[The] "...world is encountered not as a conglomeration of determinate objects, but as a community of subjects – as a relational field of animate, active agencies in which we humans, too, are participant."
I heard you already motherfucker. I gotta it the first time go drink sober beer and leave me alone. I'm tired of both of your bullshit. Nothing you have ever told me has helped. FUCK YOU. LEAVE ME ALONE. BOTH OF YOU.
>>17669346
what active agencies are these that you speak of?
Are they bugs and aliens, dragons and spiders?
The magic skills of the shaman are rooted in his or her ability to shift out of his common state of awareness in order to contact, and learn from, these other powers in the surrounding Earth. Only by regularly shedding the accepted perceptual logic of his culture can the shaman hope to enter into relation with other species on their own terms; only by altering the common organization of her senses is she able to make contact and communicate with the other shapes of sentience and sensitivity with which human existence is entwined. And so it is this, we might say, that defines a shaman: the ability to readily slip out of the collective perceptual boundaries that define his or her culture – boundaries held in place by social customs, taboos, and especially the common language – in order to directly engage, and negotiate with, the multiple non-human sensibilities that animate the local Earth.
>>17669358
Full quote:
"When the natural world is perceived not from the spectator-like position of a detached or disembodied intellect, but rather from an embodied position situated entirely within that world, one encounters no aspect of that world that is definitively inert or inanimate. “Animism” remains a useful term for this highly embodied, and embedded, mode of perception. In this sense, “animism” may be said to name a primordial mode of perception that admits of no clear distinction between that which is animate and that which is inanimate. Rather, every phenomenon that draws our attention is perceived, or felt, to be at least potentially animate. Each perceived thing has its own rhythm and style, its own interior animation. Everything moves – although, clearly, some things move much slower than other things, like the mountains, or the ground underfoot.
A short, haiku-like poem by Gary Snyder neatly illustrates this style of awareness:
As the crickets' soft, autumn hum
is to us
so are we to the trees
as are they
to the rocks and the hills.
Each entity in this poem has its own dynamism, its own rhythm – and yet each rhythm is vastly different, in the pace of its pulse, from the others. Nevertheless each entity is also listening, mindful of the other rhythms around it.
To such an embodied, and embedded, perspective, the enveloping world is encountered not as a conglomeration of determinate objects, but as a community of subjects – as a relational field of animate, active agencies in which we humans, too, are participant."
>>17669366
heidegger wrote about this shit in the 1920s
