Humans are tuned for relationship. The eyes, the skin, the tongue, ears, and nostrils – all are gates where our body receives the nourishment of otherness. The landscape pf shadowed voices, these feathered bodies and antlers and tumbling streams – these breathing shapes are our family, the beings with whom we are engaged, with whom we struggle and suffer and celebrate. For the largest part of our species’ existence, humans have negotiated relationships with every aspect of the sensuous surroundings, exchanging possibilities with every flapping form, with each textured surface and shivering entity that we happen to focus upon. All could speak, articulating in gesture and whistle and sigh a shifting web of meanings that we felt on our skin or inhaled through our nostrils or focused with our listening ears, and to which we replied – whether with sounds, or through movements, or minute shifts of mood. The color of the sky, the rush of the waves – every aspect of the earthly sensuous could draw us into a relationship fed with curiosity and spiced with danger. Every sound was a voice, every scrape or blunder was a meeting – with Thunder, with Oak, with Dragonfly. And from all of these relationships our collective sensibilities were nourished.
To touch the course skin of a tree is, at the same time, to experience one’s own tactility, to feel oneself touched by the tree. And to see the world is also, at the same time, to experience oneself as visible, to feel oneself seen. We can experience things – we can touch, hear, and taste things – only because we ourselves are entirely a part of the sensible world that we perceive. We might as well say that we are organs of this world, flesh of its flesh, and that the world is perceiving itself through us.
The “real world” in which we find ourselves, then – the very world the sciences strive to fathom – is not sheer “object,” but is rather an intertwined matrix of sensations and perceptions, a collective field of experience lived through from many different angles. The mutual inscription of others in my experience, and (I must assume) of myself in their experiences, effects the interweaving of our individual phenomenal fields into a single, ever-shifting fabric, a single phenomenal world or “reality.”
To touch the course skin of a tree is, at the same time, to experience one’s own tactility, to feel oneself touched by the tree. And to see the world is also, at the same time, to experience oneself as visible, to feel oneself seen. We can experience things – we can touch, hear, and taste things – only because we ourselves are entirely a part of the sensible world that we perceive. We might as well say that we are organs of this world, flesh of its flesh, and that the world is perceiving itself through us.
The “real world” in which we find ourselves, then – the very world the sciences strive to fathom – is not sheer “object,” but is rather an intertwined matrix of sensations and perceptions, a collective field of experience lived through from many different angles. The mutual inscription of others in my experience, and (I must assume) of myself in their experiences, effects the interweaving of our individual phenomenal fields into a single, ever-shifting fabric, a single phenomenal world or “reality.”
-From The Spell of the Sensuous, by David Abram
