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发表于2024-11-07
Mind in the Waters pdf epub mobi txt 电子书 下载 2024
Invitation<br >For the last six hundred years, men have been going out in small<br >boats and large to hunt down and mm der wild whales and dolphins<br >for their meat, bone, oil, and baleen. Yet three thousand years ago,<br >in the ancient Mediterranean, the dolphin, a small whale, was the<br >doorway to profound religious mysteries and the honored guardian<br >of life in the sea. Gemistos Pletho, a fifteenth century Byzantine<br >philosopher, saw the dolphin swimming through the sea as the mind<br >of God in the waters. More recently, Melville reckoned that if God<br >returned to earth in our lifetime, it would be in the guise of the<br >whale.<br > The whale is a split in our consciousness: on the one hand viewed<br >as product, as resource, as an article, an object to be carved up to<br >satisfy the economi~ imperative; on the other, a view almost lost<br >now, as the great leviathan, the guardian of the sea s unutterable<br >mysteries. Ever since we discovered the awesome abilities of our<br >hands to fashion the world to our making, we have dishonored the<br >unknown, until instead of inspiring us, it merely seems an incon-<br >venience. Yet in that time when human beings lived a less exploitative<br >.life, the earth still held her secrets, and we revered those creatures<br >who could reveal them. Now we find ourselves at the threshold<br >of approaching the sea as we did the land : creating boundaries,<br >carving up territories, dividing--in the name of nations--the waters<br >that still flow in our veins and link each living thing to every other.<br >One of the points of this book is that in so doing we are furthering<br >the annihilation of our spirit.<br > We have, for too long now, accepted a view of non-human life<br > which denies other creatures feelings, imagination, consciousness,<br > and awareness. It seems that in our craze to justify our exploitation<br >of all non-human life forms, we have stripped from them any attri-<br > butes which could stay our hand. Try for a moment, if you can, to<br > imagine the imagination of a whale, or the awareness of a dolphin.<br > That we cannot make those leaps of vision is because we are bound<br > to a cultural view which denies their possibility.<br > Moreover, we are hound to a view that relegates feeling and<br > emotion to inferior functions, that searches in vain for pure objec-<br > tivity, and in so doing denies the humanity of the investigator and<br > the livingness of the creature under investigation.<br > We are bound to a vision that leads us further away from nature,<br > and further away fi om each other.<br > l his book is written by some people who wish to take a second<br >
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Mind in the Waters pdf epub mobi txt 电子书 下载 2024