Animism And Nonduality: Exploring The Secret Language of Nature

“You see, a secret is not something untold. It’s something which can’t be told.”
― Terence McKenna

Mother Earth is alive, animate, and speaking to you—all the time, through everything happening around you. All of life is interconnected; every living being is our ancestors connected to us through a web of life and we are not the separate observers of nature. We are nature.

This worldview stems from the understanding that everything is consciousness. There’s no “dead” substance in the universe called matter, separate from consciousness. To tune into this animate consciousness, there’s a felt language older than words that is referred to as Animism.

Animism is the belief that everything is part of an interconnected web of life that is deeply embedded in indigenous worldviews and nonduality, which is central to many mystical religious and meditation traditions. Both animism and nonduality share some profound philosophical and experiential similarities.

Both challenge the rigid subject-object dualism and reductionist materialism that dominate modern thought and instead present an interconnected, holistic and kinship-based worldview and experience of existence.

I believe our ecological crisis of climate change and biodiversity collapse is ultimately a crisis of consciousness. Our disconnection from nature fuels both planetary crises and mental health epidemic. Reclaiming the felt sense of interconnectedness found in animism and nonduality is the antidote we are seeking for our alienation.

I have found that practicing nondual awareness and spending more time outdoors exploring with mindful walking practices can dramatically reduce overthinking and help to get to the root of today’s existential anxiety epidemic and heal our alienation from nature.

As you will see, when we learn to become aware of awareness through nondual awareness practices, we can start to feel a deeply rooted sense of aliveness and kinship with all other living beings.

1. Understanding Animism: The Living Cosmos

Animism is the belief that all things—humans, animals, plants, rivers, mountains, and even the wind—are alive and possess consciousness or spirit.

This perspective is found in nearly every indigenous culture, from the Amazonian shamans to the Huichol of Mexico, the Australian Aboriginals, and the animistic traditions of Africa and Asia.

The modern world is largely built upon the appropriation of indigenous ecological knowledge and the destruction of the animistic worldview that connects people to the land and allows indigenous people to live completely independently of large-scale empires and reliance on the comforts of modern civilization.

While monotheistic religions like Christianity worship books and abstract concepts that come from words written on a page, animistic religions help indigenous people develop their sensory perception at a young age to “read” the book of nature through the “felt sense” of their immediate experience.

In animistic cosmology, we are not separate from nature and they believe in a kinship worldview where they feel fundamentally at home in this world. In animism, there is no strict division between self and nature; rather, existence is participatory. The forest is not just a backdrop but a dynamic, intelligent presence.

The survival of Indigenous people through the rise and collapse of countless civilizations over the last 10,000 years shows that they are much more adaptable to changing conditions in times of great transition than people in highly-specialized societies.

Here are some key features of Animism and the kinship worldview:

• Interconnection – Everything is related and in constant communication. The secret language of nature communicates through feelings and omens.
• Felt Sense – Instead of valuing abstract knowledge, they value sensory acuity and direct experience.
• Spiritual Personhood – Not just humans, but animals, plants, and elements of nature have agency.
• Ritual and Reciprocity – Humans engage with the spirit world through rituals, offerings and deep listening.
• Visionary Experiences – Shamans and spiritual practitioners enter altered states, trances and dream states to communicate with spirits and heal the mind and body.

2. Understanding Nonduality: The Illusion of Separation

Nonduality refers to the insight that the separation between self and other is illusory. It emphasizes pure awareness beyond conceptual divisions, recognizing that all forms and phenomena arise within a singular, undivided reality.

While most popular nondual traditions come from Asia (Advaita, Zen, Dzogchen, Taoism, etc.), you will also find mystical offshoots of Christianity, Judaism and Islam that are deeply rooted in nonduality.

Typically, religious believers who have had a mystical experience of unity and connectedness get interested in nonduality because the abstract concepts and dogmas of religions start to lose their hold on their minds.

While philosophers and theologians have been arguing about dualism and nonduality since the beginning of time, the beauty of nonduality is that it can be experienced through embodied meditation practices as the mind will endlessly tie itself in knots trying to understand concepts that cannot be grasped with the intellect, only experience through the felt sense.

Nonduality is a way of living life where you feel your interconnectedness with everyone and everything around you. It’s not just a philosophy or an experience, but a way of being in the world. When people realize nonduality, the modern veil of separation and alienation starts to lift from their eyes.

Nonduality can be an antidote to the modern epidemic of existential anxiety, burnout and a sense of meaninglessness and purposelessness in the culture. When we learn to experience nondual awareness, we start to cultivate a deep sense of kinship with the world and other people that can heal us.

Here are some of the key features of nonduality and nondual awareness:

• No Separate Self – The ego is a mental construct, not an independent entity.
• Pure Awareness – Reality is experienced directly, beyond thought and identity.
• Interdependent Arising – Everything is a manifestation of a single, boundless presence (often called Brahman, Tao, or Rigpa).
• Spontaneity & Flow – Surrendering to the natural movement of existence rather than clinging to conceptual reality.

Whereas animism sees the world as alive, nonduality sees no separate world at all—just consciousness appearing as everything.

3. Seeing Beyond Duality Toward Unity And Kinship

“It was only when science convinced us that nature was dead that it could begin its autopsy in earnest.” A living, aware, and soul-filled world does not respond well to autopsy.”
― James Hillman

Since reductionistic materialism is so engrained in our psyche from decades of public schooling, it can be difficult without consistent practice for most modern people to experience animism and nonduality through direct sensory experience.

Many people come to learn about animism and nonduality through psychedelic experiences that temporarily lift the veil of materialism and reveal how everything is connected.

Despite their differences in expression, animism and nonduality share profound overlaps:

Both traditions dissolve the Western view of a separate, objective world “out there” and instead recognize experience as participatory, fluid and deeply interconnected.

While animism emphasizes relationality (Kinship), nonduality emphasizes emptiness (Sunyata).

1. Kinship

Kinship means engaging the world as a web of relationships with spirits, ancestors and natural forces.

The modern world is heading for collapse because our human decisions tend to be based on maximizing short-term human gain and don’t usually involve the interests of other species.

In kinship-based cultures, decision making processes think of future generations of children as well as the interests of other species and living ecosystems that humans depend on for long-term survival.

2. Sunyata

Nonduality points beyond conceptual distinctions, recognizing that all appearances arise within a singular, undivided awareness.

Emptiness is actually a poor translation of what Sunyata is. Emptiness is seen not as a negation of existence but rather as the undifferentiated oneness out of which all apparent entities, distinctions, and dualities arise.

In nondual awareness, we shift out of our obsession with thinking and into the felt sense of immediate experience, which allows us to step back into the enchanted world of awe and wonder that we experienced as children.

However, they are not mutually exclusive:

• Indigenous shamans often enter non-dual states during deep trance or plant medicine ceremonies.
• Many Buddhist and Taoist traditions maintain animistic elements, recognizing nature as alive (e.g., Shinto Buddhism, Zen’s reverence for natural landscapes).
• Many Christian churches and holy places are built upon ancient pagan sites of animistic practice and connection to the land.
• Both can mutually enrich spiritual practice—animism provides a sacred relational dimension, while nonduality dissolves the ego’s grip on perception.

4. Bridging Animism And Nonduality in Practice

For modern seekers exploring both traditions, several practices can help integrate these perspectives:

1. Nature-Based Meditation:

Sitting in deep stillness in nature, merging with the environment. The beauty of nondual awareness is that it can be practiced anywhere and it can easily be experienced through mindful walking immersed in natural landscapes.

• Sit in a forest, by a river, or in an open field. Instead of seeing “trees” and “sky,” experience everything as a single, living presence.
  
• Drop all labels. Let the boundary between “you” and “nature” dissolve.

2. Nature Retreats:

The stillness and silence necessary for the initial process of realizing nonduality can be incredibly difficult when our attention is always being divided by checking our smartphones. That’s why nature retreats where we can fully unplug from technology and tune into the natural world through nondual awareness practices are essential.

• Spend at least 2-3 days at a nature retreat entirely disconnected from technology to reawaken your senses.
  
• In ecotherapy, there is something called the “3 Day Rule” where the magic of our ancestral awareness starts to return when we have 3 days fully disconnected from technology.

3. Plant Medicine:

Plant medicines make it much easier to engage with altered states while staying open to the underlying unity of consciousness. Many people experience nonduality and animism for the first time with plant medicine and then develop a nondual meditation practice to integrate this felt sense into their lives.

• If engaging with sacred plant medicines (mushrooms, ayahuasca, peyote), instead of clinging to ideas, visions or spirits, let go into pure presence.
  
• Recognize that both the visionary realm and everyday reality arise from the same consciousness and that the spirit world is not separate from the physical world.

4. Contemplation of Interbeing:

Practicing seeing self and world as one seamless reality. There are many forms of nondual inquiry that help reshape our thinking and worldview to think more holistically.

• Indigenous shamans enter deep silence and stillness to hear the voices of the spirits. Similarly, nondual master enter deep silence to recognize the nature of awareness.
  
• Practicing silent retreats, fasting, or deep contemplation in solitude can reveal the unity of both perspectives.

5. Dream Work And Trance:

Observing the dreamlike nature of reality and loosening attachment to fixed identities. While modern science tends to dismiss dreaming as a way of knowing, nearly every pre-modern culture considered dreams and trance states as essential ways to knowing.

• Practicing lucid dreaming or dream yoga can help dissolve the illusion of separation between waking and dreaming states.
• Taking oneirogens and dream herbs that can help amplify your dream experiences and make it easier to remember your dreams.

6. Open Awareness Meditation

Open awareness forms of meditations such as Shikantaza, Dzogchen and Mahamudra help us cultivate a sense of pure, living presence in everything. In Dzogchen, the highest teaching of Tibetan Buddhism, the practitioner recognizes that all phenomena are spontaneous expressions of pure awareness (Rigpa).

7. Nondual Inquiry

In Advaita Vedanta (non-dual Hinduism), the separate self is an illusion—all is Brahman (universal consciousness). Ramana Maharshi encouraged self-inquiry (“Who am I?”) until one realizes there is no separate “I” apart from existence.

• Self-inquiry meditation can break down ego-based perception, revealing the world as not separate, but a unified field of presence.
• There are many nondual inquiry practices that can provide an initial glimpse of nonduality and inspire greater practice and dedication to deepen that understanding.

When we experience nondual awareness, there is no separation between the observer, the observed, and the act of observation. This mirrors the indigenous animistic view that nature and all beings are part of a single, intelligent field of presence.

5. Stepping Into A World of Awe And Wonder

Both animism and nonduality point to the same fundamental truth: Reality is not divided; existence is one, alive, and ever-present.

While Animism engages the world as sacred and relational, nonduality provides the meditative practices to dissolve the very boundaries that create “self” and “world.”

By integrating the wisdom of both, we can move beyond conceptual spirituality and directly experience life as it is—vivid, whole and awake awareness.

Both animism and nonduality point toward a way of experiencing the world beyond fragmentation, allowing a return to a more natural, embodied presence where childlike awe and wonder reanimate and re-enchant the world of our senses.

At their core, animism and nonduality guide us toward a more fluid, participatory experience of existence. Whether through reverence for the spirit world or dissolving the illusion of separation, both traditions reveal that life (noun) is not something we are separate from but something we are creating (verb).

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Kyle Pearce

I'm a serial entrepreneur, autodidact and a passionate advocate for community-driven experiential learning outdoors.

I have been running unplugged nature retreats for the last 7 years that explore embodied mindfulness, experiential learning and community building practices for improving mental health and developing ecological awareness.

I believe that today's growing ecological crisis is ultimately a crisis of consciousness and we must rewild education by teaching the kinship worldview again and helping people learn directly from nature's intelligence through all their senses.

I’m also the founder of Social Creators, an AI-powered marketing automation platform that helps experience creators sell their group coaching, workshops and retreats.

Latest posts by Kyle Pearce (see all)

• Animism And Nonduality: Exploring The Secret Language of Nature - March 9, 2025
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