In Catamaran Literary Reader, Winter 2014, Christine Huffard, PhD, senior research technician at Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, writes of the survival patterns of the Octopoda. Advised by her professor to, “Watch the animals and let them tell you what questions to ask,” she tallied the behavior of pygmy octopuses with no particular hypothesis in mind and free of any expectations, for hours at a time, for months at a time, in the shallows of N. Sulawesi, Indonesia.
Octopuses are supposed to be asocial and she has never seen them play, but her observation of a love story concluded the piece. A male octopus who over time had been guarding a desirable female was caught in the wrong place at the wrong time by a damselfish. He is held hostage and pecked relentlessly by the fish. Ten minutes later, to her shock, Huffard sees the female octopus crawl over to the damsel and grab the male, “pulling him past the stunned damsel to safety. Off they crawl . . . back to their dens, where they sit in silence and watch the fishes go by until sunset.”
Her point of view, that of the experimenter, is relevant to us and immensely rewarding in at least two ways.
First, the effort required to solve problems that inhere in any experiment brings to bear all of our faculties. We lose ourselves—our reflexive, narrow self-interest—as we contemplate the object of our focus. Indeed, what makes us uniquely fitted to be in control of our lives is what we have in our sights. In the light of this perspective, we are motivated to perceive and understand priorities and struggles other than our own. Relieved, for a time, of the constraints imposed by anxious self-interest, we become a part of something larger, more profound.
Second, and just as rewarding, what we discover—big, small or inconclusive—in our experiment, adds to the generosity, fascination and inclusiveness with which we engage the world. Offered only superficial criteria while exercising our point of view, our lives may reflect little more than patterned responses to the conventional world given to us by the prevailing conceptual reality. If we lack experimental discipline and its focus, we may remain excessively vulnerable to the shallow mind.
However, availing ourselves of substantive criteria while exercising our point of view, we have an exquisite opportunity to be a creatively independent determinant of our transformative fate.
In the excerpted words of a participant in the experiment that characterizes Autonomy and Life, “I am so grateful to participate in this experimental process which produces such aliveness. The more I experiment with the information and ideas, the more meaningful my life becomes. Experimenting upon my own life, I am the one responsible for creating meaning in my life (or not) and the one experiencing the fulfillment. I am finding that my happiness does not depend on my circumstances nor on the outcomes of my experiments. Results are not considered as 'successes' or 'failures.' Rather, they are considered information to be added to the body of knowledge utilized in designing the next experiment in the quest for what adds value to life and what works (or doesn’t work) to forward civilization.”
Arnold Siegel is the founder of Autonomy and Life and leader of its Retreat Workshops and Advanced Classes.