The Invisible Work

a conversation with Andreas Weber

Freya Mathews, writing in Learning How Land Speaks on how the world may respond to our invocations, says ‘a living cosmos is capable of responding to our call… In all instances of ontopoetics, the ‘language’ that a living cosmos speaks in response to our invocations is a concretised and particularized one. It is the language of poetics – of imagery, of meaning conveyed through the symbolic resonance of things.’

Maybe in contrast, Andreas Weber remarked in discussion that sitting with a River mentor is in itself political and leaves traces in the fabric of the world: ‘It’s a long-standing intuition of mine that this work, even if it is completely invisible, even if it is absolutely in private, has a profound impact, only that its impact is happening on the planes which aren't seen.’

Peter and Andreas recorded a conversation on these matters

Tagliamento River, last morphologically intact River in the Alps: photo Andreas Weber

Peter

In the latest Living Waters plenary discussion, responding to a question about activism, you said, ‘To my deep understanding the activist value, the contribution, the true contribution of this work is providing fecundity to the living Earth. This is the sort of inner work that we are doing in Living Waters, being as selfless as we can, is absolutely important. It’s work that has been all but forgotten by the dominating culture of this planet.’

Andreas 

I think this work is about is accessing reality from the side of inwardness, or psyche, or the non-material side. So when we experience a particular gesture from the world, this is also a manifestation of the non-material side of everything. Call it soul maybe. Everyone and everything is this one eternal essence. Everything is at the same time palpable, visible, embodied; and also but also soul, or mind, or subjectivity. We can give many imprecise and philosophically contested names to it but we know what I am speaking about, because this is how we experience ourselves in the ‘inside’. On the level of our self. So we are of both levels, because they are of course just one reality expressing itself from different angles. And because these angles are both available, communication is not only happening through the ‘outside channels’, the perception of things, their meanings, signs, symbols. Indeed, we can always, we do always communicate, or relate on both levels. On the outward level this is through signs and language, and through metaphors and ontopoetic markers – the language of things Freya refers to. But we can also relate on a purely inner plane, which is the plane of aliveness as such, a very basic plane of reality. I would even go that far that's to say that there is a ‘loving desire to give’ at the most basic plane, and we carry this desire in our hearts.

This inner plane is not visible, it's not scalable, it's not provable, but we can feel it. We feel it with the heart, not necessarily the physical heart, but with that spiritual organ of perception which dreams of giving life, of giving fecundity, in which we experience the gift of life, when the heart is opening. And what I think we humans can do particularly well – maybe this is the only thing humans can really do better than other animals – is to directly give our desire that life be, on that inner plane. We can open our hearts to the world, to each of the living, mostly other-than-human persons constituting the living fabric of reality, we can get in touch with them on the heart level. And that's very important. Because it works. It gives the others life. And it gives us life. It's actually it's a form of loving, but it's not loving through actions, but loving through intense concentration of desire that the other shall be given aliveness. It’s a very esoteric teaching that I am explaining here, but you will find it in all the ancient wisdom traditions, including indigenous contemplative practices and ritual. We, the humans, are there to nourish the life-giving powers through contributing to them on the invisible side.

Recently I published a little essay about art, about indigenous art, the great abstract turn in western art, and the original power of art in ritual and life.¹ Art is the human means to directly tap into that shared invisible plane of the heart, make it grow. I think that the old secret of what we call Art was, in traditional societies, just this: It was an action to sing about life, to sing forth life and aliveness. That's very mysterious; it's a concentration in the heart of spirit, which makes this world more fecund. And it can only happen on this inner level, it doesn't happen in any mechanistic way: there is a shortcut through the centre of what this reality is about, about giving life. And this is local and global at once: as the Sufis say, ‘Your heart is as big as the universe’.

Peter

You're emphasizing the inner level. You're saying that reality has a material and soulful side, but you're emphasizing the soul. Whereas Freya writes that the gestures of the world are necessarily material: ‘the ‘language’ that a living cosmos speaks in response to our invocations is… the language of poetics – of imagery, of meaning conveyed through the symbolic resonance of things’. The meaning is felt, but metaphorically, not written down explicitly, felt in the heart. But you're going a little bit more to soul.

Andreas

It is beautiful how Freya puts it, and I love her description of these ‘ontopoetic’ moments of encounter. The world is a poem which writes itself in ‘things’. I actually very often have experienced these gestures. I just want to stress, and I am sure Freya would agree, that there are no such things as things – everything that is matter is also soul (or mind, inwardness, experience). So if in a particular moment of inner importance a Kingfisher flies by, our encounter takes place in that inner plane of soul. The swirling Bird is a door into soul, as I am too. Of course the Bird is material, but also clearly not a thing (not even a stone is), but rather a way the One cosmos bends towards me and lets me into this oneness. So I just want to add that there are layers of interaction and there are layers going ever deeper into this, let's call it the inner planes. These are non-material; they are non-temporal. But of course, they are not dualistically separate from the physical planes. They are the same world, only experienced from different angles, or levels of immersion maybe.

What I wanted to emphasize in the remarks you referred to is that we rediscover the importance of this inner work, this totally purely inner work. We can meet the others, who of course are all manifestations of the One, on the inside. This is one of the many reasons for that we should never wait for a material ‘proof’ that our connection to the living world has worked out, that a River or a Tree will directly respond. They always listen even though they might not respond immediately or physically. If you're too firmly seated in the ontopoetic realm, you are waiting for that ontopoetic proof! So people ask, the participants of our Living Waters experience ask, is it truly, really real? But we already know that something is real, because we can feel it in the heart, this organ of spiritual perception. So being able to access these inner planes becomes a question of trust – of trust if we actually are able to access them. Well, we are, because we are made of this world, we are a version of this incredible One soul (which is One body).

This all sounds a bit more radically mystical than Freya’s choice of words. But she also talks about the cosmos, about reality, as One. So if you're a panpsychist, you're also somehow a mystic, because you understand that your innermost lived reality, which is the reality of soul, of the self, is somehow distributed through the world, and that you can somehow come into contact with it. You actually are already in contact with it, you are all the time. It is ‘closer to you than your jugular vein’, as they say. It is only a question of allowing yourself to see.

Peter

You're a mystic, but still linked to the material, integrated with the material. And I suppose that's what I like about the living cosmos panpsychist view.  And that is part of what appealed to me: that the stuff of the world is imbued with mind, with soul, however you call it.  There is no separate realm of soul and what we experience as consciousness arises through the evolution of the cosmos, and we conscious beings evolves as part of that whole. What you are saying sounds more mystical.

But what I what concerns me is how words like ‘spiritual’ so quickly drag us in the West to ideas of a transcendent divine, rather than the immanent divine, and so into dualism. I worry that when you talk about this ‘other plane’ that maybe takes us away from the beauty and of this material, living, heartful world in which matter and soul are deeply interconnected, two ways of talking about the same thing, as I think Spinoza taught.

Andreas

Yeah, that’s true. I get you. I also recommend that we leave the old dualistic way of the West behind. Yes. And indeed: If we can access reality purely on an inner plane (although it requires a lot of training, a lot of sitting with River to become really good at that), why care for bodies, the material world, nature? Here we are again, at the dangerous trapdoor that seems to force us into the decision: either take transcendence and leave the suffering real world behind (shun the flesh, castigate bodily needs), or doubt this transcendence. And I tell you, this is something I haven't completely philosophically understood. I have been asking myself this question many times. But it is a misunderstanding to say, well, there's the soul, and then there's the body. Instead, we have to see that there are two doors, or two aspects and actually deep down it doesn't make sense to differentiate, the differentiation falls away. I'm talking from my own mystical experience here.

So I think that being active on this inner level doesn't force us to shun the outer world. The Indigenous cultures will tell you that the invisible is the plane of life-giving energies, they have names for it (all those badly translated words like Dreaming and Medicine are renderings of these names). They will tell you that there is this energy and it is not embodied. They will tell you that it is a numinous energy and it's the source of life. They will tell you these things. And at the same time, Indigenous cultures are so incredibly embodied. The whole of the wild world is their embodiment.

So I don't see a contradiction, when I advise to go deeply into the nonmaterial side. But I absolutely see what you mean. And I am sure others will share your doubt. So I think it is all the more important to go this step and to fully acknowledge the existence of spiritual power. Let me use this word, because the dominant scientific culture still does not.

Peter 

And that is what happens while sitting by the River. There may not be what Freya calls an ontopoetic experience, but there's some threshold or a lifting the veil or something like that, when the distinction between me and the world, between subject and object, fades away and the experience becomes – words fail – unitive. You are part of it. And that is without necessarily any explicit communicative response like a Kingfisher flying past.

Andreas

Exactly. I think many people in Living Waters have it. They have it in my own seminars, just by patiently sitting there, enacting the gesture: “You first”. Embodying selflessness. And then at some point you start to move effortlessly without the limitations of just the physical world. And the perception of mystical unity brings this loving state which is in your heart. This is somehow the same thing. And, you know, words really start to be very difficult to pick for these things.

What is important is that spiritual energy, or love energy, or giving energy, however you call it, is created through this. Putting yourself second, and desiring life for the other (the more-than-human being in our case, but it also works for humans). And then it comes. And it changes people. And at the same time, and that is so much more important, it brings some element of worship into the world. And worship is, the realization of reality, the realization of selflessness. What can we do more to nourish reality than realize its innermost core, selflessness? This is something very powerful. And I'm still speaking from experience. We've totally neglected these powers. But we can go there always. And that’s beautiful, because, you know, Peter, this is actually the door which will always be our connecting hatch to life, however bad things will get here. It will get bad, it will get really bad. And there is always a light. And it is right in our heart. As it is in the heart of the ringing, tingling River jumping from pebble to pebble on its selfless path to the sea.

Tagliamento River: photo Andreas Weber

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1. Weber, Andreas. "Sustaining Fecundity: Artistic Creation as Care for Life." Australian Journal of Environmental Education 39 (2023): 307-19. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/aee.2023.26.