@Malachi: Note that I’m not espousing Blavatsky’s ideas across the board, merely the principle of “Universe as acting being”, where “being” doesn’t mean intelligent like you and I are intelligent; maybe like an amoeba is intelligent or less than that even. The idea is to attempt to apply a Darwinian principle to the fundamental structure of the Universe itself… the goal is to attempt to get at a mechanistic theory in this way. If it happens that the theory can be interpreted as animism, then so be it.
Clayton -