Do Trees Have Egos?
by Elinor Dickson
The ego has received a lot of bad press lately and rightly so. It has massively overplayed its hand in human affairs. Since it is a term that I frequently use, I am having one of those, “rethink your assumptions” moments. This task became more urgent while reading Glenn Aparico Perry’s recent book Original Thinking.
Overall, his thesis is cogent, including the thorny, philosophical question as to the existence of an ego. He writes, “The ego may have originally been an illusory abstraction, but it has been invoked so many times by now it has been reified into existence. In other words, it exists because we believe it does. But whether real or not, the corollary effects of our belief in ego—fragmentation, anxiety, separation, loss—are undeniably real. Moreover, they are potentially devastating for self, society, and nature. In short, once we believe in an ego, we build a separate identity. And this identity reinforces the illusion that we are all somehow apart from each other and apart from nature.”(1) Certainly, Perry correctly reflects the current dilemma humanity finds itself in. The news gives us plenty of examples where the ego has totally swallowed the person, depriving them of any morality or any ability to see the bigger picture. Therefore, if we stop believing in an ego, will our problems begin to resolve themselves?
To further examine my assumptions, I went back to Carl Jung’s definition of ego as a complex that represents the conscious mind. It comprises the thoughts, memories, and emotions that we are aware of. Or as his colleague Edward Edinger would say, the ego is not the source of our thoughts, etc., it only notices that they have arrived. Tor Norretranders, in his book The User Illusion, points to the fact that the ego has a very narrow bandwidth in which it operates. Each second we only process sixteen of the eleven million bits of information our senses pass on to the brain. (The rest goes into the body, the carrier of the unconscious). Norretranders takes the word “ego” back to its original meaning from the Greeks, namely the “I”. There is some merit in this, as the “ego – I” is, perhaps, more easily understood as the self-referent point. I am here. I did such and such. It remains, however, that the “ego – I” is not the source of its thoughts or images. It needs to take its place in relationship to the Self, a term used by the Upanishads 3000 years ago and developed by Jung to designate the totality of both conscious and unconscious reality. We have always had a relationship with the Self—the spirit-filled world of our ancient ancestors, the gods and goddesses, carved, painted, and worshipped across millennia. These images became a way of understanding the power invested in Nature and how we could relate to such energy. However, in separating out from Nature to develop a sense of “I”, or ego, as the organ of perception, we became enamored with our own ability. The development of our ego was meant to be a phase, not a destiny. The question becomes, how do we approach the relationship between our ego and our Self today?
It was then that I came across the writings of Stephen Harrod Buhner, herbalist and researcher at the Foundation of Gaian Studies. For Buhner, “The ‘ego’ in its simplest definition is the part of us that monitors our survival. It monitors our environment for safety and initiates behaviors designed to keep us safe in response to what it is perceiving. It is, at root, a healthy and important part of us that wants to keep our self-organization intact. However, it has no morality. It decides behavior and initiates it without regard to consequences. … Underneath its expressions are the desire to protect the self-organized entity of which it is a part.”(2) That is, depending on our internalized values, the ego can present creative choices, or if it sees the world around it as predatory, it will react in kind. Knowing all that could (has) gone wrong by separating ourselves from the processes of Nature, I am currently writing a book that examines patriarchy as evolution’s great gamble.
Realizing that from our earliest beginnings, our experiences, stored in the phylogenetic memory of our species, formed the bedrock of the ego, a further question popped into my mind. Do trees have an ego? My friends rolled their eyes, but in the realm of emergent evolution, there is a case to be made. From light to particles, to atoms, to molecules, to plants and animals, each evolutionary point is taken up to the next level until we arrive at humans. Whatever conscious abilities we have had to be there in an innate capacity from the beginning.
Once, while sailing in the north Pacific, I had the opportunity to listen to recordings of whales in conversation. Whales use their distinct and rhythmic language to track and inform each other of their current position and circumstances. My curiosity about consciousness in nature deepened when, in 2016, I read forester Peter Wohlleben’s book The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel and How They Communicate. I was awed by the fact that “trees evolved to live in cooperative, interdependent relationships, maintained by communication and a collective intelligence similar to an insect colony.”(3) On May 1, 2024, I opened the Atlantic magazine that featured an article by Zoe Schlanger entitled “The Mysteries of Plant Intelligence.” It is a review of the current studies on the consciousness and memory of plants and how they communicate.
The ego was shaped by our need for survival, but thinking of nature in this way, I’ve come to realize that in the nonhuman realms, the emerging ‘ego’ and its role in survival extend to include 1) community, 2) caring, and 3) play. For example, in terms of community, microscopic fungal filaments join the hair-like root tips of trees to form a mycorrhizal network, sometimes called “the wood-like web.” The biggest, oldest trees have the most fungal connections and are often called the “mother” trees. That is, having deep roots they draw up water and make it available for the young saplings. Often overshadowed, the saplings lack sunlight to photosynthesize so the larger trees “feed” them by pumping sugar into their roots.
In terms of caring, the vast amount of work done on animal interactions and communication, such as the work of Jane Goodall and many others, shows how creatures in the wild care for each other. Elephants will bury a dead newborn or share mothering responsibilities, etc. Of course, the search for food, or other instances of survival can seem aggressive to us, but I have come to the sorry conclusion that only humans slaughter their own species by the millions. Morality is bypassed completely.
Lastly, let’s consider play. Humor that flows into genuine laughter, even at oneself, is the sign of a healthy human. When the source of “laughter” is the ridicule of another, human connection is lost. Animals not only survive, but they also play. One needs only to think of dolphins, or horses, or dogs. Play is often a substitute for aggression or the preparation for survival. Like all tensions, it is, perhaps, the intent within the action that leaves room for survival and “creative” options.
Returning to my assumptions about ego, what I see in these instinctual capacities is a latent ego that acknowledges the Self. For the most part, plants and animals appear to exist with an innate ability to live in a community. Survival is attached to something greater than themselves. That is, as creation evolves, we are seeing throughout nature the roots of a larger circumference that humans have come to recognize as the totality of a person’s identity. From Shamanic times to the 14th century, we believed in a metaphysical background greater than ourselves. Certainty was invested in a transcendent world separate from us. Shaken by the Great Plague and endless religious wars, by the time of the Enlightenment our worldview began to change. The collective ego tightened its grip on the encroaching uncertainty of survival by adopting a position based on scientific materialism, determinism, and fundamentalism.
Since our ego was meant to be the witness to the evolutionary process, the chaos and anxiety many people are feeling today can be seen in two ways—both of which are true. First, we are living through the collapse of the patriarchal paradigm with its largely monotheistic, hierarchal structures based on power as strength. Even as we double down on old “strongman” structures, the current chaos leaves our ego, individually and collectively, feeling numb and out of control. Depression, drugs, conspiracy theories, authoritarianism, and violence begin to take over.
Inversely, amid the chaos, many people see the immense collective field within us trying to break through to an expanded consciousness. We continue to need our ego, but one that has the humility to open to a greater reality—a healthy ego that is the servant and not the Master. The ego that presents to the brain the images and thoughts that fill our daily lives must risk opening itself to the creative processes of Nature if we are to continue to evolve. That is, it must expand its understanding of “survival.”
What happens in the collective realm creates upheaval in the personal realm. Conversely, how we respond in our personal lives can, in turn, influence our collective reality. This realization led me to frame my own journey within a fresh perspective. I began to look at the major shifts in my life, when they appeared, and what resulted from them. Major shifts or upheavals in life can come in many ways: illness, the death of a loved one, or an unexpected task we are given. Times of chaos and upheaval in our waking world are often countered with an opposing response in our hidden collective world, expressed through unexpected encounters with people, nature, books, or dreams that challenge us to change the way we think and feel. If we can reframe the upheavals in our lives, however they come to us, the results can lead to an expanded and deeper understanding of the meaning of our life. With a new awareness, we can begin to open to the mythical world of the soul, that place where time and timelessness, matter and spirit, intersect. When we do so, the images and ideas that the ego presents to the brain support the language of creative imagination and metaphor. Science and poetry come closer together. Systems and information theory talk of relatedness, co-operation, interdependence, and synergy. Process replaces progress. Duality becomes paradox. Our machine-like, time-bound world gives way to words such as presence and resonating. Decisions about survival are seen in relationship to the whole, not just the individual “I” or the tribe to which they belong. As we move beyond the impasse of our current worldview, we are realizing that this is the expanded, inclusive role the ego was meant to play.
(1) Perry, Glenn Aparico. Original Thinking, North Atlantic Books, California, 2023, P. 223
(2) Buhner, Stephen Harrod. Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm: Beyond the Doors of Perception into the Dreaming of Earth, Bear & Company, Rochester Vermont and Toronto, Canada, pp. 486-487.
(3) “Do Trees Talk to Each Other?” Smithsonian Magazine, by Richard Grant with photographs by Diane Markosian, March 2018.