Episode 17 : Genesis Part 21 : The Sound of Silence

We’re going to start this one off nice… and slow.

If ever there were an episode to listen to without busying yourself, without multi-tasking, this would be it, but if that’s not available to you, carry on my friend. Your moment of stillness will come it’s inevitable, I suppose…

If you can… take a moment, wherever you are, to notice. Start with one object or space perhaps, an orientation to something that pleases you. Something that feels well, alive, you know, in that sense we just spent three episodes talking about. Notice the nature of the order around you.

Notice the light… where is it coming from? There is always light somewhere, well, almost always. Right now for me the light is coming from a lone window, the sun is shining directly on the carpet and I can see the dust dancing in the air. I can see everything in the room because of the light. It really ties the room together, if you know what I mean. 

My study right now, where I sit is not as tidy as it usually is. There’s a pile of opened mail that requires my attention sitting atop the box such things belong in. A few Zafu’s that should be stacked are strewn about the floor thanks to an early morning tea session with my three year old neice. Her fishy cup still has a drop of tea in it. Yes, I said fishy cup. It’s a tiny little tea cup with a coi fish on the bottom of it. It’s her favorite, of course. The nature of this order, today, has a little chaos in it, but the chaos is coherent with the order. Christopher Alexander wrote that wholeness is not an aesthetic preference but the nature of the real. The world, he said, is always trying to become whole, and occasionally—if we are very still—we notice. Occasionally, the coherence of existence is present in the dancing particles of dust that flicker for half a heartbeat in the early morning light.

Coherence is not just order, then. It is not just symmetry or tidiness or the absence of conflict.

Coherence is the sense that everything belongs, even the shadows, even your junk drawer or chaotic closet. It is when a room feels welcoming not because it is perfect, but because nothing inside it competes for attention. Every part supports everything else. This is what Alexander meant when he talked about “aliveness”—the way things gain vitality when they participate in one another’s existence. But we’re not going to talk about architecture today. We’re just going to talk about, well, the thing that is hard to talk about. The thing that existed before names or naming. Some call it the Tao; the ineffible way all things flow. To the Yoruba, it is the breath of life, the aśe, which is also the force of change or creation. To us, it is the Anima. But it existed long before the latin language from which that word arose, long before any language.

What has all this naming done to our perception of spirit? 

To our perception of our entire existence?

In the Shinto tradition, musubi is the generative binding force of the universe, the quiet motion that connects before it creates. It is the reason a seed bursts open, the reason rivers gather tributaries, the reason two strangers can, in the right circumstance, speak as though they have known each other for lifetimes. The literal translation, if you can say such a thing in Japanese, for literal seems to really mean “rational” these days, and I’ve always had a sense that Japanese rationality is nothing like ours… anyway. Musubi translates to “Joining Together” or “Binding” and can be symbolized by a knot. 

The Japanese scholar of the Edo period, Norinaga Motoori, described it as the animating logic of the kami— spirits not content to hover above the world, but move within it, shaping and being shaped by every leaf, every stream, every human gesture. When Yamamoto Yukitaka, a high priest of the Shinto tradition in the 60’s spoke of Musubi, he spoke of creation as a continuous act. Not a single beginning, but a constant weaving-together. Musubi; also known as Ashe, or Anima, the Holy Spirit, the Force, or a great many other names,… the faceless power that weaves us together and flows through us.

Take a moment to think of exactly how your own life has been woven. For most of us, much of it comes from our parents and grandparents and their lineage. In Come of Age by Stephen Jenkinson, the author speaks of the loom and its magical undercurrents and architecture in our lives. Specificaly, the book is on Elderhood and the poverty of living in a culture without elders, without the time caspules of wisdom that is those who have came before us. For they are in fact the fundament of the weaving, the thing that binds a society together, binds a culture together. He says:

“Think again of the wonder that is weaving for a moment. There are the warp threads. Typically they are the threads that you can see, whose choreography gives you the pattern and the harmonies of the cloth. And there is the weft, those threads beneath the warp, holding it apart and together enough that it is proper weaving and not piles of thread on the floor. Weaving: the seen draped across the shoulders and outstretched arms of the unseen. The miraculous “no visible means of support.” Seeing that, you can see the function of the elder in a living community. The elder is the amanuensis of the unseen, its onomatopoeia.”

The elder is the amanuensis of the unseen, its onomatopoeia. Let me break down this sentence for you. An elder is someone who listens deeply to what can’t be seen or easily said, and then gives it voice. They don’t invent wisdom; they transcribe it. Like an amanuensis taking dictation, they put words to forces, patterns, and truths that exist before language. Calling the elder “its onomatopoeia” means the elder doesn’t just describe the unseen—they vibrate it. Their speech carries the rhythm, tone, and resonance of what they’ve witnessed. And the words are not what’s heard. It’s their undercurrent. Their echo is reality itself, the way “thunder” echoes the sound it names. In short: the elder speaks from the unseen, not about it, and their words are shaped by what they’ve listened to for a long time. He continues: 

“The eclipse of early family allegiance, the concentrated frailties, the utter extinction of potential, and the wisdom that can ensue from that—in this we have elderhood, and elderhood when it is honoured in the midst of a living culture and employed in its ceremonial, political, and economic life is that culture taking dictation from the unseen, from the Great Beyond. Elders do not take their guidance from their Ancestors and their Gods nearly as much as they in their tempered, archaic, implacable ways are the mutterings of the Old Ones that the rest of us, with respect and a learned ear, get to overhear. Not the weavers, no—they are the weaving.”

This is coherence on a cultural level, found in the workings of our woven reality, in the way we build the world. The way a craftsperson leans into their work until their hands and the wood seem to understand each other. The way grief binds people who might otherwise never have met. Elderhood is essential to Animism. Musubi, ashe, coherence, whaever you want to call it, is not a force outside us. It is the architecture of relationship inside everything. And it’s been around long before we could label it or categorize it. And that’s what we’re going to talk about today. The unseen. The unheard. The under-current. The time before time and all the ways in which we can become present to it.

Our Elders, our lineage, tell us of a time lived that is not our own, and yet is for us. Lineage is the human chain that coherence and Musubi rely upon to move through the world. Stephen Jenkinson often says that culture collapses when there are no elders. Not because old people no longer exist, but because the cord between generations has frayed. And you can feel the truth of that in our culture. Ask yourself, do you long for Elders? For the older generatation to be the lighthouse in an increasingly uncertain world. To be a guidepost for how to navigate harder times? More chaotic times? A longing for answers that we couldn’t possibly know having lived only a few decades?

Coherence is the field of play, the Infinite Game, the unseen weft. Musubi, ashe, anima… is the binding, the Warp. Elderhood, then, is intergenerational presence, the way the binding travels through time. It is how memory becomes world-making.

When my Grandmother died in 2016, something died with her. Mind you, my grandfather had died a decade before that and the family dynamic remained in tact. But Nani, as my younger cousins called her, she was the warp. She was the binding agent. Because she would sit and listen and drink coffee with you until midnight any day of the week. She cooked until she couldn’t cook any longer, and by then her children were so used to being at her house on Sunday night and sharing a meal that they couldn’t do otherwise, and cooked for her. My grandmother had a gravity to her. I thought about her often, even living 2000 miles away for most of my adult life, and we spoke regularly on the phone. I’m not sure she ever did have a cell phone. There was no need, because there was an immediacy about her that demanded your presence in the room, a cup of coffee and a conversation with pauses and laughs. 

When she died, something in the family died with her. There was a fractaling of a kind. Instead of gathering under one roof to make pasta every Christmas Eve, suddedly we we all doing it somewhere else. Suddenly Chicago winters had become unbearable. Suddenly there were better ways to live that didn’t involve tradition and proximity. Because we are the children of the madness we call modernity. The warp is weakening, and with it our awareness of the weft, the unseen. Coherence is transmitted through the warp, not through instruction, but through proximity. Coherence is felt by the actions of our Elders.

Some cultures have not forgotten this. In Māori cosmology, whakapapa—genealogy—is not a family tree but a cosmic map. You descend not only from ancestors but from mountains, winds, rivers, stones. The ability to recite one’s own whakapapa is a testament to one’s idenity. You are seen through time lock step with those who came before you.

The Lakota phrase mitakuye oyasin—all my relations—means that kinship extends to the entire living and more-than-living world. These teachings aren’t sentimental. When cultures speak this way—when kinship includes rivers and winds—they aren’t romanticizing nature. They’re describing the physics of belonging. They’re saying what Alexander showed in built space and what Pirsig insisted upon in his metaphysics: that nothing is itself alone. A room, a story, a human life—each becomes more alive when it takes its shape from the things it touches.

When we looked at Byung-Chul Han’s work, specifically his book The Disappearance of Ritual, we were confronted with the disappearance of shared coherence. When rhythms are lost, when seasons blur, when there is no “we” to carry time across generations, musubi is starved. The binding weakens. When the warp is frayed, the weft becomes weak. As most of you know I live in an intentional community of a kind, and we have this conversation often. How exactly do we build a harmonious, peaceful society when that which we have in common is slowly deteriorating. Any why is it deteriorating? Yes, we have commonality, but if you look across the landscape of your relations, ask yourself, just how different is your parenting style than that of your friends. How different are your Gods, if you have them at all? Your politics? How different are your dinner customs? How exactly are humans supposed to learn and grow from each other without these common threads? How are we supposed to rest our minds and our nervous systems in the familiar if we are constantly trying to make sense of all the difference? You feel me?

We know there are problems with homogenous cultures, but the inverse is also true. Imagine what your nervous system would feel like if everyone around you share your most core beliefs around basic freedoms and the origin of the universe… imagine if you had a coherent worldview that you didn’t have to question everytime a new YouTube video on the existence of Aliens or the real story behind stem cells found its way into your Algorithm.

Now, its obvious, expecially here in America that this was inevitable to a degree. We are a culture of cultures. We are a global country moreso than any other country on the planet. The U.S.  has one of the largest foreign-born populations on Earth, drawn from nearly every country, religion, and cultural tradition. In absolute terms, few places contain more origin diversity, and we share a common language, albeit not our own, so these cultures can communicate. Despite this, American politicans are doing their best to craft a dominant culture, a democratic or republican majority, a liberal or conservative culture, whatever the f^&k that means,  and in doing so continuing to fray the warp that is our culture. It’s ironic. It’s devastating, as we’re seeing now. Something about what we’re doing right now is just not working. I have no idea how to raise children, what’s appropriate, what’s not appropriate, because our perspectives on such things are changing rapidly.

One couple raises their children entirely on the philosophy of a book they read, another by the guides of their religious beliefs, another by doing everything opposite their parents out of rebellion and trauma response, another by letting the child run as wild and free as possible without boundary. How do these parents relate? How do the children relate? What happens when they go to their grandparents house? How does coherence fit into the weave of this puzzle? 

I don’t know how you all feel out there, but America feels a long way from culturally coherent. For those of you who live elsewhere, I pray you know cultural coherence. I pray this is a phase, and that coherence of some kind is on the horizon.

Back to Jenkinson…

Stephen Jenkinson has made his living as a poet by drawing our attention to the deeper meanings embedded in our spoken and written language—meanings that sit openly before us, yet so often pass by without being seen. He has a way of exposing the weft beneath the warp, so to speak. Consider his treatise on the work Arche. He says:

“This isn’t a word that stands alone in modern English. It is, however, the root of a half-page of words in the standard dictionaries, and it deserves a second look from us now. As an adjective, it means “clever, sly, roguish.” As a prefix, it means something like “chief, principle.” It also has the shade of “first, original,” which is something closer to its Greek beginnings. Already you can sense the dance in the word. Now consider something simpler: the arch. In the foot, in the doorway of an old building, it is the curved shape that “binds by mutual pressure and can sustain a load.” This dynamic, incarnated meaning gives us something like the primordial sense of the word. The arch was an extraordinary thing once. It was a mythic structure in that it was a nothing that bore up everything that rested or depended upon it. Peasants who had never seen one coming from the countryside to a newly built church to pray couldn’t be persuaded to pass underneath it. They couldn’t tell the diabolical from the divine when they saw it, and for good reason, because the arch marries the two. The Roman arch was something of a squat, Mediterranean affair. It had a wide stance and a modest soar. The Gothic arch, its northern European grandchild, was a faithful sign of the devotional life of its time. It raced skyward, towards the remote one true God, and it did so by contracting its stance, by narrowing its contact with ground it relied upon. It would have swayed with the first strong breeze or collapsed under its own weight had it not the extraordinary ancillary structures (the flying buttress, for one) way up in the air to replace the wide stance it had forsaken for the sake of leaving this mortal coil. The arch begins and ends not with the keystone in the middle up in the air, but in the foundation stones upon which all of the building—the arch and all above it—truly rests. And there are two foundations, at least two, to every arch. The word doesn’t mean “beginning,” except to a one-origin believer. It means “beginnings.” Arche is “that which understands and bears up.” If the ancestral presence, the unseen but attested-to sustaining presence, is the ground of our personal and cultural being—and it is—then the agent of that sustenance is the foundation stones resting upon it, those upon which our personal and cultural lives stand. Those foundation stones are elders, and that under standing and bearing up is what they do for us. Real human life is inconceivable without them. Life without them is anarchy.”

Anarchy… “without the Arche”

What is the Arche of our culture that holds us up? 

Feel for a moment into what exactly is the foundation of our culture? Not some abstract idea. It’s not Freedom. I certainly hope it’s not capitalism. It’s clearly not Family Values. And like it or not, it’s no longer Christain.

So what then?

How do we restore a cultural coherence that brings a deeper meaning to our lived existence? How do we draw down into what it means to be human? Well, we’re going to go back. To the beginning, you know, when there was only darkness, and silence? That beginning. The very beginning.

You know the Church of Infinite Harmony is an Animist Church. We are begging humans to remember and re-ignite their ancestral relationship with all of Earth. To remember living world, not just one that can be bought or sold. If we are to restore it of course, then it is important to understand how and what exactly has become lost. We ask that humans honor the Great Mystery, that we stop pretending we know our mouths from our assholes and grant the universe a little well earned reverence. Let’s look a little closer at the human condition, shall we? Let’s explore why, as we’ve mentioned before, the most ancient of texts implore us to look beyond what is being said, and listen to name of the wind. Let’s explore the origins of Animism, the origins of our consciousness, as if such a thing were possible, and the golden threads that weave us together… and if we’re lucky, if we’re quiet enough, awaken… to the all encompassing  sound… of silence.

Today, on the Infinite Harmony Podcast.

If you look closely, the question of why cultures began with animism is really a question about how consciousness first met the world. Before modern language and it’s layers of abstractions, before metaphysics, before theology hardened into institutions, human beings encountered a universe that moved, breathed, shimmered, and responded. Animism wasn’t a belief system in the modern sense. It was the default grammar of reality. It was the first language in which the world spoke back.

Part of this is cognitive, part is ecological, and part is existential—so let me braid them together the way you’d expect: through story, through anthropology, through philosophy, and through the way our own bones still respond to wind in the trees.

The anthropologist Nurit Bird-David argued something radical in her re-reading of animism: that it was never a primitive misinterpretation of the natural world, but a relational epistemology. In other words, early humans didn’t assume the river had a spirit because they were naïve. They assumed the river had a spirit because they had a millennia-long relationship with it—one in which the river behaved, changed, offered gifts, punished carelessness, shaped migrations, and carved memory into the land. In this worldview, personhood is not restricted to humans; it is extended to anything with which one has an ongoing, responsive relationship. Or as Josh Shrei would say, Animism is normative consciousness.

Bird-David mentions something rather interesting in her journal “Animism Revisited.” She speaks of the ancient peoples as “dividuals,” now I had never heard of this word but apparently it is a word and pre-dates the modern “individual.” The etymology of dividual is something akin to divisible, and in the case of indiviudal the prefix in means “not”

The indivudual is not divisible, not capable by definition of merging with the animate universe. Apparently we have to become dividuals… more on that later…

This dovetails with what Graham Harvey calls the “new animism”: the idea that the world is full of “persons,” only some of whom are human. This, he argues, is not superstition; it is an accurate description of how humans perceive agency long before abstraction interferes.

But beneath the study of animism and all the irony we will discover with such an idea that it can be studied, there’s something deeper happening—something far more mythic and far more existential. Imagine the first humans walking across the Pleistocene savannah, fondly known as the ice age… the headwind beating against their fur pelts is not an object; it is a presence. The ominous storm careening over the mountain range toward them is not a meteorological anomaly; it is a force with intention. When your survival depends on your attunement to subtle shifts in weather, animal behavior, plant cycles, and soundscapes, you don’t experience the world as inert.

You experience it as alive… and in my opinion, you are more alive.

Animism emerges because aliveness is the raw data of human perception.

Even the neurologist Oliver Sacks noticed this in his patients with temporal-lobe epilepsy: in certain altered states, the boundary between self and world dissolves, and the environment seems to “respond” or “speak.” Sacks wasn’t making a claim about spirits; he was noting that the human brain is wired to detect agency long before it detects mechanism.

So early humans, living in direct reciprocity with land, experienced the world in a constant feedback loop. You give something; something responds. You take too much; the world tightens. You listen; the world teaches. There’s no need for belief—it’s a relational living.

James Frazer, in The Golden Bough, mistakenly framed early animism as a cognitive error—an infant form of science. But Robert Bellah, in Religion in Human Evolution, corrected him: he suggested that animism wasn’t pre-scientific, it was pre-separate. Humans had not yet split the world into subject and object. They lived in what phenomenologists call a “participatory ontology”—a world where self and world are continuous. As you know from previous episodes, this is a point of contention in my personal philosophy of how we can become more present, more embodied and more alive. Dismantling the subject / object relationship…

Merleau-Ponty writes in The Phenomenology of Perception that the body’s first instinct is not to categorize but to intertwine. He says “ The world is... the natural setting of, and field for, all my thoughts and all my explicit perceptions. Truth does not inhabit only the inner man, or more accurately, there is no inner man, man is in the world, and only in the world does he know himself.”

Before thought, there is participation. That is animism.

And once you understand animism as participation, something else snaps into focus: all   cultures begin with animism because it is the metaphysics of childhood, of specieshood, of life itself. Children today—before their education prunes away enchantment—intuit that trees listen, that animals feel, that water remembers. It takes years of industrial conditioning to teach them that none of this is true.

All this leads to the one of the primary golden threads of this podcast, which is the influence of language as a framework we exist within, trapping us within the cages of our own minds, unable to relate to the living world.

 David Abram, in The Spell of the Sensuous, argues that alphabetic literacy played a key role in breaking the animist worldview. Once people began reading texts instead of landscapes, their attention shifted from the living world to a symbolic one. Animism didn’t fade because we grew wiser; it faded because our attention was stolen. We will be looking at his work in depth throughout the series, as like myself, he was aware of the impacts of language and literacy on the modern mind.

Byung-Chul Han wouldsays modernity’s crisis is not that we have too little information, but that we have too little world. We’ve lost the capacity to perceive aliveness because our senses have been anesthetized by screens, speed, and fragmentation.

And this connects to our own work.

Animism is coherence perceived as kinship.

Animism is musubi before the word musubi existed.

Animism is intergenerational presence extended beyond bloodlines into ecosystems.

It is, in essence, the oldest human recognition: that the world does not just surround you; it includes you. And that every relation—tree, animal, river, ancestor, wind—is an expression of the same living field.

So why did all cultures begin with animism? Because animism is not a belief; it is the perceptual truth of a world experienced without abstraction. It is the universe meeting the human animal in the rawest, most honest way possible. It is our first metaphysics, our first ecology, our first cosmology, our first home.

Do you feel like you have never quite found “home” in this life? I sure do sometimes. Like I don’t belong in this world. Like this world doesn’t embrace me in the way that feels like “home.”

I’d challenge you with this: animism didn’t die. We just became deaf to it. But the world hasn’t stopped speaking. It never will. There’s a peculiar moment in the life of every culture when it first learns it has a religion. And that moment never arrives from within. It always comes from the outside—like someone knocking on your door to inform you that the air you’ve been breathing your whole life has a name and a physical state.

Animism, in this sense, was never born. It was diagnosed.

Before contact, before conversion, before the arrival of writing systems that carved the world into categories, people across every continent lived inside a cosmos that didn’t require a title because it wasn’t a belief. It was the condition of being alive.

No culture walks around declaring itself animist. A Lakota hunter did not say, “I practice animism,” any more than an Amazonian grandmother stirring cassava didn’t pause to consider her philosophy of religion. The San people of southern Africa—whose trance dances are older than most mythologies—never needed a term for the living world they participated in. They simply danced with forces that danced back.

The pattern is astonishingly consistent.

It was only when Europeans arrived—with their taxonomies, their classifications, their desire to

map and quantify—that the old ways were suddenly asked to stand in the witness box. Missionaries needed vocabulary: what is your religion called? What god do you follow? What are your doctrines? And when Indigenous peoples had no answers—because those questions made as much sense as asking what their economic policy was—Europeans supplied the missing terminology themselves. And of course, the Europeans were also Animist… but somewhere along the lines of history they transformed the powers of nature into Anthropormorphic Beings, into Gods.

“Animism” was coined by Edward Tylor in 1871, not to describe the worldview of his own culture, but to label the worldview of every culture that didn’t fit into the European schema of monotheism or polytheism. It was a back-formation—a word created after the fact to give shape to something that never needed a shape. It was less a description than a boundary, a way of saying: this is what people believe before they discover real religion.

But beneath the imperial arrogance, something unintentionally true was happening. What Tylor called “animism” was simply the human default: the recognition that the world is alive, responsive, inhabited by presence; that nature is not an object but a field of being. It was the recognition of the world before man divided it with his words and classifications. It was the silence that pervaded everything.

Only when cultures collide—only when a competing worldview enters the scene—does the unnamed become named. The moment a tradition must explain itself to someone who cannot perceive its world, it becomes a “religion.” It becomes a system. It becomes an -ism.

And this naming is always a diminishment, an abstraction. The named is bounded. The namless is the eternal. When the world itself is alive, language doesn’t need to capture it. Presence does. Relationship does. Participation does.

Animism is not the belief that everything has a spirit. It is the recognition that everything is a spirit—or rather, that spirit is the name we give to the aliveness that moves through all things. You feel this before you can articulate it. You lose it only when abstraction replaces intimacy.

The irony is that animism is not the primitive worldview. It’s the primordial way of being. It’s the breath of life that awakens when we quiet the rational mind and start to feel the pulse of existence,  whenever the structures of modernity crack, whenever people return to land, whenever the human heart remembers how to listen.

It is unnamed because its true name is the world itself.

Aho.. Aśe.. Amen

 Imagine a world that was never divided between the sacred and the ordinary—a world where the breath of the forest, the crash of water against stone, the dance of the dawning light as it enters a wooden doorway, and the cry of a newborn babe were all part of the same infinite family. 

This is the world of Shinto.

Long before Japan had a name, before its islands had risen fully from the sea, there were two siblings whose story reads like the first dream the world ever had. Izanagi and Izanami,  man and woman, brother and sister stood upon the Floating Bridge of Heaven, stirring the primal ocean with a jeweled spear. From the drops that fell from its tip, the islands of Japan coalesced like dew, becoming a tiny world in a vast ocean. When they stepped down upon the soft, newborn earth, their footsteps were the first rituals, and their breath was the first wind to carry intention.

Their union birthed mountains, rivers, mists, and the gods—The Kami were not hierarchical, but woven directly into the matter of the world. Fire was kami. Wind was kami. Rice was kami. Even the tenderness between people could be a kami if it held enough sincerity. For after the goddess Izanami dies giving birth to the fire kami Kagutsuchi, her husband and brother Izanagi is devastated. Unable to accept her death, he decides to travel to Yomi, the land of the dead, to bring her back. 

Yomi : the shadowy, decaying underworld—the underside of the land of the rising sun, the inverion of the sprawling rivers and forests of their great island.

When Izanagi finds Izanami there, she tells him she has already eaten the food of Yomi and therefore cannot easily return. She asks him to wait while she pleads to the spirits of the underworld for permission to return to the land above. But Izanagi becomes impatient. He lights a comb from his hair like a torch and looks at her.

What he sees horrifies him. His sister’s body is decaying, crawling with maggots, and thunder deities cling to her rotting flesh. Enraged and ashamed that he has seen her in this state, she sends the spirits of Yomi to chase Izanagi back to the world above.

He flees toward the entrance of the underworld, pursued by demons and thunder gods. Just before escaping, he throws objects behind him—grapes, bamboo shoots—to distract his pursuers and ward them away. When he emerges from the underworld, he seals the entrance of Yomi with a massive boulder.

From the other side of the stone, Izanami shouts that she will kill one thousand people every day in revenge. Izanagi replies that he will cause fifteen hundred people to be born each day. Thus, the cycle of death and birth are written into the world. 

There are many stories of the gods travelling into the Underworld. Freya for her Son Baldr, Orpheus to retreive his beloved wife, Eurydice. All whom make the journey find that there is a way to retrieve that which they desire, and yet somehow all fail.

And thus we are taught that in order to understand the anima of life, we must understand the inevitability and finality of death, for even the gods have no sway once the coins are placed upon our eyes.

After escaping, Izanagi feels defiled by his contact with death. He performs a ritual purification (misogi) by the river, and during this cleansing more kami are born from his body. When he washed his left eye, Amaterasu, the sun goddess and queen of the Kami was born. When he washed his right eye, Tsukoyumi, the god of the moon was born, and when he washed his nose, the trickster Susanoo was born into the world. 

These are the stories of the Animists. Of the old ones. Of the first peoples. Of the uncontacted tribes. They’re our stories. Just a few thousand years ago, they were the only stories.

They are older than all the written doctrines—they are the residual warmth of the world’s first coherence. If Taoism whispers that the Way is the mother of all things, Shinto smiles and answers that all things are the children of the Way. And if in the Upanishads the divine is the inner fire, Shinto replies that the divine is the outer world as well—and that the flame inside you is not different from the flame inside the mountain, or the rice stalk, or the ancestor whose hands shaped the tools you still use.

The kami are not supernatural. They are ultra-natural. They are what the world looks like when you see it without numbing, without the habit of treating everything as inert. A waterfall is a kami because it teaches constancy and transience in the same breath. A giant cedar is a kami because it stands where generations of humans have come to soften their questions. A sword can be a kami if it was forged with devotion; a child’s laughter can be a kami if it reveals the world’s original joy.

Shinto’s shrines—those quiet sanctuaries tucked into forests, perched on mountaintops, or leaning into the whisper of the sea—are not built to contain the divine. They are built to frame it. 

I’ve had the priviledge of standing beneath the Itsukushima Shrine of Miajima Island, the great O-Torii Gate and can speak to its power. It reminded me that when you pass beneath a torii gate, you are not entering another world; you are entering this world with your senses awake. The path is swept not because the gods demand it, but because care sharpens perception. The offering of rice or sake is not tribute; it is reciprocity. Shinto’s rituals are not bargains but gestures of coherence, invitations for musubi—the generative binding-force—to move freely again.

And there is a lineage here, a lineage of presence. The old priest sweeping the stone path in the rain. The grandmother placing a bowl of food at a small household shrine. The child folding their hands before a towering cedar. These acts are intergenerational bridges, carrying forward a world where nothing is separate, nothing is unimportant, nothing is without spirit.

If you walk far enough into Shinto’s heart, you dont’ find theology. You find a sensation: that the world is alive, that it pays attention, that it remembers… that it is your companion. The mountains know your footsteps. The river listens to your grief. The wind carries your intentions farther than you imagine.

Shinto is not a system. Its a relationship. A long, patient practice of noticing the aliveness that has always been here. But here’s the important part, a little golden thread we’re going to weave throughout this podcast... the Japanese did not originally call their indigenous practices Shintō. They simply lived within a world of kami. There was no system, no categorical name, because there was no competing worldview from which it needed to be distinguished. This might be difficult to illustrate on an audio podcast, but one of the reasons I’m talking about Shinto, as opposed to other animist traditions, is because of the fascinating aspect of the Japanese language, specifically the kanji, or characters we are familiar with. Firstly, they came from China, possibly through Korea, somewhere around 500 CE.

Before this moment, Japan was entirely oral.

That means the animist traditions we now call Shinto existed for what is likely millennia—without written codification. Archaeological evidence from the Jōmon period shows ritual figurines (dogū), sacred sites, and burial practices strongly suggestive of animistic cosmology that dates back as far as 14,0000 years. The Yayoi period which began around 300 BCE introduced rice agriculture and more structured ritual life. By the time kanji arrived, Japan had already lived inside a relational, kami-filled world for well over a thousand years, and likely far longer.

The word Shintō (神道) is itself a kind of cultural hinge—an old doorway built only when Japan needed a name for something that had, until then, simply been the way the world was. Its origins are straightforward on the surface but reveal a deeper linguistic and philosophical story.Shintō is written with two Chinese characters:

• 神 (shin / kami) – “spirit,” “god,” “numinous presence,” “ancestral or natural divinity.”

• 道 (tō / dō) – “the way,” “the path,” “the abiding course of things” (the same dō found in Tao/Dao, as in Taoism’s 道).

Together: 神道 = “the Way of the Spirits.”

This term,“Shintō” appears only after Buddhism arrives around the 6th century CE. And when Buddhist monks arrived with their sutras, metaphysics, monasteries, and their word for their own path—仏道 (butsudō, “the Buddha’s Way”)—the Japanese needed a way to differentiate the native practices from the imported ones. So they adopted two Chinese characters and pronounced them with a Sino-Japanese reading:

神道 → Shintō“the Way of the kami,” set against仏道 → Butsudo“the Way of the Buddha.”

This doesn’t mean Shinto borrowed its worldview from China—it means Japan borrowed the word for a worldview it already lived. The older, native word for the same reality was simply “kami-no-michi.” Meaning: “the way of the kami.” 

This phrase was found The Kojiki—Record of Ancient Matters, completed in 712 CE—is the oldest surviving book in Japan. It is a strange, shimmering hybrid of genealogy, poetry, myth, imperial ideology, and cosmology, compiled by Ō no Yasumaro from oral traditions recited by the court storyteller Hieda no Are. What makes the Kojiki so astonishing is that it captures Shinto before it was Shinto—before it had been forced into comparative frameworks, before it was filtered through Buddhist interpretation. In the Kojiki, the world begins as a thick, swirling chaos—something like the Taoist hundun—out of which the first kami emerge almost like dew forming on early morning grasses. This is where we read the story of Izanagi and Izanami.

Four years later, in 720 CE, the Nihon Shoki—Chronicle of Japan—was completed. It is more formal, more politically conscious, more aligned with Chinese history. If the Kojiki is mythic memory, the Nihon Shoki is mythic statecraft. It places the imperial line directly in descent from Amaterasu Ōmikami, the sun goddess, thereby sacralizing governance and unifying clans under a single cosmic narrative. It is meticulous where the Kojiki is intuitive, didactic where the Kojiki is poetic. But both are essential. Together, they capture the moment when kami-no-michi shifts from oral cosmology to written lineage, from something lived to something curated.

And yet, if you read them closely, they are not fossilized texts. They breathe. They reveal a world in which humans, gods, animals, landscapes, seasons, and ancestors are all expressions of the same underlying aliveness—the same primordeal coherence which is our birthright — what the Shinto priest Yukitaka Yamamoto called musubi, the generative binding-force that births and binds all things.

And this is the deeper point: the Kojiki and Nihon Shoki are not simply myths; they are technologies of memory. They preserve a world in which kami-no-michi is the condition of existence. They tell us that reality itself is relational—that beings arise with one another, not apart. That the world, in its earliest telling, was a conversation, not a machine.

If you step quietly into the pages of these chronicles, what you hear is not the clanging of ancient dogma but the murmur of a living lineage. The same murmur rising from cedar forests, from shrine courtyards swept each dawn, from the simple offerings of rice and water placed before altars in

villages across Japan for over a thousand years.

Kami-no-michi is not the past. It is the pulse beneath the present, still animating the world, inviting us into relationship rather than domination, coherence rather than fragmentation, presence rather than abstraction.  

Now let me tell you another story. 

Older than language.

Older than myth.

Older than the awareness that we humans were even capable of speaking in the first place. A story about the first name ever spoken, and what changed in the world when that name crossed the boundary between breath and sound.

Before there were words, there was only rhythm. The rustling of leaves, the pulse of water on rock, the crackle of fire stitching night to morning, the low murmur of animals dreaming. Humans lived inside this soundscape the way fish live in water—immersed, informed, shaped, carried. There was no “world” and “us.” There was only the field: shimmering, relational, alive with presence.

And in that world, everything was encountered directly. You felt the river in your bones when you drank from it. You felt the mountain in your ribs when you walked its slope. You felt the elk in your heartbeat when you followed its tracks. Nothing needed to be named because nothing was separate. In the beginning, knowledge was contact. The ancestors lived in that intimacy so completely that the idea of naming would have seemed strange—like trying to trap a gust of wind inside your palm.

But then, one night, something changed.

The story says it happened in winter, when the air thinned and carried sound farther than usual. A young human—someone whose name has been forgotten precisely because they lived before the age of names—sat by a fire at the edge of a clearing. Snow drifted down, quiet as ash. The trees leaned in.

Across the clearing, an enormous stag stepped out of the darkness. Its antlers were frost-laden, catching the moon’s light like a constellation. The young human felt awe rise in their chest, that old, trembling reverence of anima.

And then something unprecedented happened.

The human exhaled and—without meaning to, without knowing why—made a sound. A syllable. The first word.

It was not a label. It was an attempt at recognition, an approximation of the stag’s presence rendered into human breath. Something like Aruuuuu.. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that the moment the sound left their lips, the world changed.

The stag did not recoil. But the air did. It tightened, the way a lake’s surface contracts before freezing. The young human felt it immediately: the word created a slight distance where before there had been none. The stag, once experienced as an extension of the forest, now existed as something that could be singled out.

Naming was born.

The ancestors tell us the Earth shivered that night—not in fear, but in recognition. Something new had entered the cosmos: a tool that could bridge vast distances… or create them.

The next morning, the young human told others around the fire what had happened. They repeated the sound—Aru… Aru… Aru. The stag no longer required direct encounter to be conjured. It could be summoned through speech. Presence had become portable.

And the spirits noticed.

Some approved. The air spirits admired the boldness. The fire spirits crackled with excitement. Here, at last, was a creature capable of weaving worlds made not only of earth but of sound.

Others grew wary. The river spirits murmured among themselves. Naming felt like a boundary. If humans could name a thing, could they forget its real face? What power did this naming have?

The elder spirits, those who remembered the first dawns of the world, gathered in ceremony. They placed snow on their tongues; they sat in silence. If they had used words, they might have said somethign like: “Words are gifts, but gifts are a blessing.” A name must never replace the thing it names. If humans speak without listening, the world will become thinner.”

Words are gifts, but gifts are a blessing. What the elders mean here is rooted in the old knowing. The old words. For to bless, is to bloody. To consecrate an altar by blood. A blessing requires a sacrifice… and words, words my friend, have required a great sacrifice. The sacrifice of the great presence, the direct encounter of what lives within and around us all at once…

And so the tension was born—the tension every animist culture later inherited: the balance between word and world, between naming and feeling, between language and presence.

Time passed. Humans named more beings, more places, more forces. Names became stories. Stories became lineages. Lineages became cosmologies. And eventually, those cosmologies became what modern scholars call “religions.”

But in the beginning, no such category existed.

There was no Shintō. Only the way of the kami—as unnamed and self-evident as breath.

There was no animism. Only lived relationship with all my relations.

There was no Hinduism. Only living law of things.

There was no Dreamtime. Only The eternal storying of the land.

The names came later, when outsiders demanded labels. When abstraction intruded upon encounter. When the descendants of that first fire chose classification over immersion.

The old myth says that when humans began naming the spirits, some spirits withdrew into forests, mountains, and rivers—not out of anger, but out of longing. They missed the time when humans perceived them without the intermediary of words. But the myth also says this: the spirits never left completely. They simply shifted their mode of speaking. They began whispering through intuition, coincidence, dreams, the sudden weight of silence, the electric feeling of being watched by a mountain.

In this way, animism didn’t vanish. It went beneath language, waiting for us to remember the world behind our words.

And perhaps that is the invitation now. Not to abandon naming—impossible, and unnecessary—but to soften it. To hold names like lanterns, lighting the way but never mistaken for the landscape. To speak with the awareness that a name is a bridge, not a verdict. To sense, again, the presence beneath the syllable.

Because the first name ever spoken was not a reduction. It was a reverence. A trembling attempt to honor what overwhelmed the human heart.

And maybe the spirits have been waiting, ever since, for us to speak like that again.

Let me tell you another story. One that you are likely more familiar with.

 This one is older than time. Perhaps the oldest. It’s name is also the first word of it’s tale. “Bereshit”…Genesis…in the beginning.  

In the beginning God created Heaven and Earth. Earth, though, was formless and empty. So he said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. By naming he separated the light from the darkness and thought to himself, light is Good. When he named the light, in a sense, darkness too was named. The undifferentiated universe becomes distinct. For the light separated the darknenss.

Polarity was born, and through it’s birth, the entire universe.

By the act of speaking. 

The naming does not just describe reality; it cleaves it. And then to boot, he decides it’s good. 

It was a separation, as we said. The first and greatest separation of them all, the beginning of light and darkness. In naming the universe, God became its ruler. When the light became good, what did that mean for the darkness? The speaker becomes other than what is spoken. When it came time to make man in his own image, another ruler was born to preside over the plants and animals… and what did man do, he named all the animals, and his dominion was born. The field of living presences becomes a world of categorized beings. Dominion is not first political; it is linguistic. The moment a creature can be named, it can be conceptually held. And once held, it can be arranged.

It is doubtful that God named his first two children, and far more likely their names were sent back through time to represent their state. The Etymology is fascinating.   . Not a proper name at first, but a condition. The earth-creature. The red clay animated by breath. He is formed from adamah—ground, loam, dust damp with possibility. The text is not subtle. Humanity is not placed upon the earth like a foreign tenant. Humanity is sculpted from it. Adam is earth becoming upright.

And beside him, made of his rib, stands Ḥawwāh—who would become Eve in the Latin bibles —not yet the temptress of later imagination, but “mother of all living.” Her name hums with ḥay—life, vitality, aliveness. If Adam is form, she is animation. If he is clay, she is pulse. Together they are not spirit versus matter. They are matter alive. Earth breathing. Soil quickened.

Before the fruit, there is no metaphysical hostility between human and world. Adam is not alien to the garden. He is garden-shaped. Eve is not separate from life; she is its mother. They walk naked and unashamed because nothing yet has hardened into observer and observed. There is awareness, yes—but not the mirror of self-consciousness. They do not yet stand outside themselves to evaluate. They move within the garden as garden. They do not yet see themselves seeing. The world is still immediate. Reality is not yet divided into inner and outer, subject and object.

Then comes the second naming—the greater distinction. The fruit of the tree is described as the knowledge of good and evil, but that phrase is easily misunderstood. What is born in that moment is not simply morality. It is self-reflective consciousness. “Their eyes were opened.” They recognize their nakedness. They recognize themselves as selves. They perceive an interior. And once interiority appears, the world becomes exterior. 

The animist field fractures. 

This is the true exile.

The awakening becomes a punishment.

Before this moment, polarity was still being birthed—light and dark, day and night—but polarity had not yet hardened into hierarchy. After the fall, distinction becomes ranking. Good over evil. Spirit over flesh. Human over animal. Naming evolves into judgment. And judgment drawns man farther and farther away from the oneness of being. 

The serpent does not tempt them with pleasure. He tempts them with awareness. “You will be like God.” They will stand apart and observe. They will know themselves as knowers. And once that happens, Eden cannot hold them. 

It’s the tragedy of our existence: the one named for soil forgets he is soil.

“Dust you are, and to dust you shall return.” It is not merely a curse. It is a reminder. You are adamah. You were never separate. But the mind that has turned inward now experiences separation as real.

Adam names the animals before the fruit. But after the fruit, naming changes texture. It becomes classification. It becomes dominion. It becomes the subtle act of standing over what was once stood within.

Eve, whose name means life, becomes associated with pain, with struggle, with generativity through suffering. Life itself is now mediated by suffering. Earth and vitality, once seamless, are now self-aware.

Now, There is a small linguistic curiosity in the Genesis story that has fascinated scholars and mystics alike. Ḥavāh (חַוָּה), is usually translated as “mother of all living,” yet when you look at the Hebrew letters, another resemblance appears. The word for serpent in the same story is nāḥāšh (נָחָשׁ). While the roots are not the same, the phonetic texture—particularly the breathy gutturals and the hissing consonants—has led some interpreters over the centuries to notice an echo between Ḥavāh and the serpent language of the passage. In some strands of Jewish mysticism and later comparative speculation, this resemblance invites a symbolic reading: Eve and the serpent as mirrors rather than enemies. Most mainstream linguists are cautious here. The words derive from different Semitic roots, and still, myths often carry meaning hidden within the symbols. Names are powerful, and it is the sound that emits from the mouth of the human that is the spell cast.

Even within the story itself, the serpent does not overpower Eve—it converses with her. The exchange reads less like a battle and more like an interior dialogue. A question is raised. A possibility is considered. Awareness turns inward. Seen through that lens, “Eve and the serpent” begins to look like consciousness encountering itself for the first time. The serpent speaks the language of curiosity, of reflection: Did God really say that? Why? What are we that we cannot partake of all in his garden? What is he?

Metaphysically, in a universe of one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively, this could only be true… The Fall is not simply the mistake of a disobedient child, but symbolizes the birth of dual consciousness—the moment when awareness begins to question its own conditions. The serpent is the voice of inquiry, Eve the faculty that receives and considers it. Together they ask the first question. What. Am. I? And from that question arose the strange and powerful creature we have become—earth-born, life-bearing, and forever asking questions of the mystery that made us.

And so the flaming sword was set at the eastern gate— a living fire that turns in every direction, a blade made of discernment itself. It doesn’t merely block the garden; it guards a mode of being. For what stood behind it was not only Eden’s trees and rivers, but the Tree of Life— The Tree of Immortality. If a divided consciousness became immortal, than it would suffer in its division eternally and perhaps be incapable of reunification. The sword was mercy disguised as terror, preventing the eternal reign of a self that now knew shame, judgment, and hierarchy. The very faculty that had cleaved light from darkness, self from world, now stood watch, sealing the threshold it had opened. The cherubim, throne-guardians of the holy, marked the first temple gate, where unmediated communion gave way to ritual and distance, where spirituality became religion, and presence became pilgrimage. The sword turned every way because there was no path back by analysis, no return to innocence through the mind that had fractured it. Eden was not simply lost—it was transfigured into longing. And from that longing, religion was born.

What was once immediate became mediated. What was once immersion became memory. The world did not lose its spirit; humanity lost its unreflective access to it. 

So perhaps the idea of the “Animist” is laughable, for we cannot truly return to Animism. The animism that can be spoken of and written about is not the true animism. In it’s purest form, its the undifferentiated state. The state where “out there” and “in here” become one.

The story of Genesis is the moment when humanity stepped out of the seamless field and into the burden of consciousness. 

Light was named. 

Darkness appeared. 

The self was named. 

The world became other. And in that distance, longing was born—the longing to speak again without forgetting the field from which speech arises.

The state of Animism is the Great Mystery. It is Samadhi. It is the work of yoga. It is the return to the non-dual. The undifferentiated awareness of the oneness of all things. The practice of Animism is anything that draws us closer to that state. 

The school of yoga that I came up in, “Rudra Yoga” is called the primitive and unadorned path to perfection. Compared to the primordeal oneness, it was rather adorned with various practices, but I suppose what it was proclaiming was in fact true. Yoga is a deeply animist practice. The Raja Yoga postures of the sutras that the west has come to understand as “Yoga” are a way of drawing the body closer to the movements of our animal kin, constructed to prepare us for meditation, which begins our path to the undifferentiated state. 

The practice of Animism is Coherence. It is our ability to find ways to harmonize with the world around us. To draw ourselves deeper into the metaphysical backround of the universe. Coherence is the art of holding polarity without hierarchy. It is remembering that naming does not grant dominion. It is speaking in ways that re-knit what abstraction has severed.

To practice coherence is to approach the world as a field of relationship rather than a collection of objects. It is to notice when language has created an “us” and a “them,” and to soften the edge of that boundary. It is to remember that Adam still means soil, that Eve still means life, that the earth we categorize is the ground of our own being.

We cannot unlearn language. The sword turns every way.

But we can choose how we wield it.

We can speak as if the world is alive.

We can name without reducing.

We can differentiate without dominating.

Animism, then, is not a relic of the past. It is a discipline of attention. A practice of reweaving. A refusal to let our words outrun our belonging.

The great mystery was never destroyed. It was covered in categories.

Coherence is the slow, reverent act of brushing them aside.

It is time to look closely at our language. At our words and ideas and just how they are ravelling our reality and crystializing our individualism. Its time to turn the eyeglass around and peer the other way. It is time my friends… it is time.

(break)

Now if language is the blade, then look carefully at how it is being thrust into the heart of our culture in our own time.

We are living in an age where speech no longer seeks coherence, but saturation. Political strategists Steve Bannon openly spoke of a propoganda technique called “flooding the zone”—overwhelming the public sphere with so many claims, counterclaims, narratives, and half-truths that orientation collapses. The goal is not persuasion, but quite the opposite. The goal is exhaustion. A complete saturation of the information ecology with noise, so that the signal is no longer discernable. When language becomes noise, trust erodes. And when trust erodes, shared reality dissolves. How many social and political institutions do you trust? How many of your friends and family feel untrustworthy because of their beliefs.

Hannah Arendt warned that totalitarian movements do not require citizens to believe lies; they require citizens to lose confidence that truth is even accessible. Once that threshold is crossed, people retreat into tribe, into ideology, into hardened identities. “Us” and “them” calcify. Language ceases to mediate reality and begins to manufacture it. The animist field—the shared sense of being inside one living world—gives way to competing symbolic universes.

This is the modern Babel.

Every iota of data in your feed is manufactured to gain your consent. To gain your attention, to convince you its true, and everytime you bite, the fragmentation widens. All of it. Every story about a reality you can’t see, feel, touch, taste, or prove through observation, but are supposed to accept as a law of reality is feeding on your attention. And probably making money doing it, somehow. We’ve talked about this plenty. Your sensemaking capacity is likely hijacked or flooded. If you have an opinion about any of these wars that you’re willing to debate, they’ve got you.

Totalitarianism thrives in fragmentation. It feeds on mistrust. It widens polarity into hierarchy—my truth over yours, my nation over yours, my people over yours. The fracture deepens not because language exists, but because language is weaponized to sever coherence. How many times have you seen someone ranting on your opposing news station and just silently wished to yourself that everybody would just

Shut. The F%$K. Up

Where is the SILENCE?

If animism is the memory that we belong to a living whole, and coherence is the practice of re-harmonizing distinctions, then we must demand coherence as an ethical discipline. We must refuse to let language reduce neighbors to abstractions. We must refuse to let narratives harden into dehumanization.

The rise of totalizing ideologies is not merely political. It is metaphysical. It rests on a fractured ontology in which the world is no longer a shared field of experience but a battlefield of words. To practice coherence now is to resist that fracture at its root. To speak carefully. To listen deeply. To remember that even those with whom we disagree stand on the same soil, breathe the same air, inherit the same fragile earth.

The great mystery is still all around us.

But if we allow language to become only division, we risk forgetting that we were ever standing in it together. 

So what. DO. We. DO? 

Sometime I wish we could all just be quiet.

Just for a moment. All sit down and be quiet and feel everything. All of us. At once. 

Just. Stop.

I think about silence sometimes, I think about taking a vow. What would happen if I stopped talking for a year. If I had no choice but to observe the primordeal stillness from the vantage point of silence. It’s a peculiar rebellion available to us now. I mean, does a well crafted argument ever feel like it’s going to change anything. Just one more YouTube video or podcaster to say it in just the right way that convinces everyone to stop fighting? Some are waiting for Jesus. Some are waiting for Wild Stallions, if ya know what I mean.

But the world is moving on, isn’t it?

We always have the choice of silence.

Not the polite silence of restraint. Not the wounded silence of retreat. But extended ::: intentional ::: vowed :::  silence the kind that presses against the scaffolding of identity itself.

When John Francis stopped speaking for seventeen years after witnessing an oil spill, he did not begin as a sage. He began as a protester. Anger brought him to silence. But as the years unfolded, something far more radical emerged. He began to notice how competitive his speech had always been, how much of conversation is positioning. Without the ability to interrupt, clarify, or defend, he became a listener in a way that ordinary life rarely allows. Tone, posture, hesitation, breath — these details surfaced. The world gained texture. Silence did not render him passive; it sharpened him. It stripped away the reflex to assert.

That alone challenges one of our most cherished myths: that speech equals agency. Francis completed degrees. He wrote. He taught. He acted in the world with precision and purpose. What dissolved was the constant need to insert himself through words.

Sara Maitland, author of A Book of Silence, spent extended solitude in rural landscapes. At first, she says in her book, silence destabilizes. The nervous system, deprived of distraction, begins to release everything it has postponed — old fears, intrusive memories, phantom sounds. Silence exposes rather than soothes. It functions like diagnostic light. Yet beyond the turbulence, perception reorganizes. Hills and weather shift from backdrop to encounter. The self loosens its grip on centrality. The world no longer feels like scenery; it feels like presence.

Days after I wrote this, as the universe does when it weaves it’s golden thread around me, I received an email from Paul Kingsnorth whom has also been feeling the desire to shut the fuck up. Kingsnorth is an Eastern Orthodox Christian mystic and is is great contemplation of many things, the great mystery among them. In his blog post he wrotw. “It took me a long time as a Christian to even begin to understand that much of the work, at least for beginners, is simply in shutting up. There is no point in worrying about whether you are silent or childlike or holy enough, or in trying to make yourself some kind of holy ascetic through force of will. Force of will doesn’t get you that far. You can run off to the forest or the desert if you like: some people are called to that life and some people are not. But we are all called to make a desert of our hearts. The Holy Spirit will alight there, we are told, when it finds a peace to welcome it. However, we do it, so much of the work, I think now, is struggling to allow silence a place to grow. When we do that, much of our overcomplicated, worldly nonsense just falls away, even if only for a second. The cement cracks, our stories shatter, and we begin to see how to walk away from ourselves. In the silence, perhaps we discover how to be children again.”

Be like children… Jesus implored this throughout the Bible. What children you say? The children born to the garden of eden, the un-opinionated, un-questioning, undifferentiated spirit that created us. Silence reminds us of our journey, beginning first with our expulsion, or rebellion, as some might say.

Participants in long silent retreats describe consistent phases. Rebellion first. Restlessness. The mind manufacturing urgency. Then a sharpening. Colors intensify. Time stretches. The internal narrator becomes audible as narrator rather than as truth. Neuroscientific studies show decreased activity in brain regions tied to self-referential processing. Subjectively, it feels like relief from constant self-construction.

Silence subtracts.

It subtracts performance. It subtracts reflexive commentary. It subtracts the endless rehearsal of who we are in relation to others. It subtracts the constant reminder of separateness by dissolving our identity. And what remains is revealing.

In a culture saturated with speech — posts, comments, debates, declarations — identity is reinforced through constant articulation. Extended silence removes that reinforcement. Without immediate response, who defends you? Without explanation, what remains of your convictions? Without narrative defense, does the self collapse or clarify? Without speech, is there a speaker?

Ah… the age old question of the sages.

Without speech, is there a speaker?

Those who endure the stripping often report a reorganization of attention. Listening deepens structurally, not sentimentally. One notices how often speech anticipates its own reply. Silence interrupts that habit. It demands full reception. It interrupts the machinery of dominance.

Hear that colonialist?

There is risk here, of course. Trauma researchers rightly note that silence can surface unresolved material. Grief, long deferred, rises. Memory intensifies. Silence in its pure form confronts. That is why traditional silence is structured. It is a well crafted initiation, not an escape.

And yet, those who return from extended wordlessness frequently carry a distinct quality: reduced reactivity. A longer pause before response. A diminished need to occupy narrative space.

Silence exposes how much language we use to secure ourselves — to signal virtue, to assert intelligence, to fortify belonging. Remove speech, and the architecture of identity becomes visible.

In the broader arc of what we have been exploring — language as the blade that distinguishes, naming as the beginning of separation — silence becomes a counter-practice of coherence. It softens hierarchy. It allows the field of aliveness to be sensed again without constant categorization.

In that quiet, animism returns as a soft perception of everything communicated without words, by all the beings, breathing and non-breathing alike.

The boundary between observer and observed grows porous. Not mystically. Not theatrically. Simply through reduced interference, one can hear the signal in the noise.

Our information ecology is compromised by weaponized narratives and hardened identities. Extended silence subverts the noise. It interrupts the cycle of reaction. It destabilizes the economy of outrage. It withdraws participation from the machinery of fragmentation.

Perhaps this is one way back toward coherence.

There is no dismantling identity, but by Gods perhaps we can quiet it.

Just long enough to discover what remains when the narrator ceases to have a voice.

To stand in the field again — soil, breath, and presence — before the next word divides it.

To once again feel the Infinite Mystery without immediately translating it. For it is all Infinite Mystery, isn’t it. Do we not stand at the edge of something vast? Call it the great field. Call it the horizon that recedes as we approach it. Whatever name we give it, it remains larger than language, deeper than our doctrines… and older than memory. It moves beneath the myths of ravens and chaos serpents, beneath quantum equations and sacred geometry, beneath temples and telescopes alike. Every culture has tried to sing it. Some sang of a garden. Some sang of a cosmic egg. Some sang of void and vibration. Some mapped it in mathematics. Some painted it on cave walls. Each expression carries a fragment of orientation, a way of walking within immensity. None exhaust it. Myth keeps this openness alive. Explanation seeks completion.

Myth keeps the horizon moving. When a story breathes, it leaves room for silence. When silence remains, culture can continue to grow. Carse reminds us that culture unfolds through undirected choice. It has no boundary lines. It belongs to participation, to improvisation, to shared meaning shaped in motion. The Infinite Mystery lives most vibrantly in that openness — in a people willing to evolve their expressions without claiming finality. And yet history shows how quickly certainty hardens. How our propensity for evil, our tendency to want to change others around us to fit our worldview, rears itself again, and again. Cultures are silenced. Languages disappear. Stories are erased. Entire cosmologies are dismissed because they fail to match the dominant narrative of the moment. When knowledge becomes weapon, coherence fractures. When righteousness takes the throne, listening leaves the room. We are living in such a moment. Violence, mistrust, ideological rigidity — they grow wherever humility weakens. We watch nations clash, tribes retreat into hardened identities, truth splinter into competing realities. The temptation is always the same: to claim possession of the final word. The First Principle stands as a safeguard against that temptation. 

To recognize the Infinite Mystery is to remain small in the right way — grounded, receptive, alert. It invites us to hold science and myth in the same open palm. It allows for flight, for medicine, for technology, for art, while remembering that none of these capture the whole. Each discovery reveals further depth. Each answer opens another question. Animism, in this context, becomes a posture of coherence. It is the lived recognition that soil and breath, Adam and Eve, mineral and mind, forest and city share one field of aliveness. It is the practice of speaking without erasing. Of differentiating without dividing. Of building culture through participation rather than domination.

When a language vanishes, a way of perceiving vanishes. When a culture is silenced, a unique conversation with the cosmos falls quiet. The Infinite Mystery loses one of its mirrors. To protect coherence is to protect plurality. To cultivate humility is to protect relationship. 

We do not reach the horizon. We walk with it. 

We do not solve the Mystery. We dwell within it.

The invitation is simple and demanding: look into the eyes across from you and recognize the same aliveness. Speak carefully. Listen deeply. Relate to the earth as origin rather than backdrop. Let culture remain open, amendable, alive.

Rest in Silence, But do not Silence. 

The Infinite Mystery does not require agreement. It asks for participation.

And perhaps coherence begins there — in the shared willingness to remain in wonder together.

Adam remains earthling.

Eve remains life.

The story preserves the truth even as it narrates the fracture.

It is a tale of animism remembered through longing. Arda Healed. The will of the Goddess of Everything Else.

The earth still breathes.

Life still pulses.

Right now humanity experiences itself as separate from both—and must find its way back, not by forgetting knowledge, but by transfiguring it.

The golden thread, then, is not that language kills spirit.

It is that reflexive awareness splits participation into observer and observed.

And every spiritual tradition since has wrestled with the same question:

How does the earth-creature, aware of itself, return to belonging without extinguishing the light of consciousness? Are we destined for the Tree of Life? Are we destined to return to the Garden? Or does the longing take us further still?

Likely the way back is not regression into pre-reflective innocence. In fact, that is impossible, as we’ve discussed.

Likely it is learning to speak again as earth.

To name without ranking.

To discern without dominating.

To remember that the one who stands in the garden was always made of it.

Adam is still soil. Eve is still life.

What if the problem is not language, but our language. Or most languages.

At the center of the movie “The Arrival” is a radical idea that language is not just a tool for describing reality—it is a force that shapes how reality is perceived, structured, and even experienced. This echoes the real-world Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, which suggests that the structure of a language influences the cognition of its speakers. 

In the movie, aliens arrive on earth and attempt to communicate with the humans, specifically, a academic linguist brought to work with the American Military. The alien language—circular, non-linear, without beginning or end—embodies a completely different relationship to time. It is not written or spoken in sequence. It appears all at once, as a whole. And because of that, it does not describe events unfolding in time; it assumes that all events are already present, already known.

As the protagonist learns this language, something deeper than vocabulary acquisition happens. Her mind begins to reorganize itself around the structure of the language. Her thought is no longer linear. Cause and effect lose their dominance. Instead of remembering the past and anticipating the future, she begins to experience time as a unified whole—past and future coexisting in a single, simultaneous awareness.

This aligns loosely with the “block universe” interpretation of physics, where time is treated as another dimension like space, and all moments exist equally. In that model, what we call “the flow of time” is not an objective feature of reality but a feature of human perception. Arrival suggests that this perception is not fixed—it is trained, reinforced, and ultimately constructed by language.

There’s a quiet assumption most of us carry without ever examining it—that language describes reality. That it sits on top of the world like a labeling system, tagging what’s already there. But the deeper you go, the more that assumption begins to unravel. Language doesn’t just describe the world. It participates in its construction. It trains attention. It rehearses a way of seeing until that way of seeing feels like truth itself.

This is the territory opened up by Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf. Not the crude version of their idea—that language traps you in a prison of thought—but the subtler, more unsettling version: that language acts as a kind of perceptual gravity. It doesn’t prevent you from thinking certain thoughts, but it makes some patterns of thought feel natural, inevitable, almost invisible. You don’t notice the lens because you’ve never taken it off.

In English, and in most Romance and Germanic languages, time is something like a road. We move forward along it. The past falls behind us, the future stretches out ahead. It feels so obvious it hardly seems like a metaphor at all. But then you encounter something like the language of the Aymara people, and the ground shifts. For them, the past is in front—because it’s known, visible, already seen. The future is behind—because it’s unseen, unknowable. And once you hear that, it doesn’t feel wrong. It feels… equally plausible. Which is a strange realization, because it means something as basic as the direction of time was never fixed to begin with.

Or take the Hopi people, whose language doesn’t slice time into neat, countable units the way ours does. Instead of treating days and moments as objects you can stack and measure, it leans toward a distinction between what has manifested and what is still manifesting. Time becomes less like a line of discrete segments and more like a field of becoming. Not something you move through, but something that unfolds.

And then there are languages that loosen the grip of the self itself. Among the Pirahã people, studied by Daniel Everett, reference to self and other is far less rigidly anchored in constant pronouns. Meaning leans heavily on context, on the shared field of experience. The self is still there, of course—but it isn’t being hammered into place with every sentence. It’s quieter. More situational. Less like a fixed narrator, more like something that emerges within relationship.

Even the way objects exist can shift. In Yucatec Maya language, things are often treated less as discrete objects and more as substances—less “three candles,” more “three portions of candle-stuff.” It’s a small grammatical difference, but it nudges perception toward material and composition rather than boundaries and categories. The world becomes less a collection of things and more a flow of matter taking temporary form.

And in Japanese language, the subject itself can disappear from a sentence entirely. “I” and “you” are often left unsaid, understood through context. What takes their place is a constant attunement to relationship—status, proximity, respect, obligation—all encoded directly into the way something is spoken. You’re not just expressing a thought. You’re positioning yourself within a living web.

What begins to emerge, if you sit with all of this, is a kind of vertigo. Because the things we take to be most fundamental—time, self, object, causality—are not being described in the same way across languages. They are being patterned differently. Emphasized differently. Brought forward or allowed to recede.

And if that’s true, then reality—as it is lived, not as it is abstractly theorized—starts to look less like a fixed landscape and more like something co-authored. Not entirely invented, not arbitrary, but shaped at the level of perception by the structures we inherit and repeat.

Which raises a question that sits just beneath the surface of all of this:

If language is constantly rehearsing a world into being… then what kind of world is your language training you to see?

More importantly, can the tool of language, the great divider of the human mind and the reality it inhabits, be honed to build our world for the better? For instance, what if a language was constructed that was bereft of divisiveness? A language that constantly circled everything back to unity and possibility. Or a language without negation? For as wild as it sounds, could human beings craft a universal language that constructed a reality where only peace is possible.

I’ve heard that the next iteration of the human species, the world we all wish for, the new paradigm cannot be created from within the old one. That there has to be a quantum leap of some kind, that to get from Game A to Game B, we must elimiate game A entirely.

What if it were language? What if a child never learned the idea of “mine” because the idea never existed? What if words like “enemy” or “hate” or “tyrrany” didn’t exist? What if the word “freedom” did not exist because there was no need to name that which was evident? In the same way we named “Animism” or “Shinto,” how much of what we speak into has become unattainable because we have cleaved it from our beingness? At what point did we become no longer “free.” I’m not asking for a literal account of history here. Once we conjured a slave, we also conjured “freedom”

You see how this works?

What have we conjured into the world through our language? 

Perhaps it’s time to put some words back into Pandora’s box. Perhaps it’s time to reconfigure the word. Until God spoke into the void and said “Let there be light” we were all darkness, and the darkness was good…

Until then, the flaming sword still burns at the eastern gate to Eden—not to mock us, but to remind us that to return to Eden is to unravel the the division of our consciousness, to rise to Arda Healed. To walk not with the innocence of our birth, but the hart fought coherence with all that is.

There is another thread running quietly beneath all of this — a law so ordinary we rarely notice it.

The universe moves in one direction.

In mathematics and cryptography they call it a one-way function: simple to execute, nearly impossible to reverse. You can hash data and verify its output, but you cannot reconstruct the original input. The movement goes forward.

Fry an egg. You cannot unfry it. Speak a word. You cannot unsay it. Take a life. It does not return.

This is not merely Thermodynamics. It is metaphysics. It is the arrow of time written into existence itself.

And once you see it, you realize something sobering: consciousness, too, passes through one-way gates.

There was a moment in the myth when the fruit was eaten, when awareness turned inward, when self saw itself. That threshold did not swing both directions. Whatever that act symbolizes — reflexivity, moral discernment, abstraction — it altered the structure of experience. The garden was no longer immediate habitat. The sword turned because irreversibility had entered the story.

We do not return to pre-reflective unity any more than we return a cooked egg to shell.

This is why silence matters now. This is why the lingustic revolution matters.

Consider it a reverence for irreversibility.

Every word enters the unfolding. Every narrative shapes the field. Every declaration hardens some contour of reality. In an age of deafening noise— amplifying division, multiplying certainty, accelerating mistrust — the one-way nature of speech becomes perilous. Nothing we say evaporates. It propagates.

Meaning, itself depends on this law. If death were reversible, mortality would carry no gravity. If language left no trace, conversation would hold no consequence. Complexity arises because the universe does not rewind. It accumulates.

Animism, then, cannot mean a return to some imagined pre-linguistic innocence. That gate does not open backward. Instead, it becomes the practice of moving forward with coherence inside a one-way cosmos. Speaking as if words matter because they do. Acting as if relationship cannot be undone because it cannot.

The Infinite Mystery unfolds. It does not reset.

And so the question becomes simple and immense: what do we add to the unfolding?

We cannot unfracture history. We cannot unlose languages already silenced. We cannot retract the abstractions that have reshaped civilization. But we can participate differently now. We can have a moment to take it all in and weigh the consequence of all we have done. We can stop. Reverse? No. Stop? Always.

Turns out the brake lever has been right in front of us all along.

We can let silence interrupt the reflex to keep building, keep buying, keep innovating, keep problem solving keep hoarding… whatever.

 When we do speak, we can choose speech that binds rather than severs. We can remind everyone that we’re all in it together.

Coherence is the art of stepping carefully in a world that does not step back. The consequences for our actions as a species are becoming ever more obvious as the days roll by. It’s March in the Desert, and boy, it’s hot. Too hot… and too dry, and the world is moving on with or without us if we keep this up.

The universe moves forward.

So do we.

There is a Harmonic Principle we haven’t discussed much. The Harmonic Principle of Presence. A principle that allows us to experience the infinite mystery. It requires a silence of a kind. 

Presence—we’re not talking about scented candles and the curated meditation. We’re talking about Presence as willingness, as surrender, as the courage to be claimed by the moment you are actually standing in.

When you sit with someone and truly hear them, something stirs beneath the exchange. Not sentimentality. Not agreement. A subtle knitting. A tension relaxing between two fields of awareness. You have given each other your Attention. When a truth finally leaves someone’s mouth after years of careful concealment, the air changes. You can feel it. The room inhales differently. Musubi moves. 

When an elder leans forward to tell a story and the younger bodies around them grow still without being told to, coherence gathers. It is almost visible, like warmth rising from stone. The story is not just a tale woven to entertain, thought it does, it is continuity passing hands, it is coherence. It is the feeling that you belong in the world and everyone belongs there with you. The past doesn’t feel gone in that moment. It feels seated among you. The story attends to your being. Your Attention give the story meaning. 

Walk into a well-lived home—one where meals have been shared, arguments resolved, grief held, laughter repeated—and you sense it immediately. The walls feel porous. The space remembers. Not mystically. Structurally. The repetitions of care have left an imprint. Coherence accumulates in places that are tended. 

So maybe coherence isn’t something abstract. Maybe it’s something that builds. Slowly. Through attention, through presence, through the willingness to let things be seen and heard.

Not by forcing anything into place. Just by allowing it to remain in relationship long enough for something real to form.

Attention, attends.

Where is our attention as a species right now? Why are we paying attention to all the noise? Why does your cell phone require three hours of your attention. Every. Single. Day.

Across traditions, this intuition surfaces again and again, carried in different syllables. The Vedic ṛta, The Navajo hózhó. The Greek Harmonia. No force holds these worlds together. Relationship does.

Pause for a moment and search your own memory.

There was a time when you felt held by something larger than your private narrative. Maybe it was the ocean at dusk, horizon dissolving into sky. Perhaps it was a forest where the hush felt inhabited, or a late conversation when words rose from a depth neither of you had rehearsed. In that instant, you recognized coherence. You were an emergent property to it.

Coherence is not something we manufacture. It is something we enter. No amount of defining the

Truth and declaring it true will bring us closer to Coherence. There is no truth in silence, only awareness.

Anima, Aśe, Musubi… they are not performative, despite instagram’s best efforts. They are participatory.

Wthout intergenerational presence, your elders, innovation is a bull bucking it’s rider.

When you sit with elders—any elders—you step into a story that began long before your name. Their pauses, their inflections, the weight behind those stories carry a pattern older than your lifetime. When you offer your full attention to someone younger, you extend that pattern forward. Repair begins quietly in these exchanges. The future mends in small rooms.

Attend to beauty—the kind that feels inevitable rather than decorative. The curve of a riverbank. The grain of wood shaped by patient hands. The way a grieving shoulder softens under steady touch. In those gestures, you align with something fundamental. The universe favors joining.

When this podcast began, light rested across the table. Now it has shifted. It touches a different corner. Dust motes have risen and settled again. Nothing dramatic occurred. Yet coherence persisted through the movement. It waited in the beam, in the breath, in the simple act of listening.

You are already woven into this.

Your life threads through an ancient braid of soil and story, memory and possibility. Even now—sitting, breathing, receiving—you participate in the making of the world. Belonging does not require effort. It precedes it.

So let this be an invitation rather than a conclusion.

At some point today, notice one small thing that is already whole. A sound. A gesture. A moment of silence between the words. Oh, so many words… Allow coherence to meet you there. Let the anima bind without strain. Let those who walked before you stand near for a breath.

The world continues to gather itself.

You are part of that gathering.

And after these words…

 All these words… let the quiet do what it has always done, let it set in, the undercurrent, the ashe, the anima… the sound… of silence.