Animals do not think and do not believe they live in a relative world of subjects and objects. Nor are animals saddled with the tendency to name, label, and claim experiences and judge or evaluate life or reality into relative buckets as humans do.
Animals are in tune with the organic and primal urges moving through them – as them, as impersonal consciousness. They live simply…and are simply being “lived” as consciousness.
This is not to imply that physical pain does not bother them. Of course animals feel physical pain, but they do not create a story about the pain and how terrible it feels and how it has interfered in their daily doggie activities. They have no belief in being a separate dog with a personal dog pain. Of course, I am writing about mental and psychological suffering here. Animals have no mental or psychological suffering. Yes, animals experience and demonstrate raw sensations but they do not judge these sensations unfolding as life.
Jake and Elwood, our kitties, will not accidentally nibble on their legs because of primal sensory memories like pain and pleasure. They seem to enjoy the good life on the farm and in the house with us. Neither do Jake and Elwood have a vocabulary for the objects they perceive, and they need no words or labels to accept their food, the sofa, the door, or the bed.
On the other extreme, Tony and I have many words for all the stuff in our home. We even recognize images of our stuff stored in photo albums or as digital images. The cats do not collect photos nor make distinctions about any of the stuff/objects in our home. In this way, animals are like small children before children begin to name, label, and claim objects and experiences as objects and subjects.
When the kitties jump on the sofa they have no thoughts about the sofa, what color it is, how soft or hard it is, how heavy it is. Tony and I do. We ponder why we bought leather sofas when we have cats. Ignorance at its finest. We characters have all kinds of labels for all our stuff.
The cats are always present…they are never deep in thought…never deep in the weeds pondering when to eat or play, sleep or poop. Nature is incredible to see…always accepting and embracing what is…eating arises spontaneously and the cats are eating. No thoughts about eating….just tasting and smelling and chewing.
We’ve never seen our kitties worry, fret, or ponder the past or the future.either..they embrace this…here…now…appearing as what is. They never complain about the color of the sofa or the cleanliness of the shag carpet in the den. The kitties have no preferences, they go with the flow…just like small children who are exploring the world with an open heart and a bushel of curiosity.
Tony and I as conceptual entities exist only as this dream of separation. There is nothing beyond the dreamscape. Nothing, and not even nothing. Knowing the dreamscape is a mentally projected virtual reality and that the characters are illusory seems to allow an easing, a loosening, and there is no longer any attempt to escape the illusory world we appear to inhabit.
And yet, there is nothing really going on. It is seen directly that there are no separate objects divided by space or separate events divided by time. The angst and fear of believing we have control of our characters vanishes and it’s felt as a physical and psychological release of giant proportions.
It becomes obvious that life unfolds spontaneously and uncaused…that the idea of you being a doer is silly. It’s what Paul Hedderman refers to as “traveling lighter.”
And it becomes as clear as day that the dreamscape, the illusory duality/relativity is what allows the experiencing of self and other. Without duality, there can be no self and other, no characters to play with. You might wake to the dream and see that you are a vaporous and momentary dream character, but you will never be able to escape the dreamscape.
Anita