THE HUMAN ANIMAL

April 18, 2022

I have tried, for most of my adult life, to cultivate a meditation practice of one sort or another.  Because sitting for prolonged periods of time has always been painful, in the mid-1990’s I decided to explore movement meditation –Tai Chi and Chi Gong, to be specific.  

    At the time, I really didn’t know much about T’ai Chi other than that it had long been associated with the Taoist religion.  On visits to San Francisco I’d seen groups of mostly older Chinese practicing together in a park adjacent to Chinatown, and it piqued my curiosity.  I’d also read translations of ancient Taoist texts like the Tao Te Ching, and teaching stories attributed to the quirky sage, Chuang Tse.  With this limited exposure, I decided to give T’ai Chi a whirl.

    I soon warmed to the discipline, and under the tutelage of teachers at the Madison T’ai Chi Center I mastered, in due time, the basic mechanics of what’s known as the Yang-style T’ai Chi form. In the process I also learned that this is but one among a wide variety of exercises falling under the general rubric Qi Gong. While serving in the ministry here in Madison, I learned and then taught to parishioners a graceful Qi Gong movement meditation known as the Japanese Crane. 

    Which brings me to the topic at hand. For people living in the Far East, the crane is a revered bird.  It frequently appears in artwork, and long ago the Crane’s distinctive mannerisms – its wing movements and one-legged stance - found their way into Qi Gong.  So did other movements based on the behavior of tigers, bears, deer and monkeys.  

    The roots of Qi Gong are ancient, hearkening back to a time when people believed that by imitating animals their energetic qualities could be appropriated - the agility of the monkey, the swiftness of the deer, the strength of the bear, the cunning of the tiger.  These early people practiced what we now call “sympathetic magic,” which enabled them to commune with other animals and to develop a deeper resonance between themselves and the natural environment.

    What motivated the practitioners of 4000 years ago no longer moves us today.  We utilize Qi Gong primarily for its therapeutic benefits. It promotes greater body awareness, suppleness and flexibility.  Using it regularly,  we develop a more stable posture and improved balance. Qi Gong also triggers the relaxation response and increases mental clarity.  Holistic healthcare providers regard it as a form of “complementary medicine” and a useful adjunct to conventional treatments. 

    All of this is for the good.  But there may also be merit in returning to the rationale that informed the practitioners of Qi Gong in the first place: to strengthen one’s sense of kinship with other members of the animal kingdom.  But to do that, we first must acknowledge that like other creatures, we are part and parcel of the sentient universe. 

    It is a sensibility that we, in our modern, technologically enamored and urbanized culture, have pretty much forfeited.  Excepting for the domestic creatures that share our homes and barnyards, our exposure to the wild inhabitants of the planet is minimal at best. How, then, are we to achieve that relatedness?  How do we develop a greater appreciation for their lives, and not just the life we share with other human beings?

    The present environment doesn’t lend itself to such connections, nor do our habits of thinking.  The great Western religions, as that passage from the book of Genesis indicated, have insisted that humans are a “special and unique creation” qualitatively different from and superior to every other creature – the finned, winged and the four-legged.  This, to the earth’s sorrow, is where the ideology of separateness has left us.

    The authors of Genesis aren’t solely responsible for this state of affairs.  The Greek philosophic tradition contributed to it as well.  Socrates and his student, Plato, were eager to bestow on human beings a status that placed them at a distance from their fellow creatures and from nature itself.  Thus, Plato argued that the phenomenal world revealed by our five senses is unreal, merely the “shadow” of ideal forms that exist on some higher plane and that can only be apprehended by a rational soul that is uniquely human.  As David Abrams writes,

European civilization’s neglect of the natural world and its needs has clearly been encouraged by a style of awareness that disparages sensorial reality, denigrating the visible and tangible order of things on behalf of some absolute source assumed to exist entirely beyond, or outside of the bodily world…. The psyche is that aspect of oneself that is refined and strengthened by turning away from the ordinary sensory world in order to contemplate…these eternal forms.  

         Socrates, a primary source of inspiration for both Plato and Aristotle, spent his adulthood cultivating the life of the mind in the urban environs of Athens.  The natural world outside the city gates held no appeal.  “I am a lover of learning,” he remarked, “and trees and open country don’t teach me anything, whereas men in town do.”

    Socrates and his immediate successors heralded a monumental shift in the way humans regarded themselves and their relationship to Nature. In earlier times, Abrams notes, human beings paid rapt attention to nature’s signs. The gods of Homer’s great epic poems “spoke directly (to humans) through patterns of clouds, waves and the flight of birds.”  For later generations, information that might have been gleaned from natural phenomenon receded in importance.

    This early tilt toward anthropocentrism – the prioritizing of all things human - has continued to inform our appraisals of human nature. Instead of emphasizing the traits and qualities we have in common with other creatures, we are more likely to focus on the dissimilarities – especially those “uniquely” human attributes that give us a qualitative edge over, and the right to dictate terms to, other life forms. Never mind that humans share 96% of a chimpanzee’s genes and 92% of a mouse’s, making it clear we are more like them than not. 

    Still, is it not true that unlike the mouse, and perhaps the chimpanzee, we have risen to self-consciousness and possess a talent for abstract thought?  Writing and record keeping have been a major factor in the rise of civilization, and were the harbingers of today’s advanced technologies. But these marks of human superiority have also proven to be something of a double-edged sword, for by depreciating nature we’ve become less and less able to see anything in it but a pretty landscape, to hear anything from it besides indecipherable chatter, or to accord to it anything other than instrumental value. Despite Charles Darwin’s evolutionary insights, it has been extremely difficult for us to reweave our species back into the intricate, interdependent web of life. We are too invested in a fanciful, self-congratulatory view of ourselves. 

    The task of reintegration is extremely important because in our supremacism we have made a hash of things.  Biologists and earth scientists now label the era we live in the “Anthropocene” because of the tremendous pressure the human species is exerting on the planet. The latest of Earth’s five mass extinctions took place some 66 million years ago, and we may well be the prime movers of a sixth, in which 75% of more of the earth’s species will eventually be obliterated. Our world, the British climatologist James Lovelock sourly observed, is suffering from a “Disseminated Primatemaia” – a plague of people.

    This may not be something we can think our way out of. What seems to be called for is a shift in consciousness, rather than a new set of technocratic solutions. “If there is anything unique about the human animal,” the philosopher John Gray laments, “it is that it has the ability to grow knowledge at an accelerating rate, while being chronically incapable of learning from experience.”

    And, even if we possess the means to stave off some of the more horrific consequences of climate change and species depletion, we obviously lack the necessary will. “The mass of humankind,” Gray continues, “is not ruled by its intermittent moral sensations, still less by self-interest, but by the needs of the moment.” 

    “Where there’s a will, there’s a way,” is an old cliché, but where do we find the will?  A preliminary and perhaps indispensable step in the healing of a dysfunctional relationship is to recognize the myriad ways in which the planet’s and our own interests dovetail. But for that to happen we must seek out more opportunities to experience our rightful place in the web of life.  As Diane Ackerman writes in her brilliant book, A Natural History of the Senses:

We have much to learn from and about the senses of animals.  Otherwise, how shall we hope to be good caretakers of the planet, should that turn out to be our role…. Our several senses…reach far beyond us…  they’re an extension of the genetic chain that connects us to everyone who has ever lived; they bind us to other people and to animals across time and country and happenstance.  

   It isn’t our minds so much as our five senses that elicit a sense of solidarity with nature and provide an avenue for reconnecting with our essential animal selves. Indeed, it’s precisely our busy minds that keep us at a distance, confining us to Plato’s immaterial thought-world and denying ourselves what nature needs for us to know.  “Spirit that hears each one of us,” Barbara Deming writes, “Teach us to listen!”

Our own pulse beats in every stranger’s throat/We can hear it in the water, wood and even in stone/We are earth of this earth, we are bone of its bone/But we have forgotten this, and so I the earth is perishing.

    What the moment calls for is a more contemplative approach to the ecological crisis we face.  There are many ways in which that can be accomplished.  For instance, Stephen Blackmer is an environmentalist with a degree in Forestry and Environmental Studies from Yale, Aldo Leopold’s old alma mater.  At first Blackmer pursued environmental causes from a strictly secular standpoint.  But he yearned for work that spoke to him at a deeper level, so he decided to enter the seminary. The scientist is now an Episcopal priest who presides over the open-air Church of the Woods, which he founded in a New Hampshire forest.

    In Blackmer’s view, sustainable service to the planet must be accompanied by deliberate efforts to connect spiritually with the ecosystem one inhabits. His favorite Biblical text is the one describing Moses’ encounter with the Burning Bush. “Take off thy shoes,” the Lord commands from the bush, “for the place on which you stand is holy ground.”  Taking that passage at face value, Blackmer celebrates the Eucharist barefoot beneath the forest’s canopy. “We must think of all ground as holy ground,” he maintains, because without such recognition, “there is no way out of our ecological woes.”

    Lots of folks today participate in outdoor activities - hiking, birding, fishing, hunting.  But what someone like Blackmer offers is not simply another recreational opportunity whereby nature is again placed in the service of exclusively human interests.  The recovery of reverence is his goal, and the regeneration of an empathetic response to an ailing world.   

    As a priest, Blackmer has chosen to place an ecological stamp on traditional Christian worship and move it to a natural setting that’s consonant with that shift.  But there are other means for achieving the same objective.  Here in the upper Midwest Qi Gong and T’ai Chi are usually taught and executed indoors.  But it has traditionally been an outdoor activity, with practitioners gathering in places where the animal-inspired movements match the environment. This enables one to draw from nature’s restorative and healing power.  Slow and mindful walking in woodland or prairie can have a similar beneficent effect.

    The ostensible purpose here is to bypass the interminable interior chatter that interfere with sensorial awareness. The rituals I’ve described help us, quite literally, to “come back to our senses.”  When this happens, the environment takes on a new significance, the forces of nature begin to speak to us, and caring begins to feel like a natural act, rather than a moral obligation.

    Is this self-consciousness we humans boast about such a wonderful endowment, John Gray asks?  It’s as much a disability as an asset, not only because of the way it alienates us from other life forms, but because it’s the underlying source of much of the worry and objectless anxiety we complain about.  “Think of the animals,” Walt Whitman wrote, “they do not sweat and whine about their condition…nor do they weep for their sins.”  For us to experience a vital connection with the non-human world, self-consciousness and abstract thought must be temporarily suspended. That’s what a contemplative or spiritual practice helps us do. 

   This is not about “going backward,” or returning to some primitive level of thinking and being.  There is no going back, but as David Abrams suggests, we can come full circle, “uniting our capacity for cool reason with those more sensorial and imitative ways of knowing.”