Highlights
For me animism is the recognition that you have persons beyond the human and you have to find ways to relate to these other persons which creates a more broad understanding of what is sociality, what is kinship, what is relatedness.
How can we have a dialogue between Buddhism and animism? First I think the main term for me is relationality. We are dealing in Buddhism with a process ontology or process philosophy where we see more process than objects. And in animism it’s very similar. You have a way to relate to the world where the way to relate to other is what creates an individuality.
Just to have in mind that you are felt by other presences when you go to the forest or when you go to the park and to have that possibility open when you relate to the world. I think that’s a beginning and a big shift for many of us who are used to seeing the forest as something dead or just something to amuse the human world.
There are a lot of practices where you feel like an impostor, like you’re not real, but it’s practice, it’s to sit in front of the tree and just be there and practice. Practice to have a conversation, a wild conversation with an other-than-human. It takes practice and the more you practice the more I think we’re going to feel that kind of relationship and communication. But second, just to have that seed in my mind that I am here by other entities in the world, by plants, by trees, by animals, so they hear me and I can hear them. Just to have that possibility on my mind opens up my ontology.
… to practice with, and this is very specific with the Buddhist practices, to practice outside with the mosquitoes, with the worm, with the rain, to make it part of us.
… the words of the trees or the words of the forest or the presence of the animals, they are not going to be expressing in a human language. It’s going to be another way of relating. So how can we learn that other way of relating that animism brings to our practice? We have to learn how to be there without seeking anything.
… the collective grief, but also that kind of loss where you feel you don’t have the words and the songs and the images to communicate with the more than human world. I think that’s something we need to bring to the Buddhist communities who are interested. I think the Work that Reconnects does great work with bringing a methodology to address our disconnection with the Earth but also it’s not the only methodology. We need to create other methodologies.
If you ask people from, I don’t know, the Mapuche people, I think they are not concerned with liberation as Buddhism understands. They are concerned with keeping harmony, keeping the harmony of the mundane that’s also related to extra mundane, but keeping the living conditions stable, not stable as a fixed thing, but with harmony.
If liberation is something that we understand that takes us out from the material conditions, I think there’s a problem for a Buddhism that is ecologically responsible.
