Scivillage.com Casual Discussion Science Forum

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/what...ze-nature/

INTRO: In religious cosmogonies, anthropologist Mircea Eliade argues in his 1957 book "The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion", the natural world is the bearer of sacred meaning, a precious rune to be interpreted with care. For the Babylonians, the future could be read in the stars. For the Maya, freshwater cenotes marked a passage to the underworld, and priests made offerings of gold and jade amulets to appease the water god Chaac. In ancient Greece, the sacred oak tree at Dodona carried messages from Zeus for those trained to pull words from between the leaves’ whispers.

For the secular person of the modern age, however, nature has fallen silent. “The cosmos has become opaque, inert, mute,” Eliade observes, in Willard R. Trask’s translation; “it transmits no message, it holds no cipher.” What would it take for 21st-century humans to learn once again how to see the cosmos as alive, as a sentient being capable of speaking and bearing messages worthy of our listening? This is the question at the heart of Robert Macfarlane’s haunting new book "Is a River Alive?" ..... (MORE - details)

Rivers possess all the qualities that make up a living organism. They self-propagate in dendritic fashion as streams and creeks and gullies. They replenish themselves constantly with fresh water. They feed off underground springs and lakes and rainfall. They self-organize in winding snake-like ways thru the landscape. The only thing lacking is sentience. But for all we know they may possess such thru the very medium of water:

"In Jainism, many things are endowed with a soul, jīva, which is sometimes translated as 'sentience'.[17][18] Some things are without a soul, ajīva, such as a chair or spoon.[19] There are different rankings of jīva based on the number of senses it has. Water, for example, is a sentient being of the first order, as it is considered to possess only one sense, that of touch."--- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentience