“I am as convinced as the next delusional person that my dog is a living saint. Hey, if the next Karmapa can be foretold, then my dog can be a saint. My dog can be enlightened and a bodhisattva, even one with a capital B. My dog can transform the world, one person at a time. She can also do groups. You know, because we need to speed up the process here, folks. How do I know my dog is a saint? I can tell. She looks like one. She acts like one. She feels like one. Therefore, she is one. She brings out the best in just about everyone. She shows them their true nature in a flash. It’s sometimes too much. I’m living with a saint. I’m sleeping with a saint! What did I do to deserve this? Only a saint would be smart enough to be reborn as the best looking and smartest Min Pin in the history of the world. It’s in the cards. It’s destiny, I tell you.”
When we turn the heart of our attention and affection toward animals and away from human beings, we are singled out as outliers, as oddballs, as people who have “issues.” But what if this turning away is in actuality a tuning in? What if our sensitivities have become sensibilities? What if we are actually wise? What if we now understand that we learn more from deep silence and observation than from shouting opinions and beliefs from the podium of our egocentric lives?
After decades of disappointment in the human realm, many of us have simply stopped reinvesting in people. Reinvesting in human relationships is clearly a calculated risk. As animal behaviorist Temple Grandin points out, dogs, for instance, don’t have the capacity to be deceptive, but people do. There’s the rub! And it’s not a tummy rub, my friend. Lots of women and men I know prefer to cohabitate with animals. Animals don’t do drama. Animals won’t stab you in the back, unless we’re talking wild, undomesticated animals with tusks. In that case, you’re on your own.
Human beings long for deep communion, for deep connection. So why are people ever-ready to cut the strings of connectivity, or threatening to do so? We are on edge. The dance of human codependence is dysfunctional because its roots are fear and manipulation. We are mortified of being cut off, of being shunned from our “pack.” So deeply is this need to belong engrained in our DNA, that we literally can shut off from our true natures, turn off the cosmic channel, as it were, and tune into a set of programmed ideas and mores that insidiously become who we think ourselves to be, or worse, what others insist we become. In human-to-human relationships, we think ourselves into (and sometimes out of) existence. In human-to-animal relationships, we feel ourselves into existence: this is a dramatic and essential difference. Animals care not what we think of ourselves, they respond to our energy, our being, our field, our je ne sais quoi. I’m always amazed when a dog who knows a person well sees that person on a computer monitor, say on Skype. The image is there, the voice is there, but the dog doesn’t make the connection. The dog has a simple brain, one might argue, unable to extrapolate that the image and the sound is in fact a real person, one that it knows and loves. But even if it could connect the dots, what would it do with that information? Quell its fears? Hear about what’s for dinner later and then think about it until the owner gets home? Dogs don’t do drama and they don’t do virtual reality.
I argue that our relationship with our pets is not codependent but rather interdependent (yes, I know that I’ve anthropomorphized my dog into a saint…but it COULD be true). Our lives are richer and fuller because of our love for animals, and their lives are better when we “get” them and provide, with gratitude, the simple requirements they need to have a decent life. In this environment, this communion with animals, a connection to all of life (yes, even to humans) is re-awakened. The opposition would argue that this is too simplistic: animals can be dominated and controlled by humans, and can become whatever we want them to be---dumb slaves to do our bidding, or enlightened beings ready to assist us. Maybe so, but which do you choose?
Animals paradoxically teach us how to be fully human. We have come full circle. We are awake, in touch, and alive. The time is always now to wake up, to reconnect, to love. If you think you’ve lost your capacity to love, think again. Our beloved pets are gurus of compassion in disguise. They are perfect teachers. They will take you home. That is, if you let them.
