Cultivating Curiosity

For the past month I have been deeply involved in the audiobook Entangled Life, read by its author Merlin Sheldrake. This astonishing book is all about fungi and the mycelial networks which are happening right beneath our feet. I can hear the author’s sense of wonder and curiosity as he reads his own words, describing how these powerful underground networks can reshape our understanding of life, intelligence, and interconnection.

For me, the book is about the amazing nourishment and support provided by these beings below the surface of where our beautiful Flower Essences manifest, and offered me a profoundly new way of seeing our flowers as a result of this new information. I highly recommend it. 

While I had many moments of revelation while listening to this book, I wanted to share one in particular with you - the profound power of mindfully cultivating curiosity.

This first ‘aha!’ moment came for me in the book’s introduction, where Merlin Sheldrake mentions his magician friend David Abram. David performed magic tricks at Alice’s Restaurant in Massachusetts. Diners who showed up regularly began to comment that they were seeing things differently after they left the restaurant – “the night sky was shockingly blue and the clouds large and vivid.” Or “the traffic seemed louder, the streetlights brighter, the patterns on the sidewalk more fascinating, the rain more refreshing.”

David understood this phenomenon to be that his magic tricks were changing the way people experienced the world. If they were open to bunnies appearing out of top hats and coins magically pulled out of their ears, their openness to new possibilities expanded dramatically.

David’s explanation of this phenomenon was: “Our perceptions work in large part by expectation. It takes less cognitive effort to make sense of the world using preconceived images updated with a small amount of new sensory information than to constantly form entirely new perceptions from scratch.”

Said in a different way, many of us live in a world of Premature Cognitive Commitment. This is a phrase coined by psychologist Ellen Langer in her trailblazing work on mindfulness versus mindlessness in the early 80s. It refers to the idea that early uncritical acceptance of information can limit future perception and potential.

Mindfulness is the simple, active process of noticing new things. It engages us in the present and enhances health, competence, and happiness. Conversely, mindlessness is a state of operating on autopilot, bound by rigid past perspectives, which Langer argues is the default mode for most people. Her research shows that by embracing uncertainty and actively noticing, we can alter our experience of aging, stress, and health. David Abram’s restaurant diners were experiencing exactly this. 

This notion of ‘not seeing what is really there,’ or perhaps better phrased as ‘not seeing the wholeness of what is really there,’ reminds me of the story about the elephant by the great Persian mystic, Rumi. The following words are from a screen at an amazing Rumi Exhibit at the Aga Khan Museum in Toronto in 2023:

An elephant was in a dark room, brought for exhibition.
Many people entered that darkness. Each one to see the creature.
Seeing it with the eye was impossible, so in the darkness they touched it instead.
One person touched the trunk and said, “This creature is like a pipe.”
Another brought their hand to its ear and to them it appeared like a fan.
Another felt its leg and said, “ I see the shape of the elephant as a pillar.”
Yet another laid their hand on its back and said, “This elephant is like a throne.”

The moral of this story – everyone was just seeing fragments of the whole, and operating from their past experience. The elephant in its entirety remained a mystery. 

I feel like I am at the end of my space with so many more things to say about all of this. So I will do my best to summarize and to connect the dots.

Cultivating curiosity about the world I live in, and experiencing people, events and Nature as energy unfolding - rather than static things that I can label and shelve - is my way of releasing and dissolving Premature Cognitive Commitment. My way of perceiving the elephant, of being open to bunnies appearing out of top hats.

Asking questions, meditating, and taking Essences are good practices to adopt to be in a constant state of wonder. These practices invite us to live fully in this precious present moment which, if we are being real, is the only time we have.