The Urban Consciousness Experiment: When Ancient and New Awareness Collide

Pacific gull circling the city at sunset

Yesterday, I watched a Pacific Gull circle the taller buildings of the CBD ('central business district' if you're not Australian), riding thermals created by concrete and steel. For twenty minutes, it flapped around between the buildings with the same focused intensity its ancestors brought to ancient shorelines. This wasn't a confused bird making do with degraded habitat—this was adaptation so complete it looked like belonging. I know I'm talking about a seagull, a.k.a. flying rats who would probably survive anywhere, but just go with the analogy.

I joked to myself that someone must have dropped fish and chips for gulls to be circling, but the brief moment of amusement didn't last long: what exactly am I witnessing when nature reasserts itself in cities? Is this simply the persistence of older consciousness finding new expression? Or something more complex—maybe even collaborative—happening in the spaces where human intention meets the relentless creativity of the more-than-human world?

I've discussed before the perception that cities are barren wastelands that suck the spiritual vibe out of everything. But this perspective misses something crucial about what actually unfolds in urban spaces. Cities might be consciousness melting pots - places where entirely new forms of awareness emerge from layers between ancient land spirits and human architectural ambition. Or they might serve as new habitat for existing spiritual entities seeking novel forms of expression.

But I'm jumping ahead. Let's start with what keeps returning, despite everything we've built to contain it.

The Persistence of What Was Here First

The land remembers. Beneath Hobart's grid, such as it is, the original rivulets still influence architecture and infrastructure. Water seeks its ancient channels, creating those mysterious damp basement corners and weird flash floods following a minor dump of rain. Walk through any city during the liminal hours and you might feel it: the ancient awareness that shaped these spaces long before the first human settlement.

The persistence seems most noticeable to me in the revenant wild, the moments when nature returns unexpectedly, reclaiming urban space. The weeds that gleefully crack concrete with such precision it seems intentional. Random saplings that sprout from the gutters on the tops of buildings, growing tall enough to compete with chimney stacks and AC towers. Sneak attacks from skinks, mice, or spiders in otherwise sterile office environments where you'd think nothing would survive, not even the office employees.

These aren't random acts of a flora or fauna revolt. They feel purposeful, almost mischievous—as if some older intelligence is testing the boundaries of what we think we've controlled. The most obvious of these inclusions are gulls that scavenge between city buildings and the possums that navigate footpaths and traffic. The way urban wildlife often seems bolder, more adaptable, more willing to engage with human infrastructure than their rural counterparts.

Sometimes I wonder if we've got this backwards. Maybe it's not that nature is adapting to cities, but that cities exist within nature's larger experimental sandpit. There seems to be an ongoing narrative of consciousness exploring itself through form, relationship and possibility and urban areas are the new frontier.

When Something Entirely New Emerges: The Urban Consciousness Experiment

But here's where it gets interesting. There are places in cities that don't fit the "nature reclaiming space" narrative at all. They're not dead zones with no presence, and they're not those aloof, grumpy, or downright hostile urban spirits either. Something else is happening in cities that feels genuinely novel. I'll see if I can explain it through something I encountered not long ago.

A potato sitting under a bridge, contemplating liminal space

Take the Tasman Bridge. Its spirit feels completely different from the Derwent River it spans. The bridge is all about connection and getting from A to B. The river? Ancient, deep, cold - proper old-school water spirit. But the space underneath them both? That's something else entirely. Stories of trolls aside, I've always been drawn to the underside of bridges - traffic roaring overhead, sea breeze on your face.

I ventured down under that bridge a few weeks ago. I have a 'plan' of exploring new places as part of my urban animism work. I use quotation marks as it's more plan-adjacent, if you know what I mean. I started by wandering around the place, amongst the few people fishing and the gulls screeching for no apparent reason. The liminality of that space didn't feel empty, it felt…deep?

I sat for a while and created a small offering of stones and shells, and shared some water presented in half a tin can that had washed up with other flotsam and jetsam. As it's winter here, the wind coming off the water was distractingly cold, but I managed to feel in other ways. The space was different. I felt I needed to attend differently there, but wasn't really sure how. In my head, I felt more like I was trying to tune into a frequency that was diffuse and perhaps hadn't existed before the bridge's construction.

I wondered while sitting there whether the movement and energy of the people crossing the bridge had any effect on what might be residing in the area. I got the faintest impression of something entirely new, something that couldn't have existed before this particular intersection of human engineering and tidal estuary.

Spirit midwifery or accessible housing options?

Urban shamans working in cities like Stockholm report encountering spirits that communicate through electrical grids and public transportation systems—consciousness that speaks in the language of infrastructure rather than earth and water. These aren't land spirits wearing urban costumes. They seem to be genuinely new forms of awareness that exist within the creative collaboration between human intention and material reality.

This raises questions I'm still sitting with: Does the process of building cities actually birth new consciousness? When human creativity, material agency, and land potential come together in construction, is that some kind of accidental ritual? Or are we creating new lenses through which existing consciousness can express itself in unprecedented ways, sort of like a two way mirror?

I don't have definitive answers, but I'm increasingly convinced that cities function as consciousness melting pots, giant experiments mixing new, old and the oblivious people that occupy the space - spaces where awareness experiments with forms that couldn't emerge in either pristine wilderness or sterile laboratory conditions.

Multiple Awarenesses, Same Space

Now here's the part that's really doing my head in. Different forms of consciousness seem to occupy the same urban spaces simultaneously without canceling each other out. Walk through any city neighborhood with attention, and you'll notice layers: the ancient gum tree invoking bushland memories, the apartment building that has developed its own personality over decades, and then the street corner where something entirely new seems to emerge from their coming together. This isn't spiritual overcrowding or entity homelessness, which is sort of surprising given the current housing market. It's more like consciousness operating on multiple frequencies.

In my own practice, like the example from under the bridge, I've started to notice how these layers interact with each other. The way ancient water patterns seem to influence where urban spirits feel strongest. How certain buildings seem to amplify the presence of older land consciousness rather than dampening it. The places where human architectural intention and geological memory create something that feels both ancient and utterly contemporary. These seem to be hybrid zones where accepted boundaries dissolve. If so, it would certainly explain the weird, random and sometimes rapid changes in the feel of a place.

I'm going to keep looking for places that feel like this, but I'm going to need to apply discernment to distinguish between my own projections and assumptions, genuine spiritual presence, and how it's all working together. The evidence is mostly experiential rather than conclusive, but that's part of the fun, right?

Learning to Distinguish Without Choosing Sides

If cities really do host multiple forms of consciousness, practical discernment becomes essential. How do you distinguish between land spirits and urban spirits in the same location? Why does it matter? And how do you honor multiple layers of consciousness without trying to force them into a single, simplified spiritual system? This is what I've been able to piece together so far:

A multitude of occupants in the same space. Image from Unsplash.

Land spirits in urban contexts seem to communicate through patterns that persist despite surface change: seasonal rhythms, weather responses, the behavior of urban wildlife, as well as anything we can feel physically or mentally. They seem to respond to offerings that acknowledge continuity and reduce or counteract the feeling of frazzled uncertainty that accompanies cities (and perhaps modernity?) such as water, native plants, pretty rocks - all the things that recognise the land's original inhabitants. These consciousnesses seem to appreciate practices that honor the deep time perspective, the longer view that sees current urban development as a blip in a much larger story.

Urban spirits seem to communicate through the rhythms of constructed life: traffic patterns, electrical fluctuations, in the spaces where daily cycles of human activity occur. In my experience, they respond to offerings of human creativity, intentional aesthetics (like rearranging furniture in a hotel foyer if you're in a cheeky mood), spontaneity (running counter to intention, which is interesting), recognition of the collaborative process that brought them into being. These awarenesses appreciate practices that acknowledge their somewhat novel presence rather than treating them in the same way as interacting with a mountain, river, or tree.

The hybrid zones - places where both types of consciousness seem present and potentially collaborative - seem to require an even more nuanced approach. I'm still working on this, as it seems the hardest nut to crack. So far, and I'm guessing here, it feels like these spaces might be some of the most spiritually potent places in cities, but they also don't respond a great deal to my overtures. I suspect working with them means developing the capacity to hold multiple relationships simultaneously without trying to resolve the complexity into something simpler. Maybe these hybrid zones are something else entirely and I'm just not approaching them in the right way. Clearly a stretch project for me.

Out of all this, what I'm learning is that recognition doesn't require choosing sides. The ancient land spirits and the newly emerged urban spirits aren't competing for legitimacy. They're exploring different possibilities of consciousness in relationship with place, time, and human creativity.

The False Choice That's Not Doing Us Any Favours

The most limiting belief in contemporary spirituality might be the assumption that authentic spiritual practice requires choosing between "natural" and "artificial" consciousness, which I've touched on before. This binary thinking treats cities as spiritual compromise zones, places where we make do with less authentic awareness because we've chosen urban convenience over perceived rural spiritual purity.

But what if cities aren't spiritually impoverished but consciousness abundant? What if they offer something impossible in purely rural environments: the experience of multiple forms of consciousness collaborating and experimenting in real time? What if urban environments are among the most spiritually generative spaces humans have ever created? Queue the choirs of heaven!

I'm beginning to see that stepping up my urban practice is going to require something more sophisticated than just swapping nature spirits for urban ones. It means developing the capacity to recognize and relate to different forms of awareness simultaneously - learning to feed and honor multiple types of spiritual presence without trying to reduce them to a single system or hierarchy. Doing so would be a disservice to them, and probably drive me crazy.

What's Still Unknown - a Lot

I'm sharing these observations not as conclusions but as ongoing exploration. Half the time I doubt myself and everything that I'm learning. The other half is, well, just magic. Urban animism is still experimental territory, especially for me. Most of our spiritual traditions developed in contexts very different from contemporary cities. Although I am finding a small number of writers in the urban animism headspace, who have been helpful, I'm still creating approaches as I go. I take what I know, test to see what works, document what's discovered, and remain open to possibilities I haven't yet imagined, all of which is becoming a familiar litany.

Some questions I'm still sitting with: as I've talked about above, when land spirits and urban spirits seem to sit alongside each other are they creating genuinely new beings or simply influencing each other's expression? How do we develop spiritual practices that honor complexity without getting lost in it? This last one for me is particularly challenging as I have a habit of getting stuck head first down rabbit holes.

Diving down every interesting rabbit hole, head first!

I'm also not totally oblivious to the potential wider implications of all the stuff I'm working through. For example, how understanding the presence of urban consciousness might change our relationship with urban environments themselves. If cities are consciousness melting pots, then the approach to urban development, architecture, and city planning could take on spiritual dimensions we rarely acknowledge.

I think wherever I find myself sitting in the city, what I'm sensing is consciousness itself experimenting - ancient awareness and human ambition creating new forms of relationship and expression. And we're not just observers of this process—we're active participants in an ongoing experiment in consciousness evolution

That gull circling the glass towers? It's not making do with degraded habitat. Although it sounds wanky, I think an element of what it's exploring are new possibilities of what it means to be gull in relationship with a world that's constantly changing. Maybe that's what all of us are doing in cities—exploring new possibilities of what it means to be conscious in places where consciousness itself is actively experimenting with novel forms.

I've moved past the question of whether cities are spiritual or not. The question is whether we're ready to participate in the spiritual experimentation that cities represent.