Saved by Eden M. B. Roman and
Becoming Animal
this smooth and scintillating surface that’s so much more accommodating of our desires than the irregular ground that supports our bodies, so
David Abram • Becoming Animal
In truth, it’s likely that our solitary sense of inwardness (our experience of an interior mindscape to which we alone have access) is born of the forgetting, or sublimation, of a much more ancient interiority that was once our common birthright—the ancestral sense of the surrounding earthly cosmos as the voluminous inside of an immense Body, or Te
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Every material body or thing, for Spinoza, had its mental aspect—all things were ensouled. The human body was the outward, material aspect of the human mind, as the mind was nothing other than the internal, felt experience of the body. “The mind and the body are one and the same thing …”Ω
David Abram • Becoming Animal
For our muscled, animal bodies, that blazing star makes itself felt not only as it moves across the daytime sky, but more deeply and constantly through the very heart of the earth.
David Abram • Becoming Animal
It may indeed be raining, but we can best clarify this by turning on the Weather Channel.
David Abram • Becoming Animal
A small but influential array of researchers from various disciplines began to amass evidence demonstrating that mental experience was dependent not only upon the functioning brain but upon the whole of the animate organism—that the mind is less an attribute of the brain than of the living body as a whole, of which the brain is simply a necessary c
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sure enough,
David Abram • Becoming Animal
If we are told, for example, that some location at the center of the Milky Way is basically at rest while the remainder of our galaxy whirls around it, we conceptualize that center only by transferring our felt, bodily experience of the stable ground over into that presumed place of stillness.
David Abram • Becoming Animal
But in a civilization that has long since fallen under the spell of its own signs, the conviviality between the child and the animate earth is soon severed, interrupted by the adult insistence (expressed in countless forms of grown-up speech and behavior) that real sentience, or subjectivity, is the exclusive possession of humankind.