity. The law of gravity implies that the elements of matter actively reach out to one another. They negate the negativity, the passivity of their isolation, and “involve” the other in themselves, just as the hunter negates the hunger in herself by eating her prey, making it part of herself. Such “involution,” Hegel argues, gives rise to evolution, as individuals negate their negativity as separate entities by linking with the others, and in this way they evolve into higher levels of complexity. “Evolution is thus also an involution, in that matter interiorizes itself to become life.” This reaching out of one being to another is already an incipient consciousness. Only in this way is the evolution of conscious beings out of unconscious nature conceivable. Anticipating Charles Darwin’s (1809-1882) theory of evolution, Hegel sees evolution from inanimate, to animate, to human forms of existence as arising out of an inner tension within the natural world itself, a natural dialectic in which things negate their relative isolation by binding together in ever larger wholes with higher forms of consciousness, or spirit, until they reach the stage of self-conscious human existence. Contrary to Darwin, however, Hegel regards each individual being as actively participating in its own evolution by negating its passivity and linking with others. Evolution, for him, is therefore not understood solely from the perspective of the law of inertia as the product of selection by outside forces. Human history continues this evolution of forms of consciousness in the three stages previously described: 1) that of the earliest peoples living in unity with nature, powerfully represented by the Na’vi People of Avatar; 2) the stage in which human beings separate themselves from nature and from one another, exploiting nature and one another to the best of their abilities—graphically depicted by the invaders of Pandora and their savage violation of the planet and its people; 3) a higher stage involving a return to the original unity, but in a thinking, scientific manner, with respect for nature and for one another—the ideal and hope proposed by the ending of the film. When Jake leaves his former body and his former life behind at the conclusion of Avatar, he passes through the “eye of Eywa,” to connect permanently with his new body and simultaneously become fully embodied a part of the People. In this way he implicitly recognizes the truth of Hegel’s definition of Spirit. He leaves behind the separation from nature and other conscious beings of an egotistical technological civilization by connecting to the divine Spirit of the planet and simultaneously becoming a fully embodied a member of a mutually supporting community, an “‘I’ that is ‘We,’ and ‘We’ that is ‘I.’” 3