pynchon-l-digest V2 #2734

[s~Z]

>I seriously doubt that trees are burdened with a sense of separate
>individual consciousness and ownership thereof.

"It seemed now and then as if she were
responding to something she was hearing, and in rather a matter-of-fact
tone of voice for a baby, too, as if this were a return for her to a world
behind the world she had known all along."
Vineland p. 315

The 'world behind the world' speaks up when the sense of separate individual
consciousness is dissolved, not when it is attributed to trees. The new age
movement has made a religion out of mistaking devolution to more primitive
states of mind for the evolution of consciousness. Ken Wilber calls it the
pre/trans fallacy.