octopus consciousness

       Many scientists still do not feel comfortable attributing some sort of cognition to animals.  But all of us dog and cat lovers simply know that our beloved pets have a consciousness, albeit different from our's.  They recognize different people, know our character (whether we are kind to them or not), can make themselves understood (being bored, being hungry, hurting), and exhibit feelings (mourning when a close mate has died, or exuberance when you take your dog out to run on a beautiful day).  My daughter says her Betta fish watches her as she moves about her room.

            Maybe Paul the Octopus, who supposedly predicted many 2010 FIFA World Cup outcomes correctly, was instrumental in spreading the idea of octopuses' intelligence to the wider public.  I am currently reading Sy Montgomery's delightful new book The Soul of an Octopus.  It is quite amazing to find out that these animals, whose beingness seems so  much further removed from our's than even cats or dogs, recognize their keepers and distinguish between people they like (reaching out and tasting their skin with their suction cups - yes, they taste with their suction cups, and who knows what they are able to taste, hormones? medication in the blood stream? feelings?) and dislike (water squirting).  Octopuses are enormously intelligent and inquisitive and have been known to exit their supposedly tightly secured tanks to go explore.  They can go through extreme appearance changes in a matter of seconds, not only to blend in to their environment as protect against predators, but also reflecting their disposition, such as white and smooth when calm, or red and bumpy when excited.  Each octopus has a distinct character.

            It seems to me that we are slowly entering a new and more inclusive era of understanding the nature that surrounds us  - my daughter is into crystals and swears she can feel them pulsating.  Please revisit an earlier blog post spiritual cats.

eat less meat!

How preposterous of me to tell you so?  Not.  Surprisingly, this is a huge environmental issue that goes way beyond the potentially ethical question of killing (they call it harvesting now, to make it sound more harmless) a living being and eating it. Don't get me wrong, I'm not a vegetarian.  However, in the Western industrialized world meat consumption has skyrocketed from eating meat once a week or so to just under 200lbs/person/year in the US since the advent of cheap meat!  This enormous meat consumption in combination with the rise in world population and the increasing numbers of people able to afford the cheap meat has become a recipe for disaster.

The environmental calamity arises from "cheap" and "too much."  Why?  Because the CAFOs (concentrated animal feeding operations) that these poor animals are raised in are among the biggest greenhouse gas emitters on this planet - generating about 18% (!!!) of greenhouse gases.  In addition, the huge amounts of animal waste leach antibiotics into our ground water.  And to top it off, the conditions under which these sorry souls are being raised, then killed and processed are so horrendous that it is literally unbelievable (read Jonathan Safran Foer because you must know).

There is nothing necessarily wrong with eating meat per se.  As a matter of fact, especially during childhood and adolescence animal protein helps to grow the brain.   But like with anything balance is the key and industrialized nations have become meat addicted.   Food researcher and author Marion Nestlé has advocated eating meat in condiment quantities.

How can we help?  First and foremost by resisting to buy cheap supermarket meat, which comes from CAFOs.  Instead, buy your meat at or from a local farm where the animals have been raised sustainably.  Yes, it will cost more.  But we ought to consume much less of it!

It's in the quality, not the quantity.

You may also want to revisit a series of three posts on meat eating.

spiritual cats

Would you believe that I communicated with our three cats (two alive, one dead) telepathically through an intermediary?  Some people, and a few family members are among them, will say that this is a bunch of hogwash.  But I live my life on the spiritual side (with a good dose of critical-analytical thinking!) and I am always looking for deeper ways to understand and connect with the world.  So I am open to something like this and don't dismiss it simply because it goes beyond the present scientific-material paradigm. Among other questions we had been curious about the premature (in our view) death of our beloved first cat Snowball and the jumpiness of our third cat Peter Pepper.  I had recently read that it is possibly to communicate with animals telepathically (see my earlier blog post on this).  So when a friend told me about someone right in town (though distance is irrelevant) who has this ability (take a look at her website) I jumped at the opportunity.

I was amazed how much these animals understand (be careful how you treat them and what you say in front of them!) and at the depth of their spirituality.    Snowball responded to our question about his early death at age five that a life ought not to be judged by how short or long it was but by what was accomplished, and that it was an immense privilege for him to have opened the whole family's awareness to the animal kingdom, and that his five years with us were very meaningful for him.

Peter Pepper, another little sage, communicated that he was aware of his eye condition, which I had asked about, that he resonates with the sound of Tibetan prayer bowls (boy where did that come from?) and that that would help him heal his condition.  This was quite coincidental as I had become aware of a Tibetan prayer bowl iPhone meditation app just a week or so earlier. Hmmm...

Make of it what you wish, but the answers of our three cats had enormous meaning for us.

piranhas and the eco-mind

It is interesting and eye-opening how "the truth" can be so deeply in the eyes of the beholder.  We see what we believe, and we don't see what we don't believe.  We have been thinking along the (somewhat) misinterpreted Darwinian lines of nature's potential ferociousness and cruelty in the name of the survival of the fittest.  But scientists are beginning to dismantle this paradigm. Sunday's NY Times article took wildly exaggerated reports about the supposedly blood thirsty piranhas apart and reduced them to nothing much.  Growing up I remember hearing stories about entire cows supposedly being stripped to the bones in minutes by a huge swarm of these fish.  But I also acknowledge reading later about indigenous people wading and swimming fearlessly in piranha inhabited waters.

A short video on Suzanne Simard's work on the wood-wide-web and the mycorhizzal (mushroom) network recently made the rounds on Facebook.  Dr. Simard is involved in research about mother trees (huge old trees in the woods) and their social network, where plant seedlings grow up around the mother tree, and mushroom networks reach far underground, living in symbiotically nourishing relationships with the trees for their mutual benefit.

Nature is becoming friendlier by the minute as our outlook on the environment is shifting and we are becoming more eco-minded.

the significance of animals in our life

Since the death of our beloved cat this past summer I have been pondering our relationships with animals in general, and more specifically through my relationship with our cats.  I have read several books on communication with animals since then because I really see a soul when I look into an animal's eyes (a cow's on a walk, a deer's in a field, a lion's in a zoo, a horse in a stable), the same way we see it in people  - you have probably heard the saying "the eyes are the mirror of the soul."  Well, it's as true for animals as it is for humans (and why would it be different anyhow?).

It is telling to watch people interacting with their pets.   Amelia Kinkade, the noted animal communicator, writes in her book The Language of Miracles "The animals are here to facilitate our enlightenment through their unconditional love."  Some people get it, some not so much yet.

While I by no means pretend to be able to communicate with our cats, I totally get that you can tune into them by becoming silent (.....quieting the mind as in meditation or simply tuning in and tuning other stuff out) and learning it the way we would learn Spanish or Russian.  It is a matter of practicing and a matter of applying the appropriate techniques.  You wouldn't try to learn to speak Spanish by practicing scales or chopping up onions.

What astonished me most from reading this particular book is how well developed animals' emotional lives are, and how precisely they are able to communicate to anyone who is able to listen - on how they are being treated, on what they prefer to eat, on their own and even their owner's state of health, on their preferred toys, on the layout of the place where they live, on the family dynamics of their host family, even everyone's names.  Quite amazing.

I am so much more careful now with how I interact with the cats after reading this book because I realize that they are more aware than you would ever believe it - a total eye-opener.

animal consciousness

I have always wanted to delve a bit deeper into the question of animal consciousness. The death of our dear cat Snowball a few weeks ago became the catalyst for it.  We all know the relationship between brain size and depth of consciousness, awareness and intelligence.  So it might seem that the larger the animal's brain, the deeper a relationship we can forge with it because of the animal's deeper awareness.  I did not experience an animal relationship until we got Snowball, our first cat (I grew up in city apartments with fish and hamsters - no deep relationship there).  He was white with a few well placed black spots, gentle and regal, and sociable to a point.  Sometimes, he would jump up on the bed to snuggle, but he was not a lap cat.   A few years later we adopted Mieze as a companion for him, our little black very assertive female tuxedo cat.  She talks a lot, while Snowball did not, she jumps on our laps, he did not, she'll wake us up in the morning by prancing around on the headboard and meowing by the side of the bed (not out of hunger, but for companionship).  She is very sprite, quick, and playful, a perfect hunter (she even caught bats on two occasions they made their way into the house), he lost a lot of his playfulness over the years.  I learned how individual animals' personalities are, and how they truly become a beloved family member.  Just like with my children, my nurturing gene kicked in, and I made sure the cats get the best holistic cat food and vet care and emotional nurturing.

Yet, René Descartes, the 17th century French philosopher, believed that animals were nothing more than mechanized, soulless, feelingless, rightless moving bodies we have dominion over - a prevailing understanding of his times.  And you wonder about many still prevailing animal practices like dog and cock and bull fights, raising animals for fur, CAFOs (concentrated animal feeding operations), selective breeding food animals so abnormally that they cannot function anymore  (chickens with breast so heavy they tip over, corn fed cows whose intestines scream because the diet is so unsuitable to their digestive systems, etc.).  We have come a long way, though, thanks to animal rights groups and wake-up calls that happen spontaneously when we look an animal in the eyes and see a soul or consciousness staring back at us with meaning.

Coming to the end of reading Cat Body, Cat Mind by vet Dr. Michael Fox, who obviously has a deeply spiritual understanding of life, I regret not having shown our Mieze the dead body of her companion Snowball.  Animals seem to understand the passing of close mates and companions, and need closure like we do.

Now we are working on integrating her new companion Peter Pepper into our household.  Fox says that it is important for animals to have a like companion so they always remember who they are.  We found Snowball on the side of the road when he was 4 or 5 weeks old, and we are not sure he ever totally understood how to act among cats.  Maybe he was always a bit more human than cat.

I am still intrigued and would like to learn more about this collective animal consciousness I read about, that bees or cats or cows are not as individuated as us humans, and are more a fragment of a larger encompassing cat consciousness, or bee consciousness, or cow consciousness.  It may shed some light on our own embeddedness in a larger collective human or universal consciousness, how inseparable we really are of the greater collective consciousness.

shark fin soup and hope

If the Chinese are back peddling on shark fin soup, so ubiquitous at all festive banquets of the past, there is hope for changes in our attitude about a lot of other things as well.  I am thinking of idling stances on such pressing issues as climate change, pollution, animal welfare, GMOs, child prostitution, and many other ugly realities.  It seems to me that ultimately our collective indecisiveness on these issues boils down to the hesitance of wrestling ourselves away from the profit-first model.  If we only realized that the wellbeing-first model benefits us all around. Bonnie Tsui wrote this week-end in the NY Times about the changing attitude of the Chinese on serving shark fin soup at important banquets, previously a sign of "honoring (and impressing) your guest."  I was served shark fin soup at several banquets in my company's honor in the late 1980s when we lived in Hong Kong, and was oblivious of the gruesome practice (which I can't bear to describe here, but you can look it up).    Because it has been such an inherent component of Chinese food culture I was really quite amazed to read that "last summer, the Chinese government announced that it would stop serving the dish at official state banquets."

Here's to change for the better, change towards wellbeing, change towards respect of nature and all living beings. 

death and wordlessness and the spiritual

Two days ago our dear sweet cat Snowball died and I explained to my daughter how much we look at death from our human perspective.  The regret and sadness and ensuing emotional heaviness in the chest all come from two things:  Our "word world," and a doubt that our existence could be more than just a once-and-never-again-opportunity to appear on earth, which of course causes a massive fear of death. Existing in a "word world" enables us to live with awareness of the past and projecting into the future, instead of living in the present, as animals do (and as we did pre-language).  We look back and remember, we compare it to the present loss, and translate it into future loss.  But the feeling of loss is one-sided because the transiting animal perceives the process totally differently.  Animals are different from us because of their present-oriented consciousness and inability to reflect (although meditation and mindfulness teach us to enjoy fleeting moments of being in the moment- also see previous post on "Now" and previous post on "wordlessness").

I recently read a very helpful description of an animal's death in Martha Beck's Finding Your Way In A Wild New World.  Beck reminds us that "...we suffer more from our thoughts about events than from the events themselves.  Detaching from our verbal thoughts eliminates almost all our psychological suffering."

Here is Beck's description of watching an antelope being killed by a leopard, how she connected with the animal and understood the death process on a different level:  "...The impala's always Wordless awareness is filled with shock and confusion, but absolutely none of the thought-based fears that make my own mortality so frightening to me.  I'm struck by the lack of resistant ideas, like 'This shouldn't be happening!' or 'I'm not ready to die!' or 'My loved ones will be devastated!'  There's just awareness of the strangeness of the situation and disorientation.  Then it feels for all the world as though the impala senses my compassion for it.  The animal seems very relieved to find someone caring about it, joining with it.  I project all the calm and peace I can.  Then I feel a gentle whoosh, and an incredibly sweet sensation of delicious, liberating expansion........Dropping back into language, I can clearly see that the leopard killed the impala.  Then I immediately find truth in the opposite statement: I could just as easily say the leopard 'lived' the impala, taking its stored physical energy into her own body.  Holding these opposites in my verbal mind, I feel language create a strange loop, pushing me beyond paradoxical belief structures and putting me smack-dab back into Wordlessness."

"Death is the stripping away of all that is not you.The secret of life is to 'die before you die' - and find that there is no death."

Eckhart Tolle

lawn mowing goats

I love it, the NYC Parks Department rents goats to “mow the lawn” at Freshkills Park in SI, as the NY Times reported recently.  Now here is a solution in the spirit of our times.  Eco solutions go mainstream, there is definitely hope on the horizon!

buzzing bees

Our new bees arrived this past week-end.  The day they arrived one of them got caught in my hair when it explored the garden.  I panicked and tried to whip it out of my hair – wrong thing to do.  Bees don’t like sudden movements.  So the poor thing stung me (and lost its life, which I felt really bad about).  But that’s not what this post is about.  What it is about is this: yesterday I was in and out of the garden many times, hanging up laundry.  Each time I came outside two or three bees soon enough buzzed around me.  Maybe they wanted to warn me not to come too close to their home, maybe they only wanted to check me out (my bee language skills are not that good yet).  This time I moved very slowly in awareness of the bees.  I talked to them (I told them that I wasn’t going to harm them) and let them “sniff me out” without any sudden movements. And I passed the test without getting stung.

Don’t think I am crazy when I am trying to convey that I attempted to communicate with the bees. I am currently reading Martha Beck’s new book “Finding Your Way in a Wild New World,” about consciousness and how to operate within that nonmaterial plane.  Check it out.  That is the plane from which we can communicate with animals, that is what I was trying to do with the bees – the second time around.