 throat. We might feel the reality of our life’s contingency on nature’s beneficence.
For a culture whose conceptions of mind and matter were split centuries ago (most ostensibly by Descartes in the seventeenth century) and which reserves the qualities of awareness for our species alone, the muscle of imagination must be exercised like an under-developed bicep. Imagination is the connective tissue between “self” and “other,” between “inside” and “out.” Abram writes that imagination is “the way the senses themselves have of throwing themselves beyond what is immediately given, in order to make tentative contact with the other sides of things that we do not sense directly.” Imagination can be the counter-pose to introversion, and the antidote to our neurosis.
Paracelsus used ambiguity in his texts to stoke the starved imagination of his students. The layers in his language force the literal mind into metaphor, creating a linguistic bridge between mind and material. He exploded the perceptual field this way, continually forcing thought outside of polarization and into the vibrant space of vitalized chaos where the senses had space to breathe.
We are collectively in a space of cultural chaos. It is a fertile place of necessary re-organization. The collective psychological portrait of this moment in history would look something like a finger-painting made by an artist whose body was in flame at the time of rendering. One in ten Americans is on an antidepressant. Suicide rates have increased thirty percent over the last ten years making it the tenth leading cause of death in the United States (this equates to an alarming one hundred and seventeen suicides per day). If those statistics don’t adequately capture the collective desperation, then one need only look at the ongoing instances of mass shootings to see that the American psyche is struggling.
I often wonder what the indigenous shamans would have to say about the current state of health in America and the Western World in general, given their beliefs about disease being caused by impingement on the local spirits living in the land. Perhaps there are lessons to be learned from the evolution of language, as it traces the veins of a living consciousness—once shared with the animate terrain. Cultures grew, minds changed and language morphed by scaffolding off of the physical (“the known”) into the abstract (“the unknown”). Perhaps we now know too much, and must tip-toe our way down off of this skyscraper built in paper-scraps, back down onto solid ground.
What if mind..is a property of the Earth itself?
Emerson predicted that the human race would eventually die of civilization. Seeing this prophesy beginning to be realized, how might we go about realizing the known in terms of unknown?
“To return to things themselves is to return to that world which precedes knowledge, of which knowledge always speaks” French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty is calling for a reawakening of the very basic experience of the world through sense perception.
This way of being is alive in us all in the form of a memory, engraved in the DNA from long ago. The process of unknowing might, then, look a lot like remembering. Beneath the scarring of preconceptions built up over lifetimes lies the innocence of permeable perception, which is in touch with the land.
J.R.R. Tolkien has written that “Faërie,” by which I take him to mean all things enchanted, “cannot be caught in a net of words; for it is one of its qualities to be indescribable, though not imperceptible.” One can be enchanted (defined as “filled with delight”) by earthly phenomena only if they are willing to see that every elemental being has its own subjectivity; its own interiority. Human language began as an amplification of the inner world of plants, animals and minerals. If we are careful, we can follow words back to the mind of the world, and our own sanity.
 Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, Vol 1, p. 66
 Owen Barield, History, Guilt and Habit (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1979), p.11
 O. Hannaway, The ch