Enlightenment

In a world filled with technology and industry, it can become increasingly difficult to take a step back and view the world in its natural state. In essence, we are humans trying to figure out how we fit into a world seemingly contradictory to the path of humanity. We look to nature for answers. We look to each other, as well as to one another's accomplishments for these same answers. In the end, our entire species comes to the same conclusion. In order to fully understand our world, we must first seek inner-peace and come to understand how we can relate to one another on a spiritual level. Both David Abram and Ellen Dissanayake found that through a new level of conscious, we can better come to terms with our world. We, too, must strive for this alternative consciousness if we as a race are to escape our culture's self-imposed shackles.

David Abram was a man of western culture who found what might as well have been a new world. Through his excursions in nature and curiosity of eastern culture, Abram was forced to live through a part of himself that he never knew he had. He explains his epiphany in the lines, "It was from them that I first learned of the intelligence that lurks in nonhuman nature, the ability that an alien