“The sanctity of life”(the principle that all human life is sacred) is an expression traditionally reserved exclusively for human beings, but I feel it should be extended to all beings. Let me elaborate.
We modern humans have constructed a peculiar walled off status for ourselves, entirely divorced from the vast realm of the animal kingdom. This is of course, completely fictitious, and ironically sits in complete contradiction to Darwin’s great discovery of our shared evolutionary origins and relationships with all other beings.
We are all inextricably related and bound together in the web of life, sharing much of our DNA, and our human body is even home to as many microbial cells as those of cells of our own; our bones and tissues are composed of the deep past, including our ancestors, shaped by the miracle of metabolic recycling. We’ve never been separate and are beautifully entangled in a web of kinship including every form of life. Even our fossil fuel oil is a gift of beings of the past, several hundred million years ago, when the bodies of trillions of tiny zooplankton and algae built up on the bottom of lakes and oceans, and by heat and pressure were eventually metamorphosed into oil. Now, though of course we are greedily and dangerously consuming these gifts from a vast time scale, in the blink of an eye, geologically.
The simple truth is that every being desires to live. The desire for life is in all beings, in myself, in all of us. This urge of life is expressed and is visible to me now in the explosion of white blossom on the otherwise bare branches of the local cherry plum trees at this tail end of winter. It’s echoed by the irrepressible bursting into song of the birds in the early evening in the urban streets as the chill days become a little longer. The Border Collie exuberantly bounding around with abandon on the grass field nearby, is full of the joy of life.
Biologist and philosopher Andreas Weber calls this striving to exist, the first law of desire: everything that lives wants more of life. And that urge for life is palpable and visible: feeling is actually not at all hidden; it’s everywhere visible as nature constantly unfurls; feeling can be seen as it manifests into form all around us. The depth of life can be seen on the surface.
The mind of a robin is everywhere evident in its bodily presence: her cheeky fearless manner, the way she cocks her head and holds your gaze directly, and follows your every move, searching for morsels disturbed by your passage. The interiority of an animal or plant readily reveals itself, if you are attentive, by the outward expression of that being’s bodily presence. All beings are speaking to us, though not with human words, if we have but eyes to see.
In Weber’s words, “An organism desires to be, to endure, to be more than it is. It hungers to unfold itself, to propagate itself, to enlarge itself. This is a hunger for life. And this hunger is life.”
And every being does have a life: it’s something to contemplate that in their own ways, their lives mean something to each one of them. Organisms are beings whose own existence means something to them.
Being animals, we all feel. My cat clearly feels and expresses many of the same moods and emotions as I do: she can be happy, relaxed, tense, sad, pained, affectionate, exuberant, lonely, sociable, jealous, anxious, confident. Of course, the sceptic will question whether we can ever know what a cat feels, but by the same token, we can question whether we can ever know whether another human being is really feeling this or that.
We find it harder to empathise with our non-mammalian relatives, yet now it has been established by science that fish certainly do feel pain and emotions, and even a being as different from us as an octopus, has a complex world with its own feelings.
In our human history there is a strong commonality in that indigenous peoples all over the world have tended to demonstrate a reverence for all forms of life and to see other beings as their relations. Animism has been their relational worldview in which the world and every being in it, including humans, animals, plants, lands, and waters, is understood as having agency and being part of an interconnected web of being. This animist perspective has been so widely held and inherent to most indigenous peoples, that they often don’t even have a word that corresponds to what we call ‘animism’. (the term is an anthropological construct of we moderns). Personhood is extended to all. So trees might be referred to as ‘the standing people’, and then there may be the Bear people, or the Beaver people.
In order to live, indigenous people might well need to hunt and to take the lives of other animals in order to survive, yet this was recognised as a reciprocal cycle, and gratitude was expressed towards the animal which had given its life so that they might live. Collectively, the indigenous principles and practices that govern the exchange of life for life have been termed the honourable harvest according to Robin Wall Kimmerer, the indigenous writer and botanist.
We moderns unfortunately have largely lost our connection with the living world and with the source of our sustenance. We remain dissociated to an extraordinary degree from the appallingly cruel treatment of animals, especially in factory farms, which provide much of the meat which we eat.
In historical times, there were societies and kingdoms which had a very different attitude of non-harming towards our fellow beings. It was in India where the principle of Ahimsa arose and took root and it has had a huge influence on the religions and cultures which emerged from the subcontinent: Jainism, Hinduism and Buddhism. Ahimsa is usually translated as nonviolence or non-harming and is extended to all beings, not just human beings. It is particularly Jainism which has made Ahimsa, and compassion for all animals, an absolutely central practice.
“All breathing, existing, living, sentient creatures should not be slain nor treated with violence, nor abused, nor tormented, nor driven away. This is the pure unchangeable law.”
Sutrakritanga Sutra of Jainism
I personally am drawn to the interpretation of Ahimsa by the great Indian spiritual activist Vimala Thakar. She defined Ahimsa as creative love, something which conveys a more dynamic and life affirming quality, and which resonates with me. It’s not merely abstaining from any violence or harming – which can sound a bit passive and bloodless – but rather a passionate engagement with all Life from a place of knowing oneself to be an intrinsic part of the whole body and web of life.
As large mammals clomping about, it is unavoidable for us human animals to inadvertently cause some harm to other sentient beings. But the point is to not needlessly take life or knowingly cause harm to our fellow beings. In the past, it was difficult for us to avoid having to kill other animals to eat to survive (or more likely having someone else do the deed on our behalf). For many of us in the relatively affluent West, there is no longer any necessity to eat animal products of any kind to survive, or to be healthy – and many reasons why we should refrain – not least of which is that every being wants to live. What right have we to needlessly deprive a fellow being of life just because we are attached to the taste of a particular type of flesh or because traditionally this is what we have always done, and it’s our habit?
As writer and activist Alnoor Ladha has interestingly noted, in some ways animism can be seen as the antidote to rationalism and materialism. If we inhabit a living world, then every so-called ‘thing’ is in some way animate. It’s not ‘stuff’ to own and consume. If you hold an ethic of interbeing – one that is life-centric and transpersonal – it goes beyond the binary of Western dualistic rational thinking. You can’t own another being, or a herd of cows or even your pet dog; guardian or companion might be closer to the mark. Every being has a degree of agency, its own life and own meaning, and is sacrosanct. I think indigenous people intuitively understand this. You can’t really own the rivers, mountains or the land either; it’s a temporary stewardship at best and an attitude far removed from greed, hoarding and misuse.
This is why I feel that the sanctity of life needs to be expanded from its original narrowness, to include all living beings.
Life was created long before we were born
and shall be here long after we have gone.
It is holy and sacred.
There is no moral right for any of us
to exploit nature, the fellow creatures,
or other human beings.
Vimala Thakar
