[Northern Seeker]

Greetings all,

I’m a little surprised to find a whopping ZERO threads that contain the term “animism”. Even searching for “animism” in message bodies turns up a scant list of fairly tangential references.

So, in the spirit of completeness, are there any self-prescribed animists out there that would like to share their beliefs or experiences?

From my perspective it’s hard to escape what seems to be a “prime directive” that all life, all beings have an element of the sacred in them and shouldn’t be needlessly killed, harmed or impeded. Or that all beings - a toad, a fern, an ant, your dog - shouldn’t be considered persons and sure, while they may vary in their degree of consciousness* and their potential to act, the world and the interactions of its inhabitants isn’t a more enriched place when we enchant it with this belief.

Thoughts?

Northern Seeker

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* I’m assuming here that we might never truly know what it means to be an ant, or a bat, or whether a fern has any kind of consciousness. But I would suggest that it costs nothing to give them the benefit of the doubt, and we have much to gain in perceiving, for example, a forest as a wondrous glade full of incredible beings shaping their collective destinies rather than as a soulless geography of bio-machines simply executing their mechanistic programming.