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A Review and Comparison of the Recent Writings of Iain McGillchrist, Bill Plotkin amd David Abram
Author : Don Hills
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In
what
follows I have tried to glean the essence of these author’s
understanding of the ‘pluses and minuses’ of Western culture, as it has
evolved
to date. Their respective highly imaginative, well researched and
readable
tomes – The Master and his Emissary (2009) by
Iaian McGilchrist, Nature and the Human Soul
(2008) by Bill
Plotkin, and Becoming Animal (2010)
by David Abram - have each inspired and challenged my own world view,
as well
as day to day living guidelines. I’ve gathered my thoughts under three
main
headings – some important background information, theoretical structure
of
their main work, and its relevance to life today.
Background information.
It’s
very important to
look carefully at where these three authors are coming from, in
grasping their
respective messages to the world in which we live. McGilchrist.
Very
helpful in
understanding his background, is the interview he gave earlier this
year (Feb
2010) to Frontier Psychiatrist on the Internet. The first question he
was asked
was about his change of tack, from being a scholar of English
literature to
doctor, and then to psychiatrist.
Said Iain
“Much as I loved working with literature, I began to see that the
explicit
approach to a work of art, which the critical process demanded, was
inherently
unsatisfactory. It substituted something abstract, cerebral and
generalised for
an entity, the whole purpose of which was to lead us into the opposite
direction. The encounter between the work of art – the poem or whatever
– and
ourselves was not like dealing with an object, more like the encounter
of two
people, each unique, each embodied, each an indissoluble whole that
could only
be mis-represented by examining its parts.”
Iain then looked at the mind-body
problem from a practical point of view, concluding “I thought I ought
to train
in medicine and find out for myself, in a more embodied way, what it
was like
when things went wrong with people’s brains and bodies, and how that
affected
their minds. So I wrote a book about my concerns called Against
Criticism and
went off to study medicine. Then after a brief spell of neurology, I
went to
the Maudsley to train as a psychiatrist.”
His comments on why he moved from medicine into
psychiatry are also
revealing – “When I was a House Physician, I remember there were all
these
patients who came in with chest pain. Of course we did ECGs and cardiac
enzymes – but no
luck…..I remember
working for the Professor of Medicine: the tests we were supposed to
send for,
all done on one page of A4 and half-way down the next. But no-one
thought
of….sitting down with them and asking about their lives, their families
etc.
And when I was House Surgeon it was the same, except the problem now
was
abdominal pain. But the same picture – loads of tests, drips, and
invasive
procedures: zero insight into the most common cause of abdominal pain.
The
psyche….”
Finally, what about his move from the
NHS into private psychiatric practice, and authorship of The
Master and his
Emissary? “I never foresaw”, he said, “that I would end up
working
privately – I was completely committed to the ideal of the NHS; and to
this day
I do not have health insurance myself. But I could not ignore what was
happening. I felt deskilled working as a psychiatrist in the NHS. A
largely
politically motivated, and in my view deeply mistaken, drive to
marginalize the
role of the psychiatrist, and with it the skills of diagnosis and
appropriate
treatment, has been disastrous….far too little patient contact. On top
of that,
I wanted freedom to be in control of my time and the way in which I
worked. I
knew I wanted to write the book that became The Master and
his Emissary and
I knew that there was no way I could do that unless I could choose to
work as I
do now, fitting a normal week’s work into three very long days (during
which,
incidentally I get as much clinical contact as I would have done in
weeks in
the NHS.) This gives me a fighting chance of spending the intercalated
days in
the library and on research.’ Plotkin.
Bill is a depth psychologist, guide of
wilderness rites, ecotherapist, author and speaker. As the founder of Animas
Valley Institute (
The Animas Valley Institute’s mission
is ‘to help people become more fully human by uncovering the mysteries
of their
souls – their unique way of belonging and contributing to this world –
and by deepening
and broadening their intimacy with the wild earth.’ This organisation
‘envisions a world in which inspired youth, true adults, and wise
elders work
together to create an eco-centric, just, and deeply imaginative
society.’ It
supports the ideals of the Great Work (Thomas Berry) and the Great
Turning
(Joanna Macy) by aiming to ‘assist people to become visionary leaders
and
artisans of cultural change.’ Abram.
Perhaps the clearest way of grasping
David’s background is this quote from the jacket cover of his latest
book,
‘Becoming Animal’:
‘David Abram is a cultural
ecologist and environmental philosopher who lectures and teaches widely
on
several continents. Named by Utne Reader as one of
the one hundred
visionaries transforming the world, he received a Lannan Literary Award
for his
earlier book, The Spell of the Sensuous. Director
of the
He holds a special place in the hearts
of the GreenSpirit movement for his inspiring contribution to the 2004
Annual
Gathering at Theoretical
structure of major work
McGilchrist.
Iain’s
interest in the
divided brain arose from Bogen and Sperry’s work in the 1960’s and
‘70s. They
found that the right and left hemispheres interpret and create the
world
differently, with different modes of attention, priorities and values.
But
according to Iain, the early work didn’t prosper because researchers
were
looking for different ‘functions’ for the two halves, as if the brain
were a
machine with a lot of little specialised modules. Over time it was
discovered
that each ‘function’ was carried out in both hemispheres,
and so people
gave up looking for a real difference. For Iain in his study of
neurology, this
was obviously a false conclusion, bearing in mind the objective
differences in
the shape, size, neuronal architecture, neurochemistry and
neuropsychology of
the two hemispheres. “What I began to see,” he said in the interview
with
Frontier Psychiatrist “with John Cutting’s work on the right hemisphere
was
that the difference lay not in what they do, but how they do it.” Thus: - the
right is capable of appreciating ambiguity, the
implicit and the metaphorical, where the left tends to require
certainty, the
explicit and the literal, - the
right sees the broad context and the world as a
seamless whole, interconnected with itself, where the left focusses on
detail
and produced a lot of separate fragments, - the
right is far more capable of understanding new
information, while the left deals with the already known, - the
right sees individuals, where the left sees
categories, - the
right realises the importance of what is intuitive and
embodied (see below), where the left prioritises abstraction and
rationality
(rather than reason, to which both hemispheres need to contribute).” For
Iain, all of this ‘illuminated problems in the nature of human thought
and
experience that I had struggled with all my life, and which had been
brought
into focus by my study of literature.’
So where then, for him, lies the
importance of the natural world? It comes through, I suggest, in his
use of the
term ‘embodied’. In the final chapter of The Master
and his Emissary Iain
notes:
‘There has, in my view, been a
tendency (in the West) to discount and marginalize the importance of
our
embodied nature, as if it were incidental about us, rather than
essential to
us: our very thinking, never mind our feeling, is bound up with our
embodied
nature….so does the converse, that the material world is not wholly
distinct
from consciousness in some way that remains elusive.’ (p.439).
However, he does see some light in
this puzzle when considering Oriental culture:
‘The pattern of psychological
differences between Oriental people and Westerners suggests the
possibility of
a different relationship between the hemispheres……The sharp dichotomy
in our
culture between the ways of being of the two hemispheres, which began
in
Ancient Greece, does not appear to exist in the same way in Oriental
culture:
their experience of the world is still effectively grounded in that of
the
right hemisphere’ (p. 452). He then comes to the point:
‘The recognition (in
Iain also points out that a famous
Japanese anthropologist, Iwata, argues that amongst the Japanese as
well as
most southeast Asian people, whether formally Buddhist or Christian,
there
exists an ‘intuition’ (Iain’s term) of animism.
‘Everything surrounding human life,
including mountains, hills, rivers, plants, trees, animals, fish and
insects,
has its own spirit (kami), and these spirits
communicate with one
another, as well as with those who live there……natural things cannot,
therefore, be seen by them as merely objects, as in Western science.’
(p.453).
After considering the available
evidence, Iain concludes that ‘the East Asian cultures use strategies
of both
hemispheres more evenly, while Western strategies are steeply skewed
towards
the left hemisphere. In other words, the Emissary appears to work in
harmony
with the Master in the East, but is in the process of usurping him in
the
West’! (p. 458).
NB. As further evidence for Plotkin.
Of our three major authors, Bill’s
theoretical structure is easily the most detailed and worked through.
The
publishers of his book Nature and the Human Soul
actually call it ‘A
Manifesto for Personal and Cultural Transformation’ and we are told
that the
book ‘addresses the pervasive longing for meaning and fulfilment at
this time
of crisis’ and that it ‘introduces a visionary ecopsychology of human
development that reveals how fully and creatively we can mature when
soul and
wild nature guide us.’ His manifesto/model is based on three premises: 1. That
a more mature human society requires more mature human
individuals. 2. That
nature (including our own deeper nature, soul) has
always provided, and still provides the best template for human
maturation. 3. That
every human being has a unique and mystical
relationship to the wild world, and that the conscious discovery and
cultivation of that relationship is at the core of true adulthood. Regarding
this ‘maturity’, Bill tells us:
‘Western civilization has buried most
of (its) mystical roots, yet this knowledge has been at the heart of
every
indigenous tradition known to us, past and present, including those
from which
our own societies emerged’ (p 3).
He goes on to say that his book is
basically asking the question – ‘what do the stages of modern human
development
look like when we grow, in each stage,
with nature and soul as our primary guides?’ His
answer is an
eight-stage model which shows ‘how we can take root in a childhood of
innocence
and wonder; sprout into an adolescence of creative fire and
mystery-probing
adventures; blossom into an authentic adulthood of cultural artistry
and
visionary leadership; and finally ripen into a seed-scattering
elderhood of
wisdom, grace, and the holistic tending of the more-than-human world.’
(p 5).
He describes his model as ‘ecocentric’ in two respects: 1. The
eight life stages are arrayed around a nature-based
circle (as opposed to Western style linearity). Beginning and ending in
the
east and proceeding clockwise (sunwise), the stages and their
attributes are
based primarily on the qualities found in the four seasons, or possibly
on the
four times of the day. 2. The
developmental task that characterises each stage has a
nature-oriented dimension, as well as a more familiar (to us)
culture-oriented
dimension. Bill gives the example of the nature task in middle
childhood as
learning the enchantment of the natural world through absorbing outdoor
activities, while the cultural task is learning the social practices,
values,
knowledge, history, mythology and cosmology of our family and culture.
However,
the tragedy in ‘industrial growth society’ is that we have ‘either
minimised,
suppressed, or entirely ignored’ the nature task in the first three
stages of
infancy through to early adolescence. For Bill this results in ‘an
adolescence
so out of sync with nature, that most people never mature further.’ (p
5) Among
the many impressive features of his work is the sheer slog he has
engaged in
over twenty-five years of developing his model, balancing theory and
practice
all the way. And he is very careful to define his terms as he goes –
for example,
he gives a detailed treatment of his concepts of ‘soul’, ‘spirit’, and
‘ego’,
and their interaction, in chapter 2. He could, I suppose be accused of
over-doing the analytical dimension, but there is no denying his long
years
working as a wilderness guide and engaging in ecotherapy, as well as
the
setting up of the Animas Valley Institute – all feeding into his very
grounded
spirituality. Abram.
Like Spell of the Sensuous before
it, Becoming Animal is a beautifully written,
almost poetic book, full
of the richness, mystery and enchantment of the material world. In fact
it’s
not just about ‘becoming animal’, for David also has chapters on
Shadow, House,
Wood and Stone. For me, it’s a book about embodiment in the most
profound
sense. Where the animal side comes in has to do with his ability to
‘draw
readers ever deeper into their animal senses’, as the blurb on the
inside of
the front cover tells us, ‘in order to explore, from within, the
elemental
kinship between the body and the breathing Earth.’ But even then, the
material
world has its own animate sense: consider this
startling passage from
his chapter on Reciprocity:
‘Wander over to that oak, or to a
maple, or a sycamore; reach out your hand to feel the surface of a
single,
many-pointed leaf between your thumb and fingers. Note the coolness of
that
leaf against your skin, the veined texture your fingertips discover as
they
roam across it. But notice, too, another slightly different sensation:
that you
are also being touched by the tree. That the leaf
itself is gently
exploring your fingers, its pores sampling the chemistry of your skin,
feeling
the smooth and bulging texture of your thumb, even as the thumb moves
upon
it.’ He then
concludes:
‘Such reciprocity is the very
structure of perception. We experience the sensuous world only by
rendering
ourselves vulnerable to that world. Sensory perception is this ongoing
interweavement: the terrain enters into us, only to the extent that we
allow
ourselves to be taken up within that terrain.’
(p58).
Later chapters delve into the more
complex worlds of mind, mood and language, stepping finally into ‘the
natural
magic of perception itself, exploring the willed alteration of our
senses, and
the wild transformation of the sensuous, addressing magic and shape
shifting
and the metamorphosis of culture’. (p 8). This is David at his most
enigmatic
and mystical, perhaps most revealing when he discusses the mind/body
relationship, including mind’s relationship with nature. He simply
cannot
accept that mind is an exclusive property of humans, and in a
life-changing
journey he walks away from his college, out onto the New England
highway,
thumbs his way to the
‘As my legs carried me past the last
of the phone lines and into the thick of the forest, as the shadows
deepened
and the exclusively human world fell behind me, a great remembering
shuddered
through my muscles, as though a soul long buried were striding to the
surface…I
found myself sliding through a vast array of feelings and moods,
following
thoughts as they meandered and fed into other insights and
knowings…..It was
there in that solitude, that I first noticed how the drift of my
thoughts was
instilled and steadily carried by subtle alterations in the landscape….
‘The ways of mind seemed more manifold
and mysterious here than I’d ever realised. I was beginning to glimpse
a
complex array of images for mind itself, visible patterns of mental
process far
more fitting than the neurological categories and mechanical
descriptions I’d
been inundated by in my psychology classes. Here, all around me, was a
field of
patterned metaphors as precise as one could want for the dynamic life
of the
psyche’. (pps 111
to 113). Describing
in great detail how he came to the realisation of the ubiquitous
quality of
mind as being at the heart of all life, David exclaims:
‘Mind, here in this high valley
suspended beneath the blue, seems a vast thing, open and at ease. The
thoughts
that soar into view, the sedimented knowings, the bright blossoms of
sensation
are all held, here, within an accompanying equilibrium, permeated by a
silence
that wells and breathes with the cycles of light.’ (p 113). He
concludes: ‘Sentience never was our private possession. We live
immersed in
intelligence, enveloped and informed by a creativity we cannot fathom.’ (p 129) Relevance
to life today. Each
of our three authors has a
large claim on our attention, bearing in mind the lengthy and highly
committed
nature of their respective careers, in seeking the ‘betterment’ of
human
society in relation to the needs of the natural world.
Ian McGilchrist, for example, has
progressively worked himself into a position of being able to combine
vital
research on the divided brain, with seeing patients in some depth, and
communicating his ideas in writing – as supremely with The
Master and
his Emissary. His telling message is that we have allowed
our culture to
drift far out of balance between hemispheres, becoming virtually a’
left brain
society’ immersed in materialism and shallow thinking. He believes it
is in the
areas of religion, art and our attitude towards nature (all right brain
activities), where we particularly display our lack of creative
thinking and
action. Bill Plotkin comes to a similar conclusion, especially with our
attitude to nature. For him we need to ‘deepen and broaden our intimacy
with
the wild earth’. And David Abram, as we have seen in the previous
section, with
his remarkable ideas about the vital importance of ‘becoming animal’,
firmly
believes that we need a total transformation in our relationship with
the
living land. DO
OUR AUTHORS SEE ANY HOPE FOR THE FUTURE?
Iain
concedes that the
theme of his book may seem pessimistic, but does, nevertheless see some
reasons
for hope. For example, he sees some ‘small indications’ that our
society is
‘urgently moving on from our current, limiting preconceptions about the
nature
of physical existence, spiritual life and art’. (p. 445 of The
Master).
Oddly enough, he finds another reason for hope in that ‘however much
the LH
sees progress as a straight line, it is rarely so in the real world’.
It’s the
‘very circularity of things’ that is important, and in a detailed
section of
the Conclusion (pps 446 to 449) he compares linear progression with
circularity. The
LH’s very cognitive
style is sequential – taking bits apart or putting them together, one
by one.
And it’s always reaching forward with a utilitarian end in mind. By
contrast, says Iain,
‘no straight lines are to be found in the natural world’ and the shape
that is
suggested by the processing of the RH is that of the circle, and ‘in
the round’
is the phrase we use for something that is seen as a whole, and in
depth. In a
very appealing aside on this idea, he notes that ‘cognition in the RH
is not a
process of something coming into being through adding piece to piece in
a
sequence, but of something that is out of focus coming into focus, as a
whole’.( p447). He goes on, as discussed above, to talk about what we
can learn
from oriental culture – especially the Japanese love of nature – and
how our
far eastern cousins seemed to have achieved a healthy balance between
the
hemispheres. Iain doesn’t (anywhere that I can see) predict which
cultural
orientation will ‘win out’ in the end, but does make the useful point
that ‘the
obvious inauthenticity of the LH world we have come to inhabit, may in
itself
lead us to seek to change it.’ (p. 449)
Bill
has devoted a
whole chapter (‘The
Eyes of the Future’)
of Nature and the Human Soul to looking for any
signs of the ‘personal
and cultural transformation’ he so earnestly desires. At first sight it
seems
impossible, given that his ‘Wheel of Soulcentric Human Development’
requires
‘an intact, vital, eco-soulcentric commuity, a village in which people
of all
stages and ages interact daily’ (p443). He notes that the Tuareg people
of the
Sahara give just a glimpse of this, and somewhat wryly suggests that
‘in the
modern world, there’s mostly an inverse relationship between individual
human
development and the so-called development, or industrialisation, of
what are
thought of as poorer, ‘undeveloped countries’. However, he is pleased
to note
that ‘individual development and socio-economic development need not be
opposed, as
reported by Helena Norberg-Hodge in her work with
people of Ladakh, a high altitude Himalayan desert province: ‘Ladakh
..is a place of few
resources and extreme climate. Yet, for more than a thousand years, it
has been
home to a thriving culture. Traditions of frugality and cooperation,
coupled
with an intimate and location-specific knowledge of the environment,
enabled
the Ladakhis not only to survive, but prosper.’ In spite of some
unhealthy
‘development’ inputs from the West into Ladakh, Helen and her
colleagues have
shown that ‘some kinds of technological and economic development can
enhance,
or at least be compatible with healthy individual and cultural
development,
e.g. solar greenhouses, solar heating systems for homes, water and
cooking, photovoltaic
power for lighting, micro-hydro-electric and small wind turbines, and a
seed-saving programme.’ (pps 449-50). Having
then introduced
the vexed question of global climate change, with its deep need for
global cultural
change, Bill asks if the necessary changes are possible, and somewhat
enigmatically replies – ‘NO, but let’s not let
that
stop us…’! He then goes on in his final section of the book,
‘Impossible
Dreams’, to answer the conundrum of how to make the impossible
possible. In the
first place, says Bill, this apparent dilemma has always existed. For
example,
when 2 billion years ago the eukaryotes learned how to metabolise
oxygen,
giving rise to breath itself. Or the miracle of the emergence of human
life
itself. So,
Bill’s
‘soul-centric society’ may look impossible, given the generally
ecological
immaturity of most adult humans.
But undeterred,
Bill tells us – ‘at this critical hour, any dream worth its salt ought
to
seem impossible to mainstream society, and to the mainstream elements
of our own
minds…. But if alternatively, you look at the miracles - moments of
grace -
throughout the known history of the universe, it will dawn on you that
there
is, and has always been, an intelligence or imagination at work much
greater
than our conscious human minds. Given that we cannot rule out a moment
of grace
acting through us in this century,
we have no alternative but to
proceed as if we ourselves in fact can make the difference.’ (p457).
David’s
hopes for a
better ecological future seem to be built on something not immediately
obvious
to us in western societies. Yes, we can see that the perceived world of
today
is ‘everywhere filtered and transformed by technology, altered by
countless
tools that interpose themselves between ourselves and the sensuous’.
But, says
David, ‘it is less common to suggest that there’s a wildness that still
reigns
underneath all these mediations – that our animal senses, co-evolved
with the
animate landscape, are still tuned to the many voiced earth. Our
creaturely body,
shaped in ongoing reaction with the other bodies that comprise the
biosphere,
remains poised and thirsting for contact with otherness. Cocooned in a
clutch
of technologies, the nervous system that seethes within our skin still
thirsts
for a relatively unmediated exchange with reality in all its
more-than-human
multiplicity and weirdness.’ (p 264).
David
does acknowledge that ‘there can be no complete abolishment of
mediation, no
pure unadulterated access to the real’ – the languages we’ve evolved
are themselves
‘a kind of filter that mediates our experience.’ But nevertheless ‘some
ways of
speaking are more abstract than others, and some are more permeable to
the
hoofed and scaly shapes that fly and slither through the sensible
surroundings’. Moreover, ‘there are other, older discourses whose
sounds still
carry the lilt of local songbirds, languages whose meanings are less
removed
from the intimacy of antler and seed and leaf. Such languages live more
on the
tongue than on the page or screen.’ And, for David ‘Non-written, oral
languages
are far more transparent, allowing things and beings of the world to
shine
through the skein of terms and to touch us more directly.’ (pps 264 and
265) As
an encouragement to
persist with what he calls ‘the real in its wonder’, he reminds us
‘although
such states may feel peculiar to the modern intellect, it is worth
recalling
that we all have our indigenous ancestry, and indeed that our
hunter-gatherer heritage is by far the largest part of our human
intelligence.
Human culture was itself born in a thoroughly oral
context, informed by
songs and spoken stories for many tens of thousands of years before any
such
stories were preserved in a formal writing system. So while the
intensely
participatory, or animistic frame of mind common to oral cultures may
seem odd
to us, it is hardly alien: it is the very form of awareness that shaped
all
human communication for better than 95% of our cultured presence within
the
biosphere. It is that modality of experience to which the human
organism is
most closely adapted, the mode of consciousness that has most deeply
defined
our imagination and our intelligence. We could never have survived, as
a
species, without our propensity for animistic engagement with every
aspect of
our earthly habitat.’ (pps 266 and 267).
This
highly adaptive style of experience has lain mostly dormant in the
modern era,
David is saying, but is still only just under the surface of our
shallow
culture – WE CAN AND MUST recover it if we are to stop being a curse on
this
beloved planet, and start to once more becoming simply a part of its
amazing
ecological beauty and balance. I
stated at the outset that each
of the three authors have both inspired and challenged my world view,
as well
as day-to-day living guidelines. So perhaps it is fitting that I
conclude by
outlining these effects on my life and thinking. I am tempted to
simplify
things by saying that McGilchrist has influenced me most in the area of
MIND,
Plotkin in the area of BODY, and Abram in the area of SPIRIT. Stated
thus
forthrightly, it is certainly a gross over-simplification, and yet such
an
assertion is probably a good starting point. With
McGilchrist, for
example, I have been deeply impressed by his demonstration of the
actuality of
qualities I value highly – ambiguity, the implicit, the metaphorical,
the
interconnectedness of everything, the intuitive and the embodied. In
fact he
surprised himself as he increasingly found the
illumination of ‘problems
in the nature of human thought’ he had struggled with all his life. His
suggestion of the prevalence of left-brain thinking in the West has
sent a
powerful message to me as to how much I have personally ‘absorbed’ this
obsession with materialist mindsets. It is interesting that although
the
mind-brain question is not the subject of the book, he does offer his
own view
in his Introduction (pps 19-20). At one level he sees the mind as ‘the
brain’s
experience of itself’ leading to the idea that ‘the brain necessarily
gives
structure to the mind’, but he then quickly acknowledges that it is
futile to
debate whether consciousness is a product of the brain, or vice-versa.
He
leaves us with the inexplicable mystery of the interworkings between
mind,
brain and consciousness, something I have come value as I have aged
(and
hopefully matured). It leaves scope for the intuitive, imaginative
aspects of
daily living. I awake each day to the immense possibilities and
challenges it
offers. With
Plotkin we are
in very different territory. His ‘eight life stages’ are heavily
grounded in
nature-oriented dimensions, and our mystical relationship to the ‘wild
world’.
Just as we need to respect and value the natural world, so we need to
do the
same with our own bodies. He is looking for ‘an eco-centric, just and
deeply
imaginative society’. As I look through his eight life stages, I have
to
acknowledge how far short I fall in many areas, and yet, strangely I
don’t feel
disheartened. I can see that I am in no sense completely stuck at the
‘early
adolescent stage, so common in Western society. What I find really
helpful is
that Bill gives quite specific suggestions about the tasks and
challenges at
each stage, buttressed by the gifts and blessings that can accompany
our
journey if we yield to the ‘moments of grace’ that come to us all. As
for Plotkin’s influence on my world
view, I go back to the essence of his vision
- that nature provides the best template for human maturation; that ‘every human being
has a unique and mystical
relationship to the wild world, and that the conscious discovery and
cultivation of that relationship is at the core of true adulthood’.
This gives
me hope that, however immature in ecopsychological terms, any
individual has it
within him/her to ‘grow up’! And
as we have already seen with Abram,
David strongly believes that ‘our animal senses, co-evolved with the
animate
landscape, are still tuned to the many voiced earth’. Having read his
latest
book, I cannot go outside my front door without his challenging words
‘we
experience the sensuous world only by rendering ourselves vulnerable to
that
world’ ringing in my ears’. As I said above - for me, ‘Becoming Animal’
is a
book about embodiment, literally as well as
metaphorically. This is a
concept that unites our three authors: - McGilchrist
warns us about the ‘tendency (in the West) to
discount and marginalize the importance of our embodied nature, as if
it were
incidental about us, rather than essential to us’. For him, our very
thinking,
as well as feeling, is bound up with our embodied nature. It is our
right
hemispheres which enables this vital perception to reach our conscious
minds. - In
a charming passage from ‘Nature and the Human Soul’,
Plotkin tells us: ‘the body is an essential realm of the enchanted
world. Its
thorough exploration, befriending, and celebration with the child’s own
hands,
eyes, nose, ears, tongue, thought, emotions, imagination, and movement
is
natural and essential for healthy development….’ - And,
of course, David’s book is just replete with the
intensity of his immersion in the ‘wild world ‘. As Joanna Macy said of
it:
‘It’s teachings leap off the page and translate immediately into lived
experience. Shaking us free from the prisons of our mental
constructions.
‘Becoming Animal’ brings us home to ourselves as living organs of this
wild
planet’. Although,
then,
McGilchrist, Plotkin and Abram, are giving us
substantial separate
accounts of, respectively, mind, body and spirit, their thoughts
coalesce and
intermingle freely and imaginatively. They are indeed separate rivers
flowing
into the mighty ocean of the All.
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