Do Animals Have Souls?

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http://wie.org/j32/animal-souls.asp

 

What is Enlightenment? Magazine

Do Animals Have Souls?

A mind-bending journey into the deeper dimensions of animal consciousness

by Ross Robertson

 

 

One day when yoga instructor Kari Harendorf was

practicing backbends, her dog Charlie padded over

and started stretching out beneath her on the

hardwood floor. In a flash of insight that may or

may not recall some ancient yogic pioneer's

moment of inspiration for Downward and Upward

Dog, the modern-day discipline of doga was born.

Doga, or doggy yoga- " the path to enlightenment

for humans and their pets " -is the subject of

Animal Planet's new show " K9 Karma, " cohosted by

Kari and Charlie; it's also the topic of recent

books like Bow Wow Yoga and Doga: Yoga for Dogs.

" My relationship with Charlie is definitely

special, " Harendorf says. " It's intangible, and

it goes beyond language, beyond a species

barrier. He's just . . . he holds my heart, and I

hold his. "

From man's best friend to man's soul mate and

partner on the path of spiritual liberation? If

the picture of a New York City yoga studio full

of people chanting " Om " to their pit bulls and

Pomeranians seems both comical and slightly

strange, consider for a moment that popular

curiosity about animals' spiritual status has

never been higher. Nowadays, twice as many

American households include pets as include

children, and even mainstream religion is

embracing questions like " Do animals have souls? "

Animal souls? Actually, Americans are split down

the middle on this one-of the ninety-some percent

who believe in heaven, roughly half think their

pets will join them there. Theologians are

grappling with the question, too, rethinking

whether or not Benji or Fido is going to make it

through the Pearly Gates when he dies. And

priests and ministers are doing their part to

breathe new life into the phrase " pets are people

too " by performing official blessings, burials,

and even marriages for animals.

Wait a minute. Heaven in the next life and

marriages in this one? What's going on here? I've

never been much of a pet person myself-too many

dogs ran me down and bit me when I was a kid-but

in spite of that, I can certainly appreciate the

impulse to find meaning in animal relationships.

My brother and I used to love chasing after

sandpipers on the beach, and I searched endlessly

for crayfish in the streams near my house with my

friends. As I got older, I spent more and more

time in the mountains, trailing deer through the

trees and keeping my eyes peeled for elusive

black bears. But what has opened my eyes more

than ever before to the mystery and beauty of our

animal kin has been the enlightening onrush of

stories that began, interestingly enough, with my

research for this piece.

They came across my desk one after another, too

fast to process, about all manner of animals and

their relations-relations with their own kin,

with individuals of different species, and, of

course, with people too. There were cutting-edge

studies of animal cognition and moving

descriptions of compassion in elephants and

morality in coyotes. There were unbelievable

tales of wolves who practiced aikido with a human

master, stories of great apes instant-messaging

each other on AOL, even astonishing reports of a

telepathic parrot. Some stretched my mind in

directions it had never been stretched before;

some pulled unfamiliar strings in my heart; more

than a few seemed completely outlandish. But

through it all, there was the ever-deepening

realization that I knew a lot less than I thought

I did about the puzzle of life and evolution,

about the soul's elusive temperament, and, most

of all, about the boundary lines between animal

and man.

 

The impulse to make contact

 

When world-famous primatologist Jane Goodall was

only eighteen months old, she gathered up a

handful of earthworms from her parents' London

garden, brought them inside, and made a little

nest for them in her bed. After her mother

patiently informed her that the worms could never

survive in this dirtless environment, she hurried

to get them back home again among the flowers and

weeds. But the little girl who would one day

travel farther than anyone before her across the

borders of the nonhuman world had taken her first

steps toward her destiny. What was it that gave

birth to this impulse in one so young, the

impulse to make contact with another species?

What deeply felt curiosity or connectedness did

she experience that drew her to want to be closer

to them?

Oftentimes during her lectures and travels,

Goodall tells the story of a man named Rick Swope

who risked his life to save a chimpanzee named

Jo-Jo from drowning in the newly constructed moat

surrounding his enclosure at the Detroit Zoo.

Among this particular posse of Michigan chimps,

Jo-Jo was the head honcho, but when a younger and

stronger alpha-wannabe threw down the gauntlet

one day and attacked him, Jo-Jo ran, wisely or

not so wisely, over the safety barrier and into

the water. Chimps can't swim, which is why zoos

build moats around them in the first place;

chimps are also very dangerous, which is why the

zookeeper on duty that day made no attempt to

rescue Jo-Jo when he panicked and sank like a

stone. Against the keeper's dire warnings, and

much to the distress of his wife and kids, Swope

jumped in and lifted the 130-pound ape as well as

he could up the embankment. " I looked into his

eyes, " he said later. " It was like looking into

the eyes of a man. And the message was: Won't

anybody help me? "

What was it in Jo-Jo's eyes that made Swope keep

himself in jeopardy (three angry males were

charging down the bank toward him) in order to

support the stunned and waterlogged chimpanzee

until he could finally grab a tuft of grass and

pull himself to safety? Are the eyes, as the

saying goes, really windows to the soul? I can

still remember the day when, after an

embarrassingly great many years of unsuccessful

fishing trips with the Boy Scouts, I finally

caught my first fish. As I tried, also

unsuccessfully, to extract the hook from its

mouth and throw it back, I gazed into its eyes

and saw something I thought was sadness. It was

hard not to flinch away from that dying look, in

which I could see my own carelessness nakedly

reflected, but somehow I felt honor-bound not to

disturb this intimate channel that, for a brief

moment at least, had been opened up between us.

I made other efforts at " interspecies

communication " when I was a kid, walking through

the woods with my Audubon bird call and mimicking

the chirps and trills I heard up above. And

though I have no evidence of any definitive

success, my crude attempts at avian language were

nevertheless a kind of animal soul music, at

least in my own mind-a curious call to the

nonhuman world in search of the echo of

consciousness returning back to me. Who, or what,

I wanted to know, was out there listening?

Guitarist Jim Nollman must have been wondering

something similar when he anchored his boat off

the coast of Vancouver Island, dropped a

submersible speaker overboard, plugged in, and

tried to get the dolphins and killer whales to

jam with him. From recordings he's made using

underwater microphones to capture their hornlike

whistles and songs (Nollman compares one

particularly responsive whale to Bitches Brew-era

Miles Davis), he appears to have succeeded. Other

Western musicians whom Nollman has invited aboard

to try out his gear have tended to elicit either

clear responses from the whales or no interest at

all. A Tibetan lama chanting religious prayers,

on the other hand, brought forth a palpable hush.

As he intoned his Himalayan melody, the whales

approached the speaker quietly and just huddled

there, listening.

 

 

Will all thinking, feeling, caring beings please stand up?

When pods of killer whales fall strangely silent

to eavesdrop on a chanting Buddhist monk, what

exactly are they responding to? Is it to the

vibrations themselves, sounds and sensations

either pleasing or baffling to their ears? Or are

they hearing the resonance of something more

intangible, some transcendent echo reflected back

from deep within them? What is it in us, for that

matter, that responds to these things? Is it the

soul?

Whatever else the soul might be, it seems safe to

say that it is part of that dimension of

consciousness that makes us most fully human-part

of that which makes us thinking, feeling, caring

beings. Could the same be true of the animal

soul? Not so long ago, noble qualities like

reason, emotion, and morality were all thought to

be exclusively human traits. But the steady march

of science is chipping away at old ideas. In

1960, Goodall observed chimpanzees at Tanzania's

Gombe Stream Reserve stripping leaves off twigs

and using the sticks to fish termites out of

their nests, thereby poking holes in the

long-held belief that human beings were the only

species to make tools. " Now we must redefine

tool, " said her mentor Louis Leakey, " redefine

man, or accept chimpanzees as humans. " Since

then, nearly all major arguments for human

uniqueness-claims that we alone possess

rationality, self-consciousness, culture,

empathy, language, morality, etc.-have been

increasingly called into question. So if you

still find yourself attached to the belief that

animals are hopelessly undeveloped-dull of mind,

poor of heart, and devoid of soul-breaking news

from the scientific arena is here to recommend

otherwise.

 

Let's take reason, to start. According to

Descartes, animals were mere machines, while men

were machines with minds. Indeed, the bulk of

Western thought, from Plato and Aristotle to

Aquinas on up, puts great stock in rationality as

the basic factor setting human beings apart from

the rest of animal kind. And since you can't just

walk up to a guinea pig or an anteater and ask it

to describe its experience of cognition, it

hasn't exactly been easy to test this claim. One

way scientists have tried to get at the problem

is by searching for evidence of animal deception,

a cognitive skill that depends on the ability to

recognize that others have thoughts and

intentions different from one's own. They've

shown that monkeys and baboons can distract each

other in order to steal food, sneak around rocks

to do things behind each others' backs, and wait

until others are distracted (like during fights)

to put the moves on receptive females. Just

recently, a raven named Hugin passed the

deception test as well, fooling a dominant bird

into hunting for food where Hugin knew there was

none in order to buy himself some time alone

where the food really was.

Impressive as Hugin's trick may be, it must look

like kids' stuff to one of the most accomplished

birds known to science: Alex the parrot. Only

last summer, Alex raised the bar on avian

intelligence to new heights by demonstrating a

rough understanding of the number zero, a

conceptual abstraction never fathomed by even the

most learned mathematicians of ancient Greece.

How did he do it? Trainer Dr. Irene Pepperberg

laid out a tray with four groups of blocks on

it-two blue, three green, four yellow, and six

orange-and then called out a number of blocks,

asking Alex to identify the color of the

corresponding group. But for some reason, he

refused to cooperate, insisting instead on

repeating the word " five " over and over again.

When she finally replied " OK, smarty, what color

five? " Alex quickly answered " None! " A bird with

a brain the size of a walnut had understood the

" absence of quantity, " something human children

don't typically grasp until age three or four.

How did Alex feel about his accomplishment? As

recently as ten years ago, researchers would have

argued over whether it was possible for him to

have felt anything at all. But scientists no

longer dispute the presence of emotion in

birds-or in many other species, for that matter.

African elephants, for instance, " share with us a

strong sense of family and death and they feel

many of the same emotions, " Kenyan

conservationist Daphne Sheldrick says. " Each one

is . . . a unique individual with its own unique

personality. They can be happy or sad, volatile

or placid. They display envy, jealousy, throw

tantrums and are fiercely competitive, and they

can develop hang-ups which are reflected in

behaviour. . . . They grieve deeply for lost

loved ones, even shedding tears and suffering

depression. They have a sense of compassion that

projects beyond their own kind and sometimes

extends to others in distress. " Animal behavior

expert Marc Bekoff adds that elephants are known

to stand silent guard over stillborn babies for

days with their heads and ears sunk low; orphans

who witness their mothers' deaths " often wake up

screaming. " Sea lion mothers howl and cry while

killer whales dine on their babies, he says.

Dolphins struggle painfully to resuscitate dead

infants. Once, he even saw a grieving red fox

bury the body of another who had been killed by a

mountain lion: " She would kick up dirt, stop,

look at the carcass, and intentionally kick

again. I observed this 'ritual' for about 20

seconds. A few hours later I went to see the

carcass, and it was totally buried. "

Now that most biologists have accepted that

animals have richly varied emotional lives, a far

more radical proposition is taking center stage

in current research. Beyond simple raw emotion,

some say, animals are displaying the subtler,

more complex signs of moral sensibility. " There

is good evidence that chimpanzees keep track of

favors and repay them, " writes primatologist

Frans de Waal. And it goes both ways, Bekoff

tells me: " If you're labeled as a cheater in a

pack of wolves or a pack of coyotes or a group of

chimpanzees, you're going to have a lot of

trouble getting other individuals to interact

with you. " He calls this " wild justice, " and it's

not just for primates and canines. Cows hold

grudges and nurture friendships too. North

African meerkats forfeit their own safety to stay

beside wounded family members who would otherwise

have to face death alone. Stronger rats sometimes

even let the weaker ones win when they play at

wrestling. And-remarkable as it sounds-morality

in animals also crosses species boundaries. " You

see animals help each other all the time, " Bekoff

says. " Dogs and monkeys hug one another, console

one another, travel with one another. During the

tsunami last year, a baby hippopotamus was

separated from his family and taken to an animal

rescue shelter in Kenya. When he got there, he

was adopted by a 130-year-old tortoise, and

they've been inseparable ever since. " Not long

ago, de Waal watched a bonobo named Kuni pick up

an injured starling, take it outside, and place

it on its feet. When it didn't fly, she helped

unfold its wings and then carefully tossed it

into the air.

Then there are the stories of animal heroics that

involve human beings, some of which have achieved

the status of legend. Eleven-year-old Anthony

Melton's pet pig, Priscilla, made headlines in

1984 when she dove into a Houston lake to save

his life. Swimming out to the boy, who was in

over his head and starting to panic, she towed

him to shore with her leash. In 1975, a woman

shipwrecked off the Philippines was saved by a

giant sea turtle that surfaced underneath her and

carried her on its back for two full days until

rescuers finally arrived. Once, an elderly

Tennessee woman was even rescued by her pet

canary. Upon seeing her trip and fall

unconscious, the bird proceeded to find its way

out of her house, which it had never left before.

It then traveled the length of several football

fields to her niece's nearby home and banged

hysterically against the windowpane until she

finally got the message and went running to check

up on her aunt. The canary promptly collapsed and

died from the effort, but the old woman's life

was saved.

Of all such tales of interspecies love and

bravado, perhaps the most enigmatic and the most

miraculous involve dolphins, renowned the world

over for keeping unconscious people afloat,

shielding swimmers from sharks and sea lions from

orcas, guarding pregnant whales while they give

birth, and herding beached whales back to open

sea. Most incredible of these might be the story

of Pelorus Jack, a dolphin famous for guiding

steamships through a notoriously treacherous

channel off the coast of New Zealand around the

turn of the last century. French Pass was known

among sailors for claiming vessel after vessel in

its swift jaws-that is, until Pelorus Jack came

along. For over twenty years, every time a ship

approached the mouth of the hazardous strait, he

would unfailingly appear, bobbing along the

surface to lead it safely through the rocks. On

his watch, none ever foundered. Then in 1904, a

drunkard on board a ship known as the Penguin

took a potshot at him and Jack swam away trailing

blood. Although he healed a few weeks later and

diligently returned to his chosen task, nobody on

the Penguin ever saw him again; it later ran

aground in French Pass, and crew and passengers

drowned.

 

Defining the soul: a sixty-four-thousand-dollar question

While stories like these may provide the most

direct and compelling evidence of soul and

soulfulness among our animal kin, the meaning of

the word " soul " itself is usually the domain of

religion. It's been hotly debated by philosophers

and theologians alike down through the centuries,

yet the true nature of the soul remains an

alluring riddle-hard enough to fathom in human

beings, let alone in the rest of the animal

kingdom. Still, the question " Do animals have

souls? " depends in no small measure on what you

think the soul is in the first place.

 

In times of tribal animism, the boundaries

between animal and man were relatively

indistinct. All of nature was suffused with the

essence of the supernatural, and everything had

souls, including rocks, trees, horses, and

jackrabbits. Later, as increasingly sophisticated

cultures evolved across the ancient world, the

lines between us and other species tended to

remain fluid. The Aztecs and the Egyptians

thought some human souls became bees when they

died; the Greeks and the Japanese said some

became butterflies. But with the rise of the

world's great religious traditions came the first

ideas of a transcendent God or absolute higher

power, and the first sense of a dimension within

the human self-the soul-that was specially

connected to it. Generally speaking, religions

both East and West thought animals had souls,

too, but they were souls of a lower order, bound

up in physical passions and trapped by mortal

existence. The human soul, on the other hand, was

privileged with immortality. According to Western

theology, that was because humans alone had

reason and free will; in Eastern thought, it was

due to the fact that our unique capacity for

self-awareness gave us the all-important

potential for attaining enlightenment. But in

either case, it was only the human soul that

could escape the bonds of this earthly plane to

share eternal life at its maker's feet.

From the perspective of religious salvation,

therefore, animals are clearly out of luck. Yet

history's canvas is filled with images of yogis

and saints who loved their animal brethren and

honored them as moral and spiritual beings.

Twentieth-century Indian sage Ramana Maharshi

taught that animals could reach enlightenment

directly without needing to advance first through

human birth. He was famous for having close

spiritual relationships with dogs, cats, cows,

peacocks, squirrels, birds, and monkeys; his

favorite cow, Lakshmi, is said to have achieved

final liberation when she died. Back in the day,

fish supposedly poked their heads above water to

hear St. Anthony preach. St. Martin de Porres

trained animals in ethics and virtue, and St.

Francis gave sermons to flocks of birds from

around the world. Once, Francis even tamed the

terrible wolf of Gubbio, walking straight into

its lair and demanding that it stop eating the

local livestock-and the local townspeople. To

everyone's surprise, this tactic actually worked:

the wolf bowed its head, placed its paw meekly in

the saint's hand, and followed him into town,

where the people agreed to keep it well fed in

exchange for its pact of peace.

With the advent of science, the religious belief

in sharp distinctions between humans and animals

has taken somewhat of a beating. As Bekoff

explains, it is consistent with evolutionary

biology that everything humans have (including

souls), animals have, too-if perhaps in less

developed form. " Variations among different

species, " the argument goes, " are differences in

degree rather than differences in kind. " Charles

Darwin called this idea evolutionary continuity,

and it has become a fundamental axiom in the

study of animal behavior. Yet while some

scientists such as Bekoff probably take Darwin's

insight too far by saying that the only major

difference between us is that animals don't cook

their food, there are others who recognize far

more significant distinctions. In her studies of

the chimpanzees at Gombe, for instance, Goodall

concluded that their lack of a spoken language

has been a fundamental evolutionary ceiling,

making it impossible for them to develop higher

capacities like shared moral codes. " Chimpanzees

show behaviors that seem likely precursors to

human morality-as when a high-ranking individual

breaks up a fight to save a weaker companion, "

she writes, " but for the most part, in their

society, 'might' is 'right,' and the subordinates

have to be submissive whether or not they are in

the wrong. "

Where all this leaves us is ambiguous at best. As

philosopher Daniel Dennett says, " Current

thinking about animal consciousness is a mess. "

Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori even goes so

far as to say that robots possess the

unquenchable spark of awakening known as

Buddha-nature. Robot souls? I guess anything's

possible, but it's hard enough to come up with

definitive answers about animals, let alone

artificially intelligent machines. There is one

more realm of evidence we have yet to examine,

however. And there, things operate by a different

set of rules entirely . . .

 

 

The further horizons of animal consciousness

Biologist Rupert Sheldrake has spent upwards of

fifteen years researching psychic phenomena in

animals-things like the impossible synergy of

bird flocks wheeling together in unison or the

uncanny knack some dogs and cats seem to have for

knowing when their owners are coming home.

" Unexplained abilities like telepathy, " he says,

" are widespread in the animal kingdom. " Indeed,

one of his most intriguing studies involves a

famous Manhattan parrot named N'kisi who not only

shares a telepathic bond with his owner Aimée

Morgana but, by virtue of his advanced language

ability, also has the tools to prove it. Schooled

from a young age as though he were a human child,

N'kisi knows roughly a thousand words; he

conjugates his own verbs, cracks jokes, initiates

conversation, and invents novel word combinations

with delight. He also has the unnerving ability

to read your thoughts and repeat them back to you

out loud.

In a series of double-blind tests, Sheldrake

placed Morgana and N'kisi in different rooms on

different floors of a building and simultaneously

videotaped them as Morgana flipped through a

series of pictures she'd never seen before and

N'kisi chattered away happily on his perch. Three

times more often than chance would allow, N'kisi

was talking about the image Morgana happened to

be browsing atthat very same instant. " Can I give

you a hug? " he chirped as she viewed a photograph

of a couple embracing. " What'cha doin' on the

phone? " he said when she saw one of a man talking

on his cell phone. Sometimes, N'kisi even

eavesdrops on Morgana's dreams: " I was dreaming

that I was working with the audio tape deck, " she

remembers. " N'kisi, sleeping by my head, said out

loud, 'You gotta push the button,' as I was doing

exactly that in my dream. His speech woke me up. "

I was surprised to find that interspecies

telepathy was not only more common historically

than one might think but that it seems to be

turning into the foundation for a whole new

occupation: professional animal communicator.

Considered by many to be the field's chief

pioneer, Penelope Smith has made psychic contact

with everything from horses to horseflies over

the past thirty years-not to mention training

several hundred others in the subtle spiritual

arts of animal mind-reading and even animal

therapy. This small brigade of clairvoyant

counselors means business. They're there to

listen to your pet's point of view and help you

sort through whatever issues may have come

between you, even over the phone. If you're

lucky, they might even help you wake up to what

animals have to offer you. " Animals have

tremendous understanding of our problems, " Smith

says. " They're always trying to help de-stress

us, to help us play and meditate and all the

rest, you know? " As bizarre as that might sound,

she's not the only one who thinks so. Epona Farm

in Sonoita, Arizona, is now hosting human

development seminars facilitated by telepathic

horses; the dolphins of Dolphin Heart World offer

workshops in life skills, community-building, and

alternative healing modalities via their nonlocal

" Dolphin Consciousness. "

Revolutionary dolphin researcher John C. Lilly

talked about the wonders of dolphin

consciousness, too, but he may not have been

sober at the time, and he certainly wasn't

capitalizing the term and using it to sell life

skills workshops. Inventor of the isolation tank

and psychedelic compatriot of Timothy Leary,

Lilly took enormous doses of LSD and ketamine

while he was with dolphins and came back raving

about vast, incandescent matrices of information

surging through their powerful group mind. Your

guess is as good as mine on that one, but it's

interesting to note that the gifted American

psychic Edgar Cayce might have agreed with

him-Cayce also believed that the deepest

dimensions of the animal self exist not at the

level of the individual but of the entire

species. " Cayce would say that there is a group

soul, for example, for all cats, " explains

scholar Kevin Todeschi. " And this overseeing

energy, which is part of the divine, is really

responsible for the cat world. Rather than each

cat having its own individual soul like a human

being, each attracts a piece of that group soul

as its individual personality. And it's possible

to attract that same personality more than once,

so you could have a cat die and another cat come

along, and you might say, 'My cat came back to

me.' "

Speaking of animals " coming back, " the literature

of supernatural experience is positively teeming

with the ghosts of pets haunting places and

people they knew while they were alive. Once, for

example, a veterinarian treating a sick white

horse gave its owners some baffling instructions:

he told them that for safety's sake, it would be

best to separate the ailing animal from the other

white horse in its corral. " What other horse? "

they asked-and were dumbfounded as the vet went

on to describe, in unmistakable detail, a second

horse of theirs who had recently died. On another

occasion, two young boys were close to drowning

in a cold lake near the Austrian border when

their father leapt into the water to rescue them.

Swimming as fast as he could, he saw that the

family dog Fritz had beaten him to the punch and

watched as the faithful pet steered his boys back

to the beach. The wrinkle: Fritz had been dead

for over a year. When they all got to shore, his

ghost disappeared, but not before a dozen

onlookers had seen him too.

 

When chimps get religion

Ultimately, the precise parameters of human

uniqueness may be too elusive to pin down, the

character of the animal soul too loosely

understood to be tied off with any authority.

Even so, there's one last question on my mind:

What lies in store for the future? Just last

September in the rainforests of the Congo, new

types of tool use were observed among wild

gorillas. Then in November, researchers in St.

Louis made the startling announcement that higher

mammals like whales and humans aren't the only

ones smart enough to be able to sing-now mice

have been overheard performing complex (and

catchy) ultrasonic love ballads to woo potential

mates. And new findings like these seem to be

cropping up by the month. Of course, science

itself is always progressing, but could these

discoveries also suggest that animal

consciousness is evolving? If so, are their souls

evolving too?

 

 

However one understands the soul's nature and

function in human beings, is it possible that

animals-audacious as it may seem to ask-could

even have their own spiritual inklings? One of

Goodall's most famous stories is of a great

forest waterfall in the Kakombe valley where she

occasionally observed the chimpanzees performing

strange, spontaneous dances. Their behavior was

inexplicable, she writes, but for the sense that

they were responding to " feelings akin to awe . .

.. a feeling generated by the mystery of water;

water that seems alive, always rushing past yet

never going, always the same yet ever different. "

J. Allen Boone reflects on a similar incident in

Kinship with All Life, marveling at a German

shepherd watching the sunset from a mountaintop

ledge: " His gaze was focused on a point in the

sky considerably above the horizon line. He was

staring off into fathomless space. Out there

beyond the ability of my human senses to identify

what it was, something was holding the big dog's

attention like a magnet! And it was giving him

great satisfaction, great contentment, great

peace of mind. That fact was not only written all

over him; it was permeating the atmosphere like a

perfume. I had watched human pilgrims in such

meditative poses on sacred mountains in the

Orient. I wondered . . . and wondered . . . and

wondered . . . "

What does this mean? Goodall speculates that it

was " similar feelings of awe that gave rise to

the first animistic religions, the worship of the

elements and the mysteries of nature over which

there was no control. " Bill Wallauer, a

videographer who has spent nine years with the

chimps in Tanzania, adds, " We can't come to any

real conclusions, but I honestly do believe that

chimps have the capacity to contemplate and

consider (even revere) both the animate and

inanimate. " Unlikely though it seems, it's

fascinating to consider the notion of some sort

of proto-religious impulse in animalkind. Yet

evolutionary philosophers such as Teilhard de

Chardin and Henri Bergson would likely have seen

such a development as no longer possible. Now

that the wild upward thrust of consciousness in

the universe has finally burst the bonds of

matter through the awakening human mind, they

believed, it has no more need to push its way

forward through other species.

" Everywhere but in man, " writes Bergson,

" consciousness has had to come to a stand; in man

alone it has kept on its way. " Nevertheless, the

future is an open book. What unseen potentials of

soul and consciousness might one day rise to the

surface of the animal mind? Reflecting on my own

few moments of fleeting communion with the spirit

and intelligence of wild creatures, I can't say

for sure. But I've heard that in the high, cold

mountains above Dharamsala, India, Tibetan monks

in exile recite the dharma to their dogs in hopes

that someday they, too, will be able to practice

it themselves . . .

 

 

--

Kim Bartlett, Publisher of ANIMAL PEOPLE Newspaper

Postal mailing address: P.O. Box 960, Clinton WA 98236 U.S.A.

CORRECT EMAIL ADDRESS IS: <ANPEOPLE

Website: http://www.animalpeoplenews.org/