The cat and the dog part two
Rambling of an old yoghini.
The girl who was cleaning my house had a four year old child. I have six cats that do their business
in the litter box (not always I am sorry to say).
At one point I asked her to clean the litter box but, holding her nose, she refused, saying that the poo of the cats stank. I said that the poo of the baby also stank. She said that the cat was an animal but that her son was a human being and so the poo does not stink. I said her son was also an animal.
She was furious.
Internally I was having a whale of a time with this, but she was a young girl, not yet seasoned in life, so I stopped teasing her. 80 years against 25 is an unfair battle.
Is the human being really different from the animal? I say: No. It is wrapped up in a different way, but meat is meat. When a lion meets a buffalo in the wilds of Africa, it will kill it, because the buffalo is ‘food’. The buffalo is meat, which will feed the meat of the lion itself.
When a lion meets a human being in the wilds of Africa, it will kill it, because the human being is ‘food’. The human being is meat, which will feed the meat of the lion itself.
Meat, bones, ligaments, the whole body of the ‘human’ being is the same as that of the buffalo, of the lion, of the cat. It is wrapped up in a different way, but it is the same stuff. The cannibals in Papua said that the tastiest food there is is the forearm of a white woman.
There you are. Thank god I do not live in Papua.
So the ‘meat’ and the rest of the body has to eat to continue growing and living, whether you are a lion, a cat or a human being. So in the tradition of Vedanta, from which comes yoga, this meat-bones-ligaments-nerves etc. is called annamaya kosha, or the body made of food. (anna). Simple.
This goes for ALL LIVING THINGS, down to the tiniest ants.
But...that goes only for the material part of the animal, including the human animal.
There are other components.
Let us say I am a rich guy, and have a car. I also have a chauffeur.
I want to go somewhere, so I decide to go by car.
Now comes the problem: where do I go? Let us go to the bar for a coffee.
The car does not go by itself. I do not say to the car: take me to the bar.
It stands there in the garage, mute, lifeless.
So I call the chauffeur and say I want to go to that bar in that street etc. I give him instructions where we go.
The chauffeur looks on the map where this bar is, starts the motor of the car and off we go.
So for the simple act of going to the bar we have we have a whole series of passages:
1. The car
2. The owner of the car
3. The chauffeur
3. the goal of where to go
4. The map of how to get there
5. The brakes to stop at the right moment.
Translating it in yogic terms, we can say that the car is the annamaya kosha. It is lifeless, and made of the same stuff as all the other cars going around. In the same way the annamaya kosha is ‘dead’.
It needs to be brought to life by something else.
Elsewhere I have talked about the Atman or the Jivan, that part of the Universe (Brahma) that decided to go on safari in this matrix. I think there are many of these matrixes, but we are talking now about the one that we ‘live’ in. Later on I will change the word ‘matrix’ for hallucination.
So it arrives in this matrix and then has to set up shop, so to speak. It has to acquire:
1. A physical body (the car or annamaya kosha) in order to move in these new surrounding
2. A brain that decides where to go and what to do (manomaya kosha)
3. A chauffeur to drive the car (pranamaya kosha)
4. A telephone line to the chauffeur to tell him where to go (intent)
With these ‘tools’ he can make his way around in this matrix.
These tools are the same that ANY animal has.
Every animal has these tools and every animal HAS TO LEARN HOW TO USE THEM.
We are animals, let us admit it.
Lorenz Conrad did a lot of experiments with goslings. When they were hatched in a container, without their parents, the whole package was there apart from ONE thing: they did not know how to be geese, because they did not have their parents to teach them. He had to teach them to be geese!!!
All adult animals, including human animals, teach their offspring to be and to do what they are supposed to be and do in their world. A newborn baby is an animal. Then begins the conditioning, and this conditioning becomes the ‘dog’ part of us, the one that ‘barks when someone higher up on the scale says :bark!!
Often people in remote areas have found children between 4 and 12 years old ( the most famous was the feral child Victor but there were many more). I remember one child was raised by ostriches in Africa who could outrun anybody, others by wolves in India etc.
These ‘wild’ children never had their similars to teach them how to be a human being. Instead the ‘wolf boy’ behaved in all respects like a wolf, having been raised and taught by the wolves, and the other children also behaved according to their surrogate ‘parents’.
Sadly, when these children were captured, they ended up in clinics for ‘crazy’ people.
Lorenz called this ‘imprinting’. You can also call this ‘hypnosis’, but I will get to that. The newborn whatever-it-is is a white sheet. There is no writing on it. And this is where imprinting-hypnosis-dogness starts. The dog part of us is the brain. It knows how to think. That is its function.
The brain (manomaya kosha) is a thinking machine. It does not have any feelings, it does not have any emotions. The function of the brain is to ‘talk’, and talking is caught within time and space. The dog is trapped in time and space. The cat is not.
A famous Vedantic saying says: “ Nothing is ever born, nothing ever dies”. That is the cat, the un-born, un-dying part of us, the ‘piece’ of Brahma that decided to have a trip in this matrix.
Like all animals we are ‘imprinted’ or taught or hypnotized or forced to cultivate the civilized dog in us, suppressing or forgetting the cat, the ‘real’ wild part of us that NEVER WILL BE HYPNOTIZED, as it is not part of the whole set-up, but is the jivan, the atman, that wanted to experience this matrix. It is the incorruptible part of us.
What we do not understand is that thinking and intelligence are two entirely different things.
Thinking is never intelligent; intelligence does not think. The most famous example that we all know is how Einstein worked endlessly on his famous formula, which kept eluding him. Then, one day when he was shaving, the answer came. The act of shaving had silenced the thinking ‘dog’ part of his brain, so that the voice of the ‘cat’, intuition, could be heard. And the solution was there.
Interestingly enough, where the dog part of us leads us into all kinds of dangerous or other situations, the cat is our protector. It is Brahma inside us that, if we listen to its voice, will lead us safely through this caravanserai. But sadly enough not many people listen to its voice, being blinded by the glitter of this matrix, being hypnotized by the honkey-tonk of tv, newspapers, shops with millions of things that nobody really needs, other people’s opinions etc.
There are so many examples where someone was saved in spite of himself. Somebody has to take a plane to go somewhere, misses the plane because of a traffic jam and learns later that the plane crashed and everybody died. Or someone who has to take the elevator and at the last moment has a ‘funny’ feeling and steps back out of the elevator, which crashes and everybody inside it dies.
To call the cat side of us ‘intuition’ is a little underestimating., but they are narrowly linked. It is the voice that is heard when the dog stops ‘barking’.
Now Konrad Lorenz called it ‘imprinting’. It is a form of hypnosis, of conditioning, of fitting into the masses, of ‘barking’ when someone higher up says ‘bark’.
Mind you, this is absolutely necessary to live in this matrix. The bees live in the beehive with the queen. Without queen there would be total chaos. The matrix has its rules, and they should be obeyed in order to keep a certain coherence, a certain order.
This is all necessary, but we should not forget that according to Einstein himself the universe DOES NOT EXIST, at least not as a material ‘object’., but is energy that vibrates at a certain speed (frequency). So are we, energy that vibrates at a certain frequency.
The closest I can get to understanding this conundrum is when Laurence van der Post, who lived for a while with the Bushmen of the Kalahari desert, asked one of them WHAT LIFE WAS, at which this man, who had never been to school, who had not learned to read and write and in other ways had never gotten corrupted, answered:
THERE IS A DREAM DREAMING US.
BAM. There goes my classical lyceum with Latin and Greek and all the other useless stuff, including history and geography and algebra and all the hours wasted doing homework while instead you could be outside chasing squirrels.
Maybe this whole matrix is a dream, a form of hypnosis, or, if we want to stay on the Vedanta side, we are all victims of
MAYA
Maya is the grand ILLUSION, the veil that covers us, the, as Robert Malone calls it, Mass Formation that the universe put on us. Maybe when we die the veil is lifted and we become again what we always were: energy which vibrates at a certain frequency: SAT-CIT-ANANDA.