Led by Newt Fink, Aug 22, 2021
August 22, 2021 UU
The guidance system
In many examples from nature we see the workings of an apparent guidance system.
A tiny bird, the Red Knot, migrates every year eight thousand miles without a map, without a device, through storms and headwinds and crosswinds, around tall manmade structures with shiny glass windows that can be fatally misperceived as clear space, around windmills on the ridges, despite manmade and climate-made changes in feeding and resting and nesting grounds. In North America about 75% of all birds migrate.
A just-hatched sea turtle digs its way to the surface of the sand and races to the sea (having never been in a race before) while predatory birds feast on its little siblings – and then once in the sea swims determinedly from new predators – diving birds from above and fish from below. Seven years and thousands of miles later the surviving turtle struggles out of the water in the night, on the same beach, digs a hole – evades poachers, and lays dozens of eggs to renew the cycle.
A Monarch butterfly which, how does it even fly(?), somehow cooperates with the winds and flies thousands of miles – somehow sharing the cycle with four generations – each one doing only a part of the journey, yet amazingly, collaboratively, they migrate, metamorphosize and succeed in reproduction.
Salmon eggs hatch way upstream, the young make their way into the vast ocean, as much as seven and eight years later for some species, the surviving mature fish return to the very streams where they we hatched to lay and fertilize eggs .. and then die. Who or what remembers where they were born and how to find the place?
The systems of memory and computation and sensing that brought the Apollo 11 moon crew back to earth might seem elementary compared to whatever guides these simple fish – and the astronauts could at least see the moon and the earth all the way.
The point is that all of life is a seemingly unquenchable flow of moving, striving, extending and succeeding with an intelligence – an interconnection with an intelligent guidance that we do not understand – to go where every life-form is intended to go and to do what it is destined to do.
Is it likely that such creatures would have a “guidance system” but we don’t?
Is it likely that these would know where “home” is and how to get there, but we be at a loss – left abandoned and guessing which way to go?
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As modern scientific beings, we might think ourselves quite capable of plotting a course through our lives. And yet we mostly seem to ignore an inborn facility to contemplate, to behold, to feel awe, to experience an alive and expansive – and guiding – presence within us.
We don’t often even see the stars and are detached and self-deprived of the nature around us by our self-focus. The digital devices that have captured us do not offer apps for joining with the intelligence that is witnessed in the tiny seed or the migrating bird or the self-sacrificing salmon. We have mostly ignored inner promptings that so served the old Quakers – to wait in silence – to wait in faith that, as they used to put it – “way will be shown” and “God will provide.”
Where do we go from there/here to find and activate our predicted “inner guidance system?”
It does not seem as though our mental evolution has yet brought to us the certainty of the goofily-flying butterfly, or the confidence of the turtle struggling up the beach on a moonless night, or the sure faith of the long-migrating bird that “home” waits – or the satisfaction of the salmon that its destiny, its very reason for being – the meaning of life for it will be fulfilled in struggling up a stream, exhausting its life to leave and fertilize eggs for the next generation.
Mystics and sages, sources of perennial wisdom such as scriptures of major religions have taught that we can transcend – go beyond – where thought and reason would take us – to the certainty, confidence, faith and satisfaction that the simple creatures of our natural world demonstrate.
Very few of us evolve to that way of being – however – yet guidance-type answers have come and do come. We are not strangers, any of us, to intuitive experience – an “answer” to what is “right” or what is “wrong” or what is the direction to go in the face of a choice or experience – answers to at least some of the questions that have evaded our normal thinking process. Sometimes an answer arrives in the midst of a stack of contrary reasons – some in your own head and some from friends and common sense and the way things are always done – directing you in the opposite way: there it is – a quieter voice saying “do this” .. or “go this way” – not necessarily with words, but with a feeling of certainty and courage that cannot be explained.
Silence, more than anything else we can experience, shows itself to be – with practice – not a door to nothingness – but an opening to sensing beyond the ordinary senses, beyond habit, beyond experience: to intuition – to hearing what has been promised by the mystics and our religious traditions and sacred texts – a still small voice of calm – a voice with quiet authority – a voice of clear authenticity.
Regrettably, my development in this skill is limited – yet I have experienced enough to highly recommend it. It is hard to improve on silence when ultimately each of us has to find our own way. In fact we insist on it – not wanting anyone else to tell us. Without some silence each day guidance cannot be heard.
The spirit of life – the still small voice – comes with invitation, it is never coercive – honoring each one’s choice, awaiting the open ear, eye and heart.
Is it likely that the other creatures in nature would have an endowment of “guidance” that we would not have?
Is it likely that a tiny bird would know where “home” is and how to get there, but we be at a loss – guessing at life itself?
