Anima Mundi means world soul. It implies an intrinsic connection between all living things on the planet, and also things which we don't necessarily consider to be alive such as rocks. We can use the words Anima Mundi as an approach to how we experience our Earth and ourselves in relation to it. We cannot have a world soul if we don’t engage with it and we can do this by experiencing our individual worlds as us actually being our Earth - after all we wouldn’t be here if we weren’t part and parcel of the Earth. We (mostly Western cultures) have developed a sense of separateness from our Earth and in the process have become distanced from ourselves as earthly beings. It is an illness of our soul and as we are the world soul we make the world ill too.
A way forward is to start to see ourselves as Earth, using our senses as a form of perception, making what we consider to be matter conscious so that it becomes something we can converse with on a conscious level. That means there is nothing ‘dead’ in the world, it becomes alive because all is conscious. And we're not just talking about being out in nature, we mean everything, from the chair you are sitting on to the device you are reading these words on, to the walls of the structure you are within, to the very air that is passing in and out of your lungs as you breathe. When we engage with the anima mundi in this way we begin to engage with ourselves, our souls reconnect compassionately with all around us and we value our selves as we see that we are our Earth. A flow begins, and instead of excess or lack (poverty) an equilibrium begins to form, in a truely Gaian self regulating way.
