Today’s episode brings us into the heart and philosophy of Zen Buddhism, as practiced by the Plum Village monastic community that was founded in 1982 by the Vietnamese peace activist, monk, poet, and teacher Thich Nhat Hanh. Today it has grown into Europe’s largest Buddhist monastery, with over 200 resident monks and nuns, and known as one of the most actively engaged Buddhist communities offering insight on the modern world, and on the climate and ecological crises.

We’ve spoken on the show about fragmented consciousness, a mind that sees parts and not the whole. Meditation and other Buddhist practices are one of the core ways of how we can heal minds and views. And so we will hear from two Plum Village monks: Sister True Dedication and Brother Spirit. Before entering the monastery, Sister True Dedication studied History & Political Thought at Cambridge University and worked as a journalist for BBC News. In the early years of her monastic training, she assisted Thich Nhat Hanh in their engaged Buddhist actions for human rights, religious freedom, applied ethics, and ecology. Brother Spirit began his monastic training in Plum Village in 2008, and before ordaining he studied mathematics at Cambridge and worked professionally as a composer, and as such has since composed many of the community’s beloved chants. They both helped to found the international Wake Up Movement, a community of young meditators finding new ways to combine mindfulness and engaged Buddhism.

We talk about:

• the fragmentation of consciousness
• how to hold the perspective of non duality and interbeing within unlikely contexts, and how doing so grants us agency and transformation
• dehumanization, de animation, and what Buddhism teaches about our relationship to other life and other intelligences
• the Mayahana Diamond Sutra (the world’s earliest printed text) and its invitation for us to reconsider four key notions of existance
• how to find and make peace with one’s activism
• the seeds of wisdom that lie dormant in 4000-year-old magnolia trees
• how to hold the suffering of the world and call upon our ancestors for support
• spiritual bypassing, instrumentalising, and get out of jail free cards

Episode Website Link

Show Links:

• Plum Village
• About Thich Nhat Hanh
• Zen and the Art of Saving the Planet
• Thay's Poetry / Please Call Me by My True Names (song & poem)
• Lifeworlds Meditation on Food inspired by Plum Village
• Mahamudra: Dr Dan Brown
• Hope in the Dark: Rebecca Solnit
• Global Optimism

Look out for meditations, poems, readings, and other snippets of inspiration in between episodes.

Music: Electric Ethnicity by Igor Dvorkin, Duncan Pittock & Ellie Kidd

Photo credit: Plum Village website

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Woven together loosely by my narrative, this special episode traces through a selection of five dazzling poems from the Pulitzer-prize winning poet Mary Oliver; bringing us into giddy relationship with the natural world -- with geese and grasshoppers and miracles and scars and existential queries on what makes life worth living. Mary's sharp and gentle perception of nature, her ability to communicate its messages with such simple and profound language, is at once both balm and flame for the soul.

“Poetry is a life-cherishing force. For poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry.” – Mary Oliver

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Are plants conscious? Do they experience forms of cognition and intelligence that go beyond patterned and hard-wired evolutionary behaviors? Do intelligence and consciousness really require a brain and central nervous system? Or should we consider intelligence on Earth to be less brain-bound, perhaps not even residing in the individual self, but rather in an enmeshment within an ecosystem? A swarm intelligence, a networked mind, distributed, adaptive, like a murmuration of starlings in the setting sun. And how would we even begin to start answering these questions empirically?

Today it is my explicit intention to change the way that you think about the kingdom of plants and the intelligence that resides within it. This is a controversial topic with scientists on all sides of the spectrum vehemently advocating for or against concepts.

It was Darwin who first introduced to the Western world the concept of the "root brain" hypothesis, where the tips of plant roots act in some ways like a brain, a distributed intelligence network. They challenge our very notions of an individual. Plants exhibit qualities that are adaptive, flexible, and goal directed – all hallmarks of an intelligence that goes beyond hard wired impulsive responses. They make decisions, perform predictive modeling, share nutrients and recognize kin. Electrical and chemical signalling systems have been identified in plants very similar to those found in the nervous systems of animals, including neurotransmitters like dopamine and melatonin.

Our guest today is Paco Calvo, a professor at the University of Murcia in Spain, where he leads the Minimal Intelligence Lab focusing on the study of minimal cognition in plants. He combines insights from biology, philosophy, and cognitive science to explore plant behavior, decision-making, and problem-solving, challenging conventional perspectives of his field. Paco has said that ‘to ‘know thyself’, one has to think well beyond oneself, or even one’s species. We are only one small part of a kaleidoscopic variety of ways of being alive.

Episode Website Link

Show Links:

• MINT lab
• Planta Sapiens book
• Time Lapse Video of vines and plants
• Michael Pollan NYT
• International Laboratory of Plant Neurobiology
• ENG - intelligent-trees - The Documentary
• Monica Gagliano
• **TED talk** Stefano Mancuso The roots of plant intelligence
• Scientific American - "Do Plants Think?

Look out for meditations, poems, readings, and other snippets of inspiration in between episodes.

Music: Electric Ethnicity by Igor Dvorkin, Duncan Pittock & Ellie Kidd

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.