{"id":689,"date":"2010-10-09T02:26:51","date_gmt":"2010-10-09T02:26:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/apagansblog\/2010\/10\/davud-abrams-becoming-animal.html"},"modified":"2010-10-09T02:26:51","modified_gmt":"2010-10-09T02:26:51","slug":"davud-abrams-becoming-animal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/apagansblog\/2010\/10\/davud-abrams-becoming-animal.html","title":{"rendered":"David Abram’s “Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology”"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>\n

Books can be
\ngreat in several ways.  <\/span>Some
\nencapsulate the spirit of their time. 
\n<\/span>Some grow in profundity, as the reader returns to them again and again,
\nmarveling at how much the author is saying that had been missed in earlier
\nencounters.  <\/span>Some make
\nbreak-throughs in established fields of knowledge.  <\/span>And some, a very few, leave you experiencing the world
\ndifferently after you’ve read them, never to return to what seemed obvious
\nbefore the encounter.<\/p>\n

David Abram
\nwrote one of these few with his book The Spell of the Sensuous<\/a><\/i>.   <\/span>Now, alone among all I have ever
\nread, he has done it again with his just released <\/span>Becoming Animal: An
\nEarthly Cosmology<\/a><\/i>. Mind, the self, the world – all take on a new visage.<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n


\n<\/p>\n

Becoming
\nAnimal<\/i> takes the reader to places I had
\nlong thought the printed word could not go: into that visceral non-verbal
\nmulti-sensory encounter with the more-than-human world within which we are
\nimmersed.  <\/span>We encounter this world
\nall the time, with every breath, but we have learned to be tone deaf and blind
\nto it.  <\/span>It has become invisible to
\nall of us much of the time, and much invisible to many of us all of the time.<\/span><\/p>\n

Abram helps us
\nnotice that while our eyes have been open, we have not been using them to see,
\nnor our open ears to really listen, our skin to feel, our nose to smell.  <\/span>More importantly still, he leads us to
\nappreciate what our collective cultural autism costs us, and the world within
\nwhich we live.  <\/span>He teaches us to
\nsee, feel, taste, and smell this world, and when we do, it is magic. (Not with
\na ‘k’ because we are seeing what is there, often for the first time, not
\nbending it to our will.) <\/p>\n

Over and over
\nagain after reading a passage I would think “Yea!  <\/span>I’ve been there, but never really noticed, or never could
\nput it into words if I did.”  <\/span>Abram
\ndoes.<\/p>\n

Abram’s analysis
\nof the human relationship with a living Nature fits into much recent research
\nthat has demonstrated the human mind can only exist because we have bodies,
\nemotions, and other basic traits usually considered distinct from and even
\nhostile to our minds.  <\/span>But Abram
\ntakes these insights by people such as Antonio Damasio<\/a> and George Lakoff<\/a> even further, and argues our mind is immersed within and part of a far vaster
\nmind, that of this earth.  <\/span>In my
\nopinion he does an unequalled job of describing our own half0conscious
\nexperience of this vastly more-than-human mind.  <\/span><\/p>\n

When I read Spell
\nof the Sensuous<\/i>, as transformative and
\nwonderful as it wad, I always thought Abram took his readers to a certain
\npoint, and then pulled his punches. 
\n<\/span>I see now that I was right, but that to take his readers that further
\ndistance needed more work on his part to do justice to what he then chose not
\nto write about except through allusion. 
\n<\/span>In <\/span> <\/span>Becoming
\nAnimal<\/i> he resumes his journey.<\/span><\/p>\n

Abram asks “once we acknowledge that our
\nawareness is inseperable – even in some sense indistinguishable – from our own
\nmaterial physiology, can we really continue to maintain that mind remains alien
\nto the rest of material nature?” (109)<\/span><\/p>\n

Recently a fascinating repor<\/a>t <\/span> <\/span>of research on wild
\nchimpanzees funded by the National geographic Society has become available on
\nyoutube.  <\/span>Chimpanzees that live on
\nthe edge of forestland, and spend much of their time in a savannah environment
\nthought to be similar to the one where humans first diverged from apes, have
\nbeen discovered acting in hitherto unexpected ways.  <\/span>They make caves their home, relax in waterholes on hot days,
\nand make primitive spears to hunt other mammals.  <\/span>Some were observed sharpening the points of these simple
\nspears with their teeth.<\/span><\/p>\n

Apparently it took the savannah to bring
\nabout this change in behavior, illustrating Abram’s point that “Sentience is
\nnot an attribute of a body in isolation: it emerges from the ongoing encounter
\nbetween our flesh and the forest of rhythms in which it finds itself…” (110)
\nMind exists embedded within our relationships in a far more intimate way than
\nhad been normally conceived.  <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

As we come to realize this viscerally we
\nbegin healing the radical Cartesian break between ourselves and the rest of
\nlife.  <\/span>Animals are “in a constant
\nand mostly unmediated relation with their sensory surroundings, [they] think
\nwith the whole of their bodies<\/i><\/span>. . . . Equipped with proclivities and patterned behaviors
\ngenetically inherited from its ancestors, each wild creature must nonetheless
\nadapt such propensities to the elemental particulars of the place and moment
\nwhere it finds itself. . .” (189) <\/span><\/p>\n

If you want to experience something akin
\nto animal awareness, go for a walk or ride a bicycle.  <\/span>As Abram notes “we humans also think with our muscled limbs.
\n. . . It’s an ongoing and attentive response to the unpredictable nuance of the
\npresent moment, a corporeal decision-making that underlies all our abstract
\nreflections.” (191)<\/span><\/p>\n

But it is not just animals who are aware,
\nnor even animals and plants combined. 
\n<\/span>The world itself is aware and consciousness is not confined tour brains,
\nor even tour bodies.<\/span><\/p>\n

Nor are ideas simply constructions of our
\nminds.  <\/span>In a discussion that will
\nbe especially meaningful to those of us aware of thought forms, Abram takes the
\nrole of ideas and their nature in far more exciting directions than I have ever
\nencountered before. There is material and insight here for a lifetime’s
\npondering and, even more, investigation.<\/span><\/p>\n

We live in a world-pathic civilization,
\nfocused on a cultural narcissism that reaches its zenith in Tea Parties and a
\nnihilistic obsession with power and possession that has reached its own height
\nin corporate oligarchy and its military enablers.   <\/span>This is modernity’s ultimate expression, and it is
\ndestroying us.<\/span><\/p>\n

What we need to do is to be able to see
\nthrough the autistic walls our culture has erected between itself and the world
\nthat sustains us all.  <\/span>David
\nAbram’s book accomplishes this better than anything else I have ever read.<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Books can be great in several ways.  Some encapsulate the spirit of their time.  Some grow in profundity, as the reader returns to them again and again, marveling at how much the author is saying that had been missed in earlier encounters.  Some make break-throughs in established fields of knowledge.  And some, a very few,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,109,105],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-689","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-environment","category-pagan-spirituality"],"yoast_head":"\nDavid Abram's "Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology" - A Pagan's Blog<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/apagansblog\/2010\/10\/davud-abrams-becoming-animal.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"David Abram's "Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology" - 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