Minding Mother Nature

When you go to a movie, you willingly suspend your beliefs for an hour or two. I’m only asking you to suspend them for a few minutes. This has to do with your happiness, so do pay attention.

You don’t exist.

At least not in the way you think you do.

Ninety five percent of what we humans do is habitual. And only five percent of our behavior occurs when we are being "at choice". Many of us continue to habitually operate in self-defeating ways even though that behavior does not serve us. We have become comfortable with the behavior and uncomfortable with the results. Jean Farber, the great French naturalist came across a perfect example of this type of habitual self-defeating behavior while studying the processionary caterpillar. He discovered that this unique creature spends its life in the forest feeding on pine needles and moves among the trees as part of a long chain with his eyes half-closed and his head butted closely against the fellow just ahead in sort of a bumper to bumper fashion. What would happen, Faber wondered if he connected the leader to the last caterpillar in the chain? Without much trouble he succeeded in getting a circle going around the rim of the flower pot. Around and around they went for seven days and seven nights. Nothing could break the chain….except exhaustion and weakness from lack of food, and yet food and water was there in the middle of the pot, less than a caterpillar away.