Lately, I have been exploring the idea that we not only share minds — our minds actually arise in response to ‘calls’ that we issue and encounter in relation. More simply, our minds organize their anatomy and abilities in direct and intimate correspondence with the contexts and roles that our relational experience implies and provides.

This would mean that the lion’s share of our actual cognitive and relational faculties remain hidden from us, awaiting contexts and situations that might awaken them or call them into our conscious discovery, development and application. And the most astonishing and available of these contexts is, of course, Nature. The one we most ignore, attack, lie to ourselves about, and co-opt.

Thus it appears that most of the contexts our cultures establish and propagate so pervasively result in roles that are and remain uninhabitable. They cannot invite us into development or fulfillment, precisely because that would give the lie to their form and structure.

Our cultures must therefore actively inhibit and co-opt the forces and processes with which we would otherwise obtain some direct experience of the true breadth and depth of our relational intelligence, our intellectual intelligence, and our capacities for intimate cooperation and mutual fulfillment.