Geology Reference
In-Depth Information
ties, he journeyed as an itinerant magician throughout rural areas in south-east Asia,
meeting and learning from the traditional indigenous magicians, or shamans, who prac-
tised their craft in those village lands. Initially focused on the uses of magic in cur-
ing and folk-medicine, Abram was startled to discover that the traditional medicine-per-
sons he lived with viewed their ability to heal other persons as only a secondary skill.
Their power to heal was considered by them a by-product of their much more primary
role, that of their function as
intermediaries
between the human community and the
more-than-human realm of animals, plants, and earthly elements within which the hu-
man community was embedded. In the course of living with these practitioners, Abram
began to sense the diverse life of the surrounding nature with an intensity he had never
experienced in his home country, the United States.
One day, climbing on an island in Indonesia, Abram was unexpectedly trapped in
a cave by the first torrential downpour of the monsoon season. As the runoff from the
cliffs above gathered into a solid waterfall, sealing off the entire entrance to the cave,
a small spider weaving its delicate web across the cave's entrance caught his attention.
Watching the subtlety of the spider's spiralling movements as she set and tested the
various parts of her web, Abram soon caught sight of another spider weaving its own
web overlapping the first. This led him to adjust the focus of his eyes, whereupon he
abruptly discovered that there were numerous other spiders spinning their spiral struc-
tures at various distances from his face as he watched, dazzled. The intricate activity of
the spiders drew him deeper into a trance; he soon found that he could no longer hear
the roar of the cascading torrent just behind the expanding webs. His senses transfixed,
Abram began to feel that he was witnessing the universe itself being born, galaxy upon
galaxy taking shape before his eyes.
When he was awakened by the sunlight streaming into the cave the next morning,
Abram could find no trace of the spiders, nor their webs. But as he climbed down from
the cave, he discovered that he was no longer able to see any aspect of the world as
an inert or inanimate presence: even the rocks and the cliffs were shimmering with life.
Like Leopold, Abram had been
Gaia'ed.
In his subsequent writings, Abram began to describe the event of perception as
a deeply interactive, participatory encounter—as a kind of nonverbal conversation
between the perceiver and that which he or she perceives. Indeed, in a seminal essay
published in
The Ecologist
in 1985, entitled 'The Perceptual Implications of Gaia',
Abram points out that sensory perception could be recognised as a wordless commu-
nication between the encompassing sentience of Gaia and one's own individual aware-
ness—for if soils, plants, animals, atmosphere and water are not just a random collection
of passive objects and determinate, mechanical processes, but are in truth living, sen-
