this is prayer

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Each house has a number of windows, which open onto a garden: a light window, a sound window, an olfactory window, a taste window, and a great number of tactile windows. Depending on the manner in which these windows are built, the garden changes as seen from the house. By no means does it seem like a section of a larger world. 

Rather, it is the only world that belongs to the house— its [Umwelt] unique sensory bubble. The garden which appears to our eye is fundamentally different to that which presents itself to the inhabitants of the house.


—Jakob von Uexküll, 1909
from An Immense World, Ed Yong

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Even when animals share the same senses with us, their Umwelten can be very different. There are animals that can hear sounds in what to us seems like perfect silence, see colours in what looks to us like total darkness, and sense vibrations in what feels to us like complete stillness. 

There are animals with eyes on their genitals, ears on their knees, noses on their limbs, and tongues all over their skin. Starfish see with the tips of their arms, and sea urchins see with their entire bodies. 


—Ed Yong (treasure)
An Immense World
also treasure

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To be conscious of oneself right to the core is to perceive, at the depths of the self, an Other. 

This is prayer: to be conscious of oneself to the very center, to the point of meeting an Other. 

Thus prayer is the only human gesture which totally realizes the human being’s stature.


—Luigi Giussani

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