I agree with this.
I've also been thinking about where we draw the line. Humans have "consciousness," okay. What about apes or dogs? Do they? If so, why, and if not, why not? And if they do, then do dolphins? Cats? Bats? Where does it end, and why does it end just there?
I think the oldest religions end up saying that everyone and everything has consciousness (or a soul), that the material universe in some sense *is* a soul.
I've always sort of understood animism or pantheism, mostly on an intellectual plane. But I had a couple epiphanies lately when reading Robin Wall Kimmerer. She points out that for third person singular pronouns, most indigenous languages do not chose "it." They chose "he" or "she." And so almost everything is conceived of in personal terms ("it" is reserved for things that people make, like tents or knives). And since almost everything - animals, plants, rocks, stars, waters - is referred to with personal pronouns and conceived of as like a person, the neurological circuitry in the human brain that is activated by interpersonal relationships becomes activated in our connection to the natural world (IOW, this is much more than just an opinion or an idea, it involves the actual behavior and activity of the brain itself). And so it is simply offensive to call a river an "it," to reduce it to merely its physical aspect. It would be like looking at someone's grandmother in the kitchen and going "it is cooking."
She also said that indigenous languages are very verb-heavy. They have many more verbs, and many of them are deployed in ways that seem bizarre to western materialism. For example, "Sunday" is a verb. What you doing today? I'm sundaying....oh, me too. Prof. Kimmerer said that one of her toughest challenges in learning her native Potawatomi was hearing that "bay" was a verb. She was like, "No it's not. It's a person, place or thing. A bay is a noun." Until she realized that it was only a noun in the abstract. Any actual, individual, singular bay...well just go look at it. You'll see it's in motion....water coming in, clouds passing by, sounds of seabirds, insects buzzing around...this place is indeed "baying."
For me, once I got a glimpse into those two things, the whole flower of animism unfolded before me. It is very beatiful. And much closer to the truth, IMO, than western epistemology (minus Spinoza and a few others) and western materialism.
From this point of view, do humans have souls? Of course. As does everything else in the whole of creation.
