The ancient belief that everything has eyes and sentience challenges modern rationality and suggests a world where everything is alive.
Stones are revered in various cultures and their animacy blurs the line between inanimate matter and living states.
Musical instruments are believed to have agency and power, shaping human experiences and raising questions about the essence of music.
Deep dives
The Animacy of Everything
The podcast explores the idea that everything, including natural phenomena and human-made objects, is imbued with life and animacy. It challenges the rationality of modern thinking that dismisses these notions as fantasy. The ancient belief that everything has eyes, a voice, and sentience clashes with modern Western culture, but it resurfaces in rituals, states of flow, and experiences of connection with the natural world. The podcast suggests that there is a continuum of animacy, blurring the lines between life and death, sentience and incension, and time and space.
The Living Presence of Stones
The episode discusses the animacy and sacredness of stones in various cultures. Stones are seen as grandfathers, trickster beings, and former people. They are revered and given life through rituals and offerings. Modern science recognizes the crystalline structure and electromagnetic properties of certain stones, blurring the distinction between inanimate matter and living states. The animate nature of stones challenges our perspective on the separation between humanity and the natural world, beckoning us to recognize that we are intertwined with ecology and responsible for our actions.
The Consciousness of Musical Instruments
The podcast explores the animacy of musical instruments, such as violins, guitars, and drums. Traditions around the world ascribe sentience and personality to instruments, believing that they play themselves or have spirits residing within them. The relationship between musician and instrument blurs, as the instrument impacts the individual's life and community. The podcast suggests that instruments have agency and power to evoke emotions and shape human experiences, raising questions about the origins and essence of music itself.
The Power of Stories and Objects
The episode emphasizes the living nature of stories and objects. Stories are seen as beings that exist beyond mere words, connecting people across time. Objects within stories serve as focal points, infusing the narrative with animacy and significance. The episode explores how objects like golden keys and bells have their own stories and play crucial roles in myth and folklore. The podcast encourages listeners to recognize the vibrancy and presence of stories and objects in their own lives and the responsibility that comes with this awareness.
The Power of Loving Attention to Objects
Focusing on and caring for objects in our lives can lead to a deeper connection and understanding of the world around us. Fairy tales illustrate the value of paying attention and loving things, as they offer up their secrets. Objects, even the most ordinary ones, hold meaning, and our relationship with them determines our relationship with the world. By valuing and attending to objects, we open ourselves up to a richer and more vibrant experience of life.
The Animacy of Place and the Seat of Consciousness
Places and seats hold animacy and consciousness. The seat is a symbol of awareness, and by sitting and focusing our attention, we connect with the animacy of the world. Taking a seat allows us to witness the universe and all its actors, to explore inner and outer realms, and to experience the interconnectivity of all things. The throne of the universe, embodied by the goddess Isis, represents the seat upon which animacy transpires. Consciousness animates the world, giving life and meaning to all things.
In the myths and fairytales, everything teems with sentience and agency... Everything is alive. There are talking trees and singing stones and hedges that move of their own will. Mirrors speak. Swords dance. There are flying carpets and far-seeing spyglasses and cloaks and boots that leap by themselves. This pervasive insistence in the old stories that absolutely everything is alive — that everything has eyes — butts up against modern rationality and therefore gets marginalized as childish 'fantasy.' But as science discovers more and more that the lines between living and dead, conscious and not, human and non-human are not as clearcut as we'd once imagined, as science starts to unpack the sentience of trees and the latent life within clay, we start to (re)discover that 'things' are not just dead objects at all, and that this whole world hums with animacy. And so the vision of a world of persons, a world with eyes, is not simply a child's eye view — it's actually much closer to the way things are. In taking our attention to the least of things, and remembering that we inhabit a world with eyes, we open up the possibility of redefining our relationship with the cosmos itself. Sparked to life by a conversation with sculptor Rose B. Simpson and featuring original music by Peia, Marya Stark, Sidibe, Ben Murphy, and Andy Aquarius, this episode takes us on a journey through talking stones and living clay and animate bells and drums into a world in which everything has eyes, everything has agency, everything is a portal to the infinite — even the seemingly 'inanimate.' Even... your car. Listen on a good sound system, at a time when you can devote your full attention.
