Umwelt

 I am slowly (very slowly) reading the most interesting book that is opening my mind in various ways. The name of it is "An Immense World" by Ed Yong. I highly recommend it though I wouldn't read it to children and it would take a special teen to read it.  I read some pages and then I have to stop and think about it as the ideas are new and different, but intriguing and understandable.

I wish I could set here the opening page of that book, "The Only True Voyage" where the author sets up an gym where an elephant, Rebecca, mouse, robin, spider, bat, owl, mosquito, and rattlesnake are in the same room. He describes how each is perceiving [or not] each other and what happens when the lights go out. Hearing, sight, perceptions, magnetic trail from earth, echolocation, infrared radiation, sonar, are touched on or inferred that "each is enclosed within its own unique sensory bubble, perceiving but a tiny sliver of an immense world." He goes on to explain Umwelt which "is specifically the part of those surroundings that an animal can sense and experience--its perceptual world."

How fascinating Umwelt is!! There are more senses than the usual five and each animal or being experiences life in a unique and specific way. The earth's magnetic field guides and directs many animals that others don't experience.  Anyway, I'm only on the first chapter after the introduction and my mind is exploding with thoughts and ideas as I learn.

One of the big ones is that God and Jehovah would created the world had to already have all the knowledge of how magnetic fields, sonar, echolocation, etc., etc. worked BEFORE they pulled chaos into organization to make the solar system and earth we live on. How they got each piece to work with the other pieces into this "Immense World" of senses and lives immeshed with each other.  Omniscience, Omnipotent and Omnipresent are starting to open up in my mind a little.

Alma 30:44  "....all things denote there is a God; yea, even the earth, and all things that are upon the face of it, yea, and its motion yea, and also all the planets which move in their regular form do witness that there is a Supreme Creator."

All things that are upon the face of it.  I can see a little bit more about things on the face of it. I'm still figuring it out.