Anima l

One of the great difficulties of being human in an all too human world is realizing your fundamental animality. Within the rush and roar of modern society, it's often very difficult to tap into one's primordial essence. The required ingredients of remoteness, solitude, quietness, and wilderness are all too often too far out of reach from the confines of the city. Yet, it is the responsibility of very human to re-engage their original essence, and their aboriginal aliveness in the form of animal-being.

The key attributes of 'animal' are as its etymology suggests: a highly tuned sense of movement (agility, nimbleness, balance, stillness), and an equally highly tuned sense of consciousness (perception, awareness, wits, wherewithal) ...

This highly tuned nature of these attributes is what distinguishes animals from people. In terms of movement and consciousness, people are rather sluggish in comparison to animals. Their level of animation has been hindered by too much 'progress', and too much outsourcing to technologies that propose to do it for us. Animals on the other hand have never really gone in for this type of outsourcing, have never really given in to the dubious proposition that 'having technology' is better than 'being alive'.

As a result, animals are in constant touch with their environment, for they know that this is what feeds and shelters them, what effectively allows their aliveness. Humans, on the other hand, in their arrogance and egregiousness (in their removal from the flock of all animals), have decided in their infinite wisdom (which isn't wisdom at all but rather disconnected facts) that the domination of nature and their fellow animal kin is no big deal. In this grand perversion of the natural flow, the human animal has almost been extinguished (entirely dammed up), with 'deluded man' (Homo mendax) stepping in to take his place. This Homo mendax, as his title now suggests, is the problem, for he not only deceives others but also his own self. This deception is at the root of the biblical 'devil' or any other demon for that matter. To deceive is to demonise, and to bedevil. And sadly, within a rapacious world of advertising, sensationalist media, and the big sell, deception, in their various guises, is rife.

It is only by re-engaging 'anima' - hyper-critical thinking and hyper-critical moving - that we will have any chance of exorcising these demons from the world, and embracing, not the beast, but the animal within. It is every human's responsibility.