## Metadata - Author: [[David Abram]] - Full Title: The Spell of the Sensuous - Category: #books ## Highlights - the shaman or sorcerer is the exemplary voyager in the intermediate realm between the human and the more-than-human worlds, the primary strategist and negotiator in any dealings with the Others. ([Location 259](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B009FKTKUW&location=259)) - Tags: [[aqua]] - community. The sorcerer derives her ability to cure ailments from her more continuous practice of “healing” or balancing the community’s relation to the surrounding land. ([Location 262](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B009FKTKUW&location=262)) - Tags: [[aqua]] - the traditional magician or medicine person functions primarily as an intermediary between human and nonhuman worlds, and only secondarily as a healer. ([Location 272](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B009FKTKUW&location=272)) - Tags: [[aqua]] - Magic, then, in its perhaps most primordial sense, is the experience of existing in a world made up of multiple intelligences, the intuition that every form one perceives—from the swallow swooping overhead to the fly on a blade of grass, and indeed the blade of grass itself—is an experiencing form, an entity with its own predilections and sensations, albeit sensations that are very different from our own. ([Location 306](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B009FKTKUW&location=306)) - Tags: [[aqua]] - “…I’m a lover of learning, and trees and open country won’t teach me anything, whereas men in the town do.” These words are pronounced by Socrates, the wise and legendary father of Western philosophy, early in the course of the Phaedrus—surely one of the most eloquent and lyrical of the Platonic dialogues. ([Location 1921](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B009FKTKUW&location=1921)) - Tags: [[aqua]] - Stories, like rhymed poems or songs, readily incorporate themselves into our felt experience; the shifts of action echo and resonate our own encounters—in hearing or telling the story we vicariously live it, and the travails of its characters embed themselves into our own flesh. The sensuous, breathing body is, as we have seen, a dynamic, ever-unfolding form, more a process than a fixed or unchanging object. As such, it cannot readily appropriate inert “facts” or “data” (static nuggets of “information” abstracted from the lived situations in which they arise). ([Location 2265](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B009FKTKUW&location=2265)) - Tags: [[aqua]] - The astonishing endurance of the Aboriginal peoples must be attributed, at least partially, to their minimal involvement with technologies. Their relation to the sustaining landscape was direct and intimate, unencumbered by unnecessary mediations. They relied upon only the simplest of tools—primarily the boomerang, the hunting spear, and the digging stick—and thus avoided dependence upon specialized resources while maintaining the greatest possible mobility in the face of climatic changes. ([Location 3057](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B009FKTKUW&location=3057))