Luxúria de Orvalho, meaning “Lust of Dew” in Portuguese, is an evocative mixed-media painting that uses rich colors, organic textures, and translucent layers to suggest a membrane between dimensions. In the artwork, iridescent droplets and hazy forms seem to coalesce at the threshold of two realms – much like morning dew condenses at dawn, bridging night and day. This visual motif of dew on a surface can be seen as a metaphorical membrane: a thin interface between the physical and the spiritual, the conscious and the subconscious, or the human and the natural worlds. The critical analysis of this piece benefits from introducing the Japanese concept of 知性 (chisei) – roughly translated as intellect or innate intelligence. By weaving in the idea of chisei, we can enrich our understanding of the painting’s theme, interpreting it as a representation of the intelligent vitality permeating nature and the porous boundary through which different dimensions of consciousness interact.
Chisei – The Inherent Knowingness in Nature
Chisei (知性) in Japanese literally combines 知 (“knowledge, wisdom”) and 性 (“nature, character”), implying an intrinsic capacity to know. In everyday terms it means intelligence or intellect, but Jeremy Narby – an anthropologist known for bridging indigenous knowledge and science – adopts “chi-sei” to denote a broader “knowingness” pervasive in all life forms. Lacking an exact English equivalent, chisei captures the idea that intelligence is not a special property of human brains alone, but a quality inherent to living systems at every scale. Narby’s exploration of Amazonian shamanism led him to favor this term after finding the English word “intelligence” too narrow. He uses chisei to refer to the sense of intelligence running through nature that he encountered both in shamanic visions and in cutting-edge biological research. In his 2005 book Intelligence in Nature, Narby documents how bacteria, plants, and animals exhibit problem-solving and decision-making, prompting him to “give up the reductionist view” of intelligence as exclusively human and instead speak in terms of chisei – a knowing capacity at all levels of life.
Importantly, chisei is not just raw brainpower; it’s an innate wisdom of nature. The choice of a Japanese word is telling. Japanese culture (influenced by the animistic Shinto tradition) readily accepts that mind and spirit permeate the natural world. By contrast, Western thought since Descartes often drew a sharp line between human mind and inert matter. Chisei thus lets us discuss nature’s intelligence without the Western baggage of the term “intelligence” (which usually implies human-like conscious reasoning). It points to a more subtle form of awareness or responsiveness in nature – what one scientist called an inherent “capacity to know” in even simple organisms. In the context of Luxúria de Orvalho, we can interpret the painting’s “membrane between dimensions” as a kind of living interface through which chisei flows. The dew itself – glistening on a leaf at dawn – could symbolize droplets of universal intelligence, each tear of wisdom bridging earth and sky. The painting’s layered textures and translucent veil hint that on the other side of the everyday physical dimension lies a responsive, conscious natural world, alive with chisei.
Animistic Perspectives – From Childhood Wonder to Shamanic Wisdom
The notion that everything around us is alive and aware is not new – it resonates with what children experience and ancient cultures believe. Many young children exhibit animistic thinking, instinctively treating objects or animals as if they have feelings and intentions. For example, a child might believe “the sidewalk was mean and made me fall down” or that “the stars twinkle because they are happy”. This childhood sense that the world is enchanted with mind and purpose is often dismissed as a phase outgrown by age and education. By the time we reach adulthood, Western society trains us to regard such beliefs as naïve – mere imagination rather than reality. However, the concept of chisei invites us to reconsider: what if that childhood intuition of a living, conscious world contains a truth that our rational minds have later filtered out?
Indigenous and shamanic cultures have long maintained an animistic worldview in which plants, animals, and even rocks or rivers are regarded as conscious “beings” with their own spirits or intelligence. In Amazonian shamanism, for instance, healers working with the psychoactive brew ayahuasca report communicating with plant spirits and learning directly from the rainforest flora and fauna. As Jeremy Narby recounts, Amazonian people will straightforwardly say that in visions they speak with the “owners” or personalities of each plant, obtaining knowledge of their medicinal properties. Such claims sound shocking to a materialist mindset – “an epistemological impossibility” within conventional science. Yet Narby noticed striking parallels between these shamanic assertions and the findings of modern biology. In fact, he undertook Intelligence in Nature as a kind of “Trojan horse” project: by reporting scientists’ discoveries of cognitive capacities in non-human life, he hoped to reveal the wisdom indigenous shamans had long held.
From a shamanic or animistic perspective, the membrane between dimensions is thin. The everyday world and the spiritual or imaginal realm interpenetrate, and one can cross that membrane (through ritual, trance, or art) to experience nature’s chisei directly. This is echoed in the painting Luxúria de Orvalho – the dewdrop can be seen as a lens or portal into an otherworld, where perhaps the spirits of nature whisper knowledge. The title’s use of “luxúria” (lust or luxuriance) hints at passionate desire or deep yearning – possibly the longing of the conscious mind to reconnect with that animate world it sensed as a child. Indeed, animism is about treating all organisms as entities with agency and awareness worthy of respect. Luxúria de Orvalho’s imagery of moisture kissing the earth at dawn evokes a reverence for nature’s intimate intelligence – as if the earth herself yearns to touch the sky through the gentle caress of dew. By embracing chisei, we validate the feeling (whether from childhood or spiritual experience) that the world around us is not dead matter but vividly alive and capable of relation.
Consciousness Beyond the Human – Scientific Insights
Remarkably, current scientific research is converging on the idea that intelligence or consciousness might be far more widespread in nature than previously acknowledged. Over the past two decades, studies of animal and plant behavior have produced an “avalanche” of findings, each week revealing yet another species exhibiting strikingly intelligent behavior. Biologists have documented crows using tools and solving puzzles, octopuses unscrewing jars, and bees learning abstract concepts. Perhaps even more surprising, researchers like Suzanne Simard have shown that trees in a forest exchange nutrients and information via underground fungal networks (the “wood-wide web”), implying a form of communal intelligence in ecosystems. Fungi themselves (e.g. the single-celled slime molds studied by Toshiyuki Nakagaki) have amazed scientists by solving mazes and optimizing networks without any brain at all. These examples bolster Narby’s contention that the Cartesian notion of animals as unthinking automatons is crumbling. Many Western scientists, once hesitant to use the word “intelligence” for non-humans, now speak freely of cognition in dolphins, problem-solving in plants, and communication among microbes – essentially, validating that a spectrum of chisei pervades the living world.
In the plant kingdom, evidence for intelligent-like behavior is mounting. Plants can communicate distress signals, deter predators by “chemical cries for help,” and even perform molecular “memory” of past events. For example, corn seedlings under attack by caterpillars release airborne chemicals to summon parasitic wasps, enlisting them as allies – a sophisticated, evolved strategy. Some orchids deceive insects by mimicking sex pheromones, tricking wasps into pollinating them. Such complex interactions suggest a kind of biological savvy. A few pioneering botanists and philosophers (like František Baluška and Stefano Mancuso) argue that plants possess a form of consciousness or at least “plant intelligence”. Baluška, for instance, openly espouses a panpsychist view: “consciousness is a very basic phenomenon which started with the first cell,” he says. In other words, even the simplest living cells might have an rudimentary interior experience or responsiveness – a bold claim that blurs the boundary between life and mind. Though controversial, this view aligns with chisei: it posits an unbroken continuum of knowingness from the tiniest organisms up through humans.
Modern consciousness studies are also entertaining ideas once relegated to philosophy. One prominent theory, Integrated Information Theory (IIT), proposes that consciousness corresponds to the degree of integrated information in any system. Notably, IIT’s architects (neuroscientist Giulio Tononi and others) acknowledge that this implies a form of panpsychism – that consciousness might be a fundamental property of the universe, present even in simple or non-biological systems. This radical proposition is gaining serious consideration. In 2023, a workshop of scientists and philosophers debated panpsychism as a solution to the infamous “hard problem” of consciousness – the mystery of how physical processes produce subjective experience. Proponents like philosopher Philip Goff and neuroscientist Christof Koch suggest that if we accept consciousness as real and “substrate-independent” (not tied to a particular biology), then “the entire cosmos is suffused with sentience” in some form. Even a photon or an electron, on this view, might possess a glimmer of experience – an echo of chisei at the subatomic level. While mainstream science hasn’t fully embraced this paradigm, it reflects a growing openness to the idea that mind-like properties are deeply woven into the fabric of reality.
The convergence of these trends – animal cognition research, plant signaling studies, and theoretical models like IIT – lends new credibility to ancient intuitions. They illuminate how the membrane between matter and mind is more permeable than we thought. The boundaries between human and animal intelligence, or between brain-based cognition and body-wide or networked awareness, are being reconsidered. Some scientists remain skeptical, cautioning against anthropomorphizing too much. Yet, as our definitions of intelligence and consciousness broaden, the concept of chisei becomes a useful bridge: it encapsulates the idea of a distributed, intrinsic intelligence without insisting that a rock thinks like a person.
Weaving Chisei into Luxúria de Orvalho
Viewing Luxúria de Orvalho: A Membrane Between Dimensions through the lens of chisei and these consciousness studies can deepen our interpretation. The painting’s translucent layers and shimmering dew suggest that the divide between our reality and a subtler dimension is gossamer-thin – like a dewdrop, it is transparent and easily traversed. In the context of chisei, we might say the artwork portrays the flow of knowingness across that membrane. The dew, formed at the meeting of air and leaf, can symbolize how intelligence condenses where different realms meet: the spiritual and material, or the collective unconscious and the conscious mind. Each droplet glinting in the morning light could represent a packet of insight – nature’s intelligence made manifest on the physical plane.
Narby notes that once people open up to the idea of intelligence in nature, it often inspires greater respect and awe toward other life. Luxúria de Orvalho seems to invite that exact sense of reverence. The word “luxúria” (often meaning lust or luxuriance) hints at a celebration of vitality – perhaps the luxuriant lust for life that pervades even a tiny droplet of dew. The painting can thus be read as an homage to the living spark in all things. It stands at the crossroads of art and metaphysics, much as chisei stands at the crossroads of science and spirit. The membrane between dimensions might also allude to the membrane of human perception itself. Our senses and cognitive filters typically separate us from a fuller experience of reality (we see the world in ordinary terms, missing the magic). But art, like meditation or psychedelics, can thin that veil. The viewer of this painting is encouraged to peer through the dew-lensed membrane and glimpse the interconnected consciousness beyond – a vision akin to what a child sees in a world where every cloud, tree, and star is alive, or what a shaman perceives in a trance.
In recent consciousness studies, some scholars have even likened the brain to a reducing valve or filter that normally limits our awareness, suggesting that under certain conditions (psychedelic states, deep meditation, etc.), this filter opens and a wider cosmic consciousness floods in. In Luxúria de Orvalho, one might interpret the imagery of modulation and hallucination – hinted by the subtitle Epistolário com a Máquina — Fase 1: Alucinação Modulada – as referring to a controlled opening of perception, a dialogue with the “machine” (perhaps a metaphor for a cosmic or biological process). The “modulated hallucination” could be the artist’s way of rendering the invisible visible – painting the membrane so we can perceive it. Here, chisei plays the role of the message passing through that membrane: the painting itself becomes a letter (epistle) from the machine of nature’s intelligence, inviting us to correspond with the other side.
Conclusion
By incorporating the perspective of 知性 (chisei) into the analysis of Luxúria de Orvalho, we recognize the painting as more than an abstract exploration of color and form. It emerges as a philosophical statement about consciousness and the continuity between all forms of being. Chisei illuminates the idea that the membrane between dimensions is a living membrane – one that throbs with the intelligent essence of nature. Recent research into consciousness and intelligence in non-human entities gives this idea a newly credible foundation, bridging mystical insight with scientific inquiry. The childlike sense that “maybe everything around me can feel and know” finds affirmation both in cutting-edge science and in this artwork’s ethereal beauty.
In Luxúria de Orvalho, dew drops are not mere water on petals; they are gleaming portals. Through them, we see that our world and the “other” world are intimately connected, with knowledge (知) as the very nature (性) of that connection. The painting thus stands as a celebration of cosmic intelligence manifest in the natural and the mundane. It gently urges us to approach the world with the same wonder and openness as a child or a shaman – to sense the chisei in the dew and to realize that the divide between self and nature, matter and spirit, here and beyond is as thin as a film of water. By understanding and feeling this, we honor the membrane between dimensions not as a barrier, but as a sacred meeting place where our consciousness can reunite with the broader tapestry of life’s intelligence.
Sources: Recent critical analyses, cultural and scientific references have been used to support this interpretation, including Jeremy Narby’s reflections on chi-sei, developmental psychology on animistic cognition, and contemporary discussions on panpsychism and plant intelligence. These sources illustrate how ancient concepts of a living, knowing nature are finding resonance in modern thought, enriching our reading of Luxúria de Orvalho as a work that harmoniously fuses art, spirituality, and emerging science.