Film

Nonviolent Communication - Our Brains, Stereotypes, and Strategies

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Fragment from an 18th Century Memento Mori, Poland

Wayland Myers April 30, 2024

Fifteen years ago, learning that I'd written a book on Nonviolent Communication, my wife's Community Nursing  professor asked if I would come to the community clinic and share some  of what I knew about NVC with a small group of men. They  were beginning the process of  reintegrating themselves into civilian life after having completed multi-year prison  sentences and a six-month stint in halfway houses. The evening was part of a support program  made available to them and I was keen to share some of the  wisdom and humanity I’ve derived from this unique framework for helping people create  compassionate connections with others and themselves.I readily agreed. 

When preparing for talks like this one, I think about the particular audience I'll be speaking with  and try to imagine which parts of NVC they might find interesting and relevant. When I thought  about what to share with these men, I drew a blank. I also unhappily discovered that when thinking about the evening with them, I felt anxiety about how the evening might go far more than I usually do. What was going on? 

It wasn’t until recently, when in preparation for writing a new book on NVC of which these articles are a part, that I explored the most recent findings concerning how our brains work and discovered that the strength of my anxious feelings wasn’t my fault. Particular brain structures and neurological processes that bestowed the most survival and reproduction advantages to our ancestors had kicked in. Without my conscious involvement, my brain had, in an instant, automatically performed  a safety assessment using whatever information concerning people who’d been in prisons I absorbed up to that point in my life. The problem was,having never met someone who had done a multi year prison sentence, the only information my brain had to work with was whatever I’d seen in  movies, TV, documentaries, and the media. Oh boy! The more primal parts of our brains go to work even before we become consciously aware of things, and they aren’t sophisticated enough to  discern the difference between reasonably reliable information and total fictions. As a result, mine had  created a stereotype of “these types of men” that it felt was accurate enough to sound the prophylactic alarms (generating feelings of anxiety). This was not the  mental and emotional energy I wanted the men to encounter when I met them. My dream was  for them to have the happy surprise of meeting someone who was open-minded, respectful, and had no pre-existing prejudices. But back then, I just criticized myself for not being a very good  practitioner of what I was trying to teach. 

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“To view another through the lens of the stereotypes, activated emotions, or moralistic appraisals  is like putting on glasses whose prescription is designed to help you find the evidence that confirms your prejudicial views”

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In the practice of NVC stereotypes, preconceptions, and any other ways that we formulate or work from assumptions about the “type” of person another is are barriers. They make it much more difficult to practice the “in-to-me-see” part of NVC, which is its heart, and where its power to calm conflict and facilitate mutually beneficial relationships comes from. 

To view another through the lens of the stereotypes, activated emotions, or moralistic appraisals  is like putting on glasses whose prescription is designed to help you find the evidence that confirms your prejudicial views and the emotions offered up by your primal brain to try and keep you safe. Good luck creating mutually enriching connections wearing those glasses. 

Yet, given how automated the creation of this prejudice is, what can we do? I don’t know how to stop my brain from doing what it is designed to do, but I have  discovered that I can stay alert to the possibility that it may happen. When it does, I remind myself that the stereotype and whatever emotions accompany it are simply the products of well intended but unsophisticated parts of my brain. Sustaining this perspective enables me to relate  to those most likely incorrect phantasms my mind has produced in a detached, observing,  kind of way. “There’s nothing to necessarily believe here.”, I say, “You can move on.” Doing this greatly helps me to proceed along the path I’d prefer to follow, which is to learn from the person in front  of me who they actually are. 

In my next instalment, I will return to the story of my night at the community clinic with the six men who were ex-prisoners. I will share how I handled a difficult moment then, and how I would handle that moment now with the deeper, more mature understanding of NVC I have 15 years  later.

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Wayland Myers, Ph.D. is a psychologist who writes books and articles on Nonviolent Communication and other applications of compassion. He was introduced to the Nonviolent Communication process in 1986 by its creator Dr. Marshall Rosenberg, and has since used it extensively in his personal and professional lives with profound and deeply valued results.

Iggy Pop Playlist

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Iggy Pop is an American singer, songwriter, musician, record producer, and actor. Since forming The Stooges in 1967, Iggy’s career has spanned decades and genres. Having paved the way for ‘70’s punk and ‘90’s grunge, he is often considered “The Godfather of Punk.”

On Writing Well

The Priestess (Tarot Triptych)

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Name: The Priestess
Number: II
Astrology: Moon
Qabalah: Gimel ג

Chris Gabriel April 27, 2024

The Priestess is the first woman of the tarot, we meet her enthroned, crowned, and bearing her book or bow. She is calm. From her we will learn a great deal about our journey through the Major Arcana. She is old and wise, yet ready to bear fruit, weep, or sing. She is the Feminine.

In Marseille, we find La Papesse, the female Pope. Legend tells us of only one woman pope, Joan, who held the position for two years before she was swiftly put to death, as women of wisdom so often were throughout history. She is adorned in the papal tiara, fine robes, and a book, likely a Bible. She is the eldest of the three cards, not only chronologically, but in appearance.

In Rider, we find her with a crown of butterflies, a robe covered in clouds, and sitting atop a throne of babes and butterflies. She is the most expressive of the three, with a more intense frown and glaring eyes. She is brunette. Her left hand is raised, as if gesturing for one to come toward her.

In Thoth, we meet the divine lunar goddess Diana. She is naked but for her triple moon crown. In her lap are arrows and a bow, for she is a huntress. Unlike the past two cards, her arms arch upwards but she carries nothing, instead she brings down energy, which is woven toward the  flowers, fruits, and crystals beneath her. We also find the Camel, which is the ideogram of her Qabalistic letter, Gimel. Gimel forms the longest path along the Tree of Life, from Kether to Tiphereth, from the Heavens to the Human. She guides us through this long path down, like a camel in the desert.

In Rider and Thoth we are met with a great deal of triplicity. Though the Moon has four primary phases, only three are present here: Waxing, Full, and Waning. This is the very symbol of the feminine, and we find it embodied in the ancient goddesses who form the character of this card.

The first of these is Hekate, the triple lunar goddess, made up of “Maiden, Mother, and Crone”. She is a goddess of magick and witchcraft. Consider the spell from Hamlet: 
Thou mixture rank, of midnight weeds collected,    
With Hecate's ban thrice blasted, thrice infected,    
Thy natural magic and dire property,
On wholesome life, usurp immediately.

Etymologically, we can connect her directly to the Egyptian goddess of magic and medicine, Heka, whose name literally means magic.

And finally, the one directly depicted in Thoth: Diana, the Roman goddess of the Moon who is known by the epithet “Diana Trivia” or Diana of Three.

In Rider, we find another triple, this one taking the form of the anagram in “TORA”, which takes us from “Teaching” to ROTA, or wheel, to our subject, TARO. Tarot teaches us the nature of cyclical change.

From these associates we can begin to grasp the Priestess as a card of wisdom – the wisdom of magic, nature, and the feminine.

When dealt this card, we are being shown the influence of nature and of the feminine in our situation, and we can be sure she will teach us a valuable lesson.

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Chris Gabriel is a twenty four year old wizard and poet who runs the YouTube channel MemeAnalysis.

CHANNEL, SOCIAL, CARDS

Questlove Playlist

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Questlove has been the drummer and co-frontman for the original all-live, all-the-time Grammy Award-winning hip-hop group The Roots since 1987. Questlove is also a music history professor, a best-selling author and the Academy Award-winning director of the 2021 documentary Summer of Soul.

Film

Machine Sex, SRL

Poster for "Machine Sex", San Francisco, February 1979

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Lamia Priestley April 25, 2024

In 1978, Mark Pauline founded a new San Francisco based arts organisation called Survival Research Lab (SRL). The organisation puts on large-scale performances, which through extreme engineering, seek to liberate industrial machines from their own functionality. Machine Sex was their first performance.

At a Chevron gas station in San Francisco in February, 1979, encircled by a modest crowd, Pauline brought out “The Demanufacturing Machine,” a creation built of sharp blades, a conveyor belt, a plastic dome and an ejector. The performance began when Pauline placed eight self-caught dead pigeons into the jaws of the machine. The birds whisked through the machine’s innards and came flying out onto the crowd as blood and guts. The pigeons placed in the machine were dressed as “OAPEC dignitaries” wearing traditional middle eastern outfits and, throughout the performance, a loudspeaker played The Cure’s Killing of an Arab at a volume that was reportedly “too loud.”

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“When you see an SRL show, you either see God or the insides of your eyelids.”

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The Demanufacturing Machine, February 1979

The fact that Machine Sex took place at a gas station and coincided with the fall of the Shah of Iran and the ensuing oil crisis suggests some political commentary on the part of Pauline. On what, it’s hard to be sure. Most of SRL’s performances have exploited a similar kind of absurdity, weaving together seemingly disparate, and often bizarre, cultural references into their machine based theatrics to create an intense experience for the viewer. As one onlooker put it, “when you see an SRL show, you either see God or the insides of your eyelids.”And, as new performances were brought to the “stage” following Machine Sex, the spectacle only grew. 

The team spends years dismantling advanced technologies, modifying them and recasting them as characters in their performances which often involve violent clashes between machines, pyrotechnics, and even blood and gore. The charismatic machines, set upon each other to produce military-grade theatre, are themselves impressive feats in engineering. The 1985 New York show starred the flame shooting Stu Walker, the world’s first robot in a performance controlled by an animal, Pauline’s Guinea Pig, and the 1997 Austin show featured the monumental Hand O God, a massive hand of air-cylinder fingers holding 8 tons of pressure. Audiences consistently reported fearing for their safety. The drama swelled as more and more ingenuity was pumped into SRL’s creations, which were often destroyed in the process of performance, sacrificed for the viewer’s entertainment. 

The violence alone makes it easy to interpret SRL’s shows as commentary on the threat of technological advancement, especially when set in the context of the late-1970s, early-1980s and the rapid growth of the Bay Area’s tech industry. That interpretation may have even more salience today, in the era of Artificial Intelligence, when it often seems as though technology’s evolutionary drive has been let loose, sheared from our own, wholly out of our control. At a time when the media is inundated with thought pieces on AI’s imminent take over through means most of us hardly understand, a performance that frames the man vs. machine dynamic as a straightforward showdown has resonance. 

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“The immense workmanship behind SRL’s creations says more about what it is to be human than what our future with machines might look like.”

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Mark Pauline and Matt Heckert operate the Inchworm, Inspector, and Big Walker

But despite the gruesome nature of their performances, SRL’s machines also touch on a more profound, spirited side of man’s relationship to machine, a side seldom considered amidst today’s progressively less enchanting experiences of technology. The machines in combat do more than play out a dystopian tech prophecy, they are deliberately made as masterpieces in engineering. Years of unimaginable effort go into rewiring these machines of their designed functions, removing their utilitarian value, rendering them incarnations of time spent. In that sense, the immense workmanship behind SRL’s creations says more about what it is to be human than what our future with machines might look like.

Pauline once described the project of SRL—his life’s work—as a “decade long prank.” This prank, he explained, has been “executed with an unfathomable degree of meticulousness and precision, the uncompromising pointlessness of it revealing the banality of most everything.” In committing his life to the task of undoing purpose in machines, Pauline makes clear an essential difference between man and machine: humans, like Pauline, have the freedom to be pointless, to do pointless things. Goalless in their undertaking of a silly amount of violence, his machines have been endowed with uniquely human qualities. Freed from their banal fates, their irreverence is matched by only that of their makers.

There’s a gleeful thrill in watching the world’s most inventive machines go up in flames for no apparent reason at all. Though they may be perceived as no better than teenage boyishness, SRL performances are life affirming for their audiences. As one critic writes, “Mark Pauline has spent the last 37 years making machines that remind you that you’re going to die.” But perhaps it's not only the machines’ destruction that reminds us of this fact but the machines themselves. As our lives become increasingly tethered to technology, and we ourselves live more mechanically, more efficiently, entrenching deeper technological systems into each and every one of our experiences, SRL’s crazed machines, ironically, wake us up to human life.

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“What escapes the machine, even the computer, even networks of computers, even the human mind in its automatic phases is this capacity to escape from its own determination.” - Enlightenment Aberrations: Error and revolution in France, David Bates”

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Lamia Priestley is an art historian, writer and researcher working at the intersection of art, fashion and technology. With a background in Italian Renaissance Art, Lamia is currently the Artist Liaison at the digital fashion house DRAUP, where she works with artists to produce generative digital collections.

Golden Harper

Film

Body Typologies

City Metaphors (1982), O.M. Ungers

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Robin Sparkes April 22, 2024

In my youth, I trained with a professional ballet company. Through the experience of being a dancer, learning the semiotics of ballet, I began to understand movement as a structural medium. The classical arabesque pose, for example, embodies suspension when the leg is lifted in derrière (to the back) at a 90-degree angle. It is a delicate balance; the head, neck, chest, back, and suspended leg are held in balance while the supporting leg acts like a stabilising column — a structural support. 

From railway to cultural sanctuary: The metamorphosis of Musée d'Orsay, Orléans, France. Originally a train station built in 1900, the building was repurposed into a museum in 1986. The open hall facilitates public exchange, preserving its original geometry which once served the purpose of the train platform, now transcended into a place of contemplating art.

Understanding the body as a structure helped me to understand the body within a structure. Buildings confine the body, and the body responds to their latent potential. The architectural shell produces both positive and negative space. The body’s existence is facilitated by its container, and the movements made within that container affect the manner in which the container is perceived. Movements made within a space can expand that space’s potential uses and, in this way, we can view the body as an architectural object. As the presence of the body alters the description of the built environment: it introduces the body as a type, a vessel within a vessel. Reimagining the body as a typological unit, a part of architecture, can we imagine what it means to live with architecture?

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“Buildings encapsulate the ideologies of the era in which they were built. As time unfolds, buildings may be repurposed, yet they retain the qualities that mirror the values, beliefs, and priorities of the society that built them.”

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City Metaphors (1982), O.M. Ungers

Buildings are physical philosophies. Structures frame experience. Architecture can shape and influences us beyond the material realm. Our sense of place affects our emotions, perceptions, and even our spiritual realities. 

The architectural landscape is an archive. Buildings encapsulate the ideologies of the era in which they were built. As time unfolds, buildings may be repurposed, yet they retain the qualities that mirror the values, beliefs, and priorities of the society that built them. 

Amphitheater Euripides 300-340 BC.

Different building types are categorized into architectural typologies, which are a system that is used in the process of both design and analysis. These 'types' are defined by the functions that a building provides, such as a library, a swimming pool, or an amphitheatre. Typologies are not set, but  evolve to accommodate the requirements of our changing lives, of rapidly evolving technology, new societal needs and belief systems.  This is often reflected in a buildings architectural plans. An architectural plan is a detailed drawing outlining the layout, dimensions, and features of a building. The drawing represents the design’s concept, structure and materials.  The architectural plans for buildings of the same type can often resemble one another. The plans for the Amphitheater of Euripides, for instance, (dated 300-340 BC) emphasize circulation. Two millenniums later, in 1926, Allied Architects relied on that same emphasis to create the Hollywood Bowl. 

Hollywood Bowl, Allied Architects (1926). Various acoustic interventions have been made since by architects such as Lloyd Wright and Frank Gehry.

Architecture not only frames but also shapes how we translate and read body language. The way we perceive and interpret movement and sound is influenced by the architectural context in which they occur. Dancing alone in a living room offers a personal and intimate experience, where one's movements are framed by the domestic space. Conversely, performing on a stage with an audience amplifies the gestures and tones, as the architectural setting shapes the communicative exchange between performer and spectator. The relationship between movement and sound in space influences our perception of temporality. Time is an essential current of interpretation, a shared continual reality. The buildings we inhabit construct our experience, and therefore help us construct time itself; shaping how we perceive and interact with the passage of hours, days, and seasons. 

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“With the sun at its centre,  architecture and design can serve as a type of choreography, directing the body’s language and facilitating sociological progression.”

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 Archaeologists suggest that early architecture built for the collective often hosted rituals. These spaces embodied the inherent bond between human expression and the built environment. For instance, Blombos Cave in South Africa reveals remnants of organized rituals among its ochre-painted cave drawings, suggesting caves may have been architectural settings to host communal dance ceremonies. An understanding of architectural space is intrinsic to the creation and understanding of artistic expression, and our interpretation of culture.

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Once bacteria, now human, every cell in our bodies have evolved under Earth's closest star, our Sun. Contemplating the body’s role with architecture, and our architecture’s place in the universe draws our focus to sunlight as an all-encompassing force that influences the body’s experience of time and space. With the sun at its centre, architecture and design can serve as a type of choreography, directing the body’s language and facilitating sociological progression. The designer, with sensitivity to  the tempo, rhythm, and ritual of life, has the potential to guide the body to light.

City Metaphors (1982), O.M. Ungers

On a planet of severe ecological  stress, what are the possible futures of architecture? Modular, flexible designs that build upon and expanding from existing structures like tentacles—that can constantly adapt to our changing needs and climate. Drawing from raw, natural materials, would help us to reimagine space and society by fostering our relationship with nature. 

We turn to our environments to meet our needs and desires. In turn, we affect ecosystems both near and far when considering the resources this requires. Similarly, when we enter a building, we shape its purpose and definition—we affect its architectural typology. This process of human interaction with space plays a pivotal role in the evolution of architecture over time. Our presence today shapes future archaeological perceptions and understandings of architectural type as a reflection of our societal values. Can we imagine a type of architecture that lives with us, where time itself is allowed to be an architect?

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Robin Sparkes, a is spatial designer, studying the kinesthetic experience of architecture. Her design, research, and writing practice traverses the relationship between the body, temporality, and the acoustics of space.

Iggy Pop Playlist

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Iggy Pop is an American singer, songwriter, musician, record producer, and actor. Since forming The Stooges in 1967, Iggy’s career has spanned decades and genres. Having paved the way for ‘70’s punk and ‘90’s grunge, he is often considered “The Godfather of Punk.”

Human Heart, Cosmic Heart

Hannah Peel Playlist

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Mercury Prize, Ivor Novello and Emmy-nominated, RTS and Music Producers Guild winning composer, with a flow of solo albums and collaborative releases, Hannah Peel joins the dots between science, nature and the creative arts, through her explorative approach to electronic, classical and traditional music.

The Queen of Swords (Tarot Triptych)

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Name: Queen of Swords
Astrology: Libra, Water of Air
Qabalah: He of Vau  ה of ו

Chris Gabriel April 20, 2024

The Queen of Swords is a court card. Court cards in tarot differ from the face cards in a playing deck only in their inclusion of a fourth face, the Princess. Each court card in tarot is elemental, all Kings are Fire, all Queens are Water, Princes are Air, and Princesses are Earth. So the Queen of Swords is the watery part of air, thus the clouds that surround her.

In these three cards she is enthroned, and she bears the sword indicating her suit. Her expression remains essentially the same, a slight frown.

This is a card of great wit, beauty, and cutting words.

In Marseille, we find her with a simple crown, fine colored robes, and bearing a red bladed sword. In a playing card deck her equivalent would be the Queen of Spades. She is blonde. Her left hand is kept before her.

In Rider, we find her with a crown of butterflies, a robe covered in clouds, and sitting atop a throne of babes and butterflies. She is the most expressive of the three, with a more intense frown and glaring eyes. She is brunette. Her left hand is raised, as if gesturing for one to come toward her.

In Thoth, we find her at her most evocative. Her crown is enormous, made of green crystal, and adorned with a babe’s head. Her breasts are bare, but she has a blue skirt, and she is enthroned by the clouds themselves. She is without a care, her sword is held low and in her left hand the fruits of its labor, the head of a man.

We can grasp the nature of the Queen of Swords by looking for her historical counterparts. We find one in Judith, who beheads her unwanted suitor Holofernes in his sleep, protecting her virtue. And another, in “reversed” form, in Salome, who demands the head of John the Baptist be brought before her on a silver platter.

The Queen of Swords is a woman who knows exactly what she does and does not want.She is both a symbol of purity and of the ruthlessness required to preserve it.. Her character being Libra, we know that this is not wanton violence, but literal justice and a maintenance of balance by her sword. 

She is, in fact, a figure of Lady Justice, in her original, unblinded form. The phrase “Justice is blind” is a misunderstanding of a joke on the uncaring nature of the state. Human Justice may be blind, but divine Justice has 20/20 vision.

When dealt this card, we may be forced to “cut off” a negative influence in our lives.

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Chris Gabriel is a twenty four year old wizard and poet who runs the YouTube channel MemeAnalysis.

CHANNEL, SOCIAL, CARDS

Film

Fork

Bizzarie di Varie Figure (1624), Giovanni Battista Bracelli

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Mason Rothschild April 20, 2024

"Language keeps me locked and repeating", shouts Ian MacKaye over and over again in the Fugazi song ‘Stacks’. The mantra is raging against the profound influence of language on our perception of reality. 

Words are a kind of magic, they are spells that shape our understanding of the world. In our infancy, we are tiny explorers, eager to touch everything and put all of it in our mouths, attempting to grasp existence itself. But without language, we do not have containers for the concepts and ideas we meet and so we thrash and flail and cry. As we mature, we gain the ability to comprehend objects and their permanence. We learn that the sounds emanating from our mouths can represent these objects, and that written symbols can represent both these sounds and ideas. We join these foundational elements together and form a framework of understanding.

Our understanding of the world is not static. Where at first we remain malleable in our definitions and concepts, as we grow up we create a dictionary in our minds and solidify the meanings of words with a sense of certainty. We are beings with linear timelines, born and destined to die, with limited time to allocate and we cannot endlessly dive into the meaning of each word.  At a point we must say we know, and move on.

Consider the word ‘fork’. I know that a fork can be made of various materials: metal, wood, plastic. I know that a giant six foot fork is kind of funny to me. I know that one can ineffectively eat soup with a fork. Imagine that I then take these pieces of knowledge, peel open the top of a little brick shaped box in my mind and put everything I know ‘fork’ to be in there. At some point I'm not learning what fork means anymore and I close that little box up and place it on the ground. I stack up more little bricks full of definitions and pretty soon I'm in a house. This house is my reality. 

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“Our realities are constructed from the definitions we gave to objects, places and ideas. Each symbol in our mind is a cornerstone in the architecture of our personal reality.”

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Reality is subjective. We may both gaze upon a flower, but what we truly experience is our own interpretation of what a flower means. We’ve already closed the flower box. Unless we revert back to a state of childlike wonder, allowing the flower's form, color, and scent to wash over us as if for the first time and shove it in our mouths to discover what it is, we merely project our preconceptions onto it. Our realities are constructed from the definitions we gave to objects, places and ideas. Each symbol in our mind is a cornerstone in the architecture of our personal reality.

Yet, while this mode of boxing works well for something like ‘fork’, what's a little terrifying is that ‘love’ occupies the same symbolic space. We enshrine our understanding of love within a mental container and fill it with images of fairy tale romances, our parents' failed marriages, some Beatles lyrics, and poetic verses and then we shut the little box and move on. 

In doing so, we condemn ourselves to stay locked and repeated in our understanding of complex and malleable concepts. If our fairytale, Beatles, poetic type love should fail to show up in our lives, we fail to see the other ways we might love and be loved. The solution is simple – We possess the power to deconstruct our reality by deconstructing our definitions. Though the process may be messy, intentional dismantling allows us to become architects of our own existence. We are the magicians, wielding the simple act of focusing intention to shape our world. Thy will be done! We have the agency to change our understanding and relationship with the concept of love, and in doing so realize the love we have and the love we need. We don’t have to open up every word. It may serve us to have a closed box around ‘fork and it may not be so with Love.  At least the Greeks had eight words for love. We English speakers have but one and we lock it up quick.

Examining what is going on behind our curtains provides more usefulness than not. Let’s lay around and open some boxes, and paint pictures, and put things in our mouths.

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Mason Rothschild is a reformed touring fool turned occultant obsessed with contributing to the evolution of the collective human vision as we look away from accumulation and toward community. 

Jon Kabat-Zinn

Film

Becoming Alive to the More-Than-Human World

Etidorhpa (1895), John Uri Lloyd

Tuukka Toivonen April 16, 2024

Sometimes life brings us in contact with people who help us discover aspects of reality we did not know existed. Their behaviours can serve as gentle guides to new ways of seeing.

Recently, an old friend and bandmate from South Africa came to visit me in Finland with his wife. On his first morning in a totally new environment, he had taken a dip in the sea and ventured out into a nearby forest. There, he picked up a humongous edible mushroom – the kind I had never noticed before – that he promptly delivered to a hotel chef who generously turned it into a delicious dish on the spot. This delightful episode reminded me of how, by being actively curious and alive to one’s surroundings, it is possible to let joy and wonder emerge.

Etidorhpa (1895), John Uri Lloyd

Years ago, when I was a foreign student in Japan, I shared a university campus – and on occasion, a communal bathtub – with a remarkable young Tongan. A towering man with an angelic singing voice and the warmest smile; it was impossible to walk across the campus with him in any reasonable amount of time, as friend after friend after friend would stop us to say hello. Having grown up in a tight-knit village with around a thousand people whose names and life events he kept track of, he had developed an extraordinary power to connect. Able to detect the nuanced facial expressions and emotions I would miss, it dawned on me that my friend saw reality as something more finely textured than I did. For him, it appeared rich with possibilities for genuine moments of connection.

Several other friends have aroused similar feelings of fascination in me when they have instantly recognised (and eaten!) wild plants; spotted rare birds by ear; or when they have shared magical encounters with  nonhuman animals. I also find myself inspired when art and design school colleagues explain how they have learned to create art with multiceullular organisms (like slime molds) or developed new materials from fungi or seaweed.

Compared to the friends just mentioned, I seem to be only half alive to my surroundings, nonhuman living beings and other people, perhaps numbed by long years of indoor living and the stresses of my adopted cities of London and Tokyo. Music became my partial window into this more-alive world through a well-nurtured teenage obsession with electric guitar. In spite of my overall slumber, music opened that window just enough so that I could imagine that a different way to experience the world might exist.

Having subsequently become a sociologist interested in regenerative making and organizing, I have started to wonder whether the mysteries of aliveness could be fruitfully approached by re-engaging with the notion of the more-than-human world. Introduced by the ecological philosopher-anthropologist David Abram in his now-classic book, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human-World (1996). This curious term points to a way of being that recognises and embraces our deep entanglement with the world as experiencing beings. Perhaps by revisiting Abram’s work, we can better comprehend why attuned ways of being feel inaccessible for many of us.

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“Whether that which we perceive is a rock, butterfly, another planet, a person or a mushroom does not matter – perception opens up the possibility of discerning rich qualities in another and their environment.”

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Etidorhpa (1895), John Uri Lloyd

For Abram and the philosophers he draws upon (most notably, the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, 1908-1961), everything begins with the contention that human reality is fundamentally rooted in the embodied, perceivable world. Abram invites us to notice the strangeness of how quantified abstract knowledge and measurable ‘systems’ have been given ‘realer’ status in society over the fluid experiential world. He challenges us to think how we might reclaim the primacy of experiential life and knowledge, overcoming our culture’s tendency to de-value direct experience in favour of ‘objective’ scientific knowledge and data. 

Re-establishing the centrality of direct experience does not imply (or urge) a withdrawal into hermetically sealed, private experiential worlds – far from it. For in the sensuous, more-than-human world, experience and perception are inherently bound up with meaningful, responsive participation and interaction. For Abram, engaging fully in perception is a gateway to interchange and the formation of relationships:

“In the act of perception, in other words, I enter into a sympathetic relation with the perceived, which is possible only because neither my body nor the sensible exists outside the flux of time, and so each has its own dynamism, its own pulsation and style. Perception, in this sense, is an attunement or synchronization between my own rhythms and the rhythms of the things themselves, their own tones and textures”.

Whether that which we perceive is a rock, butterfly, another planet, a person or a mushroom does not matter – perception opens up the possibility of discerning rich qualities in another and their environment.

This brings us to a challenge: modern society directs us to treat things as dead objects; as materials for consumption or narrow instrumental use. We enjoy wooden furniture but rarely think of where that wood was grown; we enjoy trees as beautiful objects in our parks and forests without considering that delicate habitat that tree provides wildlife, or the mycelial network connecting it to others. 

To gain entry to the more-than-human-world, we need to not only acknowledge the intrinsic worth and beauty of all the things we may encounter, but also their animateness, their potential for aliveness and interaction. 

Moving beyond societal inhibitors, one assumes, greatly increases the potential to find aliveness in the social and ecological world. Aliveness always has the potential to emerge from the attuned interactions between us and the world when we are willing to imagine that there may be qualities, resonances and possibilities just below the level of conscious awareness that can be brought forth through an active process of ‘perception as participation’. I now realize it is precisely this kind of willingness to imagine (and openness to possibility) that I found so remarkable in my friends from South Africa and Tonga.

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“If I so choose, I can allow the living world to have a voice – a voice that ‘beckons to me’, that engages my senses, that calls me to participate in its rhythms and mysteries, that blends with my own presence.”

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What The Spell of the Sensuous teaches us is that, through the process of attuned perceiving and imagining, we can enter into an authentic relationship with the world. Conversely, when we refuse to view the world as animate and intelligent, or other people as interesting and worthy of our attention, we deny the possibility of rich, nuanced and mutually nourishing relationships. It is this refusal to perceive and imagine – whether personally, societally or philosophically induced – that kills the potential for aliveness. If I so choose, I can allow the living world to have a voice – a voice that ‘beckons to me’, that engages my senses, that calls me to participate in its rhythms and mysteries, that blends with my own presence.

To make these philosophical and ecological ideas more personally relevant, you may wish to think back to episodes in your own life that have given you a sense of aliveness or that have hinted at new possibilities for relating to other humans and the living world in a more imaginative, responsive way. Is there something in those episodes that might nourish you today and that might invite you to try new ways of connecting with the world?

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Tuukka Toivonen, Ph.D. (Oxon.) is a sociologist interested in ways of being, relating and creating that can help us to reconnect with – and regenerate – the living world. Alongside his academic research, Tuukka works directly with emerging regenerative designers and startups in the creative, material innovation and technology sectors.