UC Santa Cruz

In Findhorn, Scotland, as part of the “New Age” in the 1960s, a novel form of plant-human collaboration developed in which humans collaborated with “nature”, or specifically with “devas” and “nature spirits”, beings that are not physical and cannot be engaged with in the usual physical manner, but that through this collaboration made a meaningful difference in the lives of the humans and in the physical reality of their gardens. In a “modernist” world, defined such that only the “physical” is scientifically real, where the physical is that which can be observed and measured with the physical senses and their technological extensions, it is not possible to make sense of non-physical beings such as devas and nature spirits. The underlying theme of this project is to overcome this modernist “physicocentrism” in order to expand what is considered to be scientifically real.

Methodologically, Findhorn’s experiences are not dismissed outright, nor is it attempted to reduce them to the physical, but their experiences are engaged with as real on their own terms, suggesting the need for a critical rethinking of implicit modernist assumptions about the nature of reality, including individualist metaphysics, nature-culture dualism, human exceptionalism, and reductionism. The New Age implicitly retains these modernist tendencies, resulting in problematic practices, but with Karen Barad’s “agential realism” – an ethico-onto-epistemology that, among other features, provides a coherent interpretation of quantum physics – these modernist limitations are overcome through the reworking of key concepts such as matter, causality, space, time, agency, and knowledge.

Through agential realism’s fundamental in/determinacy of matter that is in stark contrast to the determinate individuals of modernism, it is possible to make sense of devas as “virtual beings”, of nature spirits as “transphysical beings”, and of collaboration as not limited to humans but inclusive of any mutually intra-acting agencies that jointly take responsibility for the iterative enaction of their common world. There is a possibility of engaging scientifically with virtuality and transphysicality through their physical traces in laboratory experiments, and collaborating with devas and nature spirits could help create ethically responsible scientific practices with plants.