The Soul in the Stone

Everything is alive. If we believed this, we might treat our planet, other life forms and each other rather differently. In fact, believing that Everything is alive might be the best thing that we could all do, not just to save the planet, but also to enrich our own lives. But we can't believe something just because we think it would be beneficial to believe it. We believe things when we are convinced that they are true. And it seems to many of us that Everything is alive is, well, obviously and blatantly untrue. With his new book, Ashley Curtis wants to change this. In nine vivid and entertaining chapters he takes us on a magical mystery tour of the assumptions behind both animist (Everything is alive) and non-animist (Few things are alive) worldviews. Through playful encounters with philosophers and physicists, hunters and shamans, talking trees and receptive rivers, our apparently well-ordered world of subject and object, mind and matter, consciousness and inert material is turned upside down and inside out. In the end we find ourselves in a new world, one that is not only saveable, but all the more worth saving.