A possible introduction

into the heart of lightness

Image a biologist entering a virgin rain forest where nobody has ever been. She knows something about plants and animals, from where she comes from. She knows about the behaviour of animals small and large, from the textbooks. Maybe she has instruments with her, DNA-sample kits or binoculars, electron microscopes or scanners. Maybe she just relies on her eyes and ears to explore the forest's ecology.

She bumps into a bewildering array of unknown organisms and their interactions, in which it is hard to see the forest from the trees. Where does she start? She will probably start by observing and collecting, trying to find and recognise recurring patterns in the complexity. Similarly looking plants or animals will be sorted into groups, which she calls 'families', and very close relatives within these families will be sorted into 'species'.

But every organism, so similar to the other members of its species, has its own personal characteristics. Every individual is unique. Still, each and every individual cannot survive without the entire ecosystem around it. Where does one individual end, and where does the next one begin? She realises she can start with any individual and working up towards the whole. Or vice versa.

In bacteriology, she already knows that genetic material is being swapped continuously between individuals, without them mating and procreating. The world of bacteria could be seen as one big gene-sharing pool of microscopic life. If they could sing, there hymn would be "we are the world".

And even in our own human genome, we find traces of old bacterial and viral genomes. The relationship between all living things is much greater than you would think when you look just at their outsides.

But undeterred by the immensity of her endeavour, she hacks her way into the unknown territory of the forest, gradually discovering more and more aspects of the reality she lays bare. Her knowledge grows.

And behind her back the jungle closes again. Whichever direction she looks in, so much happens behind her. Too much for one person to grasp. But she knows she is not alone. We are all together in this multiplexed world. Together we can make an effort to get our co-operating brains around it. At least, that's what humankind has been trying for the last tenthousand years. There is too much world and too little time for one person to understand. That's the power of human culture that we can build on to the work of others and hand on to the next generation. Nothing ever happens in isolation. Especially not the growth of knowledge.

In Conrad's story a human reaches into the heart of darkness in the deep primeval jungle of the Congo, or into his own mind.

I would like to turn the metaphor inside out. By exploring the unknown, by stepwise learning from mistakes and misclassifications, by trial and error, by playful experimenting and critically evaluating, we slowly progress towards the heart of lightness. The light of clarification. The hovering feeling of understanding. Our minds are catalogue-making instruments that help us to shed light on the world and on ourselves. On our thoughts and on our music.