03-22-04 @ 11:09 am EST

I've been wanting to share these two articles I found online for a while now, but the knowledge that nobody would care to read them kept me from doing so. Now that I KNOW for certain nobody will read them, rather than hoping that somebody will, it makes it easier for me to post them without any false hopes.

Here is the first one I found while randomly searching around for information on "tree spirits" (I was curious to see if anyone held similar beliefs to my own regarding trees--I also found out about "devas," but I guess that's for a future entry, if ever).

Huna teaches us that everything is alive, aware, and responsive. Therefore everything has a spirit. Many people reject this idea outright, since it appears to contradict much of what we are taught from early childhood. If the idea has even a modicum of appeal for you and yet seems totally implausible, consider simply pretending that it is true. Think of what could happen if everyone just pretended that everything is alive, aware, and responsive. Think of how we would approach everything with a greater degree of caring and respect. There is a famous teaching that says, "Never love things and use people; instead, love people and use things." But what if we were to love people and things? And what if, instead of using them, we were to cooperate with them in a spirit of harmony?

Huna also teaches us that everything is connected, so our own spirits are each connected to all other spirits. As human beings, we usually tend to have the closest spiritual connections with those life forms with which we share similarities. Only rarely do we relate to those life forms very different from us. For example, many people have very close relationships with dogs or horses but few have close relationships with snakes and even fewer with cockroaches. Yet there is one life form very different from us with which many of us do experience close spiritual links. It is the tree.

Several times each week I begin my day at the Heidelberg Cafe, where I have coffee and a muffin and read a for while before beginning my five mile walk along the bluffs overlooking the ocean. On Saturday mornings a beautiful young waitress works at Heidelberg. Her name is Heather and she is tall and slender with lovely long light brown hair and a smile that lights up everyone's day. She is studying to be a botanist. A couple of months ago Heather told me a tree story. It reminded me of a tree story of my own. I'd like to share both stories with you. Perhaps they might inspire you to revisit the ideas I presented in the first two paragraphs.

Heather's story began the Christmas after she graduated from high school. Her mom gave her a living redwood tree in a pot to use as a Christmas tree. It was about three feet tall. After Christmas, Heather set the pot outside her house, meaning to transplant the tree into the ground in the spring. During a storm, the tree was blown over on its side and it rolled, pot and all, into a ditch beside the house. Heather saw it there and resolved to climb down into the ditch and retrieve it as soon as possible but with a full time job and part-time college classes, she simply forgot about it for several weeks. The next time Heather glanced into the ditch the tree was totally brown. Since redwood trees are evergreens, she assumed that it was dead. Although she was disappointed, she once again forgot about the tree.

In the spring, Heather noticed that leaves and other debris had accumulated in the ditch. She decided to clean it out and was astonished to find that the redwood tree, still lying on its side in the pot, was totally green and apparently in robust health! She rescued it from the ditch, removed it from the pot, and planted it in the ground. Soon thereafter, she moved away.

Years later Heather received a phone call from an old friend, inviting her to come home for a visit. As they talked, her friend mentioned that Heather's tree had flourished. When she visited her friend earlier this year, Heather was astonished to find that the tree is now forty feet tall! As she gazed upon it, she felt an intense spiritual connection with "her" tree, a genuine feeling of love. Heather recently learned that the town plans to cut the tree down because it is planted on land where the height of trees is restricted and because it threatens to disturb power lines. Having been instrumental in its early success and feeling such a close emotional attachment to it even now, she has decided to intervene. She is in the process of writing to the city government in an attempt to save "her" tree.

When I was a young boy, my dad planted two young maple trees in our back yard. When they were about three or four years old, we had a hurricane. Most hurricanes that begin in the Caribbean slide up the eastern seaboard of the United States but swerve out to sea about half way up the coast. Thus Long Island avoids most of these storms. Occasionally, however, such a storm will hug the coast a little longer than usual and as it makes its right turn, it will pass over the island on its way out to sea. Extremely high winds and torrential rains make for a frightening situation, particularly for people unaccustomed to them.

During this particular storm, the winds were so strong that the maple trees, then about seven feet tall, were bending over such that their tops almost touched the ground. They were threatened with being uprooted or simply snapping in two from the strain. I can clearly recall the image of my dad, lashed by wind and rain and struggling to stay upright in the storm, pounding heavy stakes into the ground and tying each tree securely to its pair of stakes. Even so, before he could stabilize them, each tree split down one side.

After the storm my dad, who had an affinity with plants and could grow just about anything, removed the stakes. Then he brushed tar onto the exposed inner surface of each tree. He said the tar would act as a bandage and allow the trees to heal. Sure enough, they did but for all the remaining years that we lived in that home the side of each tree that had split remained flat, without bark, with the look and feel of bare lumber. The surface of the remainder of each tree, along with its bark, continued to grow, gradually expanding and rotating around so that the exposed flat area of "lumber" gradually became smaller in relation to the overall diameter of the trees.

Childhood was an emotionally tough time for me. Often I felt alone and friendless. But I loved those two maple trees and I felt that they loved me. I spent many summertime hours seated on the grass beneath the shade cast by one or the other, gazing up at its fellow, watching the robins, blue jays, red-winged blackbirds, and squirrels that called it home. When no one was around, I often stood by each tree in turn and gave it a long hug. I felt the love being given and the love being received.

Eventually, my folks sold the house. By that time the trees were each fifty feet tall and provided the most wonderful shade for the yard each summer. Over the years I have missed my good friends the maple trees. I have often wondered how they were doing or even if they still lived. Did the new owners love them as much as I had or were they considered simply a nuisance and trimmed back or even chopped down?

Just a few weeks before Heather told me her tree story, I received an unexpected note from a childhood friend. When she was five and I was four, we decided that because we were both only children, we would "adopt" each other. I became her younger brother; she became my older sister. In all the years since, we have continued to think of each other in that way. Although I have not seen her in thirty years, each Christmas and each birthday, there is a card and a note. These days, we even send an occasional E-mail. In her surprise note, my "big sister" told me that a wedding had brought her back to our old neighborhood for the first time in many years. She was taking photos and thought I might like one of my old home. There it was, enclosed with the note.

The picture was taken from the front of the house but towering over it from the back, there were my two friends, now each about sixty feet tall. It is difficult to express in words the powerful feelings of love and joy that suffused my being when I saw that photograph. My friends are well; they are thriving and happy!

If you have never made friends with a tree, or perhaps with any non-human, it might be difficult for you to imagine that I could have such feelings. If such is the case, I assure you that you are missing something wonderful in your life. Everything is alive. Everything is connected. Everything is your brother or sister. We all are one.

If you wonder how you might learn more about such spiritual connections, and even to experience them for yourself, I encourage you to delve more deeply into the Huna knowledge. The various books, tapes, and courses shown on this web site will help. You might even consider a week in paradise with Serge; learning, growing, and meeting some of your brothers and sisters in some of nature's most beautiful spots anywhere. This quest for the subtle hidden wisdom of nature's universe he calls HunaQuest. I hope that you will have the opportunity to experience it.

http://www.huna.org/html/treespir.html

No comment regarding the "Huna" stuff...I don't know enough about it to say. I'm starting to learn to take ANY site promoting animistic beliefs with a grain of salt because most animism sites, I've sadly found, are either created by delusional shaman wannabes who want all your money, or by fanatical fundamentalist Christians condemning all animists to hell. (Why these fundies go to all the trouble of creating so-called informational sites only to say at the end "REPENT!!" is beyond me, and frankly pisses me off more than the shaman wannabes. At least the shaman wannabes don't really pull a bait-and-switch on you.) Not many decent sources of information out there, I'm afraid.

The above article, though, made my eyes well up with how he described his feelings for trees. I've felt the same ways at times.

Anyway, here is the second article, found while almost futilely searching for good results on "animism." As already stated I just kept finding the above two examples, but then I fortunately came across this...and to me it makes perfect sense.

I have to copy the cached version, as of course, for some reason, the site isn't coming up today. :(

Bruce G Charlton MD
Reader in Evolutionary Psychiatry
Department of Psychology
University of Newcastle upon Tyne
NE2 4HH
England
Editor-in-Chief, Medical Hypotheses

bruce.charlton@ncl.ac.uk


Alienation

It is one of the distinctive features of Western contemporary life that, while pleasures are widely available (albeit at a price), there is almost universally a sense of alienation. Alienation is the feeling that life is 'meaningless', that we do not belong in the world.

But alienation is not an inevitable part of the human condition: some people feel at one with the world. This perspective is a consequence of the animistic way of thinking which is shared by children and hunter-gatherers. Animism considers all significant entities to have 'minds', to be 'alive', to be sentient agents. The animistic thinker inhabits a unified world populated by personal powers including not just other human beings, but also important animals and plants, and significant aspects of physical landscape. Humans belong in this world because it is a web of social relationships.

We were all animistic children once, and for most of human evolutionary history would have grown into animistic adults. Animism is therefore spontaneous, the 'natural' way of thinking for humans, and it requires sustained, prolonged and pervasive socialization to 'overwrite' animistic thinking with the rationalistic objectivity typical of the modern world. It is learned objectivity that creates alienation - humans are no longer embedded in a world of social relations but become estranged, adrift in a world of indifferent things.

But objectivity is superficial: animism remains the basic underlying mode of human thinking, and animism can be recovered. When we are removed from the rational systems of civilisation, when learned patterns of socialised behaviour are stripped-away, then animistic thinking can re-emerge and a sense of belonging in the world may return.

Animism defined

Animism is not a religious or philosophical doctrine, neither is it an ‘error’ made by people too young or too primitive to know better - animism is nothing less than the fundamental mode by which human consciousness regards the world. Consciousness just is animistic. And this perspective is a consequence of human evolutionary history.

Humans evolved sophisticated brain mechanisms for dealing with the complex social situations that formed a dominant selection pressure throughout primate evolutionary history; and in animistic thinking these social mechanisms are flexibly applied to interpret complex aspects of the world in general. Information on animals, plants and landscape are fed-into a system that codes them into social entities with social motivations, and models their behaviour in social terms.

[The hunter gatherer child] learns that many animals have to be given water when they are killed to ensure that some of their number will be willing to die again when she and her family need food. She discovers that animals and humans must be at peace with one another. [Her language] has no words for ‘vermin’ or ‘weed’. There is no demarcation between the life of an animal and that of a human - no word for ‘it’… Bit by bit she will come to understand that the world around her is shared both among people themselves and between people and the other creatures that belong here.

Human consciousness is therefore essentially a social intelligence, designed by natural selection for dealing with people, but accidentally highly applicable to understanding, predicting and controlling a wide range of phenomena. Unless suppressed during upbringing, this way of looking at the world is spontaneously generalised beyond the social sphere, so the significant world is seen as composed of 'agents', having dispositions, motivations and intentions. Humans see the world through social spectacles.

Because the natural world is seen as sentient, for an animistic thinker significant events don’t ‘just happen’ - like inert billiard balls bouncing-off one another - instead events occur because some entity wants them to occur. For the animist, every significant event is intentional, every significant event has personal implications. So a dog may be ‘kind’, a tree ‘wise’, a sky ‘cheerful’, a landscape ‘threatening’ - and such categorisations are as individual, flexible and variable as categorisations of people would be.

This is an extremely effective way of dealing with the natural world under the conditions of hunter-gatherer societies. For instance, each species of animal has its own nature, each member of a species its own character, knowledge of which enables behaviour to be predicted with considerable precision in real world situations. Even with the advantages of scientific biology, informed anthropomorphism still remains the best system for understanding, predicting and manipulating animal behaviour - especially among the social mammals that are so important to hunters.

Hunter-gatherer knowledge is dependent on the most intimate possible connection with the world and with the creatures that live in it. The possibility of transformation is a metaphor for complete knowledge: the hunter and his prey move so close to one another that they cross-over, the one becoming the other.

Furthermore, because other people were so important in evolutionary history, social information is especially vivid: it grabs and sustains our attention and mobilises our emotions. In an oral culture that depends on human memory, the best way of transmitting important information is by the medium of anthropomorphic stories and songs.

A relationship with the world

Everything about the hunter-gatherer system is founded on the conviction that home is already Eden.

Animistic thinkers are at home in the world. Children and hunter-gatherers are not necessarily happy, of course - but they have a relationship with the world: they are not alienated. Animists are watched over, controlled, protected, and also punished, by the sentient powers that constitute the world.

This land to which [an Inuit baby] belongs is the subject of many kinds of stories…history, geography, personal adventure and mysteries intertwine. There are misadventures, murder and starvation, to be sure, but spiritual powers and every kind of humour mean that even the worst is part of being in the best possible place, in one’s own land…

Although there are hostile powers, the relationship of each individual to the world is that of child and parent. The world is a ‘giving environment’ - fundamentally benign because it keeps us alive. This is a beneficent ‘cosmic economy’ which cannot be controlled, planned or significantly shaped.

The people depend on the animals, and the animals allow themselves to be killed. An animal’s agreement to become food is secured through the respect that hunters and their families show to the land in general and the animals in particular. […] Rather than seeking to change the world, hunter-gatherers know it. They also care for it, showing respect and paying attention to its well-being. […] They do not make any intensive efforts to reshape their environment. They rely, instead, on knowing how to find, use and sustain that which is already there.

By contrast, since the invention of farming, modern life has become a state of siege, a small gang of family and allies against a mass of hostile strangers, an island of order surrounded by overwhelming forces of chaos - planning is essential, yet most plans will fail. The world is not an unconditionally nurturing parent but must be coerced into producing the necessities of life, survival is a hard bargain, failure an ever present threat. For the farmer, the natural world is neither unchangeable nor ‘giving’ - it is raw material for the production of food and other necessities and luxuries. Production entails prolonged, dull, repetitive tasks to force nature into new and different shapes.

The conditions of [the] archetypal farm are harsh. This is not Eden but the curse of exile: only by the sweat of his brow does the man provide food for his family. Not only the man, of course; the woman, too, must work all and every day. The children are the labourers who will ease the burden of the cursed land.

The same forest that is a nurturing parent for the hunter-gatherer, becomes for the farmer a perpetual threat of savage encroachment. The world consist of objects to be manipulated:

The trees are felled, their root are hauled from the ground, stones are picked from the earth, invading wild plants and shrubs are rooted out again and again.. the soil will grow grass and vegetables only if a great deal else is “kept under control”, which means excluded or destroyed. Not only rival plant life, but also wild creatures that harm seeds, seedlings, buds or fruits, or eat the domestic animals… Weeds and vermin. These are the agents of wild nature that have to be walled out, scared off or killed.

And ‘the farmer’ stands for the modern human condition - the life of modern man is ‘farming’ the whole world. The serious business of survival now depends absolutely on a shift to objectification, control, imposed order. Animism must be denigrated, written-over and suppressed.

The distinction between respect and control is of immense importance to an understanding of how agriculturalists approach hunter-gatherers. The skills of farmers are centred not on their inner relationship to the world but their ability to change it. Technical and intellectual systems are developed to achieve and maintain this as completely as possible. Farmers carry with them systems of control as well as crucial seeds and livestock. These systems constitute ways of thinking as well as bodies of information. .. the achievement of abstraction and the project of control are related.

Recovering animism

Mass alienation is no accident but an inevitable consequence of the kind of society we inhabit. Animism is grossly maladaptive for a complex society that depends on objective information and rational planning. Alienation is therefore necessary to the generation and maintenance of our world, and returning to a thoroughgoing, society-wide animism would be impossible without a return to hunter-gatherer lifeways.

The most probable human future entails more complexity, more planning, more control, and more alienation. But if a shared and public animism is ruled-out, the situation for individuals is different. There may be niches for more-or-less wholly animistic individuals even in modern society, and there certainly are niches for animistic thinking within many ordinary people’s lives. The problem is that, for a modern adult, recovery of animistic thinking entails undoing the effects of an exceptionally thorough and prolonged process of socialisation that has buried animism under a vast superstructure of repressions. Modern adults cannot necessarily recover their animistic thoughts at will, even temporarily.

Methods used to help in the recovery of animistic modes of thinking have been known since the Romantic era. They essentially involve detachment from the social systems that tend to maintain objectivity and rationality. For example, solitude (away from people), leisure (away from the economy) and unstructured time (as contrasted with technologically-measured time). Direct contact with nature is another classic strategy. Under such conditions of societal detachment there tends to be a spontaneous resurgence of animistic thinking - and those who can achieve detachment, often strive to do so. But clearly detachment is not possible for everyone, nor is it always effective. Some people find that it takes many clear days of vacation - or even longer - before they can ‘switch off’ their organised minds, and begin to live in the here-and-now.

It has also been noticed that altered states of consciousness due to accidental or deliberate impairment in brain functioning will allow the re-emergence of animistic modes of thinking by a process called 'disinhibition'. Disinhibition usually involves a relatively selective impairment of the 'higher' and more recently evolved brain centres (pre-frontal cerebral cortex). Animistic thinking emerges when drowsy (eg. during hypnagogic states between sleeping and waking), when delirious due to serious illness or brain injury or intoxication - whether accidental or deliberate, and also occurs in severe psychotic illnesses such as schizophrenia and mania. People with ‘paranoid’ delusions, which occur in many psychiatric conditions, are characterised by an frightening kind of animism called ‘delusions of self-reference' - which is the sense of being the focus of a world of hostile sentient powers. Deluded individuals may perceive the radio talking to them personally, and interpret newspaper stories as containing coded allusions to their situation.

The quality of this animistic state - whether self-reference is experienced as benign or hostile - depends on the emotional state. Emotional state colours the experience of a delusion. The delirious animism of severe physical illness is almost always very unpleasant, because the person is sick and suffering negative emotions such as pain. So alcohol withdrawal may involve terrifying delusions of a persecuting and hostile environment. Mania, by contrast, may involve a blissful state of godlike one-ness with an animated world; because the emotional tone of mania lends an euphoric colouring to delusions of self-reference. Something similar applies with hallucinogenic drugs - whether someone has a good or bad ‘trip’ depends substantially on their simultaneous state of mind and body.

Any significant alteration of consciousness may lead to a resurgence of animistic thinking. And this effect may be exploited as a ‘cure’ for modern alienation.

Shamans and Neo-shamanism

Shamans are known as the ‘priests’ of hunter-gatherer animistic ‘religions’ - and shamans learn how to make use of altered states of consciousness induced by sleep, hypnotic trances, drumming, dancing, rattling, disease and intoxication. Shamans ‘dream’, they remember their dreams, and they interpret their dreams.

Dreaming is the mind’s way of combining and using more information than the conscious mind can hold. It allows memory and intuition and facts to intermingle. […] Shamanism prepares the brain to work at its fullest, widest potential.

Even without shamanic practices, hunter-gatherer animistic thinking moves freely across the porous boundaries between humans, animals, plants and landscape. Shamanistic dreaming further loosens the mental associations, making porous the boundaries of space and time - allowing the shaman to go on ‘journeys’ in search of useful knowledge.

The dreamer crosses the boundary between human and animals… and may also move through the boundaries of time… for hunters the dream experience is real. The events of the dream are relied upon as a guide…

Traditional shamanism is therefore essentially a cognitive technique that is employed by animistic thinkers to gain access to otherwise unattainable objective knowledge of value to the tribe.

For many hunter-gatherers, dreams are a form of decision-making… hunters use dreams to help them decide where to hunt, when to go there and what to hunt. .. When should the next step of the seasonal round be taken? Will the fish be running… will the deer be feeding… is it time to go inland or return to the coast?…

To make these decisions, hunters need knowledge. They must bear in mind all the facts that inform the choice… must draw on knowledge that they have accumulated over many years… what others have seen and done over the past few days… In the end there is need for… some leap of the imagination, some way of processing the facts so that they yield a conclusion. This is what dreams can do.

The modern practitioners of revivalist ‘Neo-shamanism’ use similar consciousness-altering techniques to traditional shamans, but the implicit purpose and function is different. Modern people are alienated, they are not animistic thinkers but instead objective-thinkers, and dreams are not a reliable form of decision-making in the modern world. Therefore shamanistic dreaming has a different effect in the modern context.

In the modern cultural context shamanism does not - in general - provide access to objectively-valid, publicly-useful knowledge. When modern people want their sickness healed they typically consult a trained doctor, when they need to predict the weather they consult a meteorologist. An exception is in creative thinking. Animistic states, perhaps in circumstances of altered consciousness, may enable leaps of imagination to otherwise unattainable conclusions. However, these conclusions typically require checking by standard rational, objective methods before they become publicly acceptable and useable.

Neo-shamanic trances are essentially employed with the purpose of enabling modern people to think animistically, and to heal their sense of alienation. Typically, rhythmic techniques such as hypnotic dancing and drumming are used, rather than drugs, because they are safer and more controllable. Indeed, no technique need be used at all, and some people are able spontaneously to self-induce a ‘shamanic’ state of mind. If a person is able to achieve the necessary detachment and/ or self-hypnosis, then they will experience the desired resurgence of animism.

What is sought, is a state of consciousness sometimes termed ‘active imagination’ (CG Jung) or the ‘poetic trance’ (Robert Graves); a state in which the mind is freed, associations are broadened and emotions are enhanced - but in which purposive thinking remains possible and memory systems remain operative. As well as inducing a sense of belonging, this is potentially a creative state in which (as for shamans) mental synthesis and integration may occur, personal problems, and intuitive truths may be reached using otherwise inaccessible mental powers.

The difference between shamanism and Neo-shamanism is that one provides objective knowledge while the other provides a subjective experience.

Cognitive impairment

An important difference between hunter-gatherers and modern people is that moderns may need to experience altered states of consciousness to reach the level of animistic thinking which is only the starting point for traditional shamans. Hunter-gatherers are already animistic thinkers whose minds cross the boundaries between humans, animals, plants and landscapes. The altered states of dreaming consciousness enables hunter-gatherers to cross further boundaries of time and space in pursuit of high-level insights that synthesise and integrate complex knowledge of many kinds. But a similar state of altered consciousness would probably take modern people only to the level of animism. To experience journeys through time and space would require extreme levels of delirium.

And this highlights the problem with altered conscious states: brain impairment is never wholly specific to the goal of recovering animistic thinking. Not only does impairment cause disinhibition and release of animism, but impairment also affects other aspects of general brain function such as concentration, judgement, and reaction times. Extreme states of intoxication or delirium will significantly damage memory processes, so it may not be possible to remember or learn from mystical and spiritual experiences. But even mild states of cognitive impairment may be dangerous in situations where skilled or responsible behaviour is required (driving a car, looking after children, doing most kinds of job).

Nonetheless, modern people may potentially use shamanic techniques to ‘cure’ alienation, to achieve that sense of belonging in the world which is spontaneous for hunter-gatherers. If detachment and self-induced hypnotic trances are unattainable or ineffective, an optimal strategy may be to seek minimally-effective alterations of consciousness by reliable, safe and controllable methods. The aim is reduction of conscious level just sufficient to allow the resurgence of spontaneous animistic thinking, but not so much impairment that the laying-down of new memories will be affected.

Recovered animism and the modern world

Neo-shamanism is therefore an approach to the goal of inducing desirable subjective states that may work as a cure for modern alienation. It is, however, a limited cure; and one that is at odds with the objective, rationalist, systematised nature of the modern world. Furthermore, beneficial effects are constrained by the unstable and temporary nature of altered conscious states, and their unwanted side-effects due to mild, general cognitive impairment. Even self-hypnosis or drowsy reverie are incompatible with optimal mental performance. For most people, most of the time, recovered animism must be a leisure-time pursuit.

The traditional shaman dreamed publicly-useful knowledge, and used this knowledge in healing and advising the tribe. For shamanism the dream is just a means to an end - but for modern Neo-shamanism the ‘dream state’ is an end in itself, and its informational content is less important that the emotional experience. Beyond the immediate dream state, memories of animism may be sustaining, since vivid memory entails re-playing and re-experiencing past emotions.

Despite these constraints and limitations, it is possible that recovered animism may become a major spirituality - indeed exactly this may lie behind the growth of interest in Neo-paganism and New Age ideas. And it seems more than a coincidence that the favourite book of the twentieth century in most surveys was substantially a work of animism: JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, with its non-human sentient beings, and its animate horses, eagles, trees, mountains and landscapes.

There are eruptions of the hunter-gatherer in the [modern] urban setting… arenas in which a rival mind seeks expression and longs for its particular forms of freedom […] The hunter-gatherers in the heartland of the exiles… are opponents of the dominant order. They oppose hierarchy and challenge the need to control other people and the land itself. Consciously or not, they are radicals in their lives.

At the least, they experience the tension in themselves that comes from a longing not to plan and not to acquiesce in plans; at most they use a mixture of knowledge and dreams to express their vision. It is artists, speculative scientists and those whose journeys in life depend on not quite knowing their destination who are close to hunter-gatherers; who rely upon the hunter gatherer-mind.

In an ever more rational and objective public world it would be ironic, although not altogether surprising, if most people privately practised some version of Neo-shamanism in order to induce a sense of belonging. Recovered animism could become the personal religion of the future.


Notes: All quotations are from The other side of Eden: hunter-gatherers, farmers and the shaping of the world by Hugh Brody, Faber, 2002. For further references and background see my papers The meaning of life, Awareness, consciousness and language, Ceremonial time versus technological time, and Peak experiences, creativity and the Colonel Flastratus phenomenon all available at my home page - www.hedweb.com/bgcharlton/. Daniel C Noel’s delightful book The soul of shamanism is fascinating on animistic spiritualities in contemporary Western society, and particularly insightful in relation to the state of active imagination.


E-mail
bruce.charlton@ncl.ac.uk

http://www.hedweb.com/bgcharlton/animism.html

I would add more of my own thoughts, but it's past logoff time, the furnace is acting up, and I have to go. Tar...