Musing: Biognosis "knowledge from life"

I'm reading a new book by Stephen Harrod Buhner. It's call The Secret Teachings of Plants: in the Direct Perception of Nature, 2004. I've read parts of it before, but for some reason last night I picked it up and did something I haven't done since graduate school on principle and that is, open the cover and begin at the beginning (said Alice).

On page three of the introduction I learned this,

"This gathering of knowledge directly from the wildness of the world is called biognosis--meaning 'knowledge from life'--and, because it is an aspect of our humanness inherent in our physical bodies, it is something that everyone has the capacity to develop. It is, in fact, something that all of us use (at least minimally) without awareness in our day-to-day lives.

The ancient mode of cognition is crucially important for us, as a species, to reclaim, for we live in dangerous times. The threats to ourselves and the planet that is our home have never been more dire. These threats come from ways of thinking that are not sustainable, that bar little relation to the real world, and that are an inevitable error inherent in the linear fanaticism and mechanomorphism (seeing the world as a machine) of contemporary perspectives. They are threats that come from the dominance of one particular mode of cognition to the exclusion of all others.

To correct this imbalance, we need to come to our senses, to reclaim the ability each and every one of us has to see and understand the world around us (an ability that has been built into us over evolutionary time) in ways far more sustainable and sophisticated than reductionistic science can ever attain."

And that, I thought, is the reason why I identify with my knowledgeable friend when she says she officially can't stand the eighteenth century. That "enlightened" age of reason and change when man believed the only way to truly understand the way a heart worked meant you had to deprive it of the means to do so. Thankfully, Romanticism kept our hearts afloat during such critical times, and I might argue it would do us a bit of good today, to remind ourselves what being Romantic actually means.