The self begins as an extension of the breathing flesh of the world, and the things around us, in turn, originate as reverberations echoing the pains and pleasures of our body.
...the inwardly felt sentience of the child is a correlate of the outwardly felt wakefulness of the sky and the steadfast support of the ground, and the willfulness of the caressing wind;
it is a concomitant of the animate surroundings.
Only much later, as the child is drawn deeply into the whirling vortex of verbal language...is the contemporary child liable to learn that...human persons alone are the carriers of consciousness in this world.
Such a lesson amounts to a denial of much of the child's felt experience, and commonly precipitates a rupture between her speaking self and the rest of her sensitive and sentient body. Yet the pain of this rupture is quickly forgotten by the speaking self...
But the breathing body, this ferociously attentive animal, still remembers.
Please see the original text. This is abbreviated for a brief taste. I am quoting David Abrams from his new book
Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology
. He uses language to bring us outside or beneath language.I am savoring this text, reading it a little at a time and carrying the felt sense into my daily life, city life. You are welcome to work through this text with me (very slowly). At this time I am posting brief excerpts and reflections on Abram's Becoming Animal on the Citta 101 Practice Board.
