Hi everyone. I'm Josh, and this is The Emerald, Currants and Trends Through a Mythic Lens,

the podcast where we explore an ever-changing world and our lives in it through the lens of myth,

story, and imagination.

The Emerald.

All that's happening on this green jewel in space. animism is normative consciousness.

The title of this episode speaks for itself, really.

For 98% of human history, 99.9% of our ancestors lived, breathed, and interacted with a world that they saw and felt to be animate,

imbued with life force, inhabited by and permeated with forces, with which we exist in ongoing relation.

This animate vision was the water in which we swam. It was consciousness in its natural

dwelling place, the normative way of seeing the world and our place in it. It wasn't a theory,

a philosophy, or an idea. It wasn't actually an ism. It was felt experience. It lived in bones and bloodstreams, in heripulated hairs rising to meet a world of

equally vibrant mists. It lived in tongues and teeth, in spines and eyes, in points of meditative

focus found in downward and upward gazing. it lived in the gurgling of streams,

the pounding of drumbeats, the sound of breath makes as it passes through nostrils.

It was an ongoing discussion that took place most often without words.

It was simply how things were, which is why it has been commonly understood across the entire world

for all of time.

We'll explore what this animate vision specifically means a little further on, but it's important

to get a few things really clear right at the

beginning. One is the scope and scale that we are talking about here in terms of time. So again,

if you're a human being, and I take it by the fact that you're listening to this that you probably

are, then at least 99.9% of your ancestors were animist.

...