Animals Don’t Have Complicated Relationships With Death

Setting aside problems at streamside, I watch as the changing late afternoon light plays on the many shades of green along the banks and on the water. Effortlessly, watching one’s thoughts and emotions as they arise in the same intensely passive way, the filters of thought fall away and perception suddenly intensifies.

It’s often been said, “We do not see the lenses through which we look.” But that’s not always or inevitably true. The screens impeding and impairing direct perception drop away through passive awareness of one’s thoughts in the mirror of nature. That is the essence of self-knowing.

As a young man, ending of the observer defined meditation. In middle age, meditation meant ending time as a psychological construct. As an older man, meditation means entering the infinite house of death.

It isn’t simply because of awareness of one’s own mortality. In a deeper state of meditation, one realizes that beauty, love and death are one movement, which the movement of thought, reason and knowledge can never know.

It’s strange how one feels truly at home entering the house of death when one is fully alive. Why is that? Because when there isn’t a trace of fear or morbidness, death is experienced as only absolute, and the source of all energy, matter and time.

Beyond the cycles of birth and death, what we fear as death is actually the perpetual ground of ongoing creation. So regularly experiencing the actuality of death, which is taking place within us at the cellular level and around us in nature every moment, renews one’s brain, enlarges one’s heart, and deepens one’s awareness.

For communion with the ever-present actuality of death to occur however, all separation must end. That’s not easy, since the primal separation of death from life was the first psychological separation that our proto-human progenitors made hundreds of thousands of years ago, and which humans have been making ever since.”

Conscious separation of ‘things’ from the seamless wholeness of nature is the core feature of symbolic thought, the evolutionary basis of our adaptive strategy as humans. Conscious separation is something that no other animal on earth does.

Other animals, especially our closest cousins the chimps, may make subconscious separations, which enable them to make crude tools or make crude war on each other, but no other animal makes separations anywhere near the level of man, who has fragmented the earth to the point of ecological collapse. We are like the Sorcerer’s apprentice, unable to stop separating, dividing and fragmenting.

This is why meditation, by whatever name but by no method, is essential. Meditation without methods or systems means observing without the infinite regress of the observer until thought yields and the mind stops separating and falls still. It means setting aside utilitarian separation, and ending psychological separation through self-knowing.

The movement of cumulative experience ends in non-directed attentiveness to thoughts and emotions as they arise in the present. Even the memory of “near death experiences,” if one has been unfortunate enough to have one, must end for the brain to spontaneously step out of the stream of man’s old, dead consciousness, end the separation of death from life, and make the leap to true consciousness.

It was recently reported that the 84-year-old actor Al Pacino nearly died at home during the Covid pandemic. “They said my pulse was gone. It was so – you’re here, you’re not. I thought: Wow, you don’t even have your memories. You have nothing. Strange porridge.”

What does he mean, “you don’t have your memories?” We are our memories. The self is a bundle of memories revolving around a central image. Therefore when the brain cells die, memory ceases, and so does the “I.”

Awareness, however, may persist, since it preceded our birth and all births, even the birth of the universe. The universe is suffused with awareness, especially as is life on earth.

Watch any bird for a while and you’ll see how aware and alert it is. Animals don’t have so-called self-awareness, as humans have. But “self-awareness” doesn’t mean awareness of the self, which is self-knowing, but living in terms of the subconsciously fabricated, illusory “me” at the center of our existence.

So the movement of thought and the self delimits our awareness. Self-knowing is a completely different thing, which allows our awareness to be unlimited.

In light of these insights, it’s dismaying to hear academic philosophers say things such as, “Like humans, animals have complicated, surprising relationships with death.” That reflects the current fad of anthropomorphising animals and blurring the quantum distinction between humans and all other creatures.

The academic philosopher echoes a conventional refrain: “We have a wide variety of animal reactions to death, and that raises the question: what is going on in their minds?”

That’s an absurdly unphilosophical question, since it makes a mockery of the first dictum of philosophy: Nosce te ipsum.

We cannot gain insight into what is going on in other animals’ minds until we are self-knowing about what is going on in our own minds. Asking such a ridiculously externalised question only adds to human alienation from nature. It does nothing to bring understanding and connection with the other animals with which we share the earth, and end their decimation at the hands of man.

The philosopher is correct in saying, “Humans are animals of very high cognitive complexity, but also we are immersed in cumulative cultures where we have all these symbolic representations of death and elaborate rituals.” But though that’s true as far as it goes, it’s also a truism that offers no insight into the human condition.

It’s no longer necessary or fitting to “have all these symbolic representations of death.” We can directly perceive the actuality of death, without fear and blind cultural immersion. And there is tremendous freedom doing so.

© Scoop Media