Quote:
|
Originally Posted by Debrah
I was pretty much in agreement with you until you said we anthropomorphize the wider reality, and as I see it, that's an effort to disengage from human responsibility as it pertains to the critters and their emotions. And they do have emotions. They feel love, joy, grief, fear....just like us. An orca whose calf has died will carry it with her for 17 days, a cat whose kittens have been killed but not eaten will draw their cold little bodies to herself and try to nurse them and warm them as she grieves. A cow will chase the farm as he drives away with the calf she has just birthed. A pig will leap for joy in the freedom of the sunshine that warms the sanctuary where she has been blessed with safety, and likewise a horse will stand trembling in fear as she's forced into the kill box.... So it's not necessary that we anthropomorphize anything, they experience the identical feelings that we have. They exist as individual entities and we only recognize their emotions. The only time that becomes 'inconvenient' to us is when it interferes with our plans for them.
You've said that '
Every unit of consciousness from the elemental, to the more complex, to gestalts has free will, its individuality and its own evolvement path, nothing being preordained.'
They are individual units of consciousness no less than we are, just as you have already agreed. So then that means if we decide to take their lives from them, we are interfering with their free will after we have pre-ordained their deaths by causing them to be born.
|
When I wrote "we tend to anthropomorphize the wider reality", I also meant the reality beyond death, and giving that reality characteristics and values we consider human. It is also true that I believe that we assign animals and plants feelings and emotions, as well as intelligent behavior as we see them, not as they are experienced by those. And I mean this in no derogatory way.
Death is a necessary end of an Earthly experience, and the way I understand reality, it always happens with the agreement of the non-physical part of the unit of consciousness (plant, animal, human) that dies. I don't think of it as something that can be only physically determined, and it is a waking into another reality, a non-physical one.
The suffering that happens at all levels (plant, animal, human) isn't necessary for evolvement, but inherently happens because of one's own innate ignorance (not used here as a pejorative qualifier), and it isn't caused by external sources.
It seems that there is no Earthly life that can exist without expending other vegetable and / or animal lives. I think that any kind of death is just a necessary and agreed way out of here.