Animystic » animism

De Numinositate Mundi

Adam — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 19:48:45 +0000

or Concerning The World’s Fullness With ‘Numen”, i.e. divine/living presences.
with thanks to megli for the title

This is incomplete. I have struggled with the intricacies of this for many months now, to try and explain where I understand the source of the aliveness and consciousness of all things to come from. When I’m there it seems so simple, but bringing it back in words becomes a clumsy thing.

1. There is experience

1.1 This is the only a true priori (the only thing that can be known without presupposing other things)

1.2 Everything that follows results from the experience of the interpretation of experience

2. Experience is the perception of things

2.1 A thing is simultaneously a thing in itself, a collection of things and a component of other things

2.2 A thing is a collection of things that are recognised to act as a thing in itself

3. Experience is a thing. That is, there is the experience of perceiving experience

3.1 This is the first distinction

3.2 To experience experiencing requires the identification of the experiencer as distinct from the experienced

3.3 Those things which are distinguished as distinct stand in relationship to each other.

3.4 Relationship is understood as reciprocal agency (the mutual capacity to effect the other) and/or reflexive agency (where the act of agency itself has effect on the agent)

3.4.1 All things are described by relationship.

3.4.2 All things can be understood as existing only in context of the relationships they stand in relation to all other things

3.4.3 As relationship is agency, relationship is a dynamic property, never the same thing at different times.

4. There is the experience of things (things as the object of experience, things being experienced) and the experience of things (things as the subject of experience, things having experience).

4.1 Whereas a thing is “simultaneously a thing in itself, a collection of things and a component of other things”, the experience the thing as the subject of the experience is the experience of the thing itself, the sum of the experience of the collection of things, and the sum of the interpenetration of the experience of the things that the thing is a component of.

4.2 The experience of the thing as the subject of the experience is the experience of all these things as the subject of the experiences and as the object of the experiences

4.3 The reflexive nature of this multiple experience gives rise to the unique experience of the thing as the subject of the experience

4.4 The distinction between subject and object is an abstraction

4.5 The experience of things is understood to be identical to the relationship that the thing as subject stands in relation to the thing as object

5. The experience of being this human person is a relationship between self as subject and self as object of experience.

5.1 Self is no more and no less than simultaneously a thing in itself, a collection of things and a component of other things

5.2 The experience of being this human person is a unique subset of the experience of being of all things

5.2 The experience of being this human person is also simultaneously a thing in itself, a collection of things and a component of other things

The Sanctity of Language

Adam — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 01:08:40 +0000

Greg Hill made a really interesting post on his blog today in which he discusses the contention raised by the philosopher Galen Strawson that physicalism entails panpsychism, or the stance that all physical matter is conscious. Now I don’t propose to develop that specific argument, but in comments I have discussed the idea that it is not so much that matter is conscious but that consciousness resides in the experience of relationship (it turns out that Strawson defines consciousness in terms of the ability to experience, so that is quite handy).

Greg refers to the experience of Jung where he “reported an experience he had as a child: ‘Am I sitting on the stone or am I the stone on which he is sitting?’”. To me, it is not so much that I experience the rock and the rock experiences me, but that there is an experience of relationship between me and the rock. Consciousness manifests experience, which in turn requires distinction to acquire form. From the creation of distinction (what G Spencer-Brown would have defined as perfect continence) comes identity and the experience of an experiencer and that which is experienced; subject and object.

So I fall to wandering. If the process of manifesting consciousness as experience gives rise to duality (in order for experience to have form), then this process appears to be mirrored in language and music. Unformed sound becomes language, words, sound with form that creates distinction. Every word cleaves our perception of the world in two. The word sand divides the world of experience into sand and not sand. Music defines a structure of sound against the chaos. Language shapes our experience of the world and gives it form in ways that mirror that primary manifestation of universal consciousness as experience.

There is potentially a tie in with Professor Julian Jaynes’ hypothesis that includes the premise that consciousness is a learned process based on metaphorical language and gives rise to the ability (amongst other things) to introspect, to self-examine. While this is a different definition of consciousness, it does stress the importance of developed language in understanding the experience of experiencing. And if language mirrors the process of the emergence of form-as-experience from consciousness, while giving rise to the ability to understand how that process shapes our sense of self… then it seems fair to understand language itself, and every word, sentence, song, poem, story as sacred. As truly and fully participating in that process of emergence and co-creation.

Arbor Low

Adam — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 12:24:18 +0000

A while back Sleeping Giant had a series of posts about spirit of place and how these were not always benevolent. This is an account of an experience I had with my family at Arbor Low in Derbyshire a couple of years back.

Arbor Low is a stone circle near Buxton, Derbyshire… I’ve known of it since childhood (Buxton was an old holiday stomping ground… we had very little money and some good family friends gave their house over to my mum and the four of us kids when they went on holiday)… Some of you may know that I have a slight obsession with visiting ancient stone circle sites whenever I get the opportunity, a few years ago when we had a shared holiday with another family we are close to, in Buxton, I thought this a great opportunity.

On the last day of the holiday, we structured our journey home so that we went past the Low. It’s on private land, but the farmer allows access in return for a donation given for access. We spotted the Low from the main road and turned off, driving up a country lane until we got to the turn to the farm. We drove a short way up the track and parked up, and that’s when it all went a bit weird.

Emily (our daughter) started to complain about feeling cold and complaining about her jacket (she says after that she wasn’t cold and she doesn’t know why she said that). I sensed a change in mood in my wife, Sian, and challenged her as to whether she didn’t really want to do this… in my opinion at the time she didn’t answer quickly enough and I started to harbour an irrational resentment, but we seemed to sort it out.

So we walked up to the tin on the wall where you make payment and dropped a couple of quid in and continued up a field to the gate to Arbor Low, and there it all blew. I challenged Sian again, Emily complained of feeling cold and Sian started on about how if it was going to be like this I could go on by myself… I blew up and started shouting, Emily burst into tears and Sian took her and walked off (LET me say here that I was being TOTALLY irrational and aggressive… this is not generally like me). We left with me and Sian arguing, Emily crying and begging us to stop… the further we got away, the easier it became to gain control and within a short time we had all calmed down and made up.

On instinct, I did a little research and discovered that local legend claims that the Low is haunted by a spirit, a boggart, that makes trouble for people who upset it… I don’t know. We did travel down a few weeks later and approach the Low to see what would happened and we all felt a real chill growing as we approached, a sense of oppression, though that could be psychological anchors related to the previous visit… but the behaviour of all of us back then had become SO out of character. I don’t know… but I would like to go back someday, alone, and somewhat more psychologically and psychically prepared, as some reparation may be in order

What Is The Nature Of The Gods?

Adam — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 13:55:40 +0000

Anyone who has read through my posts will know that I do not regard myself as a “theist”, so might be a bit puzzled as to why I entitle a post “The Nature of Gods” since, as I have no direct relationship (in a personal sense) with any Gods, anything I think and have to say on the matter must necessarily be abstract.

The thing is, I am not an atheist… I seem to fall into that category that one thoughtful poster on a forum I frequent referred to as having a “radically more nuanced position than the doctrinaire, materialist-reductionist, stance you tend to find among your classic Bertrand Russell sort of atheists. And sometimes seems to converge, albeit not actually meet, with similarly nuanced beliefs about the nature of divinity held by many Pagan polytheists.”

As I have said before, my sensory relationship is with those I would choose to refer as the living community of the spirit of my ancestors. But within that relationship I am drawn to various non-human people who would certainly share qualities that I might recognise as being of “Godness”.

I also recognise a hierarchy of power and influence within the non-human and that can lead to a perception of some beings as Gods. In the discussions I’ve had with polytheists about the matter, having more “power” has often been one of the key characteristics of godhood.

Problem I have with that is that many people have power, both non-human and human, and we rarely (at least in the context of the culture I am embedded within) elevate human persons to Godhood in this stage of their existence, and it makes little sense to me to reserve godhood for non-human persons based on a hierarchical power relationship alone.

So what can I hold as being sufficient and/or necessary for defining status of Godhood? I had the pleasure of Heron on CF encouraging me to be a little more robust than I might otherwise have been in my thoughts on this matter whilst contributing a broadening perspective, and I realise that it is by no means a question with a simple answer. What is the nature of the Gods?

Somehow, it seems to boil down to the Gods having an intrinsic and fundamental involvement with aspects of our experience of reality that are in and of themselves intrinsic and fundamental. So to me, the spirit of a place may not be a god (though in some cases it may be… the cultural manifestation and significance of a place would have a real bearing on that), though it is a powerful person worthy of respect… but the spirit of time, the spirit of transition, the forces that cleave the world and create distinction. These would strike me as being very difficult to place in anything other than the “God” category.

I guess I’m just coming to understand that the answers are not going to be conceptually neat and clean If I was going to take a pop, I’d say that the nature of Gods is to sustain reality and our experience of reality. I would also say that it is in the nature of Gods not to sit in human boxes.

Something Old, Something New

Adam — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 21:49:11 +0000

Lance Foster (The Sleeping Giant) raised some points in respect of my blog post entitled “Animism:Souls or Relationships?” that got me thinking about the language related to ‘new animism’ and ‘old animism’ and has left me feeling a little uncomfortable.

Core to any animism seem to be “ways of relating”, but in contemporary western society, the use of the words “old” and “new” are synonymous with “out-dated” and “improved”… as a distinction, I’m not sure that it is a respectful one… with an implication that “New, improved, animism” is shinier, more iPhone friendly.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not suggesting that this is an attitude inherent in those who ascribe to the new animist perspective and none of the above was implicit in anything that Lance has said, but words have a way of relating that is all of their own. I think I might prefer terms like “deep animism” and “animistic rationalism”. Descriptive at least rather than purely distinctive.

Ubuntu

Adam — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 15:30:03 +0000

Quite apart from being my Operating System of choice, Ubuntu is a word with powerfully relational, animistic etymology.

The concept of Ubuntu, of “a person (being) a person through (other) persons”, strikes at the core of what I try to express when I put my animism in terms of relationships, and what I mean when I say I fully identify “being alive” with “relationship”.

I’ve a few thoughts on why it may seem to us that some person, human or not, may seem to be more alive than another, but in the mean time…

From Wikipedia

Archbishop Desmond Tutu further explained Ubuntu as follows (2008):

One of the sayings in our country is Ubuntu – the essence of being human. Ubuntu speaks particularly about the fact that you can’t exist as a human being in isolation. It speaks about our interconnectedness. You can’t be human all by yourself, and when you have this quality – Ubuntu – you are known for your generosity.

And if we substitute the word person, in Graham Harvey’s sense of human people not being definitive of what constitutes a person, for human being… Ubuntu speaks particularly about the fact that you can’t exist as a person in isolation. It speaks about our interconnectedness. You can’t be a person all by yourself.

continued…

We think of ourselves far too frequently as just individuals, separated from one another, whereas you are connected and what you do affects the whole world. When you do well, it spreads out; it is for the whole of humanity.

Louw (1998) suggests that the concept of ubuntu defines the individual in their several relationships with others, and stresses the importance of ubuntu as a religious concept. He states that while the Zulu maxim umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu (“a person is a person through (other) persons”) may have no apparent religious connotations in the context of Western society, in an African context it suggests that the person one is to become by behaving with humanity is an ancestor worthy of respect or veneration. Those who uphold the principle of ubuntu throughout their lives will, in death, achieve a unity with those still living.

Nelson Mandela explained Ubuntu as follows;

A traveller through a country would stop at a village and he didn’t have to ask for food or for water. Once he stops, the people give him food, entertain him. That is one aspect of Ubuntu but it will have various aspects. Ubuntu does not mean that people should not address themselves. The question therefore is: Are you going to do so in order to enable the community around you to be able to improve?

Animism: Souls or Relationships?

Adam — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 07:56:52 +0000

A recent discussion on the Druid Network lead me to ask the question: Do you see animism as implying that that which is animated is so by virtue of an animating force, a spirit or a soul. Or do you, like me, understand being alive as a property of relationship within a set of systems within systems, where life is a given manifestation of the behaviour of the totality of all that is? Or do you see it is something else entirely.

A blog post by Lance Foster at The Sleeping Giant also had me asking similar things of myself. I have used terms like soul and spirit… enspirited… to describe the being alive that I mean when I refer to animism, but the words are not adequate unless used maybe as poetic metaphor.

I realise that I *fully* identify being alive with *relationship*. And as no thing can not NOT be in relationship, so all things are alive.

What we are changes. Day by day, minute by minute, second by every miniscule fraction of a second. We metamorphise constantly, both by virtue of constant change in relationship both internally and externally and by virtue of agreement… consensus within some of those relationships as to what constitutes an entity and thus, a person.

A set is a Many that allows itself to be thought of as a One.

Georg Cantor, quoted in “Infinity and the Mind” by Rudy Rucker.

And each of the elements of a set of elements is also interacting with and in relationship to all other elements, at every level of existence. The interaction is the living itself… is consciousness itself… and we descend into Indra’s net.

In Love With All Creation

Adam — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 22:26:14 +0000

In love with all creation

A respected contributor to a Druid forum I participate on wrote of becoming a “soul-in-love-with-all-creation” through a devotional meditation practice and was kind enough to share some of this practice, the Dercad Duthracht. The concept put me in mind of an exercise I have worked with from the field of NLP (neuro-linguistic programming). NLP has fascinated me for many years as an art and science of working with subjective experience, and has informed my spiritual study by virtue of giving me a framework with which I can seek commonalities in spiritual practices from many sources and from them derive experimental transpersonal processes.

This particular exercise was devised by an NLP trainer, Richard Bolstad, and published in the April 2002 edition of Anchorpoint (an NLP magazine). Richard has kindly given me permission to reproduce the exercise for discussion, experimentation and development.

To give some context, I include Richard’s summary of the main points in his article :-

People interested in their sense of connection to spirituality can benefit from having the flexibility to shift between the immanent (a sense of the power Within) and the transcendent (a sense of the power outside of them).

Devotion is the emotional or affective expression of the oneness which is central to spiritual life.

Devotion is closely related to the urge to align one’s life with the highest truth, and this alignment is the true meaning of “surrender.” As in the metaphor of a sailboat aligning with the wind, such alignment may involve a great deal of activity by the sailor. Far from being passive, such “surrender” adds greater power to our activity.

Not everyone who studies NLP is interested in a “spiritual” dimension to life. Furthermore, not everyone who studies NLP and spirituality will be drawn to devotional or Bhakti yoga practices. For, those who are, the above three frames may enable us to live a life of devotion which remains consistent with the presuppositions of NLP

Mandala

To explore the significance of this for yourself, you may enjoy guiding yourself through the following process, which is based on the Tibetan practice called mandala (Trungpa, 1976, pp. 152-156; Evans-Wentz, 1972, pp. 324-325). A mandala is a representation of the integrated nature of the universe, which is ultimately “mentally absorbed” into the artist who creates it. The process of working with a mandala is an act of devotion and adoration. But it also reminds the Tibetan Buddhist practitioner that the universe we imagine (the map of the universe in our minds), including all the imagined external power of God, is one system, and emerges and merges into our own being.

The meditation/process itself is as follows (comments within * * are mine)

1 . Elicit the submodalities (*for non-NLP practitioners, submodalities are the qualities, as opposed to the content, of our internal representations of experience… check out this link for more information*) of your internal representation of someone else, at a time that is powerfully enjoyable to remember, when you had the feeling of being “in love” with them.

*A submodality is the how of your internal representation, rather than the what… so when looking to the submodalities we are interested in things like: is the internal representation visual? if so, where in the visual field is it? is it near or far away? is it bright or dark? colour or black and white? still or moving? Flat or 3D? Bordered or panoramic? is there sound? if so is it noisy or quiet? rhythmic? where does the sound come from? Are there kinesthetic/feeling aspects to the representation? if so, are they soft/hard? warm/cool? and so on*

2. Check ecology. Would it be okay for you to feel this way (“in love”) about life in general (or about God, or however else you conceptualise the ultimate oneness) If not, consider other examples of times you were in love, or other qualities of love (such as the love you feel for your family, or the love you feel for your homeland).

3. Ask your unconscious mind to choose a symbol (at least visually; ideally with auditory and kinesthetic attributes) for, the ultimate oneness and create that internal representation in the submodalities of “in love”. Check that it has at least the same emotional feeling as the original. Experimentally adjust the submodalities to see if it is appropriate to intensify the feeling (check the ecology carefully -is it okay for you to live life with this intensity of feeling?)

4. Create an external representation of that image (an art form). Experience this art form and ask your unconscious mind to learn from it whatever it is appropriate to learn.

5. Ask yourself if there is any part of you that would object to you experiencing your unity with the oneness you have represented. If there is, check its higher positive intention and notice that anything less than fully living with oneness is not totally enabling you to reach that intention.

6. Draw the internal representation into your heart and feel that you are one with it; it has always been within you and you have always been within it.

7. See yourself in the future, interacting in several different situations where this representation within your heart inspires a new quality of response. Understand that this is the true art form that you are creating. The previous, external art form may no longer have significance.

Why I am not a polytheist

Adam — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 10:58:42 +0000

As if anyone is really going to care

But it interests me. Many people who have an animistic perspective describe a polytheistic world-view. I’ve never been able to do that, probably for a number of epidemiological nit picky reasons and for some person history ones.

Theism refers to belief in deity, which I understand to be supernatural. I have no need for a supernatural element in my world view. That which exists, that which I can stand in relation to, is natural.

Theism and deity also relate in my understanding to a “creator from nothing” God. To me the existence of “creation from nothing” is a divine mystery but does not require me to invoke a supernatural (which a “creator from nothing” God would necessarily be) being in explanation. This may indeed be a hang over from a High Anglican upbringing (not heavy but always present).

The beings referred to by some as Gods or Goddesses I regard as people who contribute to how I am defined and I contribute to how they are defined by the nature of my relationship with them (I don’t have a relationship with many, and that a distant kinship through my Ancestors at best), just as with any other persons, human or otherwise.

While I do distinguish between categories of people (bird, animal, tree, story, poem, thought), the category of God has too much baggage for me, and describes a relationship I do not find myself wishing to be defined by, nor would I wish to define others in that way. I prefer to think that there are people with different realms of experiences, who stand in relationship to me as having different powers, different responsibilities, different authority.

I guess if I was going to describe my self as anything, it would have to be a polypersonist

And please please please do not take this as an attempt in any way to denigrate the beliefs and experiences of polytheists. It isn’t. It is an attempt to iron out for myself why I have always had real difficulty with words like theism, theology, deity

The Spirit of the Story

Adam — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 10:32:53 +0000

In a previous post I wrote about stories as triggers for spiritual growth, as catalysts. But what is it that allows a story to act as such a catalyst? By what virtue does a tale stimulate psycho-spiritual development?

In the future, I shall want to explore all those things that enable a story to trigger such initiatic events, the way in which a story can strike at many levels, from emotion, belief, worldview through to the transpersonal. I would like to examine strategies for creating such tales and the context within which they work their magic. For now, however, I want to consider something most simple, and yet sharing in the real mystery. The spirit of the story.

The story is alive. The story partakes of that rich web of causal feedback loops that is the manifestation of consciousness and sentience at all levels of existence. And it does so at very intimate levels.

The universe is made of stories not atoms.
Muriel Rukeyser, poet

I made reference to a Hasidic theory of the spiritual power of stories in my previous post. In a nutshell, this theory suggests that tales have been in existence since creation and have undergone a process of ruination that parallels the catastrophe that occurred at creation known as “the breaking of vessels”. A holy man can take and restructure those stories, “repairing” them to their proper order and thus paralleling the process of the achievement of universal perfection. In this process, the stories become powerful spiritual entities, tools for that process of redeeming creation.

It’s not my belief, but it does make for a powerful story in its own right. In the description, I do recognise the recognition of divinity of the story, of it’s sacredness, and if one was to approach the story from an animist perspective we can see that

a) the story has soul

b) the story has a relationship with its creator and with the listener, and

b) the story has a relationship with the rest of existence

So every story ever told, creates and recreates part of existence each time it is told. And if a part of existence is recreated, the whole of existence is recreated.

One after the other, each ‘owner’ would then sing his stretch of the Ancestor’s footprints. Always in the correct sequence.

“To sing a verse out of order”, Flynn said sombrely, “was a crime. Usually meant the death penalty.”

“I can see that,” I said. “It’d be the musical equivalent of an earthquake.”

“Worse,” he scowled. “It would be to un-create the Creation.”

Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines (p58)