The importance of the collective (The collective capacity of mankind in general) has been expressed since recorded history, but has been poorly understood. The ability to profit from the knowledge that others have gained, to love and be loved, to amass wealth or to have any other aspect of abundance is not possible outside the collective. In fact, we cannot even have life outside the collective. It will be discussed in detail later, but is presented now in brief because, without understanding that collective abundance precedes individual abundance, many questions will arise for which there will appear to be no answers. The answers always exist, if we ask the right questions and look in the right places. But, unless we begin from the right premise, we can’t even ask the right questions, much less answer them.
To demonstrate, we’ve all heard of the question “If a tree falls in the forest and there is no one to hear it, does it still make a sound?” Stated in this form the question can be debated forever. That’s because the person who formulated the question had a clear idea as to exactly what he meant. But the way the question is posed doesn’t allow us to know. Did “no one” mean humans? Did it include animals and other hearing creatures? Did it include recording devices? Since we don’t know for sure, we have to assume, which makes the question highly debatable in its present form.
Suppose the question was posed like this. “If a tree falls in the forest and there is nothing to receive the vibrations as sound, does the tree still make a sound?” We can see that the tree falling certainly provides the potential for sound to occur. The air is still displaced and still moves through space in waves that could result in sound, but with nothing to receive the air waves and transmit them into sound, the potential would not be realized. That is unless, as some experiments suggest, plants have the capacity to respond to sound.
Clearly, we still don’t have a definitive answer to the question, but now we know where to look for it. We can now narrow our search to the tree itself and to the forest in which it resides. As there is evidence that plants respond to sound, the stimuli part maybe answered. If so, all we have to do now is determine whether plants have the capacity to perceive sound in the precise way the term perceive is intended. By clarifying each part of the equation a precise answer is possible.