Contemporary Voices From Anima Mundi

This book is a reconsideration of spirituality as a lived experience in the lives of the contributors. The authors speak both as well-informed scholars and as individuals who experienced the lived spirituality they give voice to. The authors do not place themselves above and outside of what they are writing about but within that world. They speak of living psychospiritual traditions of healing both the self and the world; of traditions that have not disembedded the self from the wider world. Those traditions are from indigenous North and South America (5 essays), a Buddhist/Shakta from Bengal, an Indo-Persian Islamic psychoanalyst, and a mystical Jewish feminist rabbi. The book also includes a historical essay about the extermination of the Renaissance worldview of Anima Mundi. "This book is a remarkable collection of essays on a topic of immense importance for our times. Bringing years of experience and expertise, the authors illustrate brilliantly the healing dimensions of the living world. Apffel-Marglin and Varese are to be congratulated on this singular achievement." --Mary Evelyn Tucker, Yale University Forum on Religion and Ecology "We have seen the de-sacralization of nature by a reductionistic materialist view which is taking us to the brink of self-destruction. This book brings forth an array of multicultural and 21st century post-materialistic science perspectives, which reveal that spirit is indeed embedded in matter, and that we are surrounded by visible and invisible non-human subjects. We need more than ever to listen to the many voices of nature and spirit. The recuperation of animistic worldviews along with the development of non-reductionistic science is to be derived from direct experience of the sentient interrelatedness of the natural world. In this regard, this book represents an important and timely contribution." --Luis Eduardo Luna, PhD, anthropologist, author of Vegetalismo, Shamanism Among the Mestizo Population of the Peruvian Amazon, among other books; Director of Wasiwaska, Research Center for the Study of Psychointegrator Plants, Visionary Art and Consciousness, Florianópolis, Brazil