Leonardi/Environmental Spirituality, 8.La Pachamama’s soul: Understanding eco-spirituality through archetypal intersubjectivity

Ancestral peoples looking at the sky, wondered, “what is out there?” and buried their loved ones using rituals that reveal their beliefs of life after physical death. These archetypal feelings of longing to return to the womb of la Pachamama or Mother Earth have connected us through the ages. To the ancestral peoples, the Earth was sacred; it had a soul and was considered a common house. For the Andean people, for instance, all were alive and had a soul: the great mountains, the rivers, Pachamama, and majestic trees had subjectivity and alterity. Life and death were part of the same reality, a cycle in which humans took part but were not less or more important than other living beings. I will argue in this chapter that we can only attain spiritual enlightenment by being aware that our nature is interbeing or intersubjectivity. The longing is archetypal, and along with the concept of intersubjectivity, I introduce the concept of archetypal intersubjectivity as an epistemology concerned with Ecospirituality that alerts us to the urgent need for a new ethical centrality to take care of our common house, Earth.