From chapter 3, "Dreamings" OCTOPUS AND CROW DREAMINGS Creatures who share Gaia with us are souls too, living the same Dreamtime, wandering in its samsara, learning constraints and wonders of new bodies. Whales, elephants, owls, moles, skinks, and seals all have wisdoms, things to tell the universe, their gods, and us. We receive these gifts through their Dreamings and folkways. Otherwise, we are cooped, lonely beings in separate worlds. While passing a pet shop advertising a new litter of hamsters in feltpen scrawl on window cardboard, I wondered, where do they all come from? The shop didn''t invent hamsters, though it might have bred them. For that matter, how do flies arise around a dead crab? Who are they? If we all suddenly entered the astral field together, our hawk and salmon neighbors--even our mosquito and sow-bug neighbors--would look much like our human ones: autonomous souls. Remove karmically imposed costumes, and we are the same beings. There is a reason that elephants attend funerals and memorial services, both elephant and human-- they remember .

Octopuses and crows are, respectively, the most intelligent and talky invertebrates and birds. An octopus is a huge, highly evolved oyster with centers of intelligence and problem-solving coordinated in suckers along each of its eight arms, all reporting to a central ganglion. It is not an octo-pussie, it is an octo-hemispheric ganglion--a different branch of intelligence from anything else in the mammal class or vertebrate subphylum. It is more akin to a dweller in a Jovian sea, though Jupiter''s and Neptune''s "cephalopods" would have to be far more humongous to diffuse greater gravity, with bronchial cells evolved for methane metabolism. In 2021, the United Kingdom recognized the invertebrate mind, adding an amendment to its Animal Welfare Sentience Bill, designating octopuses, crabs, squids, and lobsters along with "all other decapod crustaceans and cephalopod molluscs" as conscious beings. Earth''s eight-tentacled, shell-less mollusks shapeshift in sensitive chaos and nonequilibrium flux, as they squeeze their whole bodies and arms into and through narrow rock and shell openings and researchers'' traps, finding the lone gap that matches their and the obstacle''s topology. They also figure out how to unscrew a jar containing a crab. They rocket from hiding places with such sudden acceleration, sustained speed, stealth, and shape- and color-shifting that jump probabilities.

This is what modern dancers and Continuum practitioners attempt with hominid bodies: genomic fluidity, embryogenic pluripotency. Some observers have suggested that Cephalopods are not just overgrown Darwinian oysters but mutants of meteor-riding amino acids that splashed down from somewhere like the Sirius system or Pleiades and attached their strands to the genome of a Cambrian gastropod, conferring talents of elsewhere. Other meteorite RNA could have hatched the fungal kingdom with its subterranean networks and entheogenic vistas by splicing alien codes into a proto-seaweed or haploid hornwort spore. Fiber-optic-like root languages may be native to many stellar systems. Mushroom enthusiasts have proposed that mycology contains the E.T. talents and terms needed for solving our eco-crisis, delivered free from the stars: environmental clean-up (turning oil and gasoline waste into gardens of bee-gathering flowers); natural batteries (storing and releasing electrical charge); miracle medicines (cleaning cells and clearing malignancies); living machines (running factories, Teslas, and space stations); mortuary cycles (replacing crematory ash with topsoil); plus non-photosynthetic respiration, vegan cuisine, jazz and Bach-like madrigals (when electrodes are attached to their seeding bodies, unique melodies for different mushrooms)--and shamanic travels, interdimensional intelligence, attunement to Divine Love, voyeurism of Unity Consciousness, and acceptance of spirits and death. Cephalopods inspire their own exobiological speculation.

Though they didn''t fly here in saucer aquariums, their instructions might have ridden on comet cocoons: "With a few notable exceptions, the octopus basically has a typical invertebrate genome that''s just been completely rearranged, like it''s been put in a blender and mixed," said Caroline Albertin, marine biologist, at the University of Chicago. "This leads to genes being placed in new genomic environments with different regulatory elements and was an entirely unexpected find." Another interesting feature of this aquatic wonder is its ability to perfectly blend in with the surroundings. This chameleonic behavior is triggered by six protein genes named "reflectins" which impact the way light reflects off the octopus'' skin, thus turning it into assorted patterns and textures that camouflage the octopus. These creatures evolved over a period of over 500 million years and are known to inhabit almost every body of water at nearly any depth. With all this "out of this world" evidence at hand, it''s hard not to see the otherworldly traits of octopuses, especially their ability to redesign their DNA for a flawless life experience and extreme survivability. Could this be just a complex and misunderstood evolutionary process? Or were these tentacled invertebrates brought to Earth from another place in the universe by some unknown civilization?13 The octopoid is more than a biomechanical projector of marine vistas; it conducts Husserlian phenomenology, Basquiat-like Neo-Expressionism, subaqueous neo-Platonism, and Yvonne Rainer choreography--all underwater with natural paints and textiles. Octopuses change their color-and-shape biomimicries, making themselves into effigies almost as realistic as anything brushed by Michelangelo or J.

M. W. Turner. Their chromatophores paint in reds, blacks, and yellows; their deeper iridophores propriocept iridescent blues and greens. Deeper yet leucophores pearlesce as ambient whites while mirroring passing landscapes and objects. At the same time, the creature stretches sacs in its skin layers to replicate bands, stripes, and spots and uses papillae to form ridges and bumps. Cuttlefish propose Cephalopod ontology by effort-shape dynamics: dazzles of hue- and shapeshifting, hiding and reappearing in tactics of you-see-me-now, you-saw-me-then. Works of molluscan body art generate credible rocks, kelp, other sea plants, black-and-white poisonous snakes, ocean bottom, even exotic paintings substituted for landscapes by scientists.

The octopus faithfully turns into a rock or a fish or even a Miró. Mimicries are produced in instantaneous sequences, for its "critics" are onlooking predators, killer sharks and oversize groupers who render life-or-death verdicts. Octopuses can make 150 to 200 such works of art in an hour! In their diffuse eight-point intelligence, these chordates are more like collectives than any other sentient Gaian creatures. They speak to the myriad emanations of DNA wisdom. As the octopus rendition of the "Man from Galilee" goes, put your hand in the hand of the hand of the hand of the hand . That is my way of saying that deeper sources of psi, precognition, telekinesis, and cell talk on this world go substantially unexplored. Octopuses read the ocean and their own cell banks as they fluctuate and dart like underwater dervishes. Who knows what gods an octopus honors, what spirits she prays to, what tonglens she transmits through wounded seas.

Note, too, that, despite my invocation of a generic "octopus," this is a wide-ranging clan, not a circus performer from Bozo under the Sea . There are as many octopuses as there are morphs and masks of mollusk protoplasm, with new ones still being discovered; for all we know, octopuses invent "octopuses" by the hour. "Octopus" is otherwise a class: Cephalopoda. Its over 300 known species include nautilus, Atlantic pygmy, hammer, dumbo, southern blue-ringed, East Pacific red, as well as those hidden from our semiology in the deeper deep. Within a basic octo-limbed, decentralized oyster template, they encompass a variety of shapes, gowns, color displays, iridescences, sizes (capped by the great Antarctic squid), bioluminescences (the blue glowing coconut octopus among the most psychedelic). Octopuses and a few squid and cuttlefish species, "routinely edit their RNA sequences to adapt to their environment." When such an edit happens, it can change how the proteins work, allowing the organism to fine-tune its genetic information without actually undergoing any genetic mutations. But most organisms don''t really bother with this method, as it''s messy and causes problems more often that solving them.

Researchers discovered that the common squid has edited more than 60 percent of RNA in its nervous system. Those edits essentially changed its brain physiology, presumably to adapt to various temperature conditions in the ocean. DNA sequences were thought to exactly correspond with the sequence of amino acids in the resulting protein. However, it is now known that processes called RNA editing can change the nucleotide sequence of the mRNA molecules after they have been transcribed from the DNA. One such editing process, called A-to-I editing, alters the "A" nucleotide so that the translation machinery reads it as a "G" nucleotide instead. In some--but not all--cases, this event will change, or ''recode'', the amino acid encoded by this stretch of mRNA, which may change how the protein behaves. This ability to create a range of proteins from a single DNA sequence.