The idea that we may be really related to animals in much more fundamental ways may come as a shock (or be rejected) by some, but if grasped, becomes one of the major avenues through which we reestablish a sense of unity with nature that strongly resists the temptation to exploit, damage it, or treat its sentient occupants with cruelty.

These Sufi mystics and poets understood the violent jealousy of borders and so they aimed, in the words of Dārā Shikōh, to etch lines of demarcation in water rather than in stone. In Ibn ‘Arabī’s school, the variegated cosmos is nothing but the endless self-disclosure of the One as the Many. The One Reality or Essence shows itself by hiding as the many, effectively veiling itself through its unveiling.

When those two words, ‘spiritual’ and ‘material’ appear in the same sentence almost always they are opposed to one another. If you trace this historically, this has done vast damage, not only philosophically, but in extremely practical terms

My core concern here is to wrestle with the idea of ‘nature’ and with the ‘ways in which we relate to it’. A nature that is both in us as humans, and the many nature(s), animate and non-animate, outside of us. Thus it seems possible to think of nature in singular and plural terms. I will argue that in order to combat the existential threats we face, as a society and as a planet; it is time to go back in some ways and go forward in others.

Yet, the idea of secularism has become a form of “sacralisation of power… beyond the reach of contestation…” (Balibar 2018, 51). In an increasingly plural world where existential questions tear at the heart of the human condition, both secularism and religion/ theology need to be re-examined.