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    Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology
    Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology
    Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology
    Audiobook13 hours

    Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology

    Written by David Abram

    Narrated by David Abram

    4.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    As the climate veers toward catastrophe, the innumerable losses cascading through the biosphere make vividly evident the need for a metamorphosis in our relation to the living land. For too long we've inured ourselves to the wild intelligence of our muscled flesh, taking our primary truths from technologies that hold the living world at a distance. This book subverts that distance, drawing listeners ever deeper into their animal senses in order to explore, from within, the elemental kinship between the body and the breathing Earth.

    The shapeshifting of ravens, the erotic nature of gravity, the eloquence of thunder, the pleasures of being edible: all have their place in Abram's investigation. He shows that from the awakened perspective of the human animal, awareness (or mind) is not an exclusive possession of our species but a lucid quality of the biosphere itself-a quality in which we, along with the oaks and the spiders, steadily participate.

    With the audacity of its vision and the luminosity of its prose, Becoming Animal sets a new benchmark for the human appraisal of our place in the whole.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateJul 20, 2017
    ISBN9781541470972
    Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology

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    • 4/5
      With this book, David Abram seeks to bring us deeply into ourselves and our felt experience. The book is composed of engaging personal stories sprinkled with perspectives from various philosophers.What if everything is animate? The trees, the wind, the rocks? How do we behave differently when we know that the world around us is perceiving us as we perceive it?What if mind is not our own, but something we move through, part of the landscape? Have you ever noticed the ways in which different landscapes and environments affect you?Although Abram doesn't touch on trends such as "fake news" and "flat earthers" (nor are we led to believe he would endorse such movements), these seemingly irrational concepts do tell us something about the modern human experience. Maybe our society has moved too far in the direction of trust vested in figures of authority (scientists, news agencies, politicians). Nationalist Luddism may indicate that there is a social undercurrent desirous of ideas that can be verified simply and profoundly with our own senses and capacities.In a world that is increasingly mediated, there is some sense to coming back to an ethic of mastery of our own perceptive capacities, especially when we approach the exercise of perception as a mutualistic experience with an animate earth.If you're looking for both a mature and magical way to rekindle your sense of wonder with the world, this book might be just the taste of it takes to enter such a world.