Geology Reference
In-Depth Information
It may seem strange that we can learn anything from the way fungi lead their lives about
the way we should lead ours. But for Alan Rayner, this is exactly what has happened.
His many years of devoted study of the fungal kingdom have led him to radically change
his perceptions of space and boundaries and to develop a powerful new way of under-
standing nature and our place in it. Fungi have helped Rayner to see that boundaries are
not fixed and static, and that they do not enclose fundamentally isolated individuals, as
the mechanistic world-view would have it. Instead, boundaries are fluid, open, dynam-
ic and permit intelligent communication not only between those sentient 'persons' (in
the widest sense) that we call 'species', but also between previously isolated aspects of
our own psyches, such as science, art, politics and philosophy. Space for Rayner is not
a passive entity that surrounds dead objects possessed only of inert mass, but is sen-
tient in its own right and is included within dynamic, ever-changing natural forms. It is
the receptive presence by which subtle communication and evolutionary transformation
takes place amongst all that exists. These realisations lead to a deep respect for all life,
and to an understanding of its contextual unfolding as an endless pattern of “cocreative
togetherness of inner and outer domains”. One could say that Rayner has been Gaia'ed
by fungi. Perhaps Gaia's horizons could be opened out even further through his 'fluid
boundary' approach, which he calls 'inclusionality', allowing us to relax the definitions
that constrain our human perspectives and to experience ourselves being held softly in
the sentient embrace of our animate earth.
