Becoming Animal

The scientific intellect, which sometimes prides itself on having vanquished the belief in God from much of the rational populace, regularly situates its gaze in the very place (or rather, the very same non-place) recently vacated by that God.

Still, in one important respect Spinoza remains ahead of even those researchers who today claim his heretical insights as their own.

Here, all around me, was a field of patterned metaphors as precise as one could want for the dynamic life of the psyche.

Awareness, or mind, is in this sense very much like a medium in which we’re situated, and from which we are simply unable to extricate ourselves without ceasing to exist.

Before the invention of the telescope, the glimmering stars of the night sky appeared much closer than they do today. For the ancient Egyptians and Mesopotamians, the vault of the sky was considered the canopy of an enormous tent held up by the mountains that rise at the boundaries of the world. For the Haida people, a seafaring tribe of woodcarver

My porous nature seemed much less of a problem here. That permeability had always meant that I was too easily affected by other persons—by other nervous systems shaped so much like my own. Yet such porosity was just right, I now realized, for engaging nervous systems very different from my own. It was just right for entering into felt relation with

the assumption that awareness, or mind, is a special possession of our species,

It is likely that the interior chatter of verbal thought, which for many people is as incessant as it is repetitive, was greatly amplified (if not inaugurated) by the popular advent of silent reading in the late Middle Ages.

Upon hearing an alarm call, even birds from other, neighboring species halt whatever they’re up to,