Sense and Sensibility

It can be taken as self-evident that the awareness associated with animal life is all of a piece. Creatures great and small exhibit the same faculty of cognition of an exterior world. This mysterious quality has been called “awareness” or “consciousness”, but pasting a word over a mystery does not dispel our ignorance of its true nature. 

So awareness is everywhere the same. It expresses itself in ways unique to the experiencing organism's sensing faculties, but awareness is simply aware. Humans share this property with all animal life forms, and the difference between mice and men is not in what is doing the driving, but in the capacities of the vehicle being driven. The brain is not an organ separate from the body. The hazy tentacles of nerve strands reach through the entire fabric of the body, and the brain is the nodule of nerve cells that ties them all together. It is a complex physical form necessitating a well-understood transmission of electrical impulses that supply the brain with a flow of information about the outside world: information that in the brain becomes experience: awareness. The brain of every creature is as much a part of its physical configuration as its mouth, and the brain and the body are all about filling the mouth, and filling the mouth is all about the continuance of the awareness attached to it. Every creaturely form is simply a form of awareness feeding. The brain and the accompanying senses exist as a necessary element of the continuity of awareness. Reproduction (which is a continuation of the same awareness) and physical maintenance both rely on awareness acting upon impulse rising from the physical shape of the brain. Senses are in place to provide information necessary to the rise of impulses necessary to the continuance of physical form, which is necessary to the survival of individual awareness. As awareness, through millions of years of refinement, has sophisticated its capacities to experience and to survive we have its latest experiential hot-rod: man. 

In man, awareness has created a dangerously advanced feeder. In most creatures the limitations of physical form assure that the senses will have limited opportunity for exploitation. In man the exploitation of the senses is limited only by the imagination; and man is gifted with a powerful imagination. In most creatures the fact that awareness is wholly identified with its creaturely form is made harmless by the limitations of its form. In man the fact that awareness is wholly identified with its creaturely form is a cornucopia of un-necessary exploitation of the power of sensing. The hypnosis common to all animals as to the true nature of being is, in man, a luxury that the world can ill afford.

Refectory

Chipmunks have nibbled my ’49 Dodge brake lines 

Kitchen trash will molder in its high-sided bed 

And wood-rats will have a fine home 'til I get round to a fix 

A bear tore up the kitchen last week 

The rock that fasts the big doors downstairs easily nosed away

The .45 is kept at hand 

The woods folk find nourishment where can 

Questioning only the urgency of absence 

All creatures are winged mouths But for apprenticeship