Page 45 - ECOlogic Book

light on. My cat was sitting contemplatively in front of the doorwall, and as I
approached, I stopped in my tracks; for it was then I realized that an
opossum was on the other side of the doorwall, contemplating my cat. Their
noses were no more than four inches apart, with only the doorwall between
them. Each animal knew it was protected from the other by the wall of
glass, and, apparently for some time, had been enjoying the luxury of
studying the other in safety. There was no rancor between them. They
were just trying to figure each other out.

I’ve often done the same thing with squirrels who come to my kitchen
window for sunflower seeds. We sit, squirrel on the shelf outside the
window, me at my kitchen table, a few inches apart, protected by the glass
wall of the window, studying each other. I try to imagine what it’s like to be
a squirrel; perhaps she tries to imagine what it’s like to be a human.

Sometimes I look at my cats and try to think like they do. I try to imagine
that I have retractable claws instead of fingers; that there are projections on
the sides of my face that are connected to sensitive nerve endings that tell
me when an opening is too narrow for me to go through. I try to imagine
how it feels to be covered with fur which I clean by using my tongue. Once,
when I’d been meditating this way for quite a while, I suddenly felt that I
was a cat. It frightened me because I wasn’t sure I could get back to being
human. Was this an experience of “radical participation”: the mystical
oneness that I’d heard about? No, I don’t think so, because I forgot, for a
moment, who I was. In the experience of mystical oneness, you are still you
and the other is still the other, but the experience of both is sublated in a
larger oneness that includes both. It’s the separation between you and the
other – the glass wall that disappears. In my experience of catness, the
separation still existed, for I took the separation with me, and I was now on
the other side of the glass wall. In the mystical oneness experience, the
individuality of yourself and the “other is still intact, but it no longer presents
a barrier to knowing. The glass wall is gone.

The experience showed me that there is a profound difference between
individuality and separateness. “We must learn to think like a mountain,”
says Joanna Macy. True. And at the same time, we must respect the
individuality of the mountain. It is it and we are we. With our imagination,
we may enter into what we think the experience of a mountain might be, but
we can never be a mountain. We can only be who we are. However, who
we are, mountains and humans and cats and squirrels and opossums, has a
larger dimension we can all enter into. It might be called the pneuma, or
the ruah of our planet, the spirit of Gaia.

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