A Treatise on Natural Truth: Organic Truth Perspective IV
Organic Truth Perspective IV. There are Non-Human Persons existing alongside Human Persons within the inter-connected system of life.
Human persons are not alone in the world. Non-human persons exist alongside us, both in the world that is seen and explorable with the senses of our bodies, and with our minds, and in the reaches of extra-sensory reality. What we call "animals"- or should I say "Non-human animals", are persons as well; a "person" is defined by me as
"An individual conscious being or entity that is known with reference to certain relationships within his, her, or its natural and social environment, and with reference to his, her, or its behavioral patterns as conditioned by natural forces or natural forces and culture."
Non-human animals are thought by humans to be of a lesser caliber of being due to their relative levels of intelligence (which are believed to be lower than human intelligence) and their lack of things like language or an ability to communicate that approximates the complexity of human communication. Morphological structures are also used to downplay the relative worth or value or standing of non-human animals; the lack of an "opposing thumb" or a "small brain" (when compared to human brains) and the seeming inability to either have or express what humans call "abstract thought."
All of these criteria are themselves fundamentally flawed perspectives on who and what non-human animals are, and what they represent within the system of Nature. Non-human animals are persons, acting within the same natural environment as humans, who have been shaped by natural forces to adapt to things differently, and occupy different positions within the natural system of life than human beings.
They communicate in the ways that are natural and expedient to themselves, they occupy necessary and crucial ranges of nature's body, and humans, along with the rest of the world, depend on their healthy continued existence in many ways. Most animals are "elders" to human beings, owing to their emergence as living persons before the emergence of human beings. That non-human animals may, indeed, lack some "abstraction" capacity that humans do possess, or lack the ability or the intelligence to produce complexity in communication as humans do, does not in any manner demote these beings to a lesser ontological status than human persons.
In the unfolding of natural events, and the formation of the natural world, "the human animal" has been involved in the same processes of competition, resource gathering, and even predation that non-human animals are involved in. The fact that animals are not ontologically "less" than humans does not mean that humans do some moral evil when they kill or consume animals for the purposes of survival, just as predator animals who sometimes kill humans for food do not commit a moral evil.
Humans are shaped by nature to be naturally omnivorous creatures who have eaten other creatures since the beginning of their existence. The true natural sense of "equality" that exists between human animals and non-human animals does not include the warped human idea that "we cannot kill or eat our equals." It is the contrary idea- that humans are "greater" than animals, or superior in some manner, that has led to the human-inspired extinction of countless species, and the wanton destruction of the populations of many others. This is an egregious crime against the sacred life that dwells inside our own minds and bodies, for the very same life dwells within non-human animals.
Inter-species predation is a natural law, and a natural occurrence. Humans have largely given up preying on other humans (for indeed, it isn't necessary) but since the beginning of the institution of "war", have never ceased to destroy other humans in large numbers, and for reasons that often had nothing to do with survival. Killing and/or eating an equal being out of authentic necessity is no crime; driving a fellow being extinct or utterly destroying their ability to compete, procreate, persist, or thrive, is.
Animals are not the only non-human Persons that exist. There is a universally attested-to belief in all ancient and contemporary animistic cultures (cultures that maintain the primordial expressions of natural truth in a variety of particularly human ways) that "spirits" exist; and spirits are seen as non-human Persons that share the human and animal world, and perhaps occupy other "worlds" or conditions of being.
Spirits are "modes of awareness, intelligence, or consciousness that lack a physical form", though these sorts of persons are believed by all primal cultures to be capable of temporarily assuming physical forms, and of interacting with our world (the world that we can see and feel) in a variety of ways and in a variety of shapes.
The notion of non-physical modes or continuums of awareness or intelligence is not an absurd belief, however much it may violate the assumptions of materialistic and skeptically arrogant Western science. Human senses are limited in their ability to receive the entire range and spectrum of nature's powers, and human minds are limited to thinking and conceiving in certain ways. That spirits could exist, or orders of life that have a subtle form which is not perceptible to humans (as these entities are dwellers in "extra-sensory reality"), is not a large stretch of the imagination.
The universal belief in spiritual entities also brings an element of credulity to the notion that whatever is happening, however it may be, something common to all human cultures is ocurring which led every ancient culture to believe in spiritual beings. The common animistic notion that Nature itself is "ensouled" can be partly ascribed to, or explained by, a vast array of living non-human persons inhabiting Nature in a variety of ways. The many ways that spirits may exist is tied up with the many ways that humans normally experience the world- what appears to be a stone or an oak tree to a human being can be the home of one or many spirits; it may be the very body of a spirit; it can be a doorway to a world of spirits. These mind-bending perspectives (from the modern Western perspective) are natural and normal to many cultures, past and present.
Experiences of spiritual non-human Persons is ongoing, even today, in tribal and animistic societies, and even in distorted forms in other religious cultures. The belief in spirits as non-human persons with their own ecology, shaped as they were by the same enormous outlay of natural powers and processes that humans and other things were shaped by, and with their own motivations, abilities to affect the world and be affected by it, and their own destinies, is an important part of a spiritual ecology of wholeness.
Some spiritual powers have been accorded, by countless human cultures, great mythological roles in the shaping of the current pattern of the world, or given honors and worship as Gods or the like. The truth behind these complex relationships of humans to the unseen world is a very deep subject, worthy of its own study. It is enough to state that many sorts of relationships have existed between human persons and spiritual non-human persons, and that these relationships have been an important part of human history and development. They remain a crucial part of human history and development in many modern cultures and societies.
Spiritual powers, presently and in the past, have been sought for advice, healing, boons and favors for the aid of human groups, and have been believed by many in all times and places to be the original communicators or teachers to human groups all of the arts of tool-using culture and civilization. There is an ecology of kinship, respect, and mutual exchange between humans and spirits that represents the essence of the earliest human religions. It also represents the backbone of many currently existing religious traditions.
Spirits, like any Persons, may be inspired, forced, or motivated to behave differently to other Persons by environmental conditions, interactions with other persons, or the like. Spirits, having existed largely previous to human emergence, are qualified by human cultures as beneficent or malevolent, or at times both.
Animistic power-stories and religions often contain a large element of ambiguity regarding the character and behaviors/motivations of spirits, and this is an important lesson and truth- in the ecological realm of spirits, just as in the world of humans and animals, any entity can, from time to time, act destructively, and at other times act constructively or beneficially. There is an immense web of causality that underlies behavior in any Person, and overly simplistic attributions like "good" or "evil" are polarizing, nearsighted, and unwise.
