David Abram (born 1957) is an American ecophilosopher, cultural ecologist, magician, and storyteller, and one of the most inspiring ecological thinkers of our time. In his work, he combines the philosophical tradition of phenomenology with environmental and ecological issues. The work of the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty provided a fundamental impetus for his work. As a storyteller and magician, he has lived and worked with indigenous magicians in Indonesia, Nepal, and the Americas. Abram explores the forgotten ecological dimension and depth of human senses and the influence of language and writing on our sensory experience of the land around us. For him, sensory experience is “the way in which the land connects to our thoughts and dreams.” In 2006, he founded The Alliance for Wild Ethics (www.wildethics.org), which seeks to transform contemporary culture, combined with the revitalization of local communities, with their comprehensive – sensory, practical and imaginative – reintegration into bioregions. Abram's book The Spell of The Sensuos (1996), represents a groundbreaking work of ecological philosophy and ethics; it was published in Czech under the title Kouzlo smyslů (DharmaGaia 2013). An anthology of Abram's essays Procitnutí do živé země (OPS Nymburk 2008) has also been published in Czech, and several of his essays and interviews have been published in the magazines Sedmá generace, Ekolist, A2, Proměny and in the revue Prostor. David Abram is also the author of Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology (Random House 2010).
AND.
My work is motivated primarily by my awareness of loss, the widespread destruction and desecration of so much earthly beauty. The accelerating loss of other species—the extinction of so many other ways of seeing and feeling, the destruction of wetlands and forests, the damming and drying up of so many rivers to serve only our own human interests. I try to understand how it is possible that a culture of intelligent creatures like ourselves can so carelessly and unconcernedly destroy so much that is mysterious and alive, while at the same time impoverishing and destroying ourselves, our own capacity for wonder.
It seems to me that it is not out of any real malice that we destroy so much of our world. It is simply because we can no longer notice those other beings, that we do not really see or feel that we are part of the same world that the crows and the rivers inhabit. We do not realize that we are inside the same story in which the squirrel and the salmon are the characters. Our ways of speaking and our ways of living somehow perpetuate this peculiar idea that we stand outside the world, that we are separate from it, and that we look at it and think about it as if from some distant position. And our science is constantly trying to calculate the world, to come up with a precise plan of how it all works - as if the world were a vast machine that we could somehow diagram and control, because that is the only way we can get the right perspective.
But from a logical point of view, all this is a bit foolish. We are clearly fully immersed in this world and completely dependent on it. Our nervous systems have evolved in delicate interaction with all these other beings, shapes and textures. Rather than trying to understand the workings of this “machine” from the outside in the hope that we can engineer and control it to suit our purposes, it would make much more sense for our sciences to study the world from our lived place within it; and to use our experiments to see how a more sustainable relationship can be developed with particular species or with particular wetlands or forests, rather than simply trying to understand how these species or these wetlands work on their own, as if we ourselves were not involved in their processes. (…)
So much research today is motivated by a greater desire to control the world than by a sense of wonder. I think it is a sign of immaturity, a sign that science is still in its adolescent stage. A more mature science – the science that is to come – will be motivated more by a desire for a richer relationship, a deeper mutuality with the world we study. (…)
II.
In our culture, we talk mostly about nature. Adult cultures talk to nature, they feel other natures talk to them. They feel the earth they stand on, talking through them. They feel they are inside, they are part of a vast and ever-evolving story in which storm clouds and spiders are just as much players as they are. So that is part of my work: how to persuade people to go back inside the world, how to surprise their senses so that they wake up and recognize that they are truly immersed in this breathing world and that they are not spectators but active participants in this wondrous world. (…)
When we talk about the world as a collection of objects or mechanisms waiting to be understood or calculated by us, we are saying that the world contains nothing in principle that can be hidden from us; that if we had enough time and did the right research, we could measure the depth of the whole program and see how it all works. But that is just a trick of God – the idea that we can see the world from the outside, from the perspective of God’s eye. But when we pay due attention to our actual experience of things and the world, we realize that we never encounter the totality of anything at once. There is always some aspect of what we encounter that remains hidden from us: the other side of the tree or its roots underground. It is these hidden aspects, these secrets or uncertainties, that invite us to keep searching, that draw us into a relationship, into participation with everything we encounter. Perception is a kind of improvised dance with the world, a dynamic interaction between my feeling body and the sensory landscape. (…)
III.
Is there really anything that is not alive? We are certainly alive, and if we assume that the natural world is in some sense inanimate, it may only be because we think we are not fully immersed in it, or rather, that we are not entirely of it.
It is indeed difficult for me to conclude that any phenomenon I perceive is entirely inert and lifeless; or even to imagine anything that is not in some sense alive, that does not have its own spontaneity, its own openness, its own creativity, its own inner soulfulness, its own pulse – even though in the case of the earth or this rock here its pulse may move much more slowly than yours or mine.
In the deepest sense, magic is an experience. It is the experience of discovering that I am alive within a world that is itself alive. It is the experience of contact and communication between me and something profoundly different from me—a swallow, a frog, a spider weaving its web. (…) Magic is the overwhelming experience of contact and communion between me and another form of existence, whether it be a human or an aspen or a gust of wind. It is the sense of wonder that arises from encountering what I cannot understand, something that my thoughts or understanding can never fully explore. Many of my most intense experiences of magic have been encounters in the wilderness with other species, with other forms of terrestrial intelligence. They have been encounters and exchanges that might be called interspecies communication. (…)
IV.
Our world has become so domesticated, so defined. People have learned to observe things in such a conventional and habitual way that they have actually stopped seeing them at all. Since they always have a precise idea in advance of what they perceive, they hardly notice what is actually there anymore. They observe a set of concepts rather than the real world. They do not participate with their eyes in the branching life of this poplar or in the swirling life of these clouds that rush over these mountains. However, the magician's trick disrupts our presupposed experience of the visible, so that we begin to really look again, we begin to actively look and stare at things - our senses are drawn into a silent dialogue with things. (…)
We have learned to think of perception as a kind of one-way process by which information from the outside world is captured by our senses and transmitted to our nervous system. But when we really attend attentively to the experience of perception, we discover that it is a reciprocal, interactive process—a dynamic interaction or participation between us and what we perceive. For our sentient, animal bodies, things are never passive. I am walking down the street, and a certain building or leaf or stone suddenly actively engages my attention. (…)
IN.
To the extent that we speak of the world as a collection of objects, we cease to see with our eyes and hear with our ears. We suppress the spontaneous reciprocity between our bodily senses and the sensory cosmos. We enter our heads and begin to live in a world of abstractions.
If we really want to start noticing where we are, if we want to come to a more respectful relationship with the earth around us, then the simplest and most elegant way I know is to simply stop insulting all the things around us by talking about them as passive objects, and instead start acknowledging that they have their own elemental spontaneity, their own active power—their own life. Once you start talking in this way, you start noticing things much more. Suddenly you find yourself in a dynamic relationship with all the beings around you—with the air you breathe, the chair you sit on, the house you live in. You find yourself constantly in a negotiating relationship with other beings. And you realize that ethics is not something that is practiced only with other people—but that all of our actions have ethical consequences.
VI.
It seems to me that the only cultures that exhibit the primacy of place—the only cultures that are deeply attuned to this earthly world, that are shaped by the particular places they inhabit (living acceptably in their place that has appropriated them)—are traditionally indigenous oral cultures. Oral culture is essentially sensory and local.
While alphabetic literacy seems inherently cosmopolitan. The written word has brought great gifts—the cosmopolitan vitality of Europe in the last millennium, the pleasures of cities, the bubbling ferment of New York or San Francisco, and the activity and ingenuity of all those exciting cultures that converge in cities from all those different places, feeding on each other and exchanging possibilities. For all its problems, literary culture is truly great.
Of course, the computer distances us even further from our bodies and our immediate sensory experience than writing. The computer proves to be an inherently globalizing technology. When I connect to the computer, when I am cognitively engaged in this abstract dimension in which I can be in dialogue with a person in China as easily as with a person on a laptop in the next room, I feel like I completely forget about my body.
But I am not interested in criticizing the computer. And I certainly do not want to demean or demonize literacy. However, both these cultures, the globalized computer culture and the cosmopolitan book culture, will only begin to make sense if they are rooted in a thriving oral culture of unmediated, face-to-face interactions within the local community. Only then will computers and books truly nourish us in a way that is more beneficial than destructive. Oral cultures are necessarily cultures of storytelling, that is, cultures that are locally based—for the stories that flourish and live in this valley will be very different from the stories that are told on the other side of this mountain ridge. Restoring the primacy of the sensory world—restoring our solidarity with a more than human land—is the only way we can revive oral culture. In the face of storytelling and all that goes with it. (…)
VII.
Do you think we will still be here in five hundred years? The point is, we may not be wise enough. Rather, we should realize that wisdom or intelligence was never ours to begin with. Mind is not a human quality: it is a quality of the earth. When we begin to relax and allow the life of the things around us to enter our bodies and speak accordingly, we begin to notice that this consciousness with which we think is not really ours, it does not belong to us. It is the earth that is truly intelligent, not humanity alone. Together with other animals, plants, and the drifting clouds, we are bodily immersed in the mind of this living world.
So perhaps we don't have to become extremely intelligent or wise. We simply have to open ourselves up again to the living earth, to study its complexities, its structures. Each earth, of course, has its own particular style of consciousness. The intelligence of this landscape here in this valley is quite different from the salty intelligence of Puget Sound, which is quite different from the wild mind of the eastern woods. Each place has its own style of consciousness, its own wisdom. If we humans are still around at the end of the twenty-first century, it will probably be because we have finally found our way to a new humility, to a new reciprocity with the living, soulful earth. (…)
So many people perceive this world as unreal, secondary, and ephemeral. We all suffer from the confusion of worlds because we place more weight on abstractions—whether the abstract truths presented to us by many of our scientific colleagues or the disembodied spiritual certainties proclaimed by so many New Age teachers—than on the far more ambiguous, difficult, and dangerous world we experience face-to-face here and now in this body. The living, soulful earth around us is far more delightful than any heaven we can dream of. But if we are to awaken to its richness, we will have to give up our detached spectator perspective, including the illusion of control that perspective offers us. For most super-civilized people, this is a terrifying prospect—for to give up control is to discover that we are truly vulnerable: to loss, to illness, to death; yet also constantly vulnerable and open to wonder and unexpected joy.
For all its stunning beauty, this land is hardly safe; it is full of uncertainties and shadows—full of beings who could eat us and full of infinite will. I think that is why contemporary civilization seems so terrified—at the thought of giving up pretending to see reality from the outside, of giving up playing this God trick, of giving up the strange assumption that we can control and govern the land.
But we cannot control it – we never could and never will. What we can do is participate more deeply, more reverently, and more creatively in the multiple life of this breathing mystery of which we are a part.