AntIchthon

I dont think things can be treated with that kind of duality. For Japanese who don't think that way, the gods are in the darkness. They may come out into the light at times, but they are usually deep in the forest or mountains. When a holy spot is created, the gods drop down onto it. That is why, in the shrines that are closest to their original form that still exist in Okinawa . . . the image of the god is just a tree or a stone. And such a shrine isn't in a bright, shining place, it's in an overgrown dark area where the silence is deep—a butterfly may flit about, but it's a bit eerie. When I went there . . . it felt as if something were there. This sense of dark awe is the sort of veneration that Japanese have toward certain forests and natural objects.

"When I was a girl, a charming old gentlewoman said something to me that I have never forgotten. I was visiting her country home, and after lunch, going for a walk with her niece, I picked up my gloves from the hall table where I had laid them down. She took them from me and laid them back on the table. ‘You don’t need these. A lot of strength comes to us through the hands.’ Sensation also. The feel of things, textures, surfaces, rough things like cones and bark, smooth things like stalks and feathers and pebbles rounded by water, the teasing of gossamers, the delicate tickle of a crawling caterpillar, the scratchiness of lichen, the warmth of the sun, the sting of hail, the blunt blow of tumbling water, the flow of wind—nothing that I can touch or that touches me but has its own identity for the hand as much as for the eye." 

"The animal must have known Adam as well. We too display a psychic image. We are each an open book to the animal eye. Especially to our household pets, who can call on your state of soul before you have any notion of it. Not only are pets part of the larger family, but they are intimately familiar observers of your unconscious presentation in everyday household life. They were the first psychoanalysts. Is that the psychological reason for the domestication of dogs and cats, of birds, pigs, cows, elephants, goats? The animals could make us aware of ourselves. When we are present to the animal Adam is there, and Eve, and we are in the Garden from which the animals, unlike us, were never ejected."