If your spirituality is just that you want to take yourself beyond, of course this is just illusion. But imagine that for, say, an Amazonian tribesperson. If they were to say that the forest they live in is ‘just illusion,’ they’d be dead within a day, right? Ecology requires us to have a deep attentiveness to the [relational] way reality manifests

Nature is full of intermediary forces. Traditions will always find their way back to intermediary beings because I think we need them.

‘Animism’ is just a Western term to describe the way everybody sees the world.