soul of bnimals

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kowalski

For ancient peoples, the soul was located in the breath or the blood. For me, soul resides at the point where our lives intersect with the timeless, in our love of goodness, our passion for beauty, our quest for meaning and truth. In asking whether animals have souls, we are inquiring whether they share in the qualities that make life more than a mere struggle for survival, endowing existence with dignity and élan.

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Without anthropomorphizing our nonhuman relations we can acknowledge that animals share many human characteristics. They have individual likes and dislikes, moods and mannerisms, and possess their own integrity, which suffers when not respected. They play and are curious about their world. They develop friendships and sometimes risk their own lives to help others. They have “animal faith,” a spontaneity and directness that can be most refreshing… all the traits indicative of soul. For soul is not something we can see or measure. We can observe only its outward manifestations: in tears and laughter, in courage and heroism, in generosity and forgiveness. Soul is what’s behind-the-scenes in the tough and tender moments when we are most intensely and grippingly alive.

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There is an inwardness in other living beings that awakens what is innermost in ourselves. I have often marveled, for instance, watching a flock of shore birds. On an invisible cue, they simultaneously rise off the beach and into the air, then turn and bank seawards in tight formation. They are so finely coordinated and attuned in their aeronautics it is as though they share a common thought, or even a group mind, guiding their ascent. At such moments, I feel there are depths of “inner space” in nature that can never be sounded. And it is out of those same depths, in me, that awe arises as I contemplate the synchronicity of their flight. To contain such depths is to participate in the realm of spirit.

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Surprisingly, many birds are relatively insensitive to pitch. But the best singers employ all the elements of tone, interval, rhythm, theme, and variation in complex and highly pleasing combinations. And what is music if not the deliberate arrangement of sound in aesthetic patterns?

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The tempo of life is faster-paced for birds than for people. This is one of the reasons the individual notes in bird song are so short, sometimes distinguishable only with a spectrograph, and why the compositions of birds last a few seconds at most, compared to an hour or more for a human symphony. It is also why birds sing in the upper registers (just as the pitch on a phonograph record rises when played at high speed). To the birds, with a metabolism continually in allegro, human beings must appear to be lazy and dim-brained creatures indeed. Just as our music reflects the rhythm and intensity of our inner life, the music of birds expresses the flash and flutter of their nervous and high-strung existence.

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If we are to keep our family homestead — third stone from the sun — safe for coming generations, we must awaken to a new respect for the family of life.

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We are kin to, and must be kind to, all creation. Overcoming speciesism — the illusion of human superiority — will be the next step in our moral and spiritual evolution.

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It is difficult to probe the inward awareness of another being. The realm of what one mystic called “the interior castle” is wholly private and wrapped in solitude. But when we look into another’s eyes — even into the eyes of an animal — we may find a small window into that inner sanctum, a window through which our souls can hail and greet one another.

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The act of making eye contact with another being presupposes a conscious self behind either pair of peepers: I see you seeing me, and I am aware that you are aware that we are looking at each other.

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If by soul we mean our sense of self, our identity as particular persons, then our souls are interwoven with those of other living beings… We know ourselves as human, in part, through our relationships with the nonhuman world.

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We are rather unsure of ourselves. What distinguishes our species may be this inward anxiety. While other animals may be endowed with special gifts—acute hearing, keen eyesight, incredible speed — human beings are nothing special. This is both a biological and a moral judgment. Lack of specialization makes us highly adaptable, but it also means we have no fixed form or definite identity. Without many inborn instincts to guide us, we as human beings need models for how to live. We need a sense of our own possibilities and limits, and we find them not only in the artificial rules and restraints imposed by human society but in the lessons for living suggested by biology and the earth itself. We are the younger siblings in life’s family — the perpetual neonates of the animal world. In a fundamental way we need other creatures to tell us who we are.

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What profit do we have if we gain the whole world and lose or forfeit our own souls? The human race may survive without the chimpanzees, orangutans, and other wild creatures who share the planet. But we will have attenuated the conditions that are necessary for our own “ensoulment”… And when we look into the mirror there will be less and less to love.

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There is a glimmering of eternity about our lives. In the vastness of time and space, our lives are indeed small and ephemeral, yet not utterly insignificant. Our lives do matter. Because we care for one another and have feelings, because we can dream and imagine, because we are the kinds of creatures who make music and create art, we are not merely disconnected fragments of the universe but at some level reflect the beauty and splendor of the whole. And because all life shares in One Spirit, we can recognize this indwelling beauty in other creatures.

Animals, like us, are microcosms.

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