Communing with Wildness
These days, it’s unfortunately the case that most of us are pretty estranged from Nature. Over fifty per cent of the world now live in urban environments and this percentage is ever increasing. As modern human beings, we increasingly live in a virtual world of abstract thinking and smartphones.
Yet there is an unexpected wild consciousness which subversively reaches into our suburban living rooms penetrating this modern isolation. And that is our pet cats. Not that the same thing can’t be said about our dogs or other pets, but dogs are usually so eager to please their humans that it is somewhat easier to recognise this wildness and natural inseparability from nature when it comes to cats. Cats definitely don’t exist to please us.
I live with a semi-wild being called Edie who has an entirely different perspective from me as she sits there looking me in the eye, self contained and easeful. She’s a valuable counter to my overstimulated and flitting mind. Often when I am swirling in petty concerns and worries, I glance at Edie, sitting meditatively like a sphinx or curled up in a ball asleep and she restores my perspective by her mere presence. She is for me a connection to a primal wildness and natural way of being that my spirit yearns for.
There is no real evidence that humans ever ‘domesticated’ cats. Rather, it seems that at some point cats saw the potential value to themselves of humans. Apart from the Egyptians who venerated cats, for most of Western history, cats were at best tolerated as useful mouse catchers. Then, since Victorian times in the West, they moved in with us on their own terms. They don’t really perform any practical service to us nowadays.
I don’t think we have any idea of the extent of our human-centric outlook. We are stymied and bound by our mental rational view of reality and our place in it. This has been of course invaluable for aiding our human progress and for all the technological blessings of our modern world. But we forget that it’s merely one perspective, one way of viewing and experiencing the world, which if exclusive, becomes profoundly limiting. Much of life takes place outside our mental awareness and control, and the body has its own extraordinary intelligence.
A recent BBC News headline caught my attention as illustrative of our bias as it asked the question: “Are animals conscious? Some scientists now think they are” My immediate retort was, “Are some scientists conscious?”
Similarly, it was recently reported incredulously that it had now been established by scientists that elephants call each other by individual names. Amazement all round, but to me, it’s yet another indication of our profoundly anthropocentric position that we can’t seem to credit other creatures as anything other than ‘dumb brutes’ even if we might find a few of them to be cuddly.
We habitually equate intelligence with language, and by language, we mean human language, alphabetic language. But that’s a very narrow notion of language. Edie speaks with me with a whole range of brrrups, purrs, trills, chirps and other vocalisations, along with speaking to me through expressive body language; and this has all been attuned between her and I over years.
Philosopher John Gray offers a radical reappraisal of how we might regard cats in his, Feline Philosophy: Cats and the Meaning of Life
“Instead of being a sign of their inferiority, the lack of abstract thinking among cats is a mark of their freedom of mind. Thinking in generalities slides easily into a superstitious faith in language. Much of the history of philosophy consists of the worship of linguistic fictions. Relying on what they can touch, smell and see, cats are not ruled by words.”
Whether sitting, sleeping or walking, like all cats, Edie has a grace of movement that Daoists term wu wei, meaning effortless action or actionless action. I’ve practiced qigong daily for years and this is an aim of daoist practice, to be in accord and in harmony with The Way. My qigong teacher suggests learning from cats as natural expressions of qigong and wu wei.
At peak moments, we can see how an elite athlete is in a flow state which is quite similar. Edie is usually in a flow state; totally relaxed and then springing seamlessly into effortless action with elegant grace. Not dissimilar to the attitude of cats and other animals, daoist practice is about being what one already is, rather than trying to become what one is not.
The cynic will say that cats are aloof and indifferent and lack feelings and emotions, but this is quite misconstrued and again points more to our default habit of judging every other being by our human conventions. People will say that you can’t know what a cat is feeling yet by the same token I could say that I can’t really know what my partner is feeling.
Like us human animals, Edie the cat clearly feels much the same gamut of emotions. Yet at the same time, she is not neurotic or anxious: as long as she has food to eat, has a comfortable place to sleep and gets some stimulation and company. At times she may insist she wants onto my lap and keeps meowing to get what she wants, but mostly she’s just content and present. She’s self sufficient, though at the same time loves company, often liking to just sit quietly next to me. She quietly expresses love to those she has a bond with.
Biologist Rupert Sheldrake has carried out extensive research on cats and dogs ability to know when their human is coming home and I can confirm this in my experience. Edie knows when we are going away or when I am coming home and Sheldrake attributes this ability to the shared emotional field between the animal and the human, which fascinatingly seems to be unaffected by physical distance. This ability has also been reported in indigenous peoples as well, so it may well be that we moderns could awaken this vestigial sense.
Unlike us, Edie the cat is not distracted by a stream of neurotic inner dialogue and so is naturally more attuned to and responsive to feelings and emotions, which are universal to all mammals. She senses moods very naturally and to give an example, once when I was away, my wife was on her own and following her just receiving worrisome medical test results, had a big health scare. Edie clearly sensed her upset, since for the first and only time ever, she came and sat purring on my wife’s lap to offer succour. Sheldrake has also recently amassed considerable documentation about the many cases where pets appear to sense their own impending death and go to say goodbye to people with whom they share an emotional bond before passing away.
This kind of relation with animals has been near universal in indigenous cultures, as far as we know, for most of humanity’s history. Eco philosopher and anthropologist David Abram writes how,
“The sense of being immersed in a sentient world is preserved in the oral stories of indigenous peoples –in the belief that sensible phenomena are all alive and aware, in the assumption that all things have the capacity for speech. Language, for oral peoples, is not a human invention but a gift of the land itself…….By denying that birds and other animals have their own styles of speech, by insisting that the river has no real voice and that the ground itself is mute, we stifle our direct experience.”
Just to say, if all this sounds very serious: I also have a lot of fun playing with Edie and I go all coochie coo and ‘fur baby’ as much as anyone. And I’m sure that Edie enjoys it too – she certainly likes playing games, and rolling on her back and being stroked under her chin.
However, I feel that if it is our default position to always relate to our cat companion as a ‘fur baby,’ then we can tend to diminish our relationship and it’s actually kind of disrespectful to a mature friend. The opposite stance of the ‘objective’ scientist can also be limiting by its position of separation and its implicit denial of kinship.
Touch is an important aspect of language, especially for cats, and I’ve noticed how over years I’ve become far more sensitive and attuned to Edie’s state of being and mood when I gently stroke her. And she responds in kind by the different ways she rubs against my hand. You have to tune into a cat’s being and sensual nature for this kind of communication.
Edie and I like to sit outside together on a summer evening and I would say that sometimes we are meditating together. Why not? She finds it easy to be undistracted and simply present; awake but not focussed on anything particular, which is not at all dissimilar to my state. Sitting in my urban environment I’m connected with the wild and my deeper nature through her.
“Humans cannot become cats. Yet if they set aside any notion of being superior beings, they may come to understand how cats can thrive without anxiously inquiring how to live. Cats have no need of philosophy. Obeying their nature, they are content with the life it gives them…..Much of human life is a struggle for happiness. Among cats, on the other hand, happiness is the state to which they default when practical threats to their well-being are removed. That may be the chief reason many of us love cats.”
John Gray
