The Universe Understanding Itself

There is a hub and spoke, expand and collect motion to the information gathering process being described in Adulthood Rites, the second book of Octavia Butler’s Lilith’s Brood series. This process mirrors the exploration and return pattern of children with healthy attachment.

Adulthood Rites

This is how children learn about the world. Expand to explore, experiment, and play then return to safety to process and understand. This is the natural ebb and flow process the taoists and identified for us.

Two key differences Butler gives us is that for the alien species in her novel, The Oankali, this is a collective process, biological and sexual as much as what we would consider learning. And in her protagonist Akin, she gives us a baby who is conscious enough to describe this exploration and collection process of healthy attachment.

Perhaps this first difference is an important insight. So much of our attachment patterns with our parents / caregivers shapes our later adult sexual relationships. Perhaps this exploration and collection and sharing belong there as well?

And possibly the second difference can be used to help us heal the rifts in our own learning process. The fundamental ebb and flow pattern developed before most of us formed coherent memories.

Using this imagined experience of it, we can reconnect to this pattern and perhaps diagnose and heal disruptions or blockages in the flow. Many of us seem to be out of balance in terms of exploration, collection, connection, and sharing. But, if we can revivify this original knowing in ourselves, we can use our adult connections to heal the wounds in our childhood ones.

Her presentation of these ideas through fiction suggests that fundamentally life, even biologically, is a learning process. The process of evolution is at its core similar to learning, fractally reflecting itself at different levels. That as Carl Sagan once said, we are the universe trying to understand itself.

~ by Edward on December 14, 2022.