That's another word that you don't find a whole lot in indigenous cultures. Belief. The assumption with the word belief is that there is the empirical material world and then everything else exists as a set of abstract principles that you either assign validity to or you don't. You believe that Chi or Prana or life force exists even though you haven't seen it. You believe that there is a nymph that inhabits that spring even though you haven't seen her. You believe through some set of inferences and abstractions you believe in unseen forces even though you haven't seen them. Of course, this view can only arise in an era already steeped in abstract thought in what Henry Corbin called the dead body of an angel. It assumes a pre-existing separation between human beings and the natural world. How about this? Our ancestors' interaction with the natural world included the experience of what we now call unseen forces because we don't see them anymore. They did. They saw them. Anthropologist David Lewis Williams spent his career demonstrating that the nature of religious or spiritual experience is not based on thinking things up but on direct experience felt in heightened states of awareness. Take it way back to episode two of this podcast to the Siberian people who watch a man grow horns as he shamanizing. That's not an idea or a thought. It's not a belief. The Tungus shaman climbing the world tree and suckling from the reindeer mother isn't a belief. It's something he experienced in trance. The energy that rises in the Koysan dancer isn't something they believe in. It's something that rises so tangibly that they have names for all of its stages they've described all the auditory phenomena that come along with it. The force of it brings such potency that bodies are doubled over, noses erupt and bleeding. They don't have to believe it's real. They feel it. They know it. They understand it. They understand how to access it. They understand the dangers that come with it. They understand the safeguards that need to be put in place in order to access it in a healthy way. They understand how to treat it respectfully. They understand what rhythms call it. Animism isn't an abstract belief. It's not an idea. It's something you experience. It's you on the camping trip humming in tune with the waters. It's feet pounding on the clay of the Kiva floor. It's the sweat that springs from the Yogi's neck. It's the eyes rolling back into the head of the Sri Lankan trance dancer. It is the convulsions of the village trance medium and I've seen those convulsions. You tell me that some abstract idea. It's the high heat of the drumming, the cries of Jaimah, Jaimah. It's 300,000 people on pilgrimage to see a single tree. It's Zorba exhorting to his dear friend, Comet once. I've found a small green stone. It's life. The force of life. The force of radiance, kinetic energy. Energy everywhere, permeating all things. The scientists might say yes, but that's just the light on the water. Yes, but that's just endorphins from dancing. Yes, holy light. Holy water. Holy endorphins. Holy nectors of the skull. These things aren't separate. They aren't material over here and abstract belief over here. They are seamless experience. The body of the angel, alive and humming. Anthropologist Tim Ingold says this, hunter-gatherers do not as a rule approach their environment as an external world of nature that has to be grasped intellectually. Indeed, the separation of mind and nature has no place in their thought and practice. And to perceive the world in this way, as he says, to perceive the world as a seamless continuum, means that you are already situated in a world. This is his quote and committed to the relationship this entails. In other words, questions about belief only arise once you have extracted yourself from this world of relationships and dwell instead in the world of abstract principles and thoughts. This abstraction, this extraction, this slaying of the angel as Corbin puts it, is the exception rather than the rule because animism is normative consciousness.