Spiders know. Spiders are aware of when they’ve been seen. I’ve been noticing this for some time now. You can verify this yourself, but it may take some resolve, depending on your level of arachnophobia. You walk into a room first thing in the morning and see a spider placidly hanging from its web. If you intentionally look at it, it knows. Leave the room for at least ten minutes and then come back. The spider will be gone. When you first stare at it, it won’t move. Nature’s flight, fight, or freeze response has a clear winner here. Spiders play it cool. This happened recently on a weekend. I had my wife verify this for me. I pointed out the spider (I’d already stared at it) and told her I was doing an experiment. She’s been married to me for thirty-five years, and such things no longer come as a surprise.
I told her my thesis and suggested we both just get breakfast ready as normal. The spider didn’t move, even with clatter of bowls and spoons. When my wife went to take her bowl to the sink several minutes later, the spider had vanished. (This doesn’t seem to apply to spiders actively descending on a web in front of your face, I’ve noticed. They’re too busy with their spider thoughts.) Animals are smarter than we give them credit for being. Who ranks spiders on their list of smart critters? But they are. And I wonder what they think of me. If a spider crawls on me, I run away. Like a spider I won’t return to the same place where it happened, at least not for some time. All of this brings Rupert Sheldrake to mind.
Sheldrake has been summarily wiped off the table by other scientists, in part because he has explored the sense of being stared at. Materialistic science tells us there can be no such thing since being seen is passive and we have no sense organs to detect it. We have all, however, had the experience of turning around to find that someone has indeed been staring at us. As so often happens with materialism, we’re told simply to discard it as fantasy. But that’s not the way it feels. So I look at my most recent spider—I know there will always be more—and know that s/he knows they’re being stared at. When you’re small running may not get you away swiftly enough. Freezing makes more sense. Freezing and waiting. The thing you fear (for a spider it’s me) will generally go away on its own, looking for something more material, I suspect.