The animistic experience is that nature is alive. one manifestation of this liveliness is the ability of things in nature - animals, plants, stones, etc. - to ‘speak’ to us.
This seems to be the basis for human culture and religion (together with the idea of the ‘holy’, i.e. of the ‘special’).
A nice description of this feeling, of ‘nature is speaking to us’, is described in Wade Davis' talk in TED.
This notion is embedded in the Shamanic journey experience, when then notion of the natural elements talking to us is reconstructed in a mental journey.
All of this sounds very ‘primitive’, or very ‘newagic’, depends on your point of view.
But if we think of the following:
Looking at a tree and saying - what is he telling me? he is telling me that winter is nearing, when the reference is to a tree in the autumn it then makes completely scientific sense. There is nothing animistic about this, nothing ‘primitive’, or ‘animistic’ about it.
My conclusion: the tendency of ‘hearing’ the environment talking to us/me is a natural inclination of the brain.
So we should differentiate:
Animism: a natural tendency of acquiring information from the surrounding.
Shamanism: doing the previous mentally (common among humans, and much less among other apes, perhaps also among pre-homos, or pre-homo sapience).
Science: doing ‘animism’ with the gray matter of the left side of the brain. Typical of homo sapience sapience (not in earlier homos, or homo sapience, like Neanderthals).
http://www.singsurf.org/brain/rightbrain.php
