Essay:Neoanimism

Right, lately I've had this idea, and want to see what people think about it. I might have just heard it somewhere, so if it's unoriginal, please tell me.

What if everything, to varying degrees, is living, and are all just parts of the collective consciousness (the universe). This implicates the lack of a satisfying dichotomy of "living" and "nonliving" in the scientific community (e.g. viruses), how multicellular organisms are just many (living) single-celled organisms united, and how consciousness is widely considered an emergent phenomena, implying a continuum rather than a dichotomy.

So the more complex a thing is, the more alive it is. You may think, "The sun is quite complex, has a huge metabolism, and is the source of all life, so it must be alive, but it runs like clockwork, and makes no decisions." Well, from a deterministic standpoint, neither do you.

So that circle of life from Lion King is kinda factual, IMHO: We die, we become the grass, they eat the grass. Kinda like reincarnation.

Thoughts?