A couple of months ago, when there was a callout for musicians to participate in a musical service for the church, I was moved to offer a song from an old group called “The Incredible String Band”, A Very Cellular Song. It’s a very long song, and I’m not surprised that we couldn’t find a place to include it, but I was a bit taken aback when it was assumed to be a humorous song – probably because I’m seen as a person who doesn’t take things, particularly spiritual things, very seriously. And it is, in fact, quite a humorous song in parts. But I had offered it as a statement of belief, perhaps without fully realizing it myself, and this challenge made me reexamine this song and my own belief system. Let me play just a part of it now.

There would seem to be no way to describe this approach other than animism, the belief that all things have a “nature” and respond to us as we respond to them. Animism, of course, has been around since Paleolithic times, and has produced many offshoots, like shamanism and ancestor worship. Shinto, the state religion of Japan, is an Animist religion. Taoism also has a flavor of animism to it. Even in the almost monolithically Judaeo-Christian United States, people give a life-value to inanimate objects, and even converse with them. I heard a forester mourning for the fall of the Wye Oak last week on NPR, and many of us have found significance, comfort or companionship in a particular rock or piece of dead wood. This is the thread of animism that is even more our religious heritage than the Judaeo-Christianity we claim.

But it is not in such a context really a belief system. What I would like to present today is an approach that sees animism as an appropriate and logical response to what we know about our universe. In this approach, I am not claiming that all material beings have a soul (which I don’t claim for people, either) or conscious thought as we know it; but I question whether conscious thought gives people any more existence-value than animals, trees or rocks. I want to go outside the human point of view, as well as it may serve us in our daily existence, and present all existence in terms of spectra. In quantum physics, a particle can be regarded either as a discrete entity or a wave; I'd like to explore the wave function of existence.

Let us take our Seventh Principle as a starting point. We state that we believe in the interdependent web of all existence. Commonly we are thinking of respect for animals and plant life when making this statement, but how deep can this go? What we know about the formation of the universe shows that it goes as deep as it possibly can. Virtually all the atomic particles that exist now have existed since the first few moments after the Big Bang. These atoms have been processed into elements through successive episodes of star formation and star destruction. As we heard when Brian Straight gave his talk a few months ago, the gold of the ring on my finger can have been forged in only one place – the explosion of a supernova, some billions of years ago. Everything in and on earth was produced in similar fashion, with the exception of hydrogen, helium and a few other elements that were formed in the big bang itself. Can our relationship with everything around us be much more basic than that?

We know that all life is interrelated, having formed from a single or few ancestral forms. But these forms themselves were created by chemical interactions of previously inanimate substances, some possibly having been carried to our planet by cometary or meteorite impact – all existence is a continuum, and it is our own anthropocentrism and our dichotomous, categorizing minds that set barriers between man, animals, plants and non-living beings.

There are obviously differences, but as a common Zen saying goes, "Not one – not two". The point I wish to make is that we have no right to assume that the value of other existences must be measured against human criteria. A rock is an existing thing. It doesn’t think, but it has a nature, properties, it changes over time, it reacts to its environment, and it speaks to us in many ways – from the information it imparts to the geologist to the impression it makes on our toes. It is an interesting and wonderful being in its own right.

Let me play another selection from Incredible String Band, called The Water Song.

Knowledge of biology and physics is not only not incompatible with an animist point of view, it is central to it – realizing, of course, that the view of animism I present is not necessarily shared by all who would consider themselves animists. The ancient animist belief, as well as the beliefs of some Native American tribes, regards other existences as part of an extended personhood; there are bird-persons and rock-persons and sky-persons. The language is not what I would use, but the concept is not so different. I share with this ancient animism a belief that these other beings can be our guides and teachers, even friends or enemies, but arising from no will or spirit on the part of these beings. I would say instead that the possibility of these relationships arises instead from the very nature of these other beings, their existence without the human qualities that we have made the criterion of value.

And even the human qualities we tout are part of a continuum that we share with these other beings. Trees and plants have a communication system, based on chemical interactions, that is differs from our mode in a qualitative but not a functional way. Ants use this means of communication also. Rocks and minerals share a place on this spectrum, more remote from us but still with some shared characteristics; there are chemical and electrical processes going on in them and between them. Geological entities do not reproduce, although they can multiply in a sense, but they metamorphose, like insects but on a longer time scale. Humans used to debate whether the "lower animals" felt pain (or pleasure) at all; this is not now in doubt, and we know that even plants have reactions, too far away from our own experience to be called "feelings" without straying into anthropomorphism, but that follow similar patterns. Farther away still are the patterns in rocks and water, but they are there. Think of the common attributes used to distinguish between minerals – hardness, fracture, crystal structure, solubility. I often wonder how such things, in combination with electrochemical reactions, compare to what we call feelings. If I ever understood the relationship, could it be put into words? Or would I have to rely on mute imagination and the language of dreams to carry the meaning?

How do these beliefs shape my everyday existence? I think they give me a awareness of my place in nature. I talk to other entities although I don’t expect a response in kind; I wonder whether erratic boulder-beings brought to the till plains of Indiana by glacier-beings are lonely, and how trees regard the wind; and I listen to what these other beings are saying to me, although I don’t always fully comprehend it. I have a consciousness that every action I take impacts other beings (even people), and I give consideration to a range of consequences stretching from the microscopic world to the universe. I don’t know whether any of this results in a coherent morality – my morality has always been pretty situational. But if the golden rule is a moral standard, perhaps this approach extends it out a little further.