Andreas Weber Quotes

I started to learn then that nature is not a place that shields us from feeling; rather, it is a refuge where we can experience our true emotions. Plants and animals help us discover significant things about ourselves. In them, we find our own inwardness.

Those whose aliveness has been trampled will desperately use others in order to enliven themselves.

Love is not a feeling, but the characteristic of a productive relationship. Failing to understand this is our great error in a time when all of us are chasing love as a goal, but finding only an extraordinary lack of love, for which we then blame ourselves. Our misunderstanding of love continues to make this situation worse. A world in which love exists in fantasies but has no actual potency loses the ability to facilitate fair negotiations, bestow meaning, or produce anything other than purely monetary wealth.

There is only one immutable truth: No being is purely individual; nothing comprises only itself. Everything is composed of foreign cells, foreign symbionts, foreign thoughts. This makes each life-form less like an individual warrior and more like a tiny universe, tumbling extravagantly through life like the fireflies orbiting one in night. Being alive means participating in permanent community and continually reinventing oneself as part of an immeasurable network of relationships.

Having the courage to feel your own needs and also to trust those feelings amounts to having the guts to stand up publicly and demand a different politics, one suitable to the demands of aliveness.

If you can manage to see yourself from the outside and accept yourself as a vulnerable organism within the biosphere, rather than focusing on the narrowness of your own needs and considering yourself the center of reality, you will be amazed at how the world positively overflows with suffering beings, each with needs and appetites of their own. Something odd occurs when one has that experience: Suddenly, the soul is filled with deep compasion for the world. This is the only attitude adequate to the task of scaling the dark mountain of the ecological catastrophe we face: without any illusion that it is possible to change human beings based on the strenght of better insights. But with full-fledged empathy for this creation, among which things are so hard precisely because it is creation. And with equally strong gratitude for this creation beneath a graciously warm sun and its affirmative light: where we have already been given everyhing we need to live, before we ever thought to desire it.

Love is an answer to the lack that lies at the heart of aliveness, but it does not compensate for that lack—it transforms it. Love transforms that lack into an excess that produces new contradictions; it is the luminous chasm and the ephemeral mass, freedom in impossibility, the always insufficient answer to the paradox of life: “vivacidad pura” (Octavio Paz)—pure aliveness, experienced from inside the world.

When people are toxic, it is always a conspiracy against aliveness, including their own. Somebody acts toxically when he or she sees me not as I am, or as I attempt to be, but instead sees me filtered through his or her own fears and expectations. People are toxic when they consider themselves deeply inferior and therefore wish to control everything simply so that alleged truths about themselves do not come to light. People are toxic when they are not only afraid but also allow themselves to be led by the nose by these fears, and then unconsciously blame others in order to cover up their panic.

In contrast to an object or a machine, a body regularly splits off a part of itself in order to survive and incorporates a piece of the foreign world into itself. This is precisely why it is wrong to compare a life-form with a machine: A machine does not metabolize. The fuel that I put into the tank burns but does not transform itself into another body.

The living world is a constant conversion of one thing into another, leading to inexorable new growth.

The world of biology is more like a wild playing field with anarchic elements, where the rules of creative togetherness are constantly being renegotiated, where gang wars break out between little groups of co-conspirators and schemers, but also where one finds acts of magnanimous sharing, heroic dedication, and dreamlike bliss.

Whenever neurobiologists observe that the brain is constantly learning, this therefore means that for as long as we are alive, we are part of a process of mental and bodily growth wherein we interpret encounters and transform ourselves into the history of these encounters. The brain is thereby a reflective organ of the world, comprising primarily relationships. It reflects these relationships by producing relationships within itself, by establishing relationships to the relationships in the world, and by attaching new relationships onto these existing relationships. The brain is an organ that reflects the world by simultaneously making itself into a part of this world.

We human beings see with plants and animals just as poets see with words. Deep down, other life-forms are what make our own perception possible. When it comes to the realm of our own identity, we are blind, deaf, and dumb without other creatures - robbed of sensory organs important to the act of being. Without them, we are not, for all being is reciprocity and reflection. Only with others are we alive, present in the enlivened flesh of this Earth, which brought us forth and carries us. We have too quickly forgotten this fact. Now that many of us procures its food processed and packaged in the supermarket, it is no longer obvious that we nourish ourselves with life in order to be alive ourselves - physiologically, as well as emotionally.

Feeling is never invisible; it takes shape and manifests as form everywhere in nature. Nature can, therefore, be viewed as feeling unfurled, a living reality in front of us and amidst us.

The mainstream of evolutionary thinking begins with the idea that all structures and manners of relating within the living realm must be the result of a kind of natural, self-organizing cost-benefit analysis. Competition has long been the undisputed dogma of the biological imagination. Mainstream evolutionary thinking aligns its analysis with these premises, instead of first observing the world and then drawing conclusions. It imposes onto reality the afflictions of a society in which uncalculated joy in life is at risk of being suffocated within a network of greed and oppression.

Like poetry, like love, like the rapt and agonizing commitment to a collective concern, like a stirring idea or a humorous insight, aliveness is something that increases when we share it.

How can these paradoxes ever be resolved? The answer lies in your eyes. The answer lies in the radiance with which you greet my presence, because it gifts to you a share of aliveness that, echoed in your gaze, welcomes me. The answer lies in the fact that I will do everything to prevent your death, and that this "everything" includes the possibility of my own death. I cannot ward off the biocentric tragedy. But I can live it to the fullest, can make myself into its embodiment. I can take on the responsibility for it. I can do what is necessary or you to live and for me to live. I can take on good will for your life, as I have for my own. I alone carry the responsibility for myself. For my courage. For my death.

No being is purely individual, nothing comprises only itself. Everything is composed of foreign cells, foreign symbionts, foreign thought.

Science deigns to study only 'objective knowledge,' believing that the truth resides solely in the neutral and lifeless building blocks of life. To understand life, we are supposed to join the conspiracy to kill and dissect it. As in a self-fulfilling prophecy, this is exactly what is happening with the biosphere right now. The conceptual framework that we have invented to understand organisms is the deeper reason for our environmental catastrophe. We are extinguishing life because we have blinded ourselves to its actual character. We treat it so cruelly because we believe it to be machinery, raw market fodder, scrap material. But when the Earth is devoid of other creatures, we will be much lonelier. Perhaps then we will realize that we have annihilated a part of ourselves.

We have to learn how we can get back to ourselves by getting closer to 'the others' — the living beings with whom we share the condition of 'livingness,' as Henry Miller put it, the capacity for expressive freedom and creative imagination.