Philosopher Plato once imagined the cosmos as “a living creature truly endowed with soul and intelligence. Animistic traditions recognise that the Earth is not passive terrain, but a living being with whom we share an interconnected consciousness.

Yet today, many people no longer see the cosmos as alive. We forget we are inseparable from the whole of nature. This perceptual fracture lies at the heart of our ecological crisis. The Earth has become resource, not relative. Still, ancient wisdom reminds us: the world is a single living entity containing all other living entities - each intrinsically related.

Jungian eco‑psychology affirms this as anima mundi - the soul of the world, Earth’s innate intelligence. Jung understood our psychic disconnect as a failure of imagination. In The Red Book, he writes of the soul’s hunger for myth. Without living stories, we suffer a flattened relationship to nature. The anima mundi calls us back not through argument but poetic perception.

When the ‘spirits’ were stripped from trees, mountains, and seas, the Western psyche lost intimacy with land. Recovery begins with re-sensing. Rilke’s gentle words remind us: “If we surrendered to earth’s intelligence we could rise up rooted, like trees…” Surrender is not weakness - it is deep anchoring.

In Jungian terms, our collective shadow is this denial of kinship with Earth. The psyche suffers not only from personal trauma, but from eco-alienation. Healing begins with remembering Earth as a living entity with a soul. As Stephan Harding writes, “as the crisis deepens, the call of anima mundi intensifies.”

Jung states: “Natural life is the nourishing soil of the soul.” We begin to sense Earth’s soul again - in forests breathing, rivers murmuring, wind whispering. The spiral turns: from disenchantment to urgent remembering. The Earth is alive. Her soul calls us home.

Swami B. V. Tripurari offers the needed clarity: “The current deplorable environmental crisis demands a spiritual response. A fundamental reorientation of human consciousness, accompanied by action that is born out of inner commitment, is very much needed.”

Written for @jungsouthernafrica

References: Plato, Timaeus 30a–b (English translation)) Rainer Maria Rilke, Book of Hours: Love Poems to God, Book II, Poem 16 (translated by Anita Barrows & Joanna Macy) Stephan Harding (2006) Animate Earth: Science, Intuition & Gaia
Carl G. Jung, The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, Collected Works 8, ¶ 800 Swami B. V. Tripurari (Ancient Wisdom for Modern Ignorance, 1994)

Image credits: Agyguru

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