Sensing Nature by Dr David Abram
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Loading ...This is 10 clips from a seminar called: The Ecology of Perception and Language By: Dr. David Abram, November 5th, 2010 Stockholm Sweden
Description of seminar:
David talks about his research into the ecology of perception: how sensory perception binds our separate nervous systems into the encompassing ecosystem; how and why different cultures perceive the surrounding earth in very different ways; and on the ecology of language:
the way in which our words, or what we say, profoundly influences what we see, or hear, or even taste of the more-than-human natural world around us.
David Abram is an ecologist, anthropologist, and philosopher who lectures widely around the world. He is the author of Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology (just published by Pantheon Books) and The Spell of the Sensuous, for which he received many awards. His essays on the cultural causes and consequences of ecological turmoil have been published in numerous magazines, scholarly journals and anthologies. David is co-founder and director of the Alliance for Wild Ethics (AWE); he lives with his family in the foothills of the southern Rocky Mountains, US.
The seminar was free of charge. It was a joint arrangement between Studieförbundet Vuxenskolan, Albaeco and Naturakademin Learning lab.
Words from Dr David Abram
1) Explaining sensing
In this clip:
- If we are cut off from relations so old in our organism that you are evolved with them, off course we are completely easily susceptible to stress of modern life.
-Explain that we can open up our senses again (Introduktion)
2) Perceptual crisis
In this clip:
-Abram speak of the ecological crisis as a perceptual crisis
-Describes how other style of sensitivity is disappearing
-Describes our human sensory blindness
-Explain how we can open up ourselves to experience the non human voices of the earth
3) The heartbeat is wild
In his clip:
-Abram tell us about the scientific research of windcurrents in a room
-Ask if the chaotic behaivour of raindrops really should be called chaotic
-Define what is out of control and what is out of OUR control
-Tell us about the wildness that we are made of
4) The rich otherness
-Abram answer the question: What about human to human relationships, don’t we need to heal our relationship between ourselves first?
-Defines inanimate and animate
-Describe the beautiful human longing for all of the rich otherness, the richness of the wild
5) An experience very old in us
In this clip:
-Abram explain this experience as common to our indigenous ancestor
-Describes that everything we can sense can be assumed to be alive
-The different experience of being alive for different beings
-Give us inspiration to awake our animal senses, our human animal senses
-Vividly explains that you can not emphasize with a inanimate object so therefore it is much more practical to assume that everything is alive
6) An answer to why.Part 1
In his clip:
Some one in the audience ask, why do we do it, why do we cut ourselves off?
-The world that we are not relating to
-We need to remember us self to, become members again not only on this earth but in this earth
-It is not a particular nice place
-Things out there can eat us
-Identifying with our animal body means accepting that we are out of our control, we are vulnerable
-The world is beginning to choke and bite back.
7) An answer to why. Part 2
In his clip:
-The reason is fear, each moment that we are vulnerable
-Its better to hide in abstraction than to have the senses awake
-If we would feel the real loss it will hurt
-We need to find our way back to the biosphere
-A threshold of grief
Air, if sacred
In his clip:
-Respiration and spirit has the same linguistic root
-Spiritus means a gust of wind and the psyche means to breath
-Atmosphere, have the linguistic root, the soul which is in the air
-The invisible air binds us to the oceans, to the soil
-The air is also moving our own thoughts, our dreams
-The air connect us to the world
9) Blindspots of divine faith
In this clip:
-Traditional religious blindspots
-The closed down style of belief, how it have supported the impulse to hide
-Break out of that blindspots, heal it
-An animal faith
-Our bodies faith in the active support of the ground, the nourishment of the world
-Our language only give us ways of thinking of that place the wholeness somewhere else. This earth is such a wholeness
-The life of the earth is eternal
10) Breath and poetry
In his clip:
- Abram tell us about how the very old Eairthly cosmonology is hidden in the traditional religions
- Tell us about the indigenous notions of holy wind, awarness and breath
- Vividly give us Maria Rilkes poem,”the inner what is it if not intensified sky….”
