...An excerpt from David Abrab's Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology

  A “new-age bookstore” in “a large Canadian city” – likely Banyen Books & Sound in Vancouver – described on page 278-280 of Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology, by David Abram. David reflects on “writing down” the living cosmology of the breathing earth.

  While exploring, some years ago, the bustling streets of a large Canadian city, I passed by some store windows displaying an unusually broad array of sacred texts translated from the world’s great spiritual traditions. I opened the door and stepped inside. The ribbon of incense unfurling in the air indicated that I had entered one of the new-age bookstores that sprang up in various cities during the latter half of the twentieth century in response to a deepening thirst for things spiritual. This store was far larger than any I’d yet encountered. Tibetan thangkas hung on the walls of the several rooms, and plush meditation cushions were scattered about, while the accumulated wisdom of all the ages seemed to be resting upon the crowded shelves. Entire aisles were dedicated to different Christian traditions and sects (from the Gnostics to the Quakers), each with their respective mystics. Another corridor was lined with Islamic and Sufi tracts in translation (including multiple shelves filled with the poetry of Rumi and other ecstatics), and still another overflowed with books on the Jewish mystical tradition of Kabbalah (translations of the Sefer Yetzirah and the Zohar, compilations of Hasidic folklore, various contemporary neo-Hasidic texts). Each of the primary Buddhist traditions had its own aisle—Theravada Buddhism (and Vipassana meditation); Vajrayana or Tibetan Buddhism (including translations of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, and many tracts written by or about the current Dalai Lama); and Zen (with its abundant lineages and contemporary exemplars). In the smaller Taoism section, contrasting translations of the Tao Te Ching jostled with one another (selflessly) for space.

  Hindu teachings took up another aisle and a half: I saw translations of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata and numerous commentaries on the part of the latter called the Bhagavad Gita, large tomes on Vedantic philosophy, as well as many small, self-published books containing the sayings of particular yogins. Celtic folklore took up many shelves. Diverse and divergent Native American traditions had their own corner of the store, including creation stories and folklore from different tribes, along with anthropological studies, books by indigenous activists, and the transcribed teachings of revered elders and medicine persons from many parts of the Americas. Several shelves were devoted to Aboriginal Australian art and mythology, and a large aisle was given over to the great African mythologies and cosmologies both on the continent and in diaspora.

  Wandering from room to room among all these colorful and carefully ordered tomes soon made me dizzy, overwhelmed by the discovery that such an abundance of wisdom could be gathered in one place. I came to a halt, finally, in the middle of the largest room, trying to take it all in. Here were the deepest insight of humankind, instructions of incalculable value garnered from every era and every region of the earth. I simply had not realized that the sacred teachings from many of these esoteric traditions were even open to the gaze of outsiders—much less that they had been translated into various contemporary languages, and so rendered accessible and available to so many contemporary persons. But it was not this accessibility, alone, that stunned me.

  It was also the strange incongruity of realizing that, while such an inexhaustible plenitude of ethical intelligence was today open and available (and being read, integrated, and disseminated within contemporary culture, was being taught in college classrooms while also being pored over and pondered by countless private individuals), still, the heedless desecration and ruination of the more-than-human natural world was accelerating all around us. The last of the great forests were being laid waste, more and more wetlands were being paved over, oceanic dead zones (born of the chemical runoff from our industries) were expanding and multiplying across the globe. Greater numbers of our fellow creatures were losing their habitual haunts every year, their migratory routes severed by new highways and subdivisions, their bodies choking on our toxins and contorted by never-before-seen climatic conditions; more and more species were being squeezed out of existence by our current ways of life.

  How to make sense of this juxtaposition? How could the open abundance of moral wisdom that was now accessible to any and all seekers within contemporary society be reconciled with the utter callousness of that same society, with the steady collusion of its citizens in the destruction of so much wonder? How could a culture as educated and spiritually curious as ours—a culture exemplified by the persons around me drawing assorted volumes from the shelves, cruising their pages with raised or furrowed eyebrows while standing in the aisles—how could such a culture be so oblivious, so reckless, in its relation to the animate earth?

  I turned and walked, once again, past bookcases thick with teaching stories from the indigenous tribes of the Americas, touching the spines of various volumes, absentmindedly sliding out a text on the animal folklore of the Pueblo Indians. How remarkable, I thought, to be able to find teachings so specific to the southwest desert way up here in a Canadian bookstore…

  And then it hit me, clear as the whack of a wooden mallet on a bronze meditation gong. No wonder! No wonder that our sophisticated civilization, brimming with the accumulated knowledge of so many traditions, continues to flatten and dismember every part of the breathing earth. No wonder that, despite all we may have learned of the ethical intelligence of the ages, we remain so oblivious, so impervious, to the rest of nature!

  For we have written all of these wisdoms down on the page, effectively divorcing these many teachings from the living land that once held and embodied these teachings.

  Once inscribed on the page, all this wisdom seemed to have an exclusively human provenance. Illumination once offered by the moon’s dance in and out of the clouds, or by the dazzle of sunlight on the wind-rippled surface of a mountain tarn, was now set down in an unchanging form. Guidance that once came from the complex interplay of elemental forces in the dank heat of the rain forest, visionary insights that arose among peoples hunkered in the endless twilight of an Arctic winter, could now be carried elsewhere, read in distant towns or on distant continents by readers at far remove from the actual textures and tastes that once informed all these insights. And so the place-specific intelligence that originally infused all these many teachings would be forgotten. By writing all this relationship knowledge down on the page, we tore these teachings from the actual earth that once taught them to us, detaching them from the particular climates and seasons that first provoked such insights. We severed all this intelligence from the dense mountain forests and the migrations of the game, from the frozen winters and the sweltering deserts that had forced our lives into new patterns, from the watering holes thick with animals where these dangerous insights swam up from the depths or alighted on our shoulders or otherwise revealed themselves to us and became a part of our knowing.

  So many of the teaching tales in these books—like the sacred stories of the Haida or the Iroquois or the Lakota, like the holy legends of Tibet or the wisdom tales of Ireland—were once embodied in particular landscapes, in the meandering abundance of a particular river and the uncanny shape of that mountain crag, in the healing medicine of this sacred spring bubbling out of the ground…

  The stories were carried, as well, by the seasonal nourishments and poisons of particular plants…Many other stories held within them the dangerous grace of particular predators—some of whom, it was told, had married into our human lineages… Other stories draw their power from the feathered vitality of the wren, and from the glistening wisdom of the salmon… The stories, in turn, had their particular seasons for the telling. For the living land was felt to be the primary author of these tales! The earthly cosmos, flowing its life-giving waters through different regions, was the primary mystery articulating itself through these many teachings…

  By writing oral traditions down, we thought simply to preserve them, and to render their teachings more accessible. We did not realize that in order to plant them on the page we were uprooting these deep teachings from the soils that gave them their specific vitality. We didn’t suspect that by transcribing them on the page we were stealing away the expressive power of each place, usurping the manifold eloquence of the land and translating it into a purely human tongue. We didn’t realize that we were divesting the ground of its voice…

  Now the paper leaves of the book, rather than the chattering leaves of oak and beech and birch, seemed to hold the ancestral knowledge. Slowly the landscape fell mute, as though the many powers lurking within it simply withdrew from human contact, receding back into the heartwood and the density of the bedrock…

  The abundant blessings of the book, like the more recent, pragmatic boons of the computer and the handheld screen, transform into poisons when they occupy the bulk of our waking attention—when our ceaseless interchange with the printed page or the digital screen short-circuits the old, instinctive reciprocity between our senses and the sensuous earth.                                           

     --from Becoming Animal: an Earthly Cosmology by David Abram, published by Pantheon.