I’ve been reading a book called The Power of Habit (Duhigg). It’s profoundly useful and informative, if a bit too mechanical. But for all Duhigg has learned about the topic, and all he can offer in terms of pragmatic insight, he has missed the root of the thing. This is, in part, because science tends to underlie our modern explanations and assertions, and in many ways, this »can be an extremely deceptive foundation. Why? Because science as we know it is primitive in far too many ways, and much of modern science and concern is driven by priorities that start out with everything backwards… from parts to wholes, rather than, as in nature, from unities to participants.

This disorientation arises because we (researchers and our societies) know next to nothing about the actual origins, natures and purposes of existence… of nature, of timespace, and living worlds. These understandings remain mysteriously beyond the ‘grasping hand’ of our science and technological orientations.

It’s extremely difficult to gain such understanding from the forms of awareness, concern and evaluation common to science, and for this reason, it often misleads us. One cannot ‘grasp’ (with the conceptual mind) the nature of being »unless the priorities and perspectives are led by direct participation and inquiry, rather than dissection and measurement.

That being said, what Duhigg misses is something I learned from participating with nature, in love and rapt fascination. It is that living beings and ecologies, living worlds… ‘hitchhike’. What I mean by this is that, like birds traveling together or fish in their swarms, or trees in their seasons, living beings and ecologies sense and respond to the opportunities provided by the environment and each other’s effects upon it. Life is incredibly conservative, energetically, so that anything that provides a new opportunity to conserve energy is sensed and responded to.

Take, for example, ‘antibiotics’, something we were trained to see as a crucial medical breakthrough — one which did, indeed, ‘save many lives’ — in one frame of time. But in another, the delivered us the results of microbial hitchhiking: resistant bacteria. For an organism with populations in the trillions of trillions, the initial effects were not precisely as pragmatic as we at first thought… because organisms respond to environmental change with transformation. And organisms whose temporality is as fast as that of microbes can integrate and evolve with profound rapidity. So a technological advance that produced incredible results… has become for us a threat… not just in terms of resistant bacteria, either. Due flaws in our perspectives and priorities… we didn’t realize we were not just wiping out the virulent targets… we were changing what it meant to be human, and our own biology, in ways nearly no one could anticipate.

Habits represent the inclination to offload the necessities of presence in making choices and decisions, effectively providing something like a new method of conservation of the energies that are required for deep awareness and consideration. Whether healthy or unhealthy, educational or stupefying, the organisms we are, and our minds, are capable of acquiring them in order to store energies that might otherwise be necessary to expend. All of life is hitchhiking on processes like sunlight, temperature gradients, and the environmental activities of our remaining ecologies.

Living beings are deeply inclined to seek these paths because they are conserving energy for times of crisis, impoverishment, and reproductive opportunity. That’s one way of viewing it. There are others that are closer to the true nature of living worlds, but they are unconcerned with pragmatism and have more to do with the spirit of Origin and the purposive underpinnings of the universe and Life. Language and explanation have but modest use in such relationships; they are inclined to collapse them to facile explanations and concepts that, while useful in specific domains of concern or ideation, are anathema to the impossibly mysterious and ecstatic nature of something more like Truth.

Living beings hitchhike. On each other. We used this skill in childhood, ‘catching a ride’ with our parents, guardians, culture, nature… and the history (and future) of our species. Unfortunately for us, our cultures and indeed our species is cognitively disoriented to a degree that, where not catastrophic, is often at best undesirable and misleading. This is, in part, due to the overwhelming dominance of dangers implicit in language, measurement, description, and what we might call left-hemispheric orientations.