The Spell of the Sensuous

I started to read The Spell of the Sensuous by David Abrams. The first chapter was poetically written as he describes his experiences in heightened sensitivity to his environment while in Nepal and Indonesia. His experiences with shamans in those oral traditions lead him to several conclusions. One is that we have lost the sensitivity to our nonhuman surroundings that is more potent in cultures that do not have writing. He concludes that shamans live on the edge of communities in order to have an even higher sensitivity to the web of life. They must sense any inbalance in the web in order to heal without upsetting the balance further.

The next chapter goes into the history and philosophy of phenomenologists Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. I want to understand this philosophy that blurs the distinctions between the perciever and the perceived. but the reading is slow going.