Does Animals Have Universal Consciousness?
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I have to face the fact more often than I would want to admit, and it drives me absolutely bonkers, that there are some individuals who are just a lot smarter than I am.
At other times, I am aware that I am in the midst of one of those spontaneously proud and arrogant moments, during which I am thinking how much wiser I am than someone else.
It is quite clear to me that there are a great number of individuals who are more intelligent than I am, and there may even be a few who are not.
I think, and because of this, I believe that I am aware of what intelligence is; but, my intellect has failed me on several occasions in the past, just as it has failed even “the finest brains of their periods,” including previous members of The Flat Earth Society.
For a significant portion of my life, I was under the impression that, at the very least, I was more intelligent than an animal.
This is an assumption that is generally accepted in our contemporary, technological civilization.
In retrospect, I believe it to have been an incorrect assumption.
The arrogant and characteristically human manner in which I think about what constitutes intelligence is what leads me to believe that animals are more intelligent than all of us humans together.
My IQ seems to be a product of how effectively my senses and capacities operate, particularly in terms of how “successful” I feel about my life; yet, what if I could hear, see, or smell hundreds of times better than I can currently?
What kind of world would I see, and how much more would I understand about it then?
What if I didn’t have to worry about whether or not I had a roof over my head or whether or not I had clothing to wear (trust me, I do)?
What if the grocery store were to be closed, or if I were to be placed in the middle of the ocean or the woods?
Would I be able to sustain myself, or would I wind up as somebody’s meal?
All of a sudden, I don’t think I really come off as “the top of the food chain.”
Stay calm.
Share your bananas. – The gorilla known as Koko
Animals Display Profound Levels of Consciousness
One of the hurdles that humans face that is difficult to overcome is the one that keeps us from understanding the deep levels of awareness that are active in our animal cousins.
This sort of prison of the human ego, which demands that we position ourselves above all other creatures, is potentially the most soul-depleting (and deleterious) barrier to human spiritual evolution that exists.
It forces us to continue living through the restricted filter of human sensory experience, which is usually misconstrued by our individual and collective egos as well as the delusions of so-called “intellect.”
As a consequence of this, we have a propensity to wreck our houses and do harm to the people we might learn the most from.
The scientific community has shown that animals have a sense of self.
Cetaceans
Let’s take a look at a couple of distinct facts about animal cognition that science is revealing with increasing frequency.
The first of these is the reality that we are most familiar with, and that is the intelligence that can be defined by language, reasoning, and the ability to solve problems.
According to findings from recent research, dolphins and other cetaceans exhibit such a high level of intellect in so many different ways that they should be called “non-human beings.”
Science has proved that uniqueness, consciousness, and self-awareness are no longer unique human properties
— Tom White, Professor of Ethics at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, as quoted by BBC News
Cetaceans are able to adjust their reasoning processes in an effective manner to solve challenges and take part in collaborative endeavors, even among different species.
They obviously have a sophisticated command of a language; in fact, their linguistic abilities are so advanced that whale songs that start in one region of the waters around the planet may become famous and spread to other regions of the world like hit tunes.
Cetaceans are not just compassionate creatures; they are undeniably self-aware as well.
These are ancient, sentient beings that have lived on Earth for a very long time.
They possess a vast amount of intellect and an incredible amount of life energy.
Not someone to be killed, but someone to pick the brain of.
Dr.
John C.
Lilly discusses his work with dolphins in his studies.
Crows
Crows have an intellect comparable to that of humans, which includes the ability to solve problems at a level that is higher than that of the majority of human children aged six.
In addition to this, they demonstrate a language that is complex and subtle, along with self-awareness, excellent personal attachments, character determination, personal recognition, and cooperative, community-oriented conduct.
All of these qualities are also possessed by elephants, whose infrasonic communication—which they are able to hear up to 10 kilometers away—begins to sound amazingly eloquent, almost like human speech.
Dogs
Even man’s greatest friend, the good old family dog, has been demonstrated by the science of MRI brain-scan analysis to reveal neurological activity extremely comparable to that of humans.
This is despite the fact that dogs are considered to be lower on the evolutionary food chain than humans.
In addition, cats, dogs, and other animals exhibit cognitive abilities as well as what we might call “extra-sensory” skills, which are associated with a different, more profound type of intelligence.
This fact lends credence to the idea that overall animal intelligence is, in some very important ways, superior to our own.
It has been demonstrated by Rupert Sheldrake, Ph.D., in his direct, video-documented experiments on dog telepathy and in his book, Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home, that dogs are aware when their far-away owners or partners even start to think about returning home.
These experiments were conducted in conjunction with the publication of Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home.
His tests involve dog owners coming home after absences of varied lengths, and the video-documented simultaneous reactions of the dogs, back at home, plainly demonstrate an understanding of their owners’ intents and actions from afar.
His experiments have been roundly rejected as unscientific, yet they depict dog owners returning home with their pets.
The Psychic Abilities of Animals
Dogs, with their highly inexplicable ESP, can read emotional states more accurately than a lie detector, and they are now employed to try to feel and warn of imminent convulsions in epileptics, as well as identify cancer in hospital patients — much before traditional medical testing can.
It has been known for a long time that many animals display a consistent “telepathic” awareness of incoming disasters like volcanic eruptions, tsunamis, earthquakes, and other catastrophic events.
All of this is connected to what Dr.
Sheldrake calls “morphic resonance,” which is the existence of invisible connecting fields of energetic coherence, of sorts.
These fields are essentially described by the larger concept of a shared field of consciousness, which is a place where the material world is imbued with the energy of intelligence, the physical realization of spiritual life.
It is the spiritual life of the world and all of its inhabitants, a truth that has been understood for millennia by the indigenous peoples of each and every continent, but which “modern” man mostly denies.
Around these parts, we refer to it as Gaia.
Animals, in contrast to humans, just exist in their natural state.
Because their consciousness is united with that source purpose, they are able to achieve a purity of conscious experience as well as a highly developed multi-sensory experience.
This is something that humans are unable to do, mostly because our intellect gets in the way.
Animals’ senses, which are unencumbered by shallow, egocentric cognition, provide them the ability to take part in a reality that is much more rich and to be directly connected to what humans may refer to as the Divine field of being.
In a very concrete sense, they possess a high level of sentience, an extraordinary level of consciousness, and a profound level of intelligence. in a reality that is, in fact, far more real than the typical human capacity for sensory experience and intellect ever permits.
Animals Help Us Advance Spiritually
After more than thirty years of collaborating on a regular basis, Alex, an African Gray parrot, became a virtually conversational research companion of Dr.
Irene Pepperburg of Brandeis.
According to her account, he was her dearest buddy.
The night before he passed away, as she was leaving the laboratory, his last words to her were, “You be good.” See you in the morning! “I adore you.”
I want to believe that I am intelligent and that I am able to distinguish between good and evil, as well as right and wrong.
It’s likely that I’ve indulged in the fabled sin of eating the forbidden fruit that hung from the tree that knew both good and evil.
Isn’t it the reason why our species, the human race, was expelled from the Garden?
Because of this, ever since then, we have been grappling with the question of what our true purpose is in this place, and yet we persist in imposing our self-righteous destruction on all the divine life about which we continue to be ignorant—on all the divine life than which I like to imagine that I am more intelligent.
There does not seem to be a representative for those with four feet.
There does not seem to be any room for the eagles.
We tend to overlook this and wrongly believe that we are more important than other parts of creation, but the truth is that we are nothing more than a little piece of what God has made.
The elements, the animals, and the birds all exist in a condition of grace.
They cannot be questioned.
They are perfect in every way.
Only those of us with two legs are capable of doing this task.
When we treat our brothers in this manner, we are acting in a manner that the Creator views as the most repugnant.
In a speech to the United Nations in 1977, Oren Lyons
