The World Peace Diet: Eating For Spiritual Health And Social Harmony

36 / the world peace diet
ligence is their ability to make connections that are meaningful to their
existence and that serve their purpose or telos. The telos of every whole
part is to serve the larger wholes within which it has its being, and the
universal intelligence we see in nature is the infinitely complex expansion
of this web of interconnectedness and feedback. The intelligence of
a particular being is thus specific to its own nature as a whole that is
served by those parts that make it up, and as a part that serves the larger
wholes within which it is embedded. We can see that intelligence is
specific to all self-organizing systems, and that all have a unique teleology,
or purpose, that their intelligence is suited to fulfilling.
For example, the intelligence that manifests as a chicken is particularly
suited to fulfilling the chicken’s purpose, and upon reflection, this
intelligence is breathtakingly complex. It attends to and regulates the
chicken’s relationship with the wholes that serve her purpose, that is, the
cells and systems within her body, allowing for digestion, elimination,
proper blood pressure and circulation, seeing, hearing, and responding
to her environment, reproduction, immune system protection, management
of hundreds of hormone and enzyme levels, and so forth. The
intelligence that manifests as a chicken also attends to her relationship
with other chickens and with her environment, as she searches for food,
establishes herself within the pecking order of her community, flies up
onto branches at night for safety, mates with a rooster, builds her nest,
protects her brood, teaches her young how to find food, and so forth.
This intelligence also allows her to serve the larger wholes in her own
unique way, contributing to her family, her flock, and to the ongoing
expression of her species by raising young, participating in the southeast
Asian jungle ecosystem community where chickens lived and evolved
for millions of years, and contributing to the celebratory unfolding of
life on this earth and in the universe.
We can easily see that there is an enormous amount of intelligence
invested in a chicken. Besides all these outer and accountable functions
of intelligence, there is also the inner, subjective world of the chicken,
which may be an equally important purpose for the investment of universal
intelligence. We can perhaps never fully know the inner feeling
states of being a chicken, but it is obvious to anyone who has been