this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2023
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Animism

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Life with our non-human neighbours

'Everything is a people'

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Where do you all think the ability to experience comes from? Are there any organisms you think don’t experience - plants, bacteria? What about rocks, galaxies, or computers?

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[–] schmorpel 2 points 1 year ago

If you want to reduce it to that, feel free. It's bit more than that from my perspective. Eating/smoking something (someone) is a form of communication. I also communicate with rice, tomato, wheat, yeast, mint ... and they all alter my consciousness in some way - it's only that parts of our society consider a select few of these non-human allies as 'too spicy' for our brainscape and make them illegal and cause people to get all worked up about them. The question I guess is whether I dismiss the non-human induced ideas in these altered states as 'just tripping' or if I engage with it as valuable information. At one point I decided to just see what happens if I pretend everything is alive and act accordingly. As a result I felt more aligned with reality. It came with undoing a lot of unreflected Western superiority, colonialism, Eurocentrism and Scientism. Don't get me wrong, I'm not against science, I just don't like the sort of science that dismisses any other system of knowledge as primitive without even trying to understand its intricacies, especially when it comes to living in a landscape (what we would call managing a landscape because we humans always want to be in charge).