Forest vs. Garden
An essay on freedom and peace
You are water, whirling water,
Yet, still water trapped within,
Come, submerge yourself within us,
We who are the flowing stream.
Rumi
While reading an inspiring interview with the ecologist and philosopher David Abram, an insight came to me, an insight related to our human ways in the wider economy of Life that surrounds us, or rather — that imbibes us. And this insight came to me in the form of the analogy:
Forest vs. Garden / Mystery vs. Certainty.
This analogy, I feel, informs every important aspect of our human life: our relationships, our work, our creativity, the way we build, the way we move in the world, the way we see and understand the world, the way we relate to Nature.
While writing, vague but convergent ideas crystallized in the concepts of
garden consciousness and forest consciousness.
I will convey here each of the two, how they relate to each other, and how, by gradually shifting from garden consciousness to forest consciousness, our sense of freedom is nourished and harnessed, while the friction in our lives dissolves, which will ultimately lead to inner peace.
Humanity has been in the garden consciousness for ages. Man has built for himself communal certainties: belief systems, unassailable convictions, strong affiliations and strong repulsions, citadels…physical and mental borders.
Yet, there is a sensation of spaciousness in the unknown, which cannot be grasped; and precisely this impossibility gives way to so many possibilities. Finding pleasure in navigating the vast sea of the unknown is Freedom.
Through this article, I am reminding myself and encouraging you to not only make peace with the unknown — the dissimilar, the strange, the mysterious — but to find pleasure in its spaciousness.
To understand the analogy Forest vs. Garden / Mystery vs. Certainty, let’s see what differentiates a Forest from a Garden?
Forest
A forest is Life simply experiencing Itself, empty of any kind of concepts. Meaning that the entities of a forest don’t need to brainstorm regarding the efficiency of their symbiosis; instead, they simply align to a flow, to a sacred order that has been around since before history: the mysterious principle of growth and expansion.
A forest is inclusive, she receives and nourishes without selection. All entities of a forest go, invariably, through the ever-unfolding process of being nourished and nourishing, in turn, the wider land around, with the final act of shedding their individual bodies as food for other entities, compost for the soil, or as a structure for other entities to climb upon. The all-engulfing creative energy of a forest is mesmerizing. Life is taking delight in death. Life is death and death is Life. Non-duality. There are no 'good’ plants nor 'bad’ plants in a forest. Concepts like weeds, pests, invasive, have no meaning here. A forest is always self-regulating.
A forest is self-contained, self-nourishing, self-sufficient. All this is made possible through the juicy interweaving of a rich variety of lifestyles and innate drives of different species, vegetal or animal: symbiosis.
The life force energy of a forest — the invisible stream that fills your being from the core to the outer surface of your skin and adorns it with goosebumps — intensifies with diversity and decreases with similarity.
Garden
A garden is domesticated. In domestication, Mystery, diversity, unpredictability, decrease in value, while Certainty, familiarities, comfort increase.
Unlike a forest, where every single process happens in alignment with the mysterious ancestral principle of growth and expansion, a garden involves a certain amount of control over this growth and expansion. Concepts like beauty, utility, efficiency, become intrinsic. Duality. To a certain extent, symbiosis itself is converted into a concept, a goal.
A garden is selective and protective with its selection. ‘Weeds’, ‘pests’, ‘invasive’ are concepts that only exist in relation to a garden, a context where a certain outcome or direction is desired or expected. Therefore, diversity decreases, and with it the intensity of life force energy.
Nevertheless, by rejecting the unfamiliar, the Garden provides a cosy and familiar environment, which is restorative for the wounded and the weak. This sense of safety is what the surviving-brain is craving for. As ambiguity, vagueness, are misperceived as threatening and stressful to people with trauma, the Garden offers the cosiness of Certainty as a soothing environment.
Our fear of the unfamiliar made us reluctant towards diversity and riveted us to the spot, to similarities and familiarities, to the known, where the Life Force Mystery is subdued by the gross comfortable Certainty. While fear is necessary for survival, when it is pervasively elicited by unrealistic threats — like vagueness, it does not serve survival anymore.
Lifeforce energy is called Prana in the Indian tradition, or Chi in the Tao tradition.
Through sensorial experiences, our bodies are antennae capable of intercepting and receiving the intensity of prana. We are nourished and connected to this life force energy through the receptiveness of our bodies. Yet the intensity can be perceived as scary — causing us to contract to the density of strongly defined identities, or it can be uplifting — where we expand, merge, dissolve, as a river into the ocean.
What I call 'density’ is a strong sense of separation between what is Me or Us and what is outside of Me or Us, a sense of separation that comes with rigid convictions and beliefs, strong affiliations and strong repulsions, with a low capacity for neutrality and low tolerance to discomfort. Density creates friction. Merging, dissolving, allows flow.
Mystery, through being undefined, nonfixed, is all-embounding.
Certainty is defined, hence selective, dismissive of what falls out of its de-finition. Mystery can accommodate many [opposing] certainties inside its in-finition.
In the same way, the forest’s life force will imbibe any garden, including them in her wild bosom. Conversely, the garden is not inclusive of the forest’s life force. A garden is selective.
A reluctant attitude towards the unfamiliar leads to the compulsive tendency to separate the word in two: me and my familiarities (with my convictions, lifestyle, values etc) vs the others (and their convictions, values etc). This attitude can only lead to friction. And while most of the time it resides in latency, friction bursts out into conflicts.
The ‘garden’ is the veil of our conditioning, the membrane that stays between our comfort and our freedom. Our innate freedom impulse is still there though —, beneath the veil, in the cosiness of our garden - contracted to the chambers of our hearts, in an intimate lockdown. But still there and alive; and by its own natural intelligence, Freedom found an escape valve in several comforting surrogates of World: carefully conceived-by-humans safe-environments that invite liberation, improvisation, creativity. These environments are shrines/altars for Freedom, as the temple is the house of God. Nevertheless, in the comfort of a temple, we might forget that God is everywhere.
We need to go past the veil, go through uncertainty in order to get to clarity, to the essence.
The Garden is the Mama, the safe nest.
So go heal in the womb of a garden, tend to your wounds, closely meet your scared inner-child’s needs in the soothing comfort of the familiar. Take rest, pick some fresh herbs and make yourself and your dear ones a warm tea. Every person deserves rest and safety.
But please, don’t forget yourself in this cosy nest: a warm bath is soothing until comfortably numb.
But The Forest is the Divine Mother.
She is all-embracing, comprising our perceived enemy as well as our perceived soul family. Through her, I am the sibling of all.
Go out of your garden and experience a different one. Try first to dissolve your density between the two, and then dissolve even further.
Go breathe the fresh air of the unknown. Embrace the wild. Love the stranger. Connect extremely opposite dots; create unexpected connections.
Swim in a chilling mountain river. Pierce through the differences until you get to the similarities. Immerse into diversity until your small ‘I’ dissolves into the Real, until you return home to the Forest. Forest consciousness.
Otherwise, what difference do we bring to the existing state of affairs?
Humanity has been in the garden consciousness for ages…
And our consciousness emerges less into our conceptual discourses and intellectual debates, and mostly into our ‘being in the world’ and into our actions as extension of the ‘being’. It emerges in the way we build our social life, in our relationships, in the way we build our house, in the way we breathe, in the way we interact with the earth and wildlife.
We may become aware and integrate the Forest concept into some areas of our life, while other areas may remain blind spots to our awareness until the blindfold falls.
Different values and beliefs constitute sieves through which the primary Forest is strained only to form as many types of gardens as collective mental states: national cultures, subcultures, religions, sects, communities, social 'bubbles’. All of these are gardens under the higher canopy of the primary Forest. By raising our awareness at the heights of the forest canopy, or rather by expanding it beyond our own garden’s limits, we are gradually switching from garden consciousness to forest consciousness.
In more concrete terms, the switch is made gradually from a fixated mind to a higher, spacious mind, empty of preconceived beliefs, a mind more able to perceive without distortions, a mind more available to the Higher Truth.
When we non-selectively include the other as part of ourselves — as the forest embraces the selective gardens — friction dissolves. Remaining, individually, in this subtle energy of inclusion, sets a solid ground for peace in the world.
A garden cannot embrace a forest unless it becomes the forest.
Man has planted many communal certainties along the ages.
It is now time for us to be the Forest.
