A Brief Summary of Animism
by Jason Godesky
The Spell of the Sensuous
By David Abram
Summarizing Abram’s Spell of the Sensuous is a difficult task. Not since Ishmael have my thoughts been so turned upside-down by a book. Abram fully understands the powerful magic of language, and uses it to full effect in this volume, as he uses it to show us that magic itself. Along the way, Abram offers a stunning and authoritative answer to Zerzan’s critique of language by showing us that language is not an arbitrary abstraction at all, but firmly rooted in our ecology. To begin a summary of Abram’s book, it may be easiest to work backwards from the starting point of Western philosophy, for as Alfred Whitehead (we’ve discussed one of his pithy aphorisms before) put it, “The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.”
Plato’s philosophy was grounded in the notion of a separation between the visible world around us, and a “true” world of ideals.
Platonism has traditionally been interpreted as a form of metaphysical dualism, sometimes referred to as Platonic realism, and is regarded as one of the earlier representatives of metaphysical objective idealism. According to this reading, Plato’s metaphysics divides the world into two distinct aspects: the intelligible world of “forms”, and the perceptual world we see around us. The perceptual world consists of imperfect copies of the intelligible forms or ideas. These forms are unchangeable and perfect, and are only comprehensible by the use of the intellect or understanding, that is, a capacity of the mind that does not include sense-perception or imagination. This division can also be found in Zoroastrian philosophy, in which the dichotomy is referenced as the Minu (intelligence) and Giti (perceptual) worlds. The Zoroastrian ideal city, Shahrivar, also exhibits certain similarities with Plato’s Republic. The existence and direction of influence here is uncertain; while Zoroaster lived well before Plato, few of the earliest writings of Zoroastrianism survive unaltered.1
Thus, Western philosophy begins, essentially, with Plato telling us to doubt our sensuous experience of the world, that our sensuous experience is illusory; true reality lies in the world of forms, of which our perceptual world is but an imperfect copy. The world of forms, separated from our sensuous experience, can only be experienced through reason.
Abram highlights a critical, but much overlooked, coincidence of history. At the same time that Socrates and Plato were formulating their philosophy, the Greek alphabet became a standard part of Athenian education. The Greek alphabet had existed for some time before that, but it had been a specialized tool, sometimes as a mnemonic device for epic poets, or as a means of keeping track of inventories, etc., but it was only in Plato’s time that literacy became a widespread social expectation, only then that Athenian society became a truly literate society.
Abram points out that this is no mere coincidence. Plato formulates the first literate philosophy, a philosophy grounded in literacy and the alphabet. Only with writing could we critically analyze abstract “forms” separated from our sensuous experience. Prior to that, the concept of a “tree” was firmly rooted in our sensuous experience of trees. With writing, it became possible to form an idea of “tree,” without ever actually seeing, or touching, or smelling one. Our senses are our only connection to the world around us, and in Plato’s time, it became possible to shut them off entirely, and live solely in an abstract world of reason and intellect—a world where only human voices could be heard.
Of course, that sealing off did not begin with Plato at all. Abram traces the Greek alphabet back, and notes the same magic in writing found in other pre-literate cultures, such as with Norse runes, Egyptian heiroglyphs (literally, “holy symbols”), or Kabbalistic ideas about the Hebrew alphabet. Abram points out that the Hebrew alphabet has no vowels. The sounded breath, the missing key in the text, must be applied with each reading, so each reading is an interaction with the text, each reading is interpretive. G-d’s word is not a dead corpse pinned to the page, but a living thing to be contended with in each passing generation. The sounded breath—our words for “spirit,” “animate” and “psyche” all derive from words for “breath”—is required to “animate” the text—to bring it to life.
The letters of the Hebrew alphabet are themselves depictions of things in our sensuous experience of the world: aleph is an ox, beth a house, and so on. They began as a kind of rebus. Pictorial representations of things were easy enough, and we could translate them using the same synaesthetic magic that allowed us to read the tracks of animals and know their gender, age, weight, height, even the intimate secrets of their life.
Writing, like human language, is engendered not only within the human community but between the human community and the animate landscape, born of the interplay and contact between the human and the more-than-human world. The earthly terrain in which we find ourselves, and upon which we depend for all our nourishment, is shot through with suggestive scrawls and traces, for the sinuous calligraphy of rivers winding across the land, inscribing arroyos and canyons into the parched earth of the desert, to the black sash burned by lightning into the trunk of an old elm. The swooping flight of birds is a kind of cursive script written on the wind; it is this script that was studied by the ancient “augurs,” who could read there in the course of the future. Leaf-miner insects make strange hieroglyphic tabloids of the leaves they consume. Wolves urinate on specific stumps and stones to mark off their territory. And today you read these printed words as tribal hunters once read the tracks of deer, moose, and bear printed in the soil of the forest floor. Archaeological evidence suggest that for more than a million years the subsistence of humankind has depended upon the acuity of such hunters, upon their ability to read the traces—a bit of scat here a broken twig there—of these animal Others. These letters I print across the page, the scratches and scrawls you now focus upon, trailing off across the white surface are hardly different from the footprints of prey left in the snow. We read these traces with organs honed over millennia by our tribal ancestors, moving instinctively from one track to the next, picking up the trail afresh whenever it leaves off, hunting the meaning which would be the meeting with the Other.
To represent abstract things that could not easily be represented, we often resorted to rebuses, and thus crossed a major threshold, wherein symbols ceased to represent things in the sensuous world, and instead represented the sounds of human speech. It was a step in us turning inwards, from a culture deeply informed by the life of the ecology around us, to one that is isolated, groundless, and focused entirely inward on itself.
The Hebrew alphabet was such a rebus, but with its lack of vowels, and its representations of actual things, it still left a door open. When the alphabet came to Greece, however, that door was slammed shut. The Hebrew ox, aleph, became the Greek alpha—meaningless in itself, a mere human sound. Perhaps even more importantly, because Greek and Hebrew were different languages, there were several Hebrew letters “left over” when it was converted into Greek. These, the Greeks used to represent vowels.
Is it any surprise, then, that Plato emerges at the very time that the Greek alphabet gains its ascendancy, promoting the first truly literate philosophy—a philosophy that enjoins us to reject our direct, sensuous experience of the world in favor of the pure world of “forms” that can only be understood by reason—by the literate intellect? Abram compares Plato to Homer, whose Illiad and Odyssey, written centuries before Plato, used writing for a very different purpose: as a means of recording an oral performance, not by any means to replace it. Plato himself shows some distinct doubts about writing in Phaedrus. In it, Plato records a story (doubtless one of his many invented myths) about the Egyptian king Thamus, being offered the gift of writing by the god Thoth.
But when they came to letters, “This,” said Thoth, “will make the Egyptians wiser and give them better memories; it is a specific both for the memory and for the wit.”
Thamus replied: “O most ingenious Thoth, the parent or inventor of an art is not always the best judge of the utility or inutility of his own inventions to the users of them. And in this instance, you who are the father of letters, from a paternal love of your own children have been led to attribute to them a quality which they cannot have; for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.”
“The show of wisdom without the reality” reminded me immediately, of course, of Daniel Quinn’s exegesis of the Genesis story in Ishmael: the knowledge of good and evil was knowledge only the gods could have. Eating of the tree did not give humans this knowledge; it only made us think we possessed it, and now possessed of that terrible conceit, we have proceeded to lay waste to all Creation.
But at the same time, in tracing this back, we can see that writing is a powerful magic—a magic so powerful it has shaped our minds and created our culture. Even today, in our cynical, literate age, we acknowledge the magic of the alphabet.
Everything that we speak of as Western civilization we could speak of as alphabetic civilization. We are the culture of the alphabet, and the alphabet itself could be seen as a very potent form of magic. You know, we open up the newspaper in the morning and we focus our eyes on these little inert bits of ink on the page, and we immediately hear voices and we see visions and we experience conversations happening in other places and times. That is magic!
It’s outrageous: as soon as we look at these printed letters on the page we see what they say. They speak to us. That is not so different from a Hopi elder stepping out of her pueblo and focusing her eyes on a stone and hearing the stone speak. Or a Lakota man stepping out and seeing a spider crawling up a tree and focusing his eyes on that spider and hearing himself addressed by that spider. We do just the same thing, but we do it with our own written marks on the page. We look at them, and they speak to us. It’s an intensely concentrated form of animism. But it’s animism nonetheless, as outrageous as a talking stone.
In fact, it’s such an intense form of animism that it has effectively eclipsed all of the other forms of animistic participation in which we used to engage — with leaves, with stones, with winds. But it is still a form of magic.2
Therein lies the problem, though: the alphabet is the only kind of magic we still recognize. Language has become a purely human concern, and as a consequence, language has been cut off from its root. It is no longer nourished by the non-human communities that surround us. It exists only in its own, little bubble; we’re left simply talking to ourselves.
Our assumptions have been deeply informed by the dualism of Plato, and later, Descartes. When we say a word like “spirit,” we think of something “supernatural”—beyond natural, as if the natural world were a lower order of being to be surpassed. In fact, that is precisely what Plato says it is, isn’t it? The “spirit” belongs to the perfect world of “forms.” Our philosophy begins by cutting at the root of animism, the deepest blasphemy animism allows: forsaking our sensuous experience of the world around us. Abram’s approach is informed by phenomenology—an approach that attempts to discern our direct experience of the world, unfiltered by our ideas and assumptions. Abram reminds us that even our words for these “supernatural” entities ultimately derive from various words for “breath.” It was the air itself that formed the invisible, magical essence of the present—just like the horizon is pregnant with the future, and the past is buried beneath our feet. In our direct experience, space and time are indistinguishable—it is only when we separate ourselves from our own experience that we can create such artificial abstractions as perfectly featureless Euclidian space, as separated from time. In our experience, every place exists in a given time, and every time in a given place; they are indistinguishable. Newtonian physics was based on the literate abstractions of our world; it took centuries, and Albert Einstein, to bring our science far enough to recognize what every child intuitively knows: space and time are one.
This brings us to the very essence of animism: a radical rejection of Cartesian dualism, the recognition that we are our bodies and not an ephemeral spirit wrapped in an arbitrary fleshy shell, and the simple belief in our own experience. Atheists often assert that they only believe what they can experience for themselves, but this is not true; they do not trust their own experience, they trust the abstractions of their own reason. It is the animist that trusts his own experience and nothing else.
To be sure there has always been some confusion between our Western notion of “spirit” (which so often is defined in contrast to matter or “flesh”), and the mysterious presences to which tribal and indigenous cultures pay so much respect. Many of the earliest Western students of these other languages and customs were Christian missionaries all too ready to see occult ghosts and immaterial spirits where the tribespeople were simply offering their respect to the local winds. While the notion of “spirit” has come to have, for us in the West, a primarily anthropomorphic or human association, my encounter with the ants was the first of many experiences suggesting to me that the “spirits” of an indigenous culture are primarily those modes of intelligence or awareness that do not possess a human form.
As humans we are well acquainted with the needs and capacities of the human body—we live our own bodies and so know, from within, the possibilities of our form. We cannot know, with the same familiarity and intimacy, the lived experience of a grass snake or a snapping turtle, nor can we readily experience the precise sensations of a hummingbird sipping nectar from a flower, or a rubber tree soaking up sunlight. Our experience may well be a variant of these other modes of sensitivity; nevertheless we cannot, as humans, experience entirely the living sensations of another form. We do not know, with full clarity, their desires or motivations—we cannot know, or can never be sure that we know, what they know. That the deer experiences sensations, that it carries knowledge of how to orient in the land, of where to find food and how to protect its young, that it knows well how to survive in the forest witbout the tools upon which we depend, is readily evident to our human senses. That the mango tree has the ability to create or bear fruit, or the yarrow plant the power to reduce a child’s fever, is also evident. To humankind, these Others are purveyors of secrets, carriers of intelligence that we ourselves often need: it is these Others who can inform us of unseasonable changes in the weather, or warn us of imminent eruptions and earthquakes—who show us, when we are foraging, where we may find the best food or the best route back home. We receive from them countless gifts of food, fuel, shelter, and clothing. Yet still they remain Other to us, inhabiting their own cultures and enacting their own rituals, never wholly fathomable. Finally, it is not only those entities acknowledged by Western civilization as “alive,” not only the other animals or the plants that speak, as spirits, to the senses of an oral culture, but also the meandering river from which those animals drink, and the torrential monsoon rains, and the stone that fits neatly into the palm of the hand. …
My exposure to traditional magicians and seers was gradually shifting my senses; I became increasingly susceptible to the solicitations of nonhuman things. When a magician spoke of a power or “presence” lingering in the corner of his house, I learned to notice the ray of sunlight that was then pouring through a chink in the wall, illuminating a column of drifting dust, and to realize that that column of light was indeed a power, influencing the air currents by its warmth, and indeed influencing the whole mood of the room; although I had not consciously seen it before, it had already been structuring my experience. My ears began to attend, in a new way, to the songs of birds—no longer just a melodic background to human speech, but meaningful speech in its own right, responding to and commenting on events in the surrounding Earth. I became a student of subtle differences: the way a breeze might flutter a single leaf on a tree, leaving the others silent and unmoved (had not that leaf, then, been brushed by a magic?); or how the intensity of the sun’s heat expresses itself in the precise rhythm of the crickets.
Animists do not believe in spirits; they are surrounded by them, plain to see, all around, all the time. Abram, trained as a sleight-of-hand magician, comes to an understand of what magic truly is. Mired in our dualism, we see magic as a supernatural violation of our mechanistic world. This dualism is, itself, a violation of our sensuous experience of the living world around us. We experience the world as a living thing; when we touch a tree, we also feel the tree touching us. To maintain this bizarre notion of a dead, clockwork where only humans are truly living, we must retreat regularly to the safe domain of our alphabet, and listen to the reassuring hum of our own voices. Magic—the prophetic powers of a sorcerer, or the ability of a shaman to heal—is rejected out of hand as a blasphemy against the fragile faith we cling to. When we discover the mechanisms, we dismiss it derisively as a “trick.”
London: Do we have any equivalents of medicine people in Western culture, people who perform a similar function?
Abram: We do have some distant equivalents, such as field biologists who are able to enter into a close rapport with the other species that they are studying. But we tend not to believe in magic in Western civilization. And so we’ve largely forgotten the place of magic. Most magicians end up performing somewhere like Las Vegas. They see themselves as “illusionists”—as people trying to create the illusion of magic. But they themselves don’t believe in magic. What a sad state the craft of magic has fallen into in the world. It would be as if most musicians and concert artists didn’t really believe that real music existed. Then you would have pianists who had pianos with flashing lights all over them and women dancing in sequence around them as they played their flashy music. Magic has been reduced to that in the West. It really doesn’t exist for us anymore.
London: What happens to a culture bereft of magic?
Abram: One thing is that its relation to the natural landscape is tremendously impoverished. In fact, by our obliviousness, by our forgetfulness of all of these other styles of awareness—the other animals, the plants, the waters—we have brought about a crisis in the natural world of unprecedented proportions—not out of any meanness, but simply because we really don’t recognize that nature is there. It seems to us, in our culture, to be a kind of passive backdrop against which all of our human events unfold, and it’s human events that are meaningful and what happens in nature, well, we don’t really notice it, it’s not really there. It’s not vital.
How different that is from the awareness of a magical or animistic culture for whom everything we do as humans is so profoundly influenced by our interactions with the earth underfoot and the air that swirls around us and the other animals.3
Abram does not leave us in despair for the inevitability of this state of affairs, though. Language does not have to cut us off from the non-human communities around us; in fact, it can help connect us to them, in surprisingly powerful ways.
Hunting, for indigenous, oral community, entails abilities and sensitivities very different from those associated with hunting in technological civilization. Without guns or gunpowder, a native hunter must often come much closer to his wild prey if he is to take its life. Closer, that is , not just physically but emotionally, empathically entering into proximity within the other animal’s ways of sensing and experiencing. The native hunter, in effect, must apprentice himself to those animals that he would kill. Though long and careful observation, enhanced at times by ritual identification and mimesis, the hunter gradually develops an instinctive knowledge of the habits of his prey, of its fears and its pleasures, its preferred foods and favored haunts. Nothing is more integral to this practice than learning the communicative signs, gestures, and cries of the local animals. Knowledge of the sounds by which a monkey indicates to the others in its band that it has located a good source of food, or the cries by which a particular bird signals distress, or by which another attacks a mate, enables the hunter to anticipate both the large-scale and small-scale movements of various animals. A familiarity with animal calls and cries provides the hunter, as well, with an expanded set of senses, an awareness of events happening beyond his field of vision, hidden by the forest leaves or obscured by the dark of night. Moreover, the skilled human hunter often can generate and mimic such sounds himself, and it is this that enables him to enter most directly into the society of other animals.
One of the most revealing twentieth-century accounts of a relatively intact indigenous community is that recorded by F. Bruce Lamb from the spoken recollections of the Peruvian doctor Manuel Cόrdova-Rios. Cόrdova-Rios was captured in 1907, when he was fifteen years old, by a small tribe of Amahuaca Indians living deep in the Amazonian rain forest (between the headwaters of the Juruá, Purús, Madre de Dios, and Inuya rivers)—probably the remnant of a larger tribe decimated by the incursion of the rubber-tapping industry into the forest. He was carefully trained by the headman of this small tribe to become his successor, and was for six years meticulously tutored in the ways of the hunt, in the medicinal and magical powers of the rain forest plants, and in the traditional preparation and use of the extracts from the ayahuasca vine to attain, when necessary, a clairvoyant state of fusion with the enveloping jungle ecosystem.
Curiously, the tribe’s language, which remained largely meaningless to Cόrdova-Rios for six months or more, became understandable to his ears only as his senses became attuned to the subtleties of the rain forest ecology in which the culture was embedded. He did, eventually, become headman of the tribe, yet he fled the rain forest the following year after a series of attempts on his life by a neighboring band.
Cόrdova-Rios’s descriptions of the various hunts in which he participated make vividly evident the extent to which these people’s senses were directly coupled to the enveloping forest:
They reacted to the faintest signals of sound and smell, intuitievely relating them to all other conditions of the environment and then interpreting them to achieve the greatest possible capture of game … Many of the best hunters seemed to know by some special extra sense just where to find the game they sought, or they had developed some special methiod of drawing game to them. Knowing how to imitate and to use the signals the animals made to communicate between their kind in various situations helped in locating game and drawing it within sighting range of an astute hunter.
In the course of Cόrdova-Rios’s account, we read careful descriptions of hunters sequestered in the foliage of high fruit trees luring partridges toward them with mimicked bird calls signaling the discovery of an abundant food source. We read of one hunter who, upon hearing a band of monkeys moving thought the dense forest canopy overhead, utters a cry that would be made by a baby monkey if it had fallen to the ground. This call stops the roving monkeys and brings them down beneath the thick foliage into the hunter’s arrow range; the hunter shoots tow of them to feed his family. Later Cόrdova-Rios’s native comrades teach him, through imitation, the principal vocal signals of a species of wild pig that they are hunting.
Is it fair to call this “magic,” or simply a sense of awe for the natural world? Here we have indigenous people who cannot only understand the language of animals, they can actually speak to them, and be understood. They can listen to the non-human communities around them to effectively “predict the future,” by relying on non-human senses. Or, consider Abram’s example of the Koyukon, and their close rapport with birds:
In Koyukon belief, the other animals and the plants once shared a common language with human beings. This was in the Distant Time (Kd’adonts’idnee) a time when all living beings “shared on society and went through dreamlike transutations from animals or plants to humans, and sometimes back again.” …
The lilting cries of the common loon are linguistically meaningful to the Koyukon. According to one man, “Sometimes people will hunt the loon, but me, I don’t like to kill it. I like to listen to it all I can and pick up the words it knows.” The speech of the rare yellow-billed loon is still more powerful than that of the common loon to the Koyukon: “…it says the same words, but its voice is just a little different.”
The assumption that nature is all aware, and that the sounds made by animals are at least as meaningful as those made by humans, leads the Koyukon to listen attentively to subtle nuances and variations in the calls of local birds. The Koyukon names for birds are often highly onomatopoeic, so that in speaking their names one is also echoing their cries. The Artic tern (k’idagaas’), the northern phalarope (tiyee), the rusty blackbird (ts’uhutlts’eegga), the blackpoll warbler (k’oot’anh), the slate colored junco (k’it’otlt’ahga)—all have such names. Written transcription, however, cannot convey the remarkable aptness of these names, which when spoken in Koyukon have a lilting, often whistle like quality. The interpenetration of human and nonhuman utterances is particularly vivid in the case of numerous bird songs that seem to enunciate whole phrases or statements in Koyukon.
Many bird calls are interpreted as Koyukon words … what is striking about these words is how perfectly they mirror the call’s pattern, so that someone outside the tribe who knows birdsongs can readily identify the species when the words are spoken in Koyukon. Not only the rhythym comes through, but also some of the tone, the “feel” that goes with it.
As we ponder such correspondences, we come to realize that the sounds and rhythyms of the Koyukon language have been deeply nourished by these nonhuman voices.
Hence the whirring, flutelike phrases of the hermit thrush, which sound in the forest thickest at twilight, speak the Koyukon words sook’eeyis deeyo—”it is a fine evening.” The thrushes also sometimes speak the phrase nahutl-eeyh—literally, “a sign of the spirit is perceived.” The thrush first uttered these words in the Distant Time, when it sensed a ghost nearby, and even today the call may be heard as a warning.
For Abram, this is the essence of magic, and he makes a compelling case, compounding example after example of the profound ways in which indigenous human communities engage the non-human communities around them. Those non-human voices nourish our human discourse; without that non-human input, our own language grows old, stale, and worn, and our own ability to communicate with one another breaks down.
Zerzan has criticized language as a purely human abstraction that cuts us off from the sensuous experience of the world, but Abram commits linguistic heresy, and instead finds that language is deeply rooted in that same experience, in the same ecology that sustains us. Language, linguists insist, is a purely human domain, a world of arbitrary symbols given meaning by human choice. Abrams finds the origins of language in the calls of local birds, the croaking of frogs, the rustling of leaves, the voice of nearby rivers, and the “language” of the non-human communities that surround us. Our languages are shaped by the ambience of our ecology, a rhythm and flow that reflects the rhythm and flow of the ecology we live in, with words and phrases taken from the animals themselves. Abram traces the deep foundations of language and thought in the landscape itself, and how, to remove an indigenous people from their land is to literally drive them out of their minds.
There is an innate magic in language, a synaesthetic alchemy that conveys meaning from one mind to another through the medium of a living, sensuous world. Our words are carried on the air, an invisible force that envelops us and sustains us, a mystery so powerful it gave us our words for “spirit” and “psyche” and “animate.” It allows us to form a human community, as vital (or even more) for us as it is for any other species. There’s nothing wrong in forming a human community, any more than there is in wolves forming a community, or trees. Our community, just like a wolf pack, is sustained by communication. The negative implication of community is exclusivity—any community must be defined in both positive (who is included) and negative (who is not) terms. The problem does not arise from forming a community, but from sealing off a community, and refusing to engage the communities around us.
In Ishmael, Daniel Quinn tells us how desperately we need a new vision. In The Spell of the Sensuous, David Abram tells us how to create exactly that.
I’ll have to read The Spell of the Sensuous for myself, it sounds interesting.
I’m a little confused about what this means for animism, though. I think that the characterization of animism and of magic that you talk about above could be equally well described as an excellence of skill. They do not require as a basis of explanation any metaphysical properties of “spirit”; in fact it seems almost as if you’re defining “spirit” in such a way that it is not metaphysical at all.
Comment by scruff — 28 August 2006 @ 5:24 PM
Exactly. The very idea of a “metaphysical” implies the separation of life from the sensuous world: the same dualism that you find in Plato, Descartes, etc. We’ve yet to find a real definition for “life,” because it’s so heavily rooted in our ephemeral sense of the spiritual and the sacred. Animism does not separate the locus of life and sanctity from the world around us. Life is a property of the sensuous world, not some alien force to it.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 28 August 2006 @ 5:29 PM
I’m not sure how I want to respond to the issue of “life”, yet, but I will say that I don’t think the idea of “metaphysical” implies separation, as such. Immanence and Transcendence can go hand in hand; transcendence does not imply NOT immanence, but it seems as if you’re taking it as given that immanence implies NOT transcendence.
I’ll try to put it a bit more clearly: when I say that “spirit” is “metaphysical”, I mean that it has qualities or capacities which allow it to function in ways not explaianble by purely physical mechanisms.
Example: a non-metaphysical-animist hunter can find the location of an animal he hunts by a savant understanding and perception of the physical conditions involved in the world that the hunter and animal share. He can look at the sky and judge the weather, he can look at the tracks on the ground, he can combine all of this data in his mind with what he knows of the animal’s behavior and thereby predict where it will be going at this time of day and where he will need to go to catch it. This process uses basically physical phenomena to meet the goal.
A metaphysical-animist hunter can find the location of an animal he hunts even if the animal is breaking normal behavior patterns and without having perceived the state of the physical world first. Without knowing the state of the weather, without looking at tracks, he may have a “vision” of the animal coming to a place he may never expect it to be, but he might take his weapons and find it there nonetheless. This process does not use normal physical investigation procedures. It involves essentially a paranormal non-local non-temporal transfer of information.
I suppose what I’m asking you is, as an anthropologist, is real-world animism as you have previously understood it in non-civilized societies primarily non-metaphysical in nature, or does it include metaphysical functions?
Because it is my understanding of animism that metaphysical functions are implied, and I’m wondering why Abram didn’t seem to come across any of this.
Comment by scruff — 28 August 2006 @ 5:53 PM
No? Then why does it have a name of its own? If the “metaphysical” is the same as the “physical,” why does it have a separate name?
The hand-waving priests so often fall back to, I’m afraid that immanence very much is the opposite of transcendence. This is precisely why this has been such a major theological issue.
Yes, but why must this be a feature of spirit? After all, spiritus is simply “breath”—entirely explainable in purely physical mechanisms.
Does it? Or does the hunter-gatherer simply have enough trust in his own senses that he can rely on his own subconscious, and put subliminal clues together more effectively and more quickly because he trusts his instincts? See Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink for some excellent purely physical explanations for exactly the kind of phenomenon you’re talking about.
What Abram reveals is that our assignation of “metaphysical” properties to animist spirits is simply projection of our own dualism onto other cultures.
In a sense, then, the main difference between our view and the animist view is that we see a dead, clockwork, mechanistic world; animists see a living, animate world. Abram came across plenty of accounts of “metaphysical” spirits, but they all owed more to the anthropologist than the people they studied. Or, to quote Jonathan Ott:
We do not experience the world as separated into sensuous reality, and ideal “Forms.” What we experience directly is a living world, a world full of alien intelligence. Children must be taught not to anthropomorphize everything around them, and treat even “inanimate” objects as living intelligences. This distinction, this dualism, is a bizarre superstition fostered by the psychological ramifications of the alphabet. Why would we expect this strange notion to be shared by oral cultures?
Comment by Jason Godesky — 28 August 2006 @ 6:33 PM
If the “metaphysical” is the same as the “physical,” why does it have a separate name?
We’re getting into some fairly complex and difficult problems with the language here. I do not mean to suggest that the terms “physical” and “metaphysical” denote identical concepts. “Metaphysical” is used to describe the quality of being beyond purely physical. What I mean to suggest is that when a philosophy addresses certain things as having metaphysical qualities, it does not necessarily imply that “life” and “sanctity” are not also applicable term to physical realities. It might merely imply that “life” and “sanctity” also have metaphysical natures. Not that life is separate from what we experience sensually, but that there is also more to it than what we experience sensually.
I’m afraid that immanence very much is the opposite of transcendence.
It seems to me that by making this statement you are validating a dualistic worldview. The problem of immanence/transcendence is mired in dualistic mindsets. If one assumes a holistic worldview, it is possible to approach the use of the terms “immanence” and “transcendence” as having value to offer without being opposing philosophies. The same applies to the terms “physical” and “metaphysical”.
Yes, but why must this be a feature of spirit? After all, spiritus is simply “breath”—entirely explainable in purely physical mechanisms.
This is another language problem I think: by the application of words which originate in physical reality to ideas about what metaphysical reality might be like, we run the risk of confusing one meaning for the other, and I think that’s what you’re doing here. It’s the old buddhist finger pointing at the moon conundrum.
That which is metaphysical is that which cannot be perceived through physical means. For example, a physicist once described to me the concept of treating energy as a metaphysical construct as valid because the energy itself cannot be perceived, we infer its existence from the behavior of the physical objects we can perceive.
Similarly, one may postulate that there exist entities/forces/principles in the world which are not visible or tangible and yet which affect things which are visible and tangible.
The application of the term “spirit” or “breath” to describe those postulated entities/forces/principles is essentially a metaphorical one, meant to build upon previous understanding of something known to lead to new understanding of something unknown.
Like if you ask me if I was an animal, what kind of an animal would I be, and I say “cat”, that doesn’t mean I’m a cat, it’s a metaphor meant to convey understanding about myself to you.
The term “spiritus” may have originally referred to physically explainable breath, but it is now also applicable to metaphysical forces. Along those lines, in the culture we both live in, the term “animism” has come to have connotations of dealing with spirits in the metaphysical sense of the word. So when Abram addresses members of this culture and describes animism as something which requires no metaphysical qualities, he’s using an abnormal definition of the term “animism” (abnormal to this culture). Whether or not his definition is ultimately objectively correct is another issue, but he’s using terminology with certain connotations to describe things for which those connotations are extraneous.
Although indigenous/tribal/oral cultures may not make a linguistic or even a mental distinction between that which our culture would call “physical” and that which our culture would call “metaphysical”, our culture’s way of viewing what those i/t/o cultures describe as reality may involve the label “metaphysical”.
The thing about Abram is, from what I can see in your article, he makes the case that what our culture perceives as “metaphysical” descriptions from the i/t/o cultures is in fact physical descriptions misunderstood by *our* culture because of the way we view reality dualistically. However, what he seems to be implying is that the entire scope of animist/magical reality is actually what our culture would consider to be physical, and does not include qualities or events which our culture would consider metaphysical. This is the point I was trying to make about the non-metaphysical-animist hunter: the process of predicting the animal’s location may be mysterious and not well understood to us, but it is essentially a physical process.
And what I wanted your opinion on was the question of whether or not it is standard anthropological theory that i/t/o cultures generally describe reality as having features that our culture would say are metaphysical, like non-local information transfer, and which cannot be explained by normal physical processes.
This process does not use normal physical investigation procedures. It involves essentially a paranormal non-local non-temporal transfer of information.
Does it?
Well, for the purposes of this question, I stipulate that it does. The example I gave is open to interpretation as
Or does the hunter-gatherer simply have enough trust in his own senses that he can rely on his own subconscious, and put subliminal clues together more effectively and more quickly because he trusts his instincts?
…but essentially it is a real issue to be addressed. Not necessarily here though.
Comment by scruff — 28 August 2006 @ 9:00 PM
At the risk of being intolerably rude, I have strong doubts that this line of inquiry can bear fruit.
I am much more certain, however, that it doesn’t _have_ to bear fruit.
Consider that the question itself is incorrect.
To be precise, animinism doesn’t rely on understanding these principles of physical vs metaphysical. Animinism doesn’t even rely on the above noted abilities of communication.
What it does rely on is you approach the world. If you approach the world openly, everything else follows. If you approach it openly, this debate makes little sense.
The only faith that animinism requires is the little faith that it is at least worth interacting with the world with the entirety of your being.
Comment by jhereg — 29 August 2006 @ 9:12 AM
Also, for anyone who wants to explore the dualism in western civ more fully, I strongly recommend Pirsig’s “Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance”.
http://bonigv.tripod.com/
Comment by jhereg — 29 August 2006 @ 9:15 AM
I don’t believe I can presume how other people understand me, or whether animals understand me. People can communicate they understand by using some sort of word/symbol we both were taught.
I can see how this animist perspective can be attractive to those who wish to see greater interdependance between living things. Yet I can only express how I can sense the world, and I would not presume how others experience it simply because we have some shared symbolism (language).
Comment by APerson — 29 August 2006 @ 9:54 AM
That’s actually an excellent example of the isolating ability of civilization.
It’s logical enough, but irrational….
You presume to know how others feel and think everyday. Have you never seen some abused? an animal? Did you not react to it?
Comment by jhereg — 29 August 2006 @ 10:33 AM
“You presume to know how others feel and think everyday.”
I doubt you have the required telepathy to know what I perceive.
I believe the words can be isolating.. as they may get in the way of direct sensation.. words judge, discriminate and contrast.
This is not a knock on language, which is a useful tool for communication. But I am hesitant to declare it as “innate”.
I can doubt, believe, and express using this coarse abstract tool. I can listen to other’s description. Yet this is far from KNOWING their experience.
I don’t know how others taste chocolate. I only know how I taste chocolate. I doubt others know how I taste chocolate.
Comment by APerson — 29 August 2006 @ 10:55 AM
BTW, the book sounds interesting, and the review above is great. I might just pick it up.
There is a such a variety of descriptions on how others contextualize their surroundings. I find most interesting. Sometimes I share such descriptions, sometimes not. But I don’t see the shared description as shared experience.
“Have you never seen some abused? an animal? Did you not react to it?”
My response to it doesn’t mean I KNOW what the animal senses. I am responding to my own senses contextualized in my particular conceptual framework.
In my framework, I don’t know anything.. I only believe and disbelieve (doubt).
Comment by APerson — 29 August 2006 @ 11:15 AM
Why do you think I need the pop culture belief of telepathy in order to know that you presume to know how others feel and think on a daily basis?
Perhaps my belief in your ability to, at _least_ presume, what others are thinking/feeling is grounded is experience.
I mean, there’s all kinds of communication that can occur before you even bring “language” into it. If you see someone kick a dog and you hear that dog yelp. What do you *think* that dog is experiencing?
If you want to understand animism, you can’t just leave it as an abstract mental construct, you *must* bring it into the real world. Go and watch, I mean *really* watch, a flock of birds for a couple hours. Do it every day. Give them your full attention.
Comment by jhereg — 29 August 2006 @ 11:19 AM
So, in other words, the metaphysical is something separate from the physical. The physical is what we experience sensually, the metaphysical is something “more,” something better, something else beyond our merely sensuous experience—something beyond the merely mechanical, physical world that animates it and gives it life, because life is not a property of the world around us. The world around us is a dead, clockwork machine, an inanimate world. So, if an animist says he talks to a rock, he can’t possibly mean that literally; he must believe there’s some metaphysical spirit that lives inside the rock, just like there’s a metaphysical spirit that lives inside the body.
Notice the dualistic assumptions here? The rock is the spirit. The spirit does not live inside the rock anymore than you live inside your body—you are your body, there is no separation!
That’s how we experience the world sensuously. It takes writing to deconstruct that, and come up with the bizarre dualism that you’re making reference to. In fact, most of us from literate civilizaton assume that to be the natural order of things, and we have a hard time imagining how it could be any other way. The real power of Abram’s work is opening your eyes to how nonsensical that assumption is.
Immanence and transcendence are concepts born from a dualistic worldview. These are fairly technical philosophical/theological terms, and your use of them suggests that you may not be entirely familiar with the centuries of argument that surround them.
This requires a radical re-definition of all the terms involved. Transcendance refers to the remoteness and separation of divinity from the physical world: divinity is beyond this world, too superlative to even be communicated with. Immanence refers to the infusion of divinity in the physical world: “G-d is all around us,” that kind of thing. The Abrahamic religions all posit a single, monotheistic deity that is simultaneously trascendant and immanent. This is a contradiction. The terms were first introduced into theology by Christian and Jewish theologians, trying to reconcile that contradiction. Most now admit that all attempts have ranged from failure to hand-waving. Mordecai Kaplan’s Reconstructionist Judaism is unique in its honesty: since G-d cannot be both immanent and transcendant, Reconstructionists believe in an immanent, but non-transcendant, deity. Most others simply give up and classify the contradiction as a “mystery of faith.”
I disagree. I think it points to the animist origin of our beliefs, prior to the dualistic trauma of writing, before we split the world into two, separate regions: the inferior world of “flesh,” and the superior world of “spirit.” The breath is the spirit, it’s the numinous, invisible prescence that unites us all, gives us life and language and thought. It also clarifies the animist view of intelligence in the universe, since intelligence is a function of breath, spiritus, it is something we borrow from the world around us. It is created by the whole ecology we are immersed in; it is not based in our own skulls, but in the world around us.
That is certainly the way we’ve used the word, yes. We believe in a dualistic world. We start with the idea that we cannot trust our own experience; the implication of this is that the world we percieve cannot be trusted, either. So, we move the locus of meaning out of the world we percieve, into the world we cannot percieve, with postulations about the metaphysical. Plato’s version was a world of “Forms.” Christianity owed much to this tradition (see “Stoa del Sol“), though it changed the nature of this metaphysical realm, it still retained the ordering of a superior, metaphysical realm and an inferior, physical realm. The two are not entirely separate—for Plato, physical things are imperfect representations of eternal Forms, just as for Gnostics, the fleshy body is a Satanic prison that captures a divine soul—but there is a clear subordination.
It should be evident immediately that this is by no means an intuitive or natural means of viewing the world. It is much simpler, and much more immediately obvious, to place meaning within the sensuous world around us itself. This is precisely what animists do. Our traditional view of animism is largely a result of the biases of Christian missionaries, who projected Western dualism onto cultures where the concept was entirely alien. We can see the same behavior in children, even in our own culture. They talk to inanimate objects, they see faces in the clouds, they relate to the sensuous world around them, human and non-human alike, with the assumption of personhood and sanctity. We must explicitly teach them that non-human existences are less important and to be spurned. We must teach them our dualism. It does not come naturally to them; it must be taught. What comes naturally is animism.
Our culture was once animist. When we invented the notion of dualism, we needed to come up with words to denote these bizarre concepts of “metaphysics” that we’d invented. The innovators of this notion were part of an animistic culture, and so the only words they had were animistic. So yes, the term “spirit” for us no longer means breath—that’s why they’re different words—but the etymology itself reflects the history of the idea, and that we were once animists, for whom “spirit” was breath.
The case is not purely etymological, though. Abram provides examples from several oral societies, showing the primacy of breath, and how it takes the place of our notion of the “soul.”
Not if we’re understanding their beliefs in the same way they do. We certainly describe their beliefs as “metaphysical” a great deal, but this is primarily a case of projection: we don’t really understand their beliefs, so we project our beliefs onto them.
Yes, anthropologists are often very dismissive of local “superstitions.” Many of the earliest anthropologists were Christian missionaries, collecting information on what local devils had bewitched the people, so they could be properly exorcised and brought to the gospel of our Our Lord and Savior. Standard anthropological theory retains a legacy of this, and ascribes metaphysical explanations where they make little sense. Paul Radin also criticizes many of these superficial projections in Primitive Man as Philosopher. This is one of anthropology’s most serious failings, and one of the central, ongoing disputes in anthropology, to strive towards a more emic perspective.
Well said, jhereg. But don’t you think that such interaction is simply another way of saying, communication?
Thank you, APerson, for an excellent example of precisely what I was trying to illustrate. The magic of our language is so potent, it’s the only magic we use. We only ever have the experience of being ourselves; we try to communicate with others to piece together an idea of what their existence is like, but the Existentialists are right: it is always an incomplete communication.
When another human being uses language to communicate with you, you assume you have understood some amount of what he was trying to communicate, because you used language. But what about gestures, and body language? Facial expressions? Didn’t these, also, communicate to you some small part of his existence?
So, why must it only be a human conversation? We can understand bird calls, and know when they’re calling for a mate, or signalling danger. We can understand the body language of large mammals. We can understand the “language” of clouds, and tell from their movements if a storm is coming, or if they are about to clear. When we understand the language of the world around us, we can even speak it. We can make bird calls ourselves; we can do a communicative dance with other mammals and communicate as much to them by our gestures and facial expressions as they do to us.
Once we’ve admitted that communication is always imperfect, we’re free to also realize that it can still be useful, even if it is always incomplete. Then, we are also free to enter into a conversation not just with one another, but with the living world that surrounds us and sustains us.
That’s when we become animists.
It’s not. Communication is always an imperfect and incomplete attempt to share our experience. We can never do that fully, but we can approach it, and I think the attempt—doomed as it is to incompleteness—is worthwhile, because understanding something of another’s existence is better than understanding nothing of it at all.
Abram actually spends a good deal of time on this, leading into a very radical deconstruction of Cartesian dualism that I liked very much.
Well said, jhereg.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 29 August 2006 @ 11:28 AM
[quote][quote]The only faith that animinism requires is the little faith that it is at least worth interacting with the world with the entirety of your being.[/quote]
Well said, jhereg. But don’t you think that such interaction is simply another way of saying, communication?[/quote]
Well, sort of. I’ll admit I was playing around with the borders a bit with this, but I think it’s not quite the same as “another way of saying, communication”. What I’m really speaking to is the willingness *to* communicate, once that’s been done, communication naturally follows. This may well be splitting hairs, but the intent was to break existing mental blocks.
Comment by jhereg — 29 August 2006 @ 11:47 AM
I don’t presume to know. I just believe. I either re/act to stimuli (sensation) or dis/belief.
I see “animism” as an abstract mental construct that is unnecessary to sense directly. Like language itself. It is simply a description using symbols (text) or symbolic sound.
Animism is an -ism.. an idea. Its just another description/narrative.
I’m not knocking it, and I’m likely to pick up the book above, as I am often interested in how others see their surroundings.
Comment by APerson — 29 August 2006 @ 12:00 PM
I see language as a double edge sword.. it can get in the way, as well as unify. Mythologies, religions, ideologies.. all various ways to frame sense data and their memories of such.
The problem is not belief, but those who insist others believe as they do.
I like the “language as magic” metaphor, since I view language as fluid and dynamic. I am cautious with it, since the tethers could become chains if one becomes too rigid with it. This is why I enjoy to play with words and test its elasticity, while maintaining comprehension.
Comment by APerson — 29 August 2006 @ 12:23 PM
If written language is such powerful magic, why not try to improve on it to make it even more powerful with the addition of mathematics?
Most of mathematics is alien to humans, this is why so much training is required, and so few people are good at it. But, we have computers now, they are very good at mathematical operations. And it appears, they help us a great deal in communication with each other. Aren’t computers now also a part of nature? Is our magic becoming more powerful with them?
Comment by _Gi — 29 August 2006 @ 5:13 PM
Obviously. Of course computers are part of nature, what else could they possibly be? Is there anything that isn’t part of “nature”? Where would such a thing come from?
And yes, I’d say mathematics count as a kind of magic, and I always did speak of my programming projects in alchemical terms … but it’s the nature of the magic that’s most important here. Even writing could be reformed, if we gave it room to “breathe,” and allowed the life of the non-human world to inform it and animate it. The same with our mathematics and computers. The problem is when our magic leads us to such hubris that we lose sight of how deeply enmeshed we are in the living world. Then we begin to treat the world carelessly. We grow blind to other kinds of magic, and that makes us grow weak and stupid, and eventually, it kills us.
It’s the living world that is the source of life and strength and wisdom. When we cut ourselves off from that, we cut ourselves off from life itself, and damn ourselves to death.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 29 August 2006 @ 5:19 PM
jhereg:
Comment by scruff — 30 August 2006 @ 1:47 AM
Whoops, sorry about that premature posting there. I’ll try again…
Note that in this post, the way in which I use words is meant to reflect the way our civilized culture uses words, and is not meant to address issues of how animist cultures use them.
You’re grossly misrepresenting my perspective and putting all sorts of words in my mouth. In order to try to fix this miscommunication, I’m going to go a different way and tell a story from my own personal experience which was instrumental in the formation of my somewhat animist worldview.
One evening as I was in bed, I had fallen asleep briefly, and woken up in a state of hypnogogic sleep paralysis. There is a spectrum of “levels” I experience in the hypnogogic state, some having more hallucinations than others. On this occasion, I was in the state with only one prominent hallucinatory sensation - that of being able to see my room through my closed eyelids.
While in this level of this state, I have often been able to clearly perceive objective sensory stimuli, and this has been verified by other people who were present at the time. What I mean by that is, although I am hallucinating that I can see my room through my closed eyelids (a false sensation by normal standards of our culture’s worldview), I can hear objectively verifiable sounds in my environment without having hallucinatory distortions of them. You could speak to me in this state, and later on I’d be able to tell you what you’d said.
So there I was lying in this hypnogogic state, and I hear the phone ring out in the living room. Immediately I am experiencing what I will call a “vision”. It was kind of like seeing a dream take place from an external perspective.
In the vision, I am talking with an old high school friend, R. R wants to inroduce me to his new puppy. That’s the basic plotline of this vision, the details aren’t really relevant to this story.
So the vision ends, and I get myself out of the sleep paralysis state, and I start relaxing again to go back to sleep. And I do so.
The next day when I wake up, I go out into the living room, and I see on the caller ID that R. called me at the same time I was hearing the phone ring. That was surprising on its own, because I had recently moved into this house about a year ago, had not spoken with R. for over two years, and had not given him my new phone number (we were not on very good terms at the time). I also notice that he did not leave a message on the answering machine. So I called him back, and it turned out that he had been trying to get in touch with me to get the number for my vet who makes housecalls, because he had just recently gotten a new puppy.
It might also be worth noting at this time that he had not had a dog at the last time I had spoken with him. He had not had a dog for about four years, and during a period of time in which he was my father’s roomate (in another house entirely) he had been so turned off of having a dog as a pet by my father’s dog’s unruly behavior that he swore he would not have another dog as a pet.
So at this point I’ve had a vision of someone at the exact same time they call me on the phone, when I have no reasonable expectation of hearing from that person, and the vision reveals information about them that I have no reasonable expectation of being true.
I couldn’t have known who was calling through normal physical means, because my eyes were closed and pointed in the wrong direction a fair distance away from the caller ID machine with two walls between it and myself. This phone did not have any special rings to allow me to audially identify callers. I could not have heard his voice and incorporated it into my “dream”, because he had not left a message of the answering machine, and therefore his voice had not been hearable in my house.
This is an example of metaphysical non-local information transfer. Paranormal, for want of a better word.
This is one of many experiences I have had which have led me to the knowledge that metaphysical principles exist which allow paranormal events to occur. Some of these experiences lend themselves to an animistic interpretation more than others, and this is one that does so very well, for two reasons:
1. This was not a purely psychic event. For R. to have called me, he would have had to have obtained my number, which means he would have had to find someone else who did have it, which means he would have had to think about who to ask for it, which means he would have had to plan a way to find my number. At none of those times did I ever metaphysically receive any kind of information about his intent. The only time I did so was when the phone actually rang. And
2. The purpose of the existence of telephones (at least according to the humans who make them) is to allow people to convey information across otherwise prohibitive distances. The metaphysical activity which took place achieved exactly that goal.
The events which took place suggest information transfer; the mechanism by which they took place is metaphysical (beyond physically understood phenomena); and the conditions of the entire event suggest that the telephone was instumental in making this information transfer take place.
The telephone has both physical and metaphysical aspects to its reality. Reality in general has both physical and metaphysical aspects to it, and everything which is a part of reality also has both aspects. This is not a judgment as to the relative value of those aspects. You have heighth, breadth, and depth. None of those is necessarily any more “sacred” than the others, although they do have different properties.
If I approach a bilingual person speaking language X, they will probable respond to me in language X. If I approach them speaking language Y, they will probably respond in language Y. This is not a claim that there are two bilingual people, one who speaks X and one who speaks Y.
The same kind of thing is true of the telphone. My normal everyday interaction with the phone takes place on the technological/physical level. In this odd experience, my interaction with the telephone took place on the spiritual/metaphysical level. For simplicity’s sake, I’ll attribute that to the fact that I was in a slightly altered state of consciousness which has traditionally been said to give one better perception of one’s own metaphysical capabilities.
Normally when I use the phone, I invoke the magical power of electrons and telecommunications infrastructure, because I usually speak language X. In this occasion, I was speaking language Y, and so I was able to invoke the magical power of… oh I don’t know what to call it. How about telephonepathy.
Now as I see it, the events which took place would be understood by our culture as being metaphysical and magical. The position that I find myself in is as follows:
1. trusting my own experiences, I know that the nature of reality is such that events can occur which are not explainable physically, and that these events are often called “magical”, and
2. my conclusions based upon my own experiences are that an animstic worldview is especially helpful in leading a person to experiencing these metaphysical/magical events, in fact it’s pretty much unavoidable if the animistic view is properly integrated, and that
3. Abram, having gone to live in an animist culture, comes back with stories of their magic, and none of them are unexplainable by physical phenomena. All of them can be attributed to (a) our culture’s misunderstanding of the animist’s worldview and communications based upon our own dualistic mindset, and (b) our lack of experience in the savant excellence that the animist culture’s members develop through their particular mindset and lifestyle.
Now do you see what is confusing me?
From what I know of reality, Abram should have brought back stories of magic which *our* culture would consider metaphysical because we would not be able to explain them by physical mechanisms.
Comment by scruff — 30 August 2006 @ 3:51 AM
I can’t speak to Abram’s book, I haven’t read it.
But as for the rest, I still think that you’re overthinking it.
I understand that you’re using “metaphysical” as western civ uses it, but it seems like you’re trying to apply it to an animist perspective. I’ll happily grant you that *our* culture’s understanding of physical reality is incomplete and inaccurrate; that there are physical forces and sensory mechanisms that we haven’t been able to fit into our reductionist world-view, but imho, those things are only “metaphysical” from a western perspective, from an animist perspective, they’re still physical, even if they are even less “material” than the wind….
Comment by jhereg — 30 August 2006 @ 8:38 AM
Hey Scruff –
Jason may come back and disagree with me… we do that, you know :-), but for what its worth:
After reading this article and examining my own views (which include some experiances very much like your telephonapathy), the final pieces have ‘clicked into place’ for me.
I see animism as less a ‘religion’ or ’spirituality’ and more of a ‘worldview’. In that worldview, there is no duality. Everything is ‘of this world’ and is therefore ‘knowable.’ Now, that is NOT the same thing as everything is known. So it leaves lots of room for things that we don’t understand.
In civilized, dual cultures, whenever some event or experiance or situation is unexplained and percieved as unexplainable, the first/most common response to that is to call it supernatural. It is not ‘natural’ because natural events are explainable. When we term it supernatural, we are forsaking all effort to understand it within the normal rules of reality.
By comparison, in an animist culture, there is no such thing as ‘unnatural’ so instead, they percieve unexplained things as just that. A range of experiances that fall on a scale of known to unknown but always, unmistakably knowable at some time and some place.
With our modern understanding of science, especially physics, and an animist worldview, we can posit that there may be magnetic fields, or quantum interractions (or some other variation of modern theory) that we have not yet come to understand that is enabling a ’sixth sense’ that we do not yet understand. And, with the animist worldview, it is totally okay to have these things that we do not understand, but that we continue to try to make sense out of.
I, too, plan to read the Abrams book to see if what he is saying is comparable to what I now am coming to understand. But I think, for me, even if I find that he disagrees with me, it won’t matter, because I feel like I have finally pulled all the loose threads in my psyche together after years of trying to figure out what I ‘know.’
Janene
Comment by janene — 30 August 2006 @ 8:44 AM
Hmm, here’s something to chew on. This is from Pirsig’s “Lila”.
There are a lot of things I disagree with Pirsig about, *but* I’ve always been fond of this passage and will never forget it.
[quote]Dusenberry smiled with a kind of arch smile. He said, `One time they [the native americans] were supposed to have food, you know, from before the white man came. Blueberries and venison and all that and so what did they do? They broke out three cans of DelMonte corn and started opening all the cans with a can opener. I stood it as long as I could. Finally I told them “NO! NO! NO! Not canned corn,” and they laughed at me. They said, “Just like a white man. Has to have everything just right.” [/quote]
For some reason it seemed like an appropriate thing to trot out for this discussion….
Comment by jhereg — 30 August 2006 @ 9:28 AM
No, I’m laying bare the unspoken assumptions that underlie what you said. Neither is anything you said explicitly, but there is quite a difference. All I did was give voice to the silent implications of what you did say: the things you left unsaid, but that must be assumed true in order for your words to mean anything. You may never have examined these beliefs yourself, yet you must believe them on some level, or else you would not be able to say what you said.
Sounds like classic synaesthesia to me: less a hallucination, than a “re-routing” of other senses through your brain’s visual channels, combined with memories of your room to flesh out the sight. Synaesthesia is our natural state, and “connecting the dots” is what our brain does.
Now, an animist doesn’t draw this line between hallucination, dream, and reality. He trusts his experience. None of them are false, all are his experience, and thus, all are equally real.
If we understand your hallucination in terms of normal neurological processes, has it ceased to be magic that you can see with your eyes closed?
I’ll admit, I’m hard pressed to come up with a physical explanation, but if that’s your criteria, then the “metaphysical” is constantly shifting. In the Middle Ages, the orbits of Jupiter’s moons would have been metaphysical. Today, it’s purely physical. Today, your experience is metaphysical, but I have no doubt that a physical explanation will eventually be found. Will it cease to be metaphysical then?
Your unspoken assumption here is exactly what I said before: that there is some “higher” realm, “beyond” this “merely” physical realm, that allows these things to happen. In that realm, your “soul” can glean information from R.’s “soul,” unencumbered by physical restrictions. If this is not the assumption, then we’d need to run instead with the assumption that we’re dealing with something purely physical, though perhaps unknown at the moment. Instead, you’re not just saying that this is a physical event that we don’t understand, you’re saying this is proof of a hypothetical realm that transcends the physical.
Au contraire, because what we’re defining here as the “metaphysical” properties of objects is their “spirit,” the thing that animates them, that gives them life. It’s that ephemeral spark of life we’re splintering off into the metaphysical. The physical reality of the phone is insufficient to explain your experience, so rather than investigate what might have been the physical process, you instead accept that the phone has a “spirit” that accomplishes its raison d’etre even when its physical abilties fail. In so doing, you’re suggesting a “true,” metaphysical phone that transcends and gives life to the merely physical phone. When the physical phone fails (as, of course, any purely physical and thus imperfect object will), the transcendant, perfect spirit of the phone succeeds. You’ve very clearly laid out a precedence that deeply contradicts your superficial refusal to acknolwedge it as such.
I think you’re probably closer to an animist than most of us. You’re not curious about the physical mechanism by which your experience might have happened; it was your experience, and you accept it as such. The problem is, you’re still overthinking it, and trying to shoe-horn it into the dualistic worldview you were raised in. You’re not simply accepting your experience for what it is, you’re still trying to understand it in terms of some larger model. I see nothing in your story that would lead me to consider the existence of some metaphysical realm; rather, I see in your story evidence that magic is a property of the physical world of our perception, and that we don’t fully understand how that world works.
EXACTLY. We started with the axiom that the physical world is dead, and life comes from some higher, better place. So, when we see evidence of life, we attribute it to something metaphysical or supernatural, because otherwise, our axiom would be violated.
Yeah, that’s kind of how I felt after reading the book. I just sat there for a few minutes, every few pages, staring off and the quietly muttering, “Wow.”
Comment by Jason Godesky — 30 August 2006 @ 10:19 AM
Is anyone inspired by this to go out into the woods and learn how to talk to animals?
I feel like I have some of this ability and that it has been severely neglected. As a child I was much more in touch with this aspect of myself. I think all children begin as animists. The world around them is alive.
Comment by Ted Heistman — 30 August 2006 @ 12:00 PM
Yes.
I know a specific land that I really need to learn the sounds of….
Comment by Jason Godesky — 30 August 2006 @ 12:03 PM
Awesome! First of all dude, I just want to say you are a genius. I don’t know how you can crank out scholarly articles like this day after day.
I aso agree about the specificity of the calls and the land. I feel I really need to find one place to live in and get to know it intimately. A place I can call my home and be a part of. I really don’t want to travel so much for the sake of traveling as I do to just find this place.
These animists, are that way. They are part of specific ecosystems and landscapes. All civilized people are cut off. Civilization around is getting more alike. Hotels look the same everywhere.
Comment by Ted Heistman — 30 August 2006 @ 12:12 PM
Not that I disagree with the specificity of land and its accompanying life, but I would really hate for someone to put off trying animism because they weren’t where they intend to “end up”.
So, I feel that I should point out that animism doesn’t *need* to be practiced in a wilderness setting. As I said before, something as simple as giving a flock of birds your full attention for a couple hours a day can help you on the way in opening yourself up to the spirits around you.
Comment by jhereg — 30 August 2006 @ 12:29 PM
Well, I can’t do it in civilization. I speak only for myself. At the beginning of the summer I had a field I walked in to listen to the birds and recharge my batteries, its being tuned into a subdivision. Its an extension of a subdivision that is already there. Last year these houses were prairies and forests, some were cornfields. Now the prairie I walked in months ago is a big mass of dirt and gravel with big pieces of heavy equiptment roaring around. A moonscape.
Comment by Ted Heistman — 30 August 2006 @ 12:36 PM
This was no important area that local conservationists were up in arms about or anything. But I connected with it spiritually, and now its dead.
Its not like I grew up there or anything either, I moved to this area in April. But just the act of having to get in my car now to take a walk in a seminatural area, cutts me off.
And I know that after a while this subdivision will be more in harmny with the Earth as the wild animals move back in, squirels and chip munks and racoons and birds. The trees will get bigger.
But now when I walk through this subdiviosion I feel the land mourning. Its a big ugly scar. The turf can’t hide it. Nor the saplings, nor the brightly colored houses.
Comment by Ted Heistman — 30 August 2006 @ 12:43 PM
Wow, thanks Ted.
Connecting to a specific place is an important step in rewilding, but jhereg’s right; animism is first and foremost just a way of looking at the world. You can be an animist in any setting.
Of course, being an animist inside civilization opens you up to the incredible horror of it all. That’s why civilization seals off animism: we can’t handle that kind of pain.
In short, the pain you felt, Ted, proves how well you slid into the animist mindset.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 30 August 2006 @ 1:39 PM
I don’t mean this as brutal as it’s going to come out, but….
good. I mean, I’m sad that this area was torn up, but I’m glad that you can still connect to the land despite the damage.
Unfortunately, I think that we’re going to have to face this kind of devastation _as_ devastation (as opposed to devastation as _progress_) as the collapse goes forward. But, for me, I find it extremely liberating to look at some of the most abused landscapes and find that life is still there.
I live just outside a city of 700,000 people and I can still go downtown and find all kinds of (essentially wild) plant and animal life. It’s not a lush wilderness by any means, but don’t overlook the power and confidence that comes with being able to look at some of the worst things that civilation can do and then see nature overcome them.
My own recommendation? I’d suggest you keep walking through the area, you already have a connection with it, and even though it may seem like more pain than you can bear at times, I really think you’ll find that there’s a lot to be gained.
Comment by jhereg — 30 August 2006 @ 1:49 PM
my experience as a poet has always been completely entwined in communication with the parts of our world this society denies can communicate with us - birds, clouds, sunlight through leaves, sidewalks, buildings and on and on…
After hiatus of years, due to responsibilities associated with getting by in this culture, I’ve been considering writing again but know it’s not something that I can choose or force. It’s solely dependent upon whether or not I can regain my stumbling fluency with the language of creation - something easily lost inside a cubicle I daresay.
Ultimately, this communication, I’ve found, is…well… love. (perhaps I don’t love my cubicle, so we don’t communicate). And I’m pleased with this conversation here on this topic as it helps me understand the experience I have in communication with non-humans which has never seemed to be anything ‘metaphysical’ or even ‘physical’ (as in explainable by physical laws), but simply as connection and communion.
Yesterday I had a glimmer of hope. I rode my bike past a long row of perennial grasses landscaped in formation the length of a long curved grey and yellow building and they were laughing and nodding and I grinned at them as I rode by. Blame the wind who might very well have been the instigator rather than the mere physical cause, but to be honest it made me so incredibly happy, like seeing old friends (and I recognize the connection: wind, ruach (Heb.), spirit, qi).
This culture, with its complicated roots in dualism hasn’t given us the chance to love the rest of creation much. We’re supposed to use it or transcend it, or deny its import in favor of some different eternity…
Poetry isn’t so much about writing as it is about being, in my experience, anyway…
Though we’re out of practice it is possible to connect - but it’ll be (as in the recent entry by Jason “where have all the savages gone”) in a way that is like but unlike the ways of our ancestors.
neighbor
Comment by Anonymous — 30 August 2006 @ 7:35 PM
As an animal-talker I gotta say it’s about time someone found a way to express this. I used to live with a dog who was quite a story-teller. I had someone tell me in response to that, “dogs don’t talk”. Of course they talk. They just don’t speak English. (Although I’ve had another person comment that my current canine companion speaks pretty understandable English.) I think the point is that language and communication are not the same thing. Language is a form of communication and a very powerful one, but it certainly is not the only type of communication. Much of what we percieve as “metaphysical” is simply the result of other people being aware of things that we ourselves are not.
Comment by ChandraShakti — 30 August 2006 @ 8:40 PM
all i have to say is that just confirms what i thought all along.
this is your personal belief, it’s a misinterpretation of the beauty of life, respect for said life, knowledge of how said life lives, and how said life is useful to us as a sort of spirit while at the same time you claim we have none.
along with this you throw in poor reasoning to the effect of trying to say we should always trust our senses when in fact it’s quite the opposite, our senses can deceive us because they are not perfect.
to top it off you claim that people need to think the way you do on this matter or they won’t survive.
your normally have a more sound reasoning when you do your entry’s. something this one lacks, in fact it seems to try to make the point of throwing said reasoning faculty’s out the window.
Comment by truekaiser — 30 August 2006 @ 11:33 PM
[quote]this is your personal belief[/quote]
it’s certainly [b]my[/b] personal belief, and it became my personal belief only slowly, with experience and a great deal of internal struggle.
[quote]and how said life is useful to us as a sort of spirit while at the same time you claim we have none.
[/quote]
I would suggest that everyone try very, very hard to watch the definitions going on here, they’re often crossing the dualism-animist divide with impunity, and I really don’t think they should, that way leads to confusion….
[quote]to top it off you claim that people need to think the way you do on this matter or they won’t survive.
[/quote]
Well, I won’t make that claim. I’m sure that many individuals that don’t embrace this [b]will[/b] survive. I’m equally certain that no more than two generations down the line, everyone will pretty much have gone back to animism, even if they don’t realize it.
[quote]your normally have a more sound reasoning when you do your entry’s. something this one lacks, in fact it seems to try to make the point of throwing said reasoning faculty’s out the window.
[/quote]
I’m not sure what else [b]I[/b] can do to address this. Personally, I don’t think that logic/reason/rationality are useless. I don’t think they should be abandoned. I [b]do[/b] think that they are limited. I [b]do[/b] think that using only logic/reason/rationality is a horrible waste of existence. Having said that, I don’t see animism as a particularly irrational belief.
Comment by jhereg — 31 August 2006 @ 8:43 AM
Truekaiser — I was afraid my first attempt to express this would fall short, and it seems it has. You’re still trying to force animism through your own dualistic mindset, just like scruff, but you fail to understand that such dualism is itself a very non-obvious cultural construction. Animism is not simply my personal belief; we’re all born animists. Watch how a child interacts with the supposedly “inanimate” objects around it. A child intuitively trusts his own perception, and accepts his own experience and his own senses. He experiences the world as alive, and so, attributes life to everything around him. We eventually beat this out of the child, demeaning this behavior as projection and anthropomorphism, but in so doing, we propogate domestication. We turn the child into a good, civilized human. He still experiences this ephemeral phenomenon of “life,” even if only in his own experience of his own life, but since we’ve taught the child very strictly that such life does not exist in “inanimate” things, there must be some other realm these things come from: thus, dualism.
Note, the “other world” need not be spiritual; it could be purely logical and rational. Such was Plato’s world of Forms, for instance. It’s still a fantasy—a logical fantasy, perhaps, but a fantasy nonetheless. Logical fantasies are by no means unheard of; they are, in fact, common. That’s why we have separate terms for “sound” logic and “valid” logic. Logic can be valid without being sound—a logical fantasy.
It’s true that I don’t think the Enlightenment was entirely a good thing, any more than the “Age of Faith” was entirely a good thing. Both were extreme swings of the pendulum. Humans have both the faculty for logical and metaphorical thought; both need to be properly exercised. To use only one to the detriment of the other is to cut ourselves off from a full half of the human experience. In today’s age, it’s more often the problem that we exercise our logic to the detriment of our intuition, but I find myself often making the opposite case among some more distinct groups, particularly those with “New Age” leanings.
Every sustainable culture that has ever existed has been animist, whether it was made up of foragers or horticulturalists (see also, permaculture). Every unsustainable culture that has ever existed has been something other than animist. The closest you’ll find to animism in a civilization is Shinto, and ironically enough, historically, Japan has come closest to sustainability of all our civilizations.
Belief fosters behavior, and behavior fosters belief, so this is hardly unexpected. Animism fosters sustainable practices, and sustainable practices foster animism. If we wish to survive in an era of reduced complexity, sustainability is the key, but sustainability leads to animism. Like sustainability itself, we can either move down that road voluntarily and at our own pace, or we can be forced down it by necessity. All societies that survive will do so by becoming sustainable, and will thus be forced to accept animism of one kind or another as a matter of course, but even if we are actively trying to create a sustainable society, a refusal to accept animism will sabotage our efforts.
Consider: to reject animism requires some amount of dualism, which requires a prioritization of the “other” world above this one. Thus, in any form we might accept, a sustainable society is cutting us off from the better world by miring us in the transient, imperfect world of our senses. If we believe in dualism, we believe in a system that ultimately contradicts any sustainable society: if the consumption of this imperfect world can allow us to enter that more perfect world (whether of divine spirit or pure logic), what loss is there, since the world consumed is but a shadow of that better place? Sustainability only makes sense when we accept the world around us as it is: in other words, when we accept animism.
You say that we should not trust our senses because our senses are faulty, but how do we know that? The only world we will ever know is the one we percieve with our own senses. Our perception must be accepted as that—perhaps there is an exterior world we are actually percieving, and perhaps there is not. That is ultimately inconsequential. We are always going to be inside our perceptions, regardless of the answer to that trivial question (trivial because we will always remain inside our perception, regardless of the answer). So that is the world that is worthwhile, that is the reality worth exploring. So, we come to the fundamental axiom that divides the wild animist and the civilized human. The domesticated human assumes that an “objective” reality exists, and pursues it to the denigration and neglect of his own “subjective” reality. The wild animist experiences his own “subjective” reality directly, and harbors no illusions about an “objective” reality, nor spends much time worrying about its possibility. Subjective reality is the only reality he will ever know, and it is quite sufficient in itself. Much more interesting to the wild animist is communication with other modes of being—i.e., “spirits”—and reconciling their subjective reality with his own, to create a wider vision from the fusion than one could ever experience alone. Ultimately, the domesticated human aspires to some hubristic, god-like knowledge of existence, while the wild animist believes his own experience, and communicates with many varying forms of existence around him, in an effort to share those experiences.
As for magic, perhaps you missed the conclusions I’ve brushed against: speaking to animals, communicating with winds, predicting the future, healing the sick … if these things are not magic, then I don’t know what is. If it becomes magic simply because you can understand how it’s done, then how can magic ever exist, since as soon as you use it, you must on some level understand it?
Comment by Jason Godesky — 31 August 2006 @ 10:05 AM
Jhereg,
I think for me to continue to live within civilization it would be better for me to dull my senses and to see my surroundings as inanimate.
I also might be more sensitive than other people. This has not turned out to be of an advantage for my life in civilization so far, I am hoping what makes me so ill-equipped here would be the opposite in the wild.
But yeah, I do see evidence of the wild springing back and that gives me some solace, but I figure getting used to misery doesn’t really prepare me for anything. If I get used to feeling like shit long enough untill it goes away…I think I will have lost somthing not gained. I don’t want to get the the point of liking subdivisions.
The best thing I ever did is quit my job at “Best Buy” selling celphones for 12 dollars and hour and become temporarily homeless and unemployed.
I will never fear those things again.
It was an exercise in intolerance. What would enduring a horrible job have taught me?
Comment by Ted Heistman — 31 August 2006 @ 12:56 PM
Ted, I really didn’t mean to suggest that you get used to misery. And you’re right, that [b]doesn’t[/b] help prepare you for anything.
I can only speak about my experiences, and for me, once I moved past the misery and accepted it, I found a very strong bond between me and the ravaged world around me. True, it’s a bond filled with pain, but also an enormous amount of perseverance and hope. Once I realized firsthand the strength and power that the natural world has even in the depths of hell… well, that’s gotten me through more than a few rough times.
I very much hope you find a way to be alive and at peace….
Comment by jhereg — 31 August 2006 @ 2:22 PM
Actually, I saw an urban coyote this morning and that cheered me up quite a bit.
I bet you like urban coyotes too. They kind of represent the point you are making.
Comment by Ted Heistman — 1 September 2006 @ 10:33 AM
OK, so if one is to be non-dualistic, as you are advocating, Jason, then what is one to do with a dream? If there is only one realm, and that realm includes stuff that I would call thought or imagination, then is everything made of the same stuff as thought?
Animist peoples know what dreams are, and know that dreams are not the same as waking reality. You say they don’t distinguish, all are equally real. Well, to me my dreams are real. Yes, I reckon every human who every lived reckoned dreams were real. Just not real in the same way that physical reality is real. Which is precisely the point.
It’s not some weird perversion to be dualistic, it’s a natural reaction to being able to see and touch and smell a tree and then close your eyes and imagine an imaginary tree. Where does the imaginary tree exist? In mind. Where’s the mind?
And if you’re promoting a monist point of view, where is mind? I’d like to know. Is it the same as the brain? Well, if it is then reality is inherently dualistic - both mental and physical at the same time. That’s quite satisfying, but it’s dualistic and monistic at the same time, isn’t it?
But if we’re going to play this game of expanding the unspoken assumptions (and I’d say it’s a touch illegitimate - means you don’t have to deal with the point as posed by the other person) then I’d like to examine why ‘dualism’ is such a bugbear. I mean, does anyone seriously believe that if Descartes hadn’t come up with his split between mind and body that the industrial revolution wouldn’t have happened? Isn’t condemning dualism just a convenient shorthand? And in fact isn’t it just wrong, if you look more closely at it?
Animist peoples believe in spirit realms, as do I, at least in my reading about them. They believe that spirits are different from, say, animals. They don’t necessarily believe one is more real or more important than the other, and neither do I. That’s dualism, but it’s not the Big Bad Dualism of evil western civilisation, is it?
I mean, I think other people aren’t the same person as me. I think I am me and the rest of the world is not-me. That’s dualistic, right, and deceptively dualistic, cos in reality we’re all part of one continuum of energy. But it’s a convenient shorthand.
I disagree with your example of time and space. I have often, as a child and as an adult, tried to get my head round the fact that the same place, the same actual molecules, could be in one time and yet also in another. This is strongest when one is thinking wistfully or regretfully about an occasion that has past, when you’re in the same place in which is happened. Let’s say you’re sitting on the same seat that the event happened on. And you wish you could get that time back, but just because you have the exact same bit of space, you haven’t got the same bit of time, so you can’t do it. Hence, the difference between time and space are vividly real to you at that moment.
I don’t think distinguishing time and space is some abstraction. It’s just taking reality at face value.
What you call ‘physical’ I call real (as do you sometimes). I don’t ultimately think that the tree out there is made of something different from my dreams, but from my perspective they’re very different things, and it’s convenient to make a category distinction. Indeed, I’d say if you don’t actually make any distinction between imagination and physical reality, you’re not sane and are incapable of operating in the real world. And as we know, noncivilised peoples are realists.
Comment by piers — 1 September 2006 @ 10:47 AM
I should think that would be obvious. You experience your dreams just as immediately as you experience the world around you, right? Ergo, your dreams are obviously a real experience of the world, as real as what you feel in your hands or see with your eyes. This is where animism leads into shamanism, but they’re essentially the same, radical acceptance of your own experience. Animism is the radical acceptance of your own, waking experience, while shamanism is the radical acceptance of your own, “autistic” experience. In fact, in light of Abram’s work, my own previous article on shamanism—”The Shaman’s Vision“—makes much more sense to me!
Abram gets into this in the last chapter. Many of our own philosophers have gotten into the link between language and thought, and this is a link shared in many indigenous beliefs. This is why all of our words for “soul” come from the word for “breath.” Abram makes the argument that animists identify thought and imagination as residing in the air. Thus, the locus of thought is not inside our minds, but it is borrowed from the world around us. It surrounds us, it is the medium in which we exists, the thing that infuses us and gives us life.
Well, that’s precisely our point, but look at actual animist beliefs about dreams: the Australian Dreamtime being the most obvious example. They accept their dreams as being quite real, and coterminous with physical reality. The air is invisible, but immediately evident to our senses; in the same way, our thoughts, imaginations, visions and so forth might be invisible to others, but they are equally real and evident to the senses.
In the air.
Let’s assume that we instead place the mind in the brain. You say this is dualistic. I take it you don’t have much background in neuropsychology?
We know that our immediate experience, our senses, our emotions, everything, is created in electrochemical reactions in our brain. The mental world is physical. At the same time, in this view, we’re seeing the brain as the physical organ that is sustained by our mental activities, so the physical world is mental. There is no separation or dualism here: the “mental” is not something distinct, but a subset of the physical.
I don’t accept the point because I don’t accept the premise—a premise that was never actually spoken. Unspoken assumptions are the very root of what we’re talking about here.
Yes. Dualism was necessary for the Industrial Revolution, but at the same time, as we discussed in the article, dualism was itself the philosophical consequence of writing, so we’re not dealing with some dualistic process whereby the “mental” creates the “physical.” We’re talking about a single process operating in a single world, where changes throughout our culture ripple and create new changes, and an understanding of culture that embraces systems of all kinds, be they mechanical systems, beliefs systems, or organizational systems. Distinguishing between them in this way is always arbitrary.
It is, but animists don’t believe that at all. That’s what I’ve been saying.
But also blinding, because we forget the continuity and focus on the artificial distinctions. It’s like the colors: we divide up the color spectrum arbitrarily. If we forget that there is a spectrum, and instead think that our “pure” colors are all that there are, we’re in some trouble. But the distinction of “you” and “not you” is not dualistic, because you’re not placing yourself in some other reality than “not you.” Animists recognize their own experience of themselves, but it’s not dualism, because they place all other things in the same reality as themselves: other people, where “people” includes animals, rocks, rivers, clouds, winds, and so forth.
Notice where this all takes place: in your mind. Not in your senses. You didn’t experience any of this sensuously. This entire scene takes place inside an imagination trained, conditioned, and taught about the dualistic world that arises from writing. Your expectations, and thus your wistfulness, are the result of your theories, not of anything you experienced for yourself.
No, you’re not. We never experience a space without time, or a time without space. Distinguishing them is purely theoretical. The distinction is never evident to our senses, it can never be directly experienced. The distinction can only take place in our imagination, never in our senses. To experience that distinction and take “reality at face value,” you will need to go to a place, without experiencing time, or a time, without experiencing a place. When you do that, I think you’ll also have assured your Nobel Prize for such groundbreaking work in theoretical physics….
No, not in your experience, but in your imagination. In your experience the tree in your dream is indistinguishable from the tree when you’re awake. It’s only when someone tells you that dreams aren’t real that you learn that they’re different. It may have felt just like real, but it’s “just” a dream, it’s “not real,” so the tree in your dream is different from the “real” tree. Why? Not because you experienced it any differently—you didn’t—but because one is “just a dream.”
They are … far too realistic to pretend that their thoughts are somehow not real. If they’re not real, then what are they? I mean, we’re experiencing them, so obviously they must have some amount of reality, correct? We define sanity in such terms, but animists do not. Animists speak of things in their imagination the exact same way they speak of things they encounter with their waking senses. There is no distinction. All of these things are experienced. All of these things are equally real.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 1 September 2006 @ 11:37 AM
Hey Piers,
It is not that mind and brain are the same, nor that dreams are ‘equal to’ the physical world… its a question of whether you are looking at a dichotomy or a spectrum.
Once again, it is the question of ‘is there anything in the multiverse that is, by default, unexplainable?’ The dualist says ‘Yes’, the animist/monoist says ‘No’.
As soon as the answer ‘yes’ is given, then you must create a whole category of things that are ‘unknowable’: therefore ’supernatural’ becomes a part of your world view.
For the monoist, there is no supernatural, there is only an amazingly diverse, complex and ‘alive’ natural world.
Janene
Comment by janene — 1 September 2006 @ 11:42 AM
I like the article above, but I have a slight quibble, which might be stylistic, but distracting once noticed.
There is a frequent usage of the word “We” and “Our”, suggesting often the writer is speaking, understanding or perceiving for others. While the passive voice is often not as compelling, it can be used judiciously and effectively.
Apart from that, its a terrific article.
Comment by APerson — 1 September 2006 @ 11:48 AM
Much talk, little said.
Go outside, begin other dialogues?
Comment by Stem — 1 September 2006 @ 11:59 AM
That’s the goal, Stem.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 1 September 2006 @ 12:11 PM
[quote]Actually, I saw an urban coyote this morning and that cheered me up quite a bit.
I bet you like urban coyotes too. They kind of represent the point you are making. [/quote]
Yes, very much so. I’m very excited about coyotes. Partly because they’re being so successful in urban (and suburban) settings. And also because wolves and coyotes are interbreeding, thus helping to preserve wolves’ genetic diversity. It’s possible that they’ll end up becoming a single species post-collapse, but I suspect that once there are ecological niches for both wolves and coyotes again, they will naturally separate again. And, honestly, I can’t think of any other term *but* magical for that!
Piers, I see what your saying, but I still think it boils down to definitions. I don’t really think that the root of this can be expressed in language, only experience. I’d love to be proven wrong tho’!
I was going to map out a really complicated theoretical situation that would ’sort of’ show an approximation of (my) reality, but then I realized that there’s already a better description available that might help here. We’re used to dealing with reality as a discrete construct that consists of an amount of other discrete constructs. Now, consider that the universe isn’t discrete, but holographic. So that any one thing is inevitably interconnected with everything else. You may want to peruse [url]http://www.spaceandmotion.com/Physics-David-Bohm-Holographic-Universe.htm[/url] for scientific speculation that this is actually the case.
Comment by jhereg — 1 September 2006 @ 12:53 PM
Part of the problem is that we’re speaking English: a civilized language with thousands of years of dualistic thinking built into it at its most fundamental levels. Just look at E-Prime.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 1 September 2006 @ 1:14 PM
[quote]Part of the problem is that we’re speaking English: a civilized language with thousands of years of dualistic thinking built into it at its most fundamental levels.[/quote]
Well, yes and no. Certainly English has a lot of problems, but in order to address the predicament that we’re in, we also need to not only be [b]speaking[/b] in a more suitable language, but also [b]thinking[/b] in one. I may be cynical, but I think most people would just carry over the same/similar definition issues.
In other words, I think in the process of relearning a new, more appropriate language, we would run into the same or similar problems that we’re seeing here. At least insofar as we’re addressing adults whose primary (probably exclusive) language is English.
Comment by jhereg — 1 September 2006 @ 1:41 PM
You have mentioned that part of animism is trusting one’s “subjective reality.” You also argue that in our dualistic state, we question our experiences.
My question is this: Are those “dualist” believers really questioning their experiences? Let’s consider a civilized person who has no knowledge of animism. He’s been raised all of his life as a dualist, and is also a fundamentalist Christian. He believes that shamanism is the work of the devil. This is his “reality.” And he refuses to consider any other value system.
Animism is about trusting one’s subjective reality and not believing in an objective reality, right?
With this logic, could we not say that these dualists are doing exactly that? To them, “reality” is that of a mechanistic, spirit-less world. They trust that reality and do not question it. The pastor at our local church refuses to believe in magic as nothing more than the work of the Devil, and will not consider anything else. He refuses to show his children Disney animated movies (that in fact, are quite animistic as they show people talking to animals repatedly) because of “evil” witchcraft. That is his “subjective reality.”
If all realities are subjective, then is this reality? Or is it black magic, or black reality?
I agree that the Cartesian dualism is false. But to many people, it is their “subjective reality.” However, I was raised on this reality as well, and it was my “subjective reality.” Prior to reading Daniel Quinn, the 30 Theses, and other related works, I was a Christian. Yet I came here because I questioned my “reality.” But you argue that that is the opposite of animism.
In short: If animism is about trusting only one’s subjective reality, that how does that explain the “reality” felt by non-animists of a magic-free, spirit-less world, that they “trust” but no one else does?
Comment by Palatia — 1 September 2006 @ 8:46 PM
“The closest you’ll find to animism in a civilization is Shinto.”
What’s the difference between Shinto and animism (other than it being a religion from a civilization)? All of my research on Shinto suggests it is a form of animism, and that the “non-animist” aspects of shinto emerged after Japan’s “colonization” by the West, but was not originally Shinto.
Also, as David Abram has shown, animist beliefs has manifested in other religions–like the Hindus of Bali he cites in Chapter 1 of his book.
Comment by Palatia — 1 September 2006 @ 9:00 PM
I didn’t say anything about “reality,” I said “experience.” Your subjective reality is your first-hand experience, before it is filtered through your biases and opinions. You’re talking about the biases and opinions we retroactively apply to our experience, while I’m talking about the experience we have prior to that application. Your Christian has never experienced shamanism. He’s heard things, he’s been told things, but he’s never experienced any of it. He’s not trusting his experience, he’s trusting the theories and imaginations of others. That’s exactly what I’m saying ISN’T animism. It’s the retroactive application of our biases—the beliefs we apply to make sense of our experience—where magic is killed. What we experience first-hand is magic and spirits, but we know, being literate, civilized, domesticated people that such things are hogwash, so we apply our literate biases to our experience, kill the spirits, and dispel the magic. This is the heart and soul of phenomenology, a branch of philosophy I readily admit to having trouble properly communicating. See Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, etc.
Shinto is very close to animism, and of course all religions ultimately derive from animism. I would not classify Shinto as animism simply because it is far more formalized and anthropomorphized than the religions we typically refer to as animist, but Shinto is definitely very close to those. If you’d rather call it a very formalized form of animism, you’re welcome to do that.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 1 September 2006 @ 9:13 PM
“What we experience first-hand is magic and spirits, but we know, being literate, civilized, domesticated people that such things are hogwash, so we apply our literate biases to our experience, kill the spirits, and dispel the magic.”
But what if there are people that have no memory of experiencing such magic? What if all of their memories are that of seeing the world through a “dual,” objective lens, and that is the only “first-hand” experience they know?
Comment by Palatia — 2 September 2006 @ 8:04 AM
Piers,
You seems to misunderstand the space-time continuum. Space is made of the three dimensions we’re used to thinking about. Time is a fourth dimension.
Your example is simply not valid in that context. It’s like a two dimensional person going into a high-rise building. They go to room 1A and experience something. Then they wander off and happen to catch the elevator to the 4th floor. On the 4th floor they wander into room 4A and wonder why it isn’t identical.
So when you go back to a location that is the same in three dimensional space, it’s not the same place in four dimensional space-time. That is why you cannot revisit a past experience by visiting the location it occurred.
Comment by ChandraShakti — 2 September 2006 @ 10:10 PM
‘Animists speak of things in their imagination the exact same way they speak of things they encounter with their waking senses. There is no distinction. All of these things are experienced. All of these things are equally real.’
Well OK so I’ve been trained to think dualistically, but I am able to believe and experience that my imaginary tree and my visual experience of one are equally real - just like an animist. But you make it sound as if an animist (or are we simply talking about pre-agricultural people here?) is unable to make any distinction. That’s extraordinarily patronising, purely theoretical, and dangerous. You’re sort of saying ‘Oh aren’t we civilised people awful and ignorant (yet actually we’re able to discuss philosophical matters, and we’re secretly proud of that) and let’s beat ourselves up about it, unlike these wonderful pure savages who trust their experience and live in reality without even distinguishing between their dreams and their reality. Aren’t they wonderful with their pure experience, even if they wouldn’t be able to join in our rather fascinating discussion because they wouldn’t be able to make the distinctions that we can.’
Both the preagricultural animist and I are equally able to distinguish and yet to grant equal status. Maybe that’s the issue: Jason, you’re supposing that I think a dream is less real than ‘out there’ reality whereas I believe dreams are real events, just not occurring in the same physical reality.
To make out that an animist makes NO distinction between her imagination and her experience of out there reality is just silly.
An animist can wake up in the morning and say, I had a dream about a big fish that ate our settlement - I think it’s time to move on to a new place. The animist knows that fish didn’t eat the waking reality settlement, but also considers that the dream is significant and thoroughly part of reality. The animist knows that different rules apply to dream reality and waking reality.
Chandra Shakti, I think you misunderstood my point. My point was just that it’s a perfectly untheoretical and taking-reality-at-face-value thing to do to separate space and time. They are clearly different to anyone who can think about them. (And, again, isn’t it patronising - or worse - to suggest that animists can’t sit wistfully in a place thinking about all the people who used to be there and aren’t now? Simply because they’re incapable of distinguishing space and time. My God, are you suggesting that when animists go back to a place they’ve previously visited that they don’t realise it’s the same place!)
On the mental/physical mind/brain point, Jason, actually I know a little about neuropsychology and also about the philosophy of consciousness, and I know that there is major problem in bridging the mental-physical divide. If you look in the brain you won’t find mental experience. All you’ll find are chemicals and electrical charges (yeah, OK, you also find subatomic particles and all the weird quantum effects). Hence, my point that if you say there is nothing but the brain, then those same chemicals and electrical charges must not only be what we know them to be (chemicals and electrical charges) but must also have a mental/conscious component. I mean, we don’t normally find any need to posit that electricity has a consciousness, but if we say the brain is all there is and there is no consciousness or mind separate from it, then we are forced to say that the brain must have consciousness as an intrinsic aspect of its reality. Or we just ignore the problem, as many people working in the field do.
You can’t get away from the fact that mind exists; it’s just where you decide to put it. Although some do argue that essentially mental experience is just an illusion, which is kind of funny really.
There is no logically sound way of explaining how mental experience can consist of what we otherwise consider as non-mental phenomena, eg chemicals. It’s an impossible gap to cross.
Consciousness is an utterly unsolved problem in western thinking.
And it’s not correct to say: ‘We know that our immediate experience, our senses, our emotions, everything, is created in electrochemical reactions in our brain.’ We don’t know that, not for sure, because we have substantial evidence that we can have mental experience while our brains are absolutely without any electrical activity (so called near death experiences).
As for saying that thoughts exist in the air, well yes. I agree, sort of (even though it’s also ridiculous to actually mean ‘air’ - I mean there’s no room in chemistry to argue that oxygen and other molecules carry mental experiences). Thoughts exist out there in reality. Thoughts can affect physical reality (as in magic, or in psi experiments): hence, thoughts are not separate and distinct from physical reality but can influence it (without the use of any physical intermediary mechanism such as an arm). This is back to what Scruff was talking about.
Animists certainly believe that thoughts can influence physical reality, are part of reality, that there’s no fundamental distinction between one and the other; but they do understand, as I do, that there are distinctions between the two. Of course they do! How patronising to suggest otherwise.
Comment by piers — 4 September 2006 @ 6:24 AM
Hey Piers –
I think we are running into LOTS of language issues with this discussion. The more any given issue is emphasised the more distorted it also becomes.
With that in mind, let me give it a try
I don’t thnik anyone meant to imply that there was No distinction at all, but rather that in an animist worldview, all of those different experiances are contained within the same, single reality. So of course a dream is ‘different’ than a ‘real’ experiance (but you can’t use those words to express animism because quite literally, everything is ‘real’ ), but both are valid and useful and ‘real’ experiances.
Ah ha. See, the argument is that there IS NO other reality. Therefore, dreams occur within the same reality as every other experience. As you express it, I think you are very close to the animist worldview, with the single exception of being unwilling or unable to question duality itself.
I think (and maybe I am mistaken, but IMO ), that space and time are NOT separate. This place NOW is a different place than this place yesterday. Of course, our language cannot express this because we see space and time as different things. But when they are unified, you change a couple of basic assumptions: everything becomes transitory, the environment around you is in constant change, there is no stasis. Likewise, people, animals, plants are part of that changing environment. And it becomes totally inconcievable to try and recreate something that occured previously. Not only was it another time, but it was also another place: a place(-time) that can never exist again (and that is a good thing.)
IMO, the ‘mind’ is an emergent property of the brain. I can’t prove it. I don’t really care about that for myself. As an emergent property of the brain, mind/consciousness fits perfectly into the animist world view. This emergence is another example of the dynamic interaction of space-time, it is NOT unique to humans, although it may not exist in every life (but something does, that something we call ‘life’ itself).
Is it not patronizing to suggest that “of course they do [understand that there is a fundamental distinction between thought and physical reality]” That does, of course, pre-suppose that there IS a difference, that reality MUST BE dual and that any other assumption about the world is preposterous.
Personally, I disagree.
Janene
Comment by janene — 4 September 2006 @ 9:13 AM
Janene, I like your point about this place now not being the same place as this place yesterday. Yes… I can get into that.
By the way, I didn’t say there is a fundamental distinction between thought and physical reality - I specifically said I don’t think there is (but there is a major distinction). In the same way, I’m not actually a dualist: I don’t believe in ‘natural’ and ’supernatural’.
I agree with what you said before about a dichotomy and a spectrum, and I think fundamentally it’s a spectrum we live in (an amazingly diverse, complex and alive natural world, as you put it rather well).
Comment by piers — 4 September 2006 @ 9:32 AM
Hey Piers –
Ahha! So it really is all semantical? We need a couple new words for ’space-time’ and ‘reality’ (not to mention ALL of the words used to describe time and space in the real world).
Oh, and thanks for the props
janene
Comment by janene — 4 September 2006 @ 10:39 AM
Hmmm, I agree with Janene that there’s been some talking past one another. I never suggested that time is separate from space. It is no more separate than depth is from width. Only in abstract can you even talk of them as different things. which was sort of my point. I apperantly misunderstood your original point, because I didn’t understand it as referring to reminiscing. Rather you seemed to be asking why you can’t actually go to a particular time by going to a particular place. Which was the point I was addressing. So, I guess I was off on a tangent, my apologies.
Comment by ChandraShakti — 4 September 2006 @ 10:52 PM
I must begin with another apology; I’ve been overwhelmed by the realizations that David Abram has opened up for me, and I readily admit that my thoughts are not entirely in order again. It may take some time before I’m able to effectively communicate what it is I’ve opened up here, but I’ll take another crack at it, since I’ll only get closer by trying….
Like, most of us? I’d say that here you’re stumbling on precisely what makes animism a challenge, why it isn’t as simple as converting to Buddhism or Islam or some other religion the way we understand it. You’ve often heard people talk about meditation in terms of sitting still and listening, and now I understand that in a much more profound way: stopping the internal, purely human dialogue long enough to listen to the non-human dialogues going on around us. We need to deconstruct the filters we sift our experience through, and learn to experience the world without trying to force that experience into our artificial dualistic models. I’m reminded of a passage from the gospels here: “I tell you the truth, anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it.” (Mark 10:15)
No, they’re certainly able. They’re often absorbed into civilization and trained to make that distinction. Neither does it come naturally to us: we, too, must be trained to make that distinction. If we’re not trained to make that distinction, then we never do, because distinguishing between one type of experience and another, and categorizing some as valid and some as not, is a very strange, arbitrary thing to do. It’s like if I always hop on one foot while rubbing my belly. Maybe I do it so often I convince myself it’s the greatest achievement of mankind. If I find out that you’ve never hopped on one foot while rubbing your belly, I might wonder what’s wrong with you. Why wouldn’t you hop on one foot and rub your belly? Are you simply incapable of it? Maybe you simply haven’t advanced that far.
Or maybe hopping on one foot while rubbing your belly is a silly thing to do, and there’s no reason to think that it’s in any way inevitable or even really a natural inclination. Why on earth would we ever expect anyone else to pick up some a strange practice? What would be truly strange would be if someone else had.
Likewise, dualism follows from the phonetic alphabet, and both are very arbitrary ways of relating to the world. Why would we expect someone else to pick them up, any more than we’d expect everyone to hop on one foot and rub their belly?
Only if you’re hubristic enough to posit that the arbitrary ideas you come up with are the natural endpoint of some unilineal progression. I’d say that besides being a strange idea, that it is actually betrayed by the sensuous experience of the living world around us. A forager cannot maintain the dualism we espouse, simply because the notion is constantly contradicted by our experience.
Read Paul Radin’s Primitive Man as Philosopher, or even just Abram’s Spell of the Sensuous. Animists have a very rich philosophy, and I’d stack the Australian Dreamtime up against Augustine’s Civitas Dei any day of the week. Philosophy does not require dualism. I’m more interested in figuring out where civilized thought went so horribly off track to get us to the point we are now. Abram actually gives our philosophy more credit than I ever would have on my own, suggesting that in phenomenology, one tangent of our philosophy has almost caught up to where we were before we suffered such an enormous fall, adopting such a nonsensical idea as dualism. Perhaps that’s why animist philosophy seems so much richer than our own.
Well, most people certainly do think that. Others reverse it, wherein it’s the dream that’s real, and the physical world that’s a shadow of it. I’ve never met a dualist who actually believed the two worlds were actually equal in status, though I’ve met many who would consciously espouse that belief. Yet, when they were pressed, they would always begin to side with one or the other as the superior realm, and denigrate the other to a kind of shadow of it.
But ethnographically, it’s simple fact that animists do not make this distinction. It doesn’t matter how feasible you make the distinction, or even if the two posited worlds are equal: it is simply not a distinction animists make. And why would they? It’s a silly distinction to make.
As silly as all those people that don’t hop on one foot and rub their belly. You’ve been doing it for so long, you were trained so young, you can’t imagine how there could be any other way. That doesn’t mean that there isn’t another way. Animists live that way every day, and if you could check your assumptions long enough to study their beliefs and examine those beliefs in their own terms, you might begin to understand what another view might look like—as well as understand how arbitrary your distinction really is.
Yes, but that doesn’t imply two different worlds, but two different experiences of the same world. Reconciling those experiences into a single, non-dualistic reality is precisely what animism and shamanism are all about. They see no need to create a whole other world to explain such things; they explain all of them in terms of a single, sensuous reality.
On the contrary, the separation is in spite of our experience of them. For an animist, time is a cycle; seasons, days, months, years, every level of time a forager experiences is a cycle, a circle. Time of day can be seen by the position of the sun; time of year by where the sun rises; time of month by the phase of the moon, and so forth. We do not normally distinguish the various dimensions of space; though we have terms to describe how long, or tall, or wide something is, the notion of a theoretical, empty, Cartesian space is an unintuitive theoretical construction. Likewise, the separation of space from time defies the forager’s experience. Spaces change with time: the same place in winter is a very different place than it is in summer. Space only makes sense in terms of time, and time only in terms of space. Abram explains this more fully, but you’re committing the same fallacy you’ve committed throughout: projecting your biases and culturally constructed assumptions as obvious cosmic truths. They are not; they are, in fact, not only arbitrary, but they fly in the face of experienced reality, and must be maintained in spite of our experience of the living world around us.
Hardly. Foragers have intense, nigh uncanny, knowledge of their surroundings.
Zerzan, “Future Primitive.” Abram provides many examples and writes about this kind of thing at length. But time is a cycle, not a line, in a forager’s experience. When an Austrlian aborigine walks a songline, he exhibits uncanny knowledge of the terrain, but it’s all encoded in his re-enactment of the Dreamtime. The Dreamtime isn’t just the distant past, it’s also the imminent present, an experience of the world in our own dreams. The aborigine walking the songline is the distant ancestor. The separation of space and time as we understand them simply do not exist.
And surely you know how those chemicals and electrical charges are mental experience? The experience of “love” is simply a release of the proper neurochemicals in response to a given electrical impulse. Mathematics is simply an extensive elaboration of the somatic map in the prefrontal lobe for planning body movement. While some parts of the process remain subject to further study, for the most part, we can trace the whole mechanical process from ion gates in the neurons building an electrical charge, to the mental experience itself. We can even give people mental experiences through specific stimulation of the brain, usually through psychopharmaceuticals. It’s a primitive science at best, but it does effectively show us that “the mind” is nothing more than our experience of a complex biological reaction.
Why? Implicit in that statement is an assumption that consciousness belongs to some other world, as Descartes proposed. If there is no other world, if what we call “consciousness” is simply our experience of a complex biological phenomenon, in the same sense that we experience a complex meteorological phenomenon and call it “rain”, then there’s no need to posit anything special about electrons or neurochemicals. They needn’t be pregnant with the seeds of some otherworldly consciousness, because consciousness is simply a matter of our experience of our own brain function. You’re drawing an unnecessary distinction, and one that has led to great problems where there needn’t be any.
Didn’t I just do that?
To call it an “illusion” requires a judgement call on your part: specifically, a judgment that the proposed ephemeral world is superior to the experienced physical world, and that “mind” is a kind of “magic trick,” pretending to be from the ephemeral world, when in fact it belongs to the physical.
If there is no distinction, then there is no illusion, and no artificial dilemna. The “mind” is simply our own experience of our own mental functioning, which can be understood both on a biological level, and on a phenomenological level, without either being “wrong” any more than it is “wrong” to explain rain in terms of wind currents and humidity, or in terms of our personal experience of it.
And yet we just did, without any problem at all, by simply realizing that the “gap” itself was imaginary, arbitrary, and not only unnecessary, but contradictory to the established facts of the matter.
NDE’s prove nothing. Though the survivor claims that this occurred while they were near death, we cannot establish that at all. We know in dreams that our brains condense the flow of time dramatically: whole weeks can pass in 15 minutes in a dream. NDE’s could be nothing more than the experience of that flash of activity when the brain is revived.
Obviously. Animists do typically lack our pedantic obsession with scientific facts, typically valuing experience over some impossible quest for the “objective.”
How hubristic to suggest that your arbitrary cultural constructions are universal truths. Animists value experience over “objective” truth, and so accept their experience for what it is. Sleight of hand magicians alter our perception and thus in a very real sense create a new reality: it is not a trick, the experience itself is quite real. Shamans use sleight of hand, but also drums, dance, entheogens, and other methods to instigate trance, as another means of creating a given type of experience. All of it is experience, so all of it must be an experience of the living world. Why would they split the world in two, when all of their experience is in one? It would be if I were to posit that I actually have two apartments; the one I live in, and another one that no one has ever seen, I’ve never signed a lease for or paid a cent of rent on. It would be a very odd belief for me to hold, don’t you think?
Comment by Jason Godesky — 5 September 2006 @ 10:55 AM
“Like, most of us? I’d say that here you’re stumbling on precisely what makes animism a challenge, why it isn’t as simple as converting to Buddhism or Islam or some other religion the way we understand it. You’ve often heard people talk about meditation in terms of sitting still and listening, and now I understand that in a much more profound way: stopping the internal, purely human dialogue long enough to listen to the non-human dialogues going on around us. We need to deconstruct the filters we sift our experience through, and learn to experience the world without trying to force that experience into our artificial dualistic models. I’m reminded of a passage from the gospels here: “I tell you the truth, anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it.” (Mark 10:15)”
Interesting.
What I meant to say is that in your writings, you claimed that animists value experience over objective truth. Thus, I was just considering the possibility that if a person’s experience is nothing but non-animist, then that is still quite “animistic” since the person is trusting his experience.
Interesting that the Gospels talk about a “little child”–as a person studying child development, I am quite aware of how “animistic” children can be. They bring life to stuffed animals, even metal poles. Children’s tales often have people communicating with animals–like Winnie The Pooh and Beauty and the Beast. That interests me as it shows how, prior to knowledge about civilized philosophy, children in the middle of civilization, even in the middle of a city, are still somewhat animist. I also see this among pet owners who have relationships with their dogs or cats.
It may also be that many people have animist experiences without knowing they are like this. As a little boy, when I grew up in my suburban house, I once saw a tree stripped of much of its branches to make room for a new house being built. I wept and cried for the tree, feeling its pain. Yet I did not know about animism back then.
Comment by Palatia — 5 September 2006 @ 1:52 PM
I think humans are born animist; if they grow up to be anything else, they have to be specifically trained to do it. I think that training has a lot to do with investing our idea of what’s “real” outside of our own senses. We need to be taught to denigrate our own experience; we need to be taught that there’s such a thing as an “objective truth” to be known; we need to be taught to deny our experience and instead place all our concepts of what is “real” into a dualistic model. This is unintuitive, arbitrary, and very strange. It doesn’t come to us naturally; it’s animism that comes to us naturally. But once trained, it can be very difficult to break out of that mold (I think much of the preceding discussion has been an excellent example of that). Once trained, we think it’s obvious that our model is reality, and it begins to become unthinkable to consider any other possibility. I think that becoming animist means breaking down those models; that becoming sustainable means deconstructing those illusions.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 5 September 2006 @ 2:14 PM
At the same time, if one’s experience is felt by one’s illusions, and that person is motivated to consider animism because they are not trusting those illusions of experience, then not trusting one’s experience can be quite adaptave until you are animist.
Comment by Taylor — 5 September 2006 @ 2:18 PM
When I say “experience,” I mean this in a phenomenological sense: prior to any application of models to it. Our direct, sensuous experience. All of us have been filtering our experience through our biases for a very long time, and those filters provide us with many illusions about the world—nicely illustrated by Piers above with the unnecessary confusion about “mind” vs. brain—but our experience occurs at a lower level than that, and our experience is precisely what we need to learn to trust.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 5 September 2006 @ 2:31 PM
Thanks for this clarification.
Comment by Taylor — 5 September 2006 @ 2:37 PM
Well… I agree with much of what you say here (and elsewhere) so I don’t think it’s worth dwelling on the disagreements. I absolutely agree with the importance of learning to experience the world without forcing the experience into our artificial models. However, I think that even though there is one unbroken reality, it contains different realms. My understanding of, say, a San experiencing a /Num trance, is that they may find themselves in a different realm where they meet entities that they do not meet in normal waking consciousness – indeed, I’ve read accounts of such experiences.
Animists don’t denigrate such experiences to ‘hallucinations’ or ‘imagination’ – they are real, but different. This is what I was trying to argue about, say, time and place, or dreams and waking consciousness. I think we’re missing something if we don’t make distinctions, and say, well, it’s all just magic really isn’t it. There are altered states of consciousness, and they achieve results.
On what you call the unnecessary confusion of mind and brain, I obviously disagree. I can see why you need to reject the idea of consciousness as something distinct from physical reality, since you reject dualism. You don’t want to have two different and qualitatively separate realms.
But you then make questionable statements like ‘our experience of our own brain function’. Who’s the ‘us’ doing the experiencing? If it’s just a brain function, there should be no experience but simply the brain functioning, in much the same way that we don’t need to invoke ‘experience’ when we describe what is happening in a row of falling dominoes, or in a computer. In principle we understand what is happening in a brain: highly complex sequences of chemical reactions. We don’t need some idea of experience to understand what is occurring physically - yet, we know we have experiences. Hence, the brain described physically is not a sufficient explanation of the brain-and-experience totality.
If you mean not that ‘we’ experience the brain’s functioning, but that the brain itself experiences its own functioning (and if you don’t mean that, I’d like to know who this mysterious extra ‘us’ is), then we come back to my point: for that point to make sense, you’d need to ascribe consciousness as a property of electricity and chemicals, because if you don’t then where did the awareness arise? Where did that extra element come in, when we don’t feel the need to believe a battery, say, is conscious?
In other words, if you say the brain is just what we conventionally understand it to be - chemicals and electricity - then you can’t say that the brain *is* experience (which you do say).
And by the way, your position on the brain/consciousness doesn’t derive from trusting experience - it’s theoretical, and it derives from western materialist science.
But I think an animist *would* believe that a battery is in some way conscious. This is a non-dualist way of looking at the world (and it is part of mystical experience, which is surely one of the least mediated types of experience): to see that consciousness is an intrinsic property of the universe, not some bizarre and unexplained emergent property of complex networks of the brain. Talking about everything being ultimately explainable on a physical level is being dualist – you’re implicity accepting the existence of non-physical reality, but you’re denying one half of your dualism. The truly accepting approach would be to accept the non-physical realities and the physical ones, and accept them as parts of the whole. We can use our discriminating intelligence to understand differences between things, but we use our undifferentiating experience to accept the whole.
And if you think talk of consciousness as separate from physical reality is just a theoretical, illusory absraction, then look at the concrete evidence supporting the distinction, in the vast body of data in psi experiments, where the only causal agent is consciousness: intention. And where consciousness achieves results in the physical world without any physical causal agents. Either those thousands of studies are faked or false in some way, or consciousness as separate from brain activity does exist. (And to maintain that NDE experiences could occur when the brain is once more active again goes completely against the facts of what state brains are in after massive trauma – see http://iands.org/research/fenwick3.php)
An animist would completely understand that psi effects exist; it’s old fashioned scientific materialists that can’t conceive of such a thing happening and fight viciously against accepting it. And I find it odd that you find yourself in the same camp as them on this issue.
I agree though that I may being using arbitrary cultural constructions: I’m trying not to. But hell, I agree with the importance of losing our abstractions and learning to experience more directly. I love many of your quotes from Abrams above, so I’ll shut up now.
Comment by piers — 6 September 2006 @ 5:24 AM
Hi Piers –
I can’t speak for Jason… but *I* reject dualism because :
A) I’ve never seen any actual evidence for it. (Including my own so called ‘paranormal’ experiences)
B) IMO, ‘consciousness’ is an emergant property of brain. No more, no less.
C) It’s not ‘don’t want’ — give me one piece of evidence that requires dualism to explain and we’ll talk.
Please don’t pick on the *obvious* limitations of the English Language. I think we have explored this fully enough to understand that it *is* the source of much of our difficulty in this discussion.
Now as to the battery… as I said above, I think that consciousness is anemergent property of the brain, so yes, it is a result of complexity in the system. Different systems have different levels of complexity and so probably have different levels of consciousness. I would NOT assume consciousness in a battery (in fact, I’d probably outright reject it). Now this may be important: the battery still contains some small bit of life in it. All things have *life*, and all*life* feel differently. The sensation I feel as I pass under Allegheny Mountain is quite different from the sensation I feel from other mountains… and each *type of thing* is yet more distinct.
The physical world includes all eleven dimensions (or thirteen, or nine depending). The physical world includes lines of magnetism, ‘psychic’ energy, consciousness… none of these things need a “second world” to be explained.
Janene
Comment by janene — 6 September 2006 @ 8:34 AM
Janene, you’re not engaging with my points - either I didn’t make myself clear enough or they just don’t make sense to you.
I am not playing semantic games. It is very tricky talking about consciousness because it does stretch the limits of language. But the whole point about picking up on the use of words like ‘we’ or ‘I’ when talking about consciousness is that we’re talking about where that sense of being an ‘I’ comes from. There is a genuine problem with a sentence like ‘our experience of our brain function’ when it’s just been asserted that the brain is all there is when it comes to consciousness. You can’t therefore separate the brain function and the ‘I’ - they are the same in this view, so it’s the brain experiencing itself. Which led on to my next point. I wasn’t playing games.
You don’t need to believe in another universe to take the consciousness problem seriously. But to me, saying a battery has *life* is not taking anything seriously. I mean, what on earth can that mean? Doesn’t life refer to living things? If you mean that everything that exists is all part of a marvellous and unfathomed universe, therefore poetically we can say everything feels alive to us, that’s one thing. But if we’re trying to actually pin down carefully what we mean, saying a battery has life seems meaningless.
You also write:
‘ONLY if you are assuming that physical reality is equivalent to everything we know. Otherwise, it is back to the same semantical BS.’
In fact, what I wrote makes no sense if I were assuming that physical reality is equivalent to everything we know. I was specifically making the point that referring to physical reality implies the existence of non-physical reality. No semantic BS at all.
And when you say the physical world includes psychic energy, consciousness and so on, you add no light at all. You leave it completely mysterious how psychic energy and consciousness can be considered physical.
Any scientific materialist will tell you that we have no evidence for consciousness or psychic energy having a physical existence. The whole point of many psi experiments is to isolate a subject so that there are no possible ways for any physical causes to be responsible for the effects observed - eg, someone will be miles away from the thing they’re trying to influence, shielded by lead so no electromagnetic waves can get through, with all means of communication blocked, etc. In that situation, what we generally think of as physical causation can’t take place - which is why an experiment like that supports the idea that consciousness is non-physical. Of course, a stream of some kind of unidentified energy could be at work – but there’s no evidence it exists. Whereas there is lots of evidence that conscious intention can, for example, achieve effects across time (even retrospectively), which makes the energy idea problematic.
Essentially, if you start taking psi experiments and consciousness seriously, you start finding that simplistic western ideas of causation, time and physical reality start coming apart. Consciousness is deeply significant in understanding reality, as animists completely understand.
Comment by piers — 6 September 2006 @ 11:12 AM
Hey Piers –
I f my last response struck you as hostile, I apologize. That said, let’s try again
Let’s take a step back on this for a moment.
Is radiation part of the physical world?
How about quantum fluctuations?
Electromagnetism?
Wind?
In my mind, the only things that we posit as ‘other-worldly’ (or supernatural, or paranormal) are things that we do not understand. Each of those things in my list were once *not* understood, and they were each once considered to be ’supernatural. The fact that we cannot understand something *now* does not add any credence (in my mind — here we go again
)to the idea that there *must be somewhere else.*
What would you say to a Creationist that claimed that God MUST exist because we cannot fully explain origin?
That’s EXACTLY what I was getting at.
We have a word for ‘physical reality’ and therefore, physical reality must be something other than all of reality. Its circular logic based upon our linguistic heritage. This whole conversation would be much more effective if we were speaking a language founded on monoism. Since we do not share any such language, we have to do the best we can with English and give each other a little leeway when those awkward words become unavoidable.
The same way radiation, wind, and electro-magnetism can be considered physical. The same way physicists can talk about additional dimensions without needing to create a dual universe.
This is NOT Scientific Materialism. That’s the difference. Science suffers from the great misfortune of fostering reductionism. Reductionism always leads to lesser understanding, even when it provides rigorous models. That’s not to suggest that both the ideas and models of science are not useful… just that they are not the end all be all of knowledge no matter how many scientists insist otherwise!
That’s bordeline offensive, dude. I do not deal in ’simplistic wstern ideas of causation, time and physical reality. ‘ That’s the point. Every argument you have made has been against those simplistic models, but you refuse to consider the living models we are trying to offer in thier place. I’m sorry if you are not seeing them, but I can only give you a rough sketch — the rest is up to you.
Janene
Comment by janene — 6 September 2006 @ 4:41 PM
Janene, I wasn’t saying *you* held simplistic western ideas at all, so sorry for giving that impression. I appreciate the direction of thought that we’re talking about here (I like the term ‘living models’), I just have some problems with what I saw as questionable simplifications (and a kind of absolute model of the right way to be), which lead into dangerous territory. Still, I’ve got plenty of things to be thinking about as a result of this thread.
Comment by piers — 7 September 2006 @ 6:51 AM
I assume we all have, and a few of us have even participated in such things. But I think that the separation of the shamanic experience from “normal waking consciousness” is primarily an artifact of our own, Western thinking, projected onto others. As Abram writes in Spell of the Sensuous:
We “see” a very narrow band of electromagnetic energy, creating a spectrum of our “colors.” What if we could see infrared, just a slightly broader band of the very same electromagnetic spectrum? How would our perception change?
Abram helped me realize how deeply Eurocentric my readings of other cultures had been. Re-evaluating the same knowledge now, I understand that the difference between dreams, trances, and “normal waking reality” in a shamanistic or animistic culture is not the difference between the natural world and the supernatural world, but merely the difference between seeing the visible color spectrum, and seeing in infrared.
Here you’ve adopted a view that no animist would recognize. Animists readily admit that everything around them is magical and alive. Magic is not solely the domain of altered states of consciousness. Our emphasis on that is a matter of our priorities, not theirs. Animists see a great deal of magic in “normal, waking consciousness.” For them, it is no more or less magical than altered states.
My desires have little to do with it. I was a dualist once, myself. It’s a simple matter of Ockham’s Razor: the seperate realm is not only problematic, but completely unnecessary. I see absolutely nothing to suggest that such a thing exists, so why would I believe it?
I’m afraid I don’t follow. Experience is not an idea, but, well, an experience. We don’t need an idea of “experience” to experience. What we call “experience” is nothing more than the sensation of a living brain, its memory, and its sensations, and its perceptions. This does not need to include any phenomenology of experience; the experience itself exists before the conception of it. I can see where the physical brain is insufficient to explain all the things you want to ascribe to “the mind,” but I still think you’re trying desperately to make this as confusing as possible, in order to justify the existence of a “mind” that is nothing more or less than the experience of the animal brain.
Animists solve that by simply believing a battery is conscious, but for the brain’s physical experience of itself, close your eye. Press your finger against your eyelid for several seconds. Then release it and open your eye. What you just saw is called an “entoptic phenomenon.” Basically, it’s caused by your eye seeing itself: blood vessels and so forth. In the same way, the brain can be temporarily rewired so that it experiences itself: emotions being routed through normally visual areas, as your brain scrambles to turn it into a viable, recognizable image, and assigns your emotions to whatever images it finds most suitable. This is what we normally call a hallucination or trance. David Lewis-Williams includes a fascinating discussion of this in his Mind in the Cave. Now, do we need to invoke some kind of supernatural eye to explain entoptic phenomenon? No, absolutely not, we know how entoptic phenomenon works, and it’s quite natural and physical. So, why do we need a “mind” to explain how the brain can experience itself?
No, the brain is not experience, the brain experiences. Sometimes, it experiences itself. In the same fashion, the eye is not sight, the eye sees. Sometimes, it sees itself.
You’re right, but we’ve gone very far from the starting point here. An animist would’ve simply ignored your whole split of mind and brain and laughed at you for believing in such imaginary things. In our experience, as Abram argues, our consciousness does not rest in our brain at all, but in the air.
Wait … what?
I’m being dualist, because I refuse to accept the duality of reality….
That’s some very circular reasoning you have, there.
What are these “non-physical realities”? Can I see them? Touch them? Have I ever experienced any of them, ever?
Why should I believe in them?
Hoo boy. See, there’s a reason “psi experiments” are classified under pseudoscience: there is no evidence for it. The Skeptic’s Dictionary entry on “psi” is an excellent place to start for the “vast body of data” (i.e.,. “nonexistent”) on the subject.
Then why no reports of this “psi” stuff among animists? Oh sure, they know some pretty incredible stuff, but when you ask them how they know these things, they don’t say anything about the power of their mind. They say they talked to a bird, or a wind, or listened to the non-human voices around them. The rest of the world becomes another set of senses for the animist, not through any kind of mysterious “psi” powers, but simply because other things in this living world have knowledge of their own, and being able to query that knowledge gives them a distinct advantage.
No. The sense of self comes not from the brain’s experience of itself, but in the brain’s experience of others. “I” is only sensible next to “you.” Babies discover their toes and fingers; this is the formation of ego. The baby learns that it is a separate thing, in its own sensuous reality. It naturally projects its own feelings onto others; we call this empathy. It is this empathy that allows us to understand that there are other brains out there, as well, experiencing the world just as we do, through our senses. So on the contrary, I think there is a real problem leaving out “we,” since “I” can only be understood in terms of “we.”
That makes no sense whatsoever. In what way does a physical being, talking about physical reality, imply some theoretical non-physical reality?
Not that any of these experiments have ever been able to prove anything at all, mind you, but let’s take a “what if,” and suppose that someone had done some of these “psi experiments” and actually did come up with useful results. Would that prove the existence of non-physical reality?
No.
A broken line of sight? Primates are peculiar in their reliance on such things. Miles apart? Well, no natural process ever travels over miles of distance, right? All such things might accomplish (had any experiment ever come up with anything like reliable results) is an elaboration of the properties of some heretofore unknown physical process. It might tell us that this physical process does not rely on electromagnetic energy, and that it operates over long distances. How you make the leap from that, to some kind of non-physical reality is a most unintuitive and frankly absurd leap.
Well, if I take the Boogey-man seriously, the same might follow. I think the problem here is less the weakness of physical causation, than the fact that we’re simply being gullible here and accepting as true things that have been thoroughly shown false.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 7 September 2006 @ 11:30 AM
Another thing: While I do agree with the principles of animism, I disagree that non-animist think is entirely inherent to civilization. I base this on the fact that David Abram, in the first chapter of his book “Ecology of Magic,” first went to Nepal and Bali, which are quite “civilized” societies, yet still retained animistic ideologies.
And of course, examples like the animism in Egyptian religion, and Shinto.
Comment by Palatia — 7 September 2006 @ 1:45 PM
Absolutely. All sustainable societies are animist, but not all animists are sustainable. Abram dicusses this himself. Non-animism is so peculiar, it is found only among a very small number of closely related and intensely unsustainable societies.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 7 September 2006 @ 2:00 PM
That was my point: there can be unsustainable animism.
Comment by Palatia — 7 September 2006 @ 2:05 PM
Well, if you choose the evidence you take seriously then we aren’t going to get anywhere.
So animists don’t report experiences of ‘psi’ - that’s a surprise, seeing as the term doesn’t exist in their understanding. But do they understand the idea of a curse? Well, then they understand what I was calling ‘psi’.
So there’s no evidence for psi? Check out Dean Radin’s The Conscious Universe. The evidence for this psi stuff is overwhelming. If anyone, such as yourself, denies it, it’s only because you can’t accomodate it in your worldview and therefore you’re just denying it exists. Don’t quote me the Skeptic’s Dictionary - Robert Todd Carroll is not interested in truth or evidence. His Dictionary in large part consists of sneers and innuendo and dodgy reasoning, much like the arguments of his friends in CSICOP.
I find it quite remarkable that you can deny it, in fact. But then you’re in good company. As I said, scientific materialists take exactly the same position as you, for the same reason: their beliefs are incompatible with the existence of these effects.
It amazes me that you can talk about ‘the sensation of a living brain’, etc, and not notice that there’s a new element introduced here, apart from the physical reality of the brain: the awareness element. My point is that our normal understanding of external reality, as in a row of dominoes falling, or chemicals interacting, finds no need for the notion of awareness. Hence a complete description of a brain needs no need for a notion of awareness - yet awareness occurs, as we know. So there’s a gap between a physical explanation and what we know to be the case - hence the need for an invisible internal/subjective/whatever-you-want-to-use-to-describe-experience reality that isn’t the same as physical reality.
It is impossible to explain how awareness can arise from something physical, precisely because we cannot logically connect those two realms. How do you get internality/awareness out of non-awareness? Look into some philosophy of consciousness if you think this is just unnecessarily complicating things.
What I find kind of amusing is that you make this big case for animism being a better way of being, but then ignore much of what animists actually experience. And this explaining away of actual magic (ie the paranormal effects of consciousness) by calling (sophisticated) physical processes ‘magic’ is just a boring old misuse of language. Oh, so the animist is just talking about a ray of sunlight when he talks about a presence in house, eh? It’s sad this - pretending to understand a living universe whilst sitting in a scientific materialist ivory tower.
Comment by piers — 8 September 2006 @ 6:56 AM
So, wait, what was the original point of contention? Something about a dualistic worldview vs an integrated worldview, wasn’t it?
Perhaps we could just avoid certain buzzwords. I, personally, would suggest that “metaphysical”, “psi”, and “paranormal” are all too loaded with too many different connotations and denotations to be especially useful here.
Can we try to bring down into something a bit more concrete, since we are, after all supposedly discussing a point of view that just assumes the primacy of experience?
Comment by jhereg — 8 September 2006 @ 8:00 AM
[quote from=piers]Oh, so the animist is just talking about a ray of sunlight when he talks about a presence in house, eh?[/quote]
And, no, the animist isn’t [b]just[/b] talking about a ray of sunlight. But get rid of the [b]just[/b] and we might find ourselves in an interesting world….
Comment by jhereg — 8 September 2006 @ 8:02 AM
I guess my core issue is that redefining magic and expanding our understanding of human capacities, as discussed in Jason’s post, sounds great, but might be a kind of reductionism dressed up all prettily.
Here’s a concrete example. Animist peoples can use dreams or drug-induced visions or other methods to find out where they will find animals to hunt - I mean, where animals will be at some point in the future. And these animals may be many miles away, in a very specific location. To me that’s what is commonly known as magic, or the paranormal.
We can redefine it as unexplained physical interactions (I mean some stream of as-yet-identified information energy, or something), and that’s fine by me - I certainly wouldn’t call this stuff supernatural. But what I wouldn’t want to go missing is an understanding that the ‘magic’ in animists’ lives is genuinely more than hyper-tuned and highly trained sight, hearing, etc - it involves non-ordinary forms of knowing. Forms of knowing that are pretty extinct in the modern world, and have been going extinct for millennia.
I can see that some people would want to explain my example above by stuff like the animists’ subconsious knowledge of animal movements, changes in the weather, subtle auditory and olfactory signals on the wind, etc. But my point is that to do so would be reductive - and patronising. The animists themselves believe that the vision itself is a special way of knowing something, different from just using your eyes, ears and nose. To assume that it’s really simply a totally tuned-in-to-your-natural-environment way of perceiving is to miss a large chunk of reality.
It’s a different argument from the one about dualism and consciousness, but what it boils down to is whether you think these so called paranormal ways of knowing do exist for animists or not. And they apparently believe they do.
Comment by piers — 8 September 2006 @ 10:13 AM
The fact that one can only experience certain aspects of reality at certain times, (e.g. Dreamtime) does not mean that those aspects are not part of reality, it means that your perceptions are limited.
I think the wind is a very good example of a phenomenon that is REAL but is not Physical (in the sense that Wind has no mass) Wind is not the air, wind is not the heat, wind is not the coriolis forces of the spinning earth. Wind is the movement. That movement is real.
Re: Mind vs Brain
The cells of the Brain certainly do have some amount of awareness, much more than the dead wood cells in a set of dominos. Maybe more than the living wood cells in a tree. Those cells eat, respire, and possibly even reproduce (I can’t remember if adult brain cells reproduce or not).
I think one of biggest dichotomies in this discussion is the separation of the Brain from the rest of the Body. Our entire body senses reality, our hands feel the texture of the tree. Our stomachs clench as we look down a cliff wall. Our faces turn red with pleasure or embarassment. Trying to understand these processes by looking at the components is like trying to experience wind by watching the trees through a window.
JimFive
Comment by JimFive — 8 September 2006 @ 10:35 AM
Nope.
Really? Seems pretty underwhelming to me.
Or, y’know, because the “evidence” is total bullshit. How about this: if anyone, such as youself, believes it, it’s only because you’re gullible and lack basic critical thinking skills. Not so nice when it gets turned around, is it? Suffice to say, I find the evidence for your psi … “wanting.” At best.
Nice of you to infer all that about me, but no, in fact, I was a good Catholic boy. I watched all the “In Search Of” episodes with Leonard Nimoy, and read up on UFO’s and psi and all that stuff, and eventually I figured out … it was all bullshit. There was no evidence. The skeptics were right. There was nothing there. It was pretty shattering for me back then. I moved on and got over it.
Actually, psi supports the scientific worldview, which is rooted in Cartesian dualism.
It amazes me that you can talk about ‘vision’, etc, and not notice that there’s a new element introduced here, apart from the physical reality of the eye: the vision element.
Oh, wait, because that’s perfectly understandable in purely physical terms? You’re mighty quick to splinter off awareness into its own realm, without any justification whatsoever. Why do you suppose that is? Seems you already have a notion of what the world is like, and you’re just looking for evidence to support it, then projecting all your worries about “worldview” onto me. The sensation of “awareness” is perfectly understandable in purely physical terms–just like sight. I don’t see any reason to break it off into some ethereal realm anymore than sight.
Your point is deeply, deeply flawed. What is awareness? You feel a need to attach it to something mysterious, otherworldly, perhaps even eternal. This is not necessarily so. Awareness could just as easily be nothing more than a subjective experience. That’s certainly what the evidence indicates. We could explain the evidence in a very complicated way, involving “awareness” as some other thing, and creating a whole, parallel world for it, and so forth; or we could apply Ockham’s Razor, and accept the simplest explanation, that “awareness” is simply a subjective experience of the sensuous world.
There’s an unspoken assumption here that awareness is, in fact, something qualitatively different from the physical. That is the assumption that I think is utterly unfounded. To put it in parlance you might be better able to appreciate, awareness is a “trick,” like a magic trick. (But of course, that’s a very superficial level that only makes sense in a dualistic mindset–the next step is to reject dualism, and understand that it’s not a “trick,” it is magic!)
Same way you get “life” from “non-life,” or “light” from “non-light” or “high humidity” from “non-high humidity.” First comes the understanding that “awareness” is not some otherworldly, qualitatively different thing. There are degrees of awareness, and awareness can build as surely as life, light or humidity, and in very much the same ways. Your argument is as nonsensical as the Creationists who reject evolution for lack of a “missing link.”
I’m fully aware of that branch of philosophy, and I find much of it to be so much self-important, anthropocentric hum-drum. As Whitehead wrote, “The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato,” because Plato’s dualism is the fundamental assumption of all the rest. Abram has a Ph.D in philosophy, and most of the book deals with phenomenology, which is probably the first sensible philosophical approach to consciousness since Plato.
No, I’m ignoring what you say they experience, because they don’t actually experience any of that. See, I, like Abram, have studied animists in their own words. You’re making up claims as you go along. You haven’t cited a single actual piece of evidence, you just keep repeating it over and over again because it’s something you believe, so obviously animists experience it too. I’ve never heard of any animist, anywhere, talk about psi. They talk about flying in their dreams; they talk about the things the birds tell them; but they never attribute their knowledge to their own psionic powers. In fact, when a naive Westerner puts it in that way, they laugh at him for being so stupid as to believe something so foolish.
As for the rest, jhereg for the win.
OK, now consider this. A shaman is also a hunter. He’s been observing the signs and patterns. It’s a vast body of data, far too much to process consciously, but the unconscious mind is able to make intuitive leaps and assemble much larger data sets into recognizable patterns. These get fed through the visual centers of the brain, so the brain scrambles to assign this information to some reasonable icon. The shaman ends up with a dream where he goes to Deer, and asks where he can find deer, and how many he can take down this season. The rest is a black box. It may not be understood, but it doesn’t NEED to be understood. The shaman trusts his own experience, and his experience is an encounter with Deer, telling him where to hunt, and how many he can take down.
If the shaman says that Deer told him where and how much to hunt this season, he’s absolutely right.
If I say his unconscious brain is assembling large data sets, I’m absolutely right.
Does one dismiss the other? No. I can talk about the cones and rods in the eye, or I can talk about the chemical composition of the pigments and the canvas, or I can talk about the geographical location of the landscape painting, or I can talk about how the picture moves me, emotionally. Each level is simultaneously true. No level detracts from any of the others.
By a historical accident, “faith” and “science” have become enemies of one another. This is unfortunate, since a life without faith is dull, and a life without science is stupid. We have the capacity to understand things on emotional and logical levels, simultaneously. We should do so. Otherwise, we’re cutting ourselves off from a full half of experience.
If that’s the way you need to understand it at first, piers, then call it “just” a ray of sunlight, but I do hope you can then move on to understanding how much nonsense that “just” really is. It’s a ray of sunlight. It is a prescence, and a power, and it moves everything else around it.
I see absolutely no evidence to support an idea like that. Could you please cite what research you’ve done? Where did you do your field work?
It is a special way of knowing, and it is different from your eyes, ears and nose, just like your eyes are a special way of knowing, different from your dreams, ears, and nose. The animists I’ve studied made little distincton between their sensuous experience of the world, and their dream experience. They considered their dreams as reliable as their own senses, and made inquiries of birds as readily as other people. I do not see any evidence for animists separating dreams and trances into a special order of sensation, though I have often seen that projected onto them by Westerners: “neo-shamans” and others interested in some manner of “mystical” experience from the “Noble Savages.”
Your logic is circular again: you’re presuming your conclusion.
No, they don’t. The distinction between “normal” and “paranormal” does not exist for them. They don’t really care what you label them. They trust their experience, whether waking or in dreams. If you want to separate them, accept them, reject them, elevate one over another or do rank them in a hierarchy, that’s your business, and utterly alien to the animist approach.
Very much so. One of the things I liked best in Abram’s book was how much he drove this point home. We’re not minds wearing bodies like clothes—we are bodies.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 8 September 2006 @ 11:22 AM
Okay, here’s one specific example of the definition problems that this thread has suffered from:
[quote]We can redefine it as unexplained physical interactions (I mean some stream of as-yet-identified information energy, or something), and that’s fine by me - I certainly wouldn’t call this stuff supernatural. But what I wouldn’t want to go missing is an understanding that the ‘magic’ in animists’ lives is genuinely more than hyper-tuned and highly trained sight, hearing, etc - it involves [b]non-ordinary[/b] forms of knowing. Forms of knowing that are pretty extinct in the modern world, and have been going extinct for millennia. [/quote]
Note that I put [b]non-ordinary[/b] in bold. What is ordinary? What is non-ordinary? Are we talking about “primitive” animists? modern “civilized” humans? corn?
Okay, probably not corn….
My point is that you’re trying to use a subjective term to define an objective measurement. This is the critical failing that reductionism has brought us to. As long as we keep playing that game and trying to use reductionist definitions for an integrative world, we’re going to have problems wrapping our heads around it….
Now, piers, I don’t know exactly what you mean by ‘psi’, and to be honest I think that [b]might[/b] be my only objection to your use of it.
An example, at one point I started dabbling with tarot cards. Now, after having spent quite a bit of time with them doing readings for myself and quite a few others (some strangers, some not) I’ve accumulated enough experiences to say that there [b]is[/b] something to it*.
But there’s nothing about an integrated worldview that discounts that. A lot of people put that under the heading of supernatural or metaphysical or paranormal or ‘non-ordinary’, but to me, it’s anything [b]but[/b] those things.
It’s completely natural, I have no doubt that [b]whatever[/b] the mechanism is it’s bound to the physical world [b]somehow[/b], even if I don’t know how.
*This may easily be discounted, but I’d like to go ahead and point out that I don’t attribute any more power to the [b]cards[/b] themselves than I would to any tool, in fact I think of them more as a crutch. Helpful when you’re not “complete”, but the goal should always be to remove the “need” to use them.
Comment by jhereg — 8 September 2006 @ 12:40 PM
Jason, I apologise - it was wrong of me to say that you’re only saying that because it’s incompatible with your beliefs. That’s an assumption, and a rude one too. I do think there’s overwhelming evidence for psi, but there are all kinds of detailed critiques of the evidence too. I guess one chooses which seems most convincing.
We’re obviously not going to get any further with our disagreement on awareness and the physical. However, let me just say:
I’m not *assuming* awareness is different from the physical. I’m concluding that.
I agree, awareness is a subjective experience - by definition. But the whole point is, how does this ‘interiority’ come about? You say the sensation of ‘awareness’ is perfectly explicable in physical terms, but that’s not true. We can see brains ‘from the outside’, we can see the particular brain processes that correlate with different states of awareness, but we can’t see why a particular configuration of chemicals should be aware at all. Where does this mysterious thing of being ‘in here’ experiencing something, anything, come from? It’s not creating a problem where none exists, it’s looking straight at the elephant in the room - we’re so used to being aware that it seems so completely normal and obvious. Yet I find it completely astonishing that we’re conscious at all. Why does consciousness exist at all? I can imagine complex living things that aren’t conscious. Do we feel the need to posit consciousness in a single celled creature? Not for our understanding of what it is to seem complete. That also applies in principle to mammals - there’s no need to introduce some awareness idea to understand completely what they are. Yet awareness exists in mammals, at least human ones.
Here’s an example that is my final attempt to explain why there’s a key difference between brains and accompanying awareness:
The brain of someone looking at the colour red has a certain configuration. The same person also experiences the colour red (we all know what that is like - it’s redness! Just imagine the colour red, and you have it. Philosophers call that a quale). Now, however closely or cleverly you examined the brain of this person, you would never encounter that redness-experience. You would see the brain. So where in the brain is that redness experience? It’s not there. You can give a *complete* description of that brain without including a description of the redness experience. Sure, the red-processing chemicals states are there, yes. But redness itself is something that exists ‘in our heads’ - in our experience - in consciousness. Redness-experience is not a chemical state, it is an awareness - by definition. It is subjective, sure, but what is it/where is it? It’s somehow the other side of the brain state coin, but in what way? There’s a difference between the redness experience and the brain state when perceiving red.
That’s as close as I can get to describing or conveying the essence of the philosophical problem and if you can’t see the problem, I can’t convey it. It’s just not a real problem for you - what I’m saying must seem like the ranting of a madman who sees something in the air that you don’t. I find this lack of understanding frustrating, rather mind-boggling, and slightly incomprehensible.
This awareness we possess is a mystery to me. I’d say it is the most fundamental unsolved problem facing science (Richard Dawkins thinks that too).
But that’s enough on that.
I agree we think with more than just our brains. The brain is really a shorthand for physical information processing in the body.
I agree that we do, as per the book Blink, process information in the black box way Jason describes - but in my view, we also use consciousness to carry out what Scruff called a non-local transfer of information. I believe in a world where both exist. It’s complicated, but it’s wonderful - so multifaceted and so dazzlingly… real. And of course I know a ray of sunlight is also a magical thing of almost infinite richness. The ‘just’ was making a different point. I don’t disagree that without that psi stuff the world is wondrous and ‘magical’, I just think that psi stuff is part of the picture.
As for my research or my field work, I have done none. Just as you haven’t done any ganzfeld experiments, which doesn’t stop you from having opinions about them. I have read numerous accounts of individuals who have lived with San, with pygmies, with Amazonian people, with Inuit and other groups, and in those accounts there are many stories of dreams predicting things, or drug induced visions that provided information that was acted on the next day, or the ability to know that someone was in trouble when that person was hundreds of miles away, and so on. Those include the words of the animists themselves, in some cases. I haven’t got the references in front of me, but I don’t need to give them. You know some of the same accounts. Robert Wolff describes one or two of them. They can be ‘explained away’ using your black box type explanation, or coincidence, and so on, but I find those explanations in many cases (but not all) thoroughly unconvincing, especially given the repeated nature of the accounts.
OK, animists don’t rank these kinds of experiences. I don’t either. I *distinguish* between them, as I distinguish between my dreams and my waking experiences, my intuitions and my sensory perceptions, and my point from the start has been that animists do too. If I get a strong sense that I’m going to meet a problem as I drive round a corner, I pay greater attention to what I’m doing. If I then use my eyes and see there’s nothing on the road ahead, I trust my eyes. I don’t privilege one over the other. I don’t even use the term normal for one and paranormal for the other, but I’m quite aware they’re different. That’s what you’re saying about animists, isn’t it?
Yes, Jhereg, I completely agree with that post. I hold an integrated worldview, even if this thread makes it sound as though I don’t. Actually, it’s clear that in my view consciousness, even if seen as having a different nature from ‘physical’ stuff, interacts with that stuff, and therefore is on a continuum with it.
Have a good weekend everyone.
Comment by piers — 8 September 2006 @ 1:04 PM
Re: The awareness problem
No matter how hard you look at the inner workings of your computer. No matter how much you map out the transistors and the electrical flow within the computer you will never find the letter ‘A’, so how did this ‘A’ get on your screen? Is it necessary to posit an ‘other’ world where the ‘A’ exists.
The Red-Experience is not in the Brain. The Red-experience is in the Eye and in the Object that is Red.
JimFive
Comment by JimFive — 8 September 2006 @ 1:32 PM
Nicely put, Jim
Janene
Comment by janene — 8 September 2006 @ 8:06 PM
This Oct. 10th Have A HAPPY DOR DAY!
In honor of A(lfred) Irving Hallowell
(source)
Died 10 Oct 1974 (born 28 Dec 1892) American cultural anthropologist who was an authority on the Northern Ojibwa Indians. He used tests of perception, and particularly favoured the Rorschach ink blot test to assess individual Ojibwa personalities. Hallowell collected a series of 266 Rorschach records from various Ojibwa communities, and although he never prepared an over-all summary of the results in the form of a sketch of typical Ojibwa personality structures, he used the data in a number of papers. All of Hallowell’s field work was undertaken among American Indians. He published many studies of the tribes and made important contributions to culture- and- personality theory. His book Culture and Experience appeared in 1955.« The Ojibwa of Berens River, Manitoba: Ethnography into History, by A. Irving Hallowell, et al.
October 10th is DOR day! What is DOR day you might ask?
A day of respect, or DOR DAY!
OK… so here is either a holiday for Bioregional Animists, a cognitive challenge, or a weekly or even daily practice… I guess it depends on you!
But here is the idea…
Find time to, just for the heck of it, think like an animist all day. Take the whole day to do it too…
by this I mean RELATE to every thing around you as a person ( an other than human person, NOT an anthropomorphised person, for you newbs to new animism) see how relating to every thing around you as a person changes your perception and your actions. Ask your self questions, ask other than human persons questions. Be mindful and respectful in your relations, but do this all day, and just see what happens.
It can be easy for us to take on the animist practice in theory and it can be easy to have relationships with powerful beings in nature like bears and cougars etc… but to extend animist thought and behavior into everything that we do for a day will be a hard rewiring for many of us not raised in a traditional animist home, and might even be hard for those of us who were!
This is a Day Of Respect to other-than-human-persons and of cultivating respectful relationships. It forces us to reevaluate of indoctrinated assumptions and behaviors and form new healthier ones…deepening our roots to our life place through the cultivation of new ways of thinking and acting in our life place… its a time of transformation and change, honor and respect… communication, acknowledgment, and celebration!
Especially CELEBRATION!!! Focus this on this day in ways we can cultivate new celebratory relationships with natural cycles and other-than-human-persons ( who might be a natural cycle as well… hmmm….), maybe ask the land how it celebrates its birthday, or the coming of winter, or how it honors its dead? DOR day is a day of communion and discovering how we might celebrate and honor our lives as animists.
Have a Happy DOR DAY!
Thanks Irving for opening a Door…
Comment by little lightening bolt — 8 October 2007 @ 6:21 PM