That one M.Night Shyamalan movie

 

Image by Gage Skidmore @ https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bruce_Willis_by_Gage_Skidmore_3.jpg

So after reading David Abram’s The Spell of the Sensuous, I came to find myself having a new perspective on a lot of things. In regards to the sixth sense specifically, I never really believed or looked into how it works. For the most part, the words “Sixth Sense” were always just a reminder of that one movie with the ghost and Bruce Willis. Or at least I think that’s the right movie, I still haven’t seen it yet but thanks to the internet I know how it ends so that kind of sucks. ANYWAYS, after reading this book, I got a whole new definition for the word sixth sense and what it can actually mean for both me and other people. Now instead of thinking about ghosts or actors, I can think about all the different abstract concepts that never really crossed my mind until now.

In fact, the one concept that really stood out to me the most while reading this was the sections on time and space. Obviously, the whole concept of time and even space are man-made, much like all concepts but I never really thought about history that way. With history, it’s always kind of been straightforward in my eyes. Events from the past that ultimately shaped some aspect of our present and will continue to have after effects on our future based on how much we choose to ignore or prioritize it. But through the way Abrams discusses history, he describes it less as people sharing the stories of their cultures with one another but rather cultures sharing their entire story with the very earth itself. Is as if in his mind, each culture has its own unique personality that makes it just as much as an individual as the people that make up that culture. People who spread the world of their culture with others in order to shape its personality and characteristics for others. I never really thought about places or cultures like this but in a way, I think we’ve always assigned roles and personalities to places. How often have you heard something like “New York is dirty” or “America is lazy” whenever people describe our country? How often do you hear jokes about or stereotypes that say “Australia is crazy” or  “Florida’s back at it again” or some variation of that whenever someone describes a country, state, or county. We’ve been assigning personalities to different cultures for years and rarely EVER talk about why despite doing it all the time. 

Now that’s just crazy…kind of like Australia.