how unique are humans really?

 

Photo from Air and Science Magazine

Primatologist Frans de Waal has spent his lifetime 

studying the lives of animals, especially our closest cousins, 

the chimpanzees. de Waal has observed their shifting alliances

 and the structure of their political ranks. He has seen bitter conflicts

 break out, only to be mended by peaceful, respected mediators.

 And he has witnessed chimpanzees grieve for, 

and attempt to comfort, their dead and dying.

But one of the most touching reflections in his new book, 

Mama’s Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us About Ourselves, 

is the story he tells of a female chimp who didn’t produce enough milk

 to feed her young. When de Waal taught her to feed her baby with a bottle

 instead, she repaid him with what most of us would recognize as gratitude

: holding both of de Waal’s hands and whimpering sadly if he tried to leave.

The book explores many stories of animal emotions from across

 the animal kingdom, and it might leave you wondering 

how unique humans really are.

Mama, the matriarch and oldest of the chimpanzee colony

 of the Royal Burgers Zoo in Arnhem, the Netherlands, 

expressed affection towards behavioral biologist Jan van Hooff

 as she gave him her last hug before she died in 2016.

 Credit: Jan A R A M van Hooff

~ Frans de Waal

from Mama’s Last Hug: Animal Emotions 

and What They Tell Us About Ourselves

with thanks to Science Friday

there is a grace approaching

There is a grace approaching
that we shun as much as death,
it is the completion of our birth.

It does not come in time,
but in timelessness
when the mind sinks into the heart
and we remember.

It is insistent grace that draws us
to the edge and beckons us surrender
safe territory and enter our enormity.

We know we must pass
beyond knowing
and fear the shedding.

But we are pulled upward
none-the-less
through forgotten ghosts
and unexpected angels,
luminous.

And there is nothing left to say
but we are That.

And that is what we sing about.

 

 

 

~ Stephen Levine 

from Breaking the Drought: Visions of Grace

 

 

 

the naked awareness of your self

.

... imagination and reason have taught you all they can 

and now you must learn to be wholly given 

to the simple spiritual awareness of your self and God....

he told his disciples, who were loath to give up his physical presence

 (just as you are loath to give up the speculative reflections of your subtle, clever faculties),

 that for their own good he would withdraw his physical presence from them, 

 He said to them, "It is necessary for you that I go,"

 meaning, "It is necessary  for you 

that I depart physically from you."  

St. Augustine, commenting on these words, says:

 "Were not the form of  his humanity withdrawn from our bodily eyes,

 love for him in his Godhead would never cleave to our spiritual eyes."  

And thus I say to you, at a certain point it is necessary

 to give up discursive meditation and learn to taste something of that deep,

 spiritual experience of God's love.

...  always and ever strive toward the naked awareness of your self, 

and continually offer your being to God as your most precious gift. 

 

 Inasmuch as this awareness really is naked, 

you will at first find it terribly painful to rest in it for any length of time

 because, ... your faculties will find no meat for themselves in it. 

 

 Let them fast awhile from their natural delight in knowing, 

It is well said that man naturally desires to know.  Yet at the same time,

 it is also true that no amount of natural or acquired knowledge 

will bring him to taste the spiritual experience of God,

 for this is a pure gift of grace. 

 

 And so I urge you: go after experience rather than knowledge. 

 On account of pride, knowledge may often deceive you,

 but this gentle, loving affection will not deceive you. 

 

 Knowledge tends to breed conceit,

 but love builds.  

 

Knowledge is full of labor,

but love, full of rest.

~ from The Book of Privy Counseling

written anonymously in the fourteenth century 

art: from Arnhem Land

red brocade

The Arabs used to say,

When a stranger appears at your door,

feed him for three days

before asking who he is,

where he's come from,

where he's headed.

That way, he'll have strength

enough to answer.

Or, by then you'll be

such good friends

you don't care.

Let's go back to that.

Rice?  Pine nuts?

Here, take the red brocade pillow.

My child will serve water

to your horse.

No, I was not busy when you came!

I was not preparing to be busy.

That's the armor everyone put on

to pretend they had a purpose

in the world.

I refuse to be claimed.

Your plate is waiting.

We will snip fresh mint

into your tea.

~ Naomi Shihab Nye

from 19 Varieties of Gazelle

lute music

 

The Earth will be going on a long time

Before it finally freezes;

Men will be on it; they will take names,

Give their deeds reasons.

We will be here only

As chemical constituents—

A small franchise indeed.

Right now we have lives,

Corpuscles, Ambitions, Caresses,

Like everybody had once—

Here at the year’s end, at the feast

Of birth, let us bring to each other

The gifts brought once west through deserts—

The precious metal of our mingled hair,

The frankincense of enraptured arms and legs,

The myrrh of desperate, invincible kisses—

Let us celebrate the daily

Recurrent nativity of love,

The endless epiphany of our fluent selves,

While the earth rolls away under us

Into unknown snows and summers,

Into untraveled spaces of the stars.

~ Kenneth Rexroth

from Sacramental Acts

NASA photo

it's whisper can be heard

 

Grace is always present. You imagine it is somewhere high in the sky,

far away, and has to descend. It is really inside you, in your Heart.

Grace is the Self. . . .You are never out of its operation.

-~ Sri Ramana Maharshi

​

 Grace is a manifestation of the cosmic free will in operation. 

It can alter the course of events in a mysterious manner

 through its own unknown laws, which are superior to

 all natural laws, and can modify the latter by interaction.

It is the most powerful force in the universe.

It descends and acts only when it is invoked 

by total self- surrender. 

It acts from within, because God resides in the Heart

 of all beings. Its whisper can be heard only in a mind

 purified by self-surrender and prayer.

Rationalists laugh at it, and atheists scorn it, but it exists.

 It is a descent of God into the soul’s zone of awareness. 

It is a visitation of force unexpected and unpredictable.

 It is a voice spoken out of cosmic silence - 

It is ‘Cosmic Will which can perform 

authentic miracles under its own laws’.

~ D.C. Desai

 from Divine Grace Through Total Self-Surrender

art:  from the Metropolitan Museum of Art

with thanks to love is a place

till you yourself are a sail

The world's spiritual geniuses seem to discover universally

that the mind's muddy river, this ceaseless flow of trivia and trash,

cannot be dammed, and that trying to dam it is a waste of effort

that might lead to madness. 

Instead you must allow the muddy river

to flow unheeded in the dim channels of consciousness;

you raise your sights; you look along it, mildly, acknowledging

its presence without interest and gazing beyond it into

the realm of the real where subjects and objects act

and rest purely, without utterance.

 

.

The secret of seeing is to sail on solar wind.

Hone and spread your spirit till you yourself are a sail,

whetted, translucent, broadside to the merest puff.

~ Annie Dillard

excerpts from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

art by Olivia Maria Chevallier

 

 

 

 

prayer happens

 

Prayer is something that happens to you (Romans 8:26-27), 

much more than anything you privately do.

 It is an allowing of the Big Self 

more than an assertion of the small self.

 Eventually you will find yourself preferring to say,

 “Prayer happened, and I was there”

 more than “I prayed today.” 

All you know is that you are being led, 

being guided, being loved, being used,

 being prayed through—

and you are no longer in the driver’s seat.

God stops being an object of attention

 like any other object in the world,

 and becomes at some level your own “I am.” 

You start knowing through,

 with, and in Somebody Else.

Your little “I Am” becomes “We Are.”

Please trust me on this. 

It might be the most important thing I could tell you.

~ Richard Rohr

from The Naked Now

art by Debra Nangala McDonald

with thanks to love is a place

great and small

When we look at things in the light of Tao,

Nothing is best, nothing is worst.

Each thing, seen in its own light,

Stands out in its own way.

It can seem to be "better"

Than what is compared with it

On its own terms.

But seen in terms of the whole,

No one thing stands out as "better."

If you measure differences,

What is greater than something else is "great,"

Therefore there is nothing that is not "great";

What is smaller than something else is "small,"

Therefore there is nothing that is not "small,"

So the whole cosmos is a grain of rice,

And the tip of a hair

Is as big as a mountain -

Such is the relative view.

You can break down walls with battering rams,

But you cannot stop holes with them.

All things have different uses.

Fine horses can travel a hundred miles a day,

But they cannot catch mice

Like terriers or weasels:

All creatures have gifts of their own.

The white horned owl can catch fleas at midnight

And distinguish the tip of a hair,

But in bright day it stares, helpless,

And cannot even see a mountain.

All things have varying capacities.

Consequently: he who wants to have right without wrong,

Order without disorder,

Does not understand the principles

Of heaven and earth.

He does not know how

Things hang together.

Can a man cling only to heaven

And know nothing of earth?

They are correlative: to know one

Is to know the other.

To refuse one

Is to refuse both.

Can a man cling to the positive

Without any negative

In contrast to which it is seen

To be positive?

If he claims to do so 

He is a rogue or a madman.

Thrones pass

From dynasty to dynasty,

Now in this way, now in that.

He who forces his way to power

Against the grain

I called tyrant and usurper.

He who moves with the stream of events

Is called a wise statesman.

Kui, the one-legged dragon,

Is jealous of the centipede.

The centipede is jealous of the snake.

The snake is jealous of the wind.

The wind is jealous of the eye.

The eye is jealous of the mind.

Kui said to the centipede:

"I manage my one leg with difficulty:

How can you manage a hundred?"

The centipede replied:

"I do not manage them.

They land all over the place

Like drops of spit."

The centipede said to the snake:

"With all my feet, I cannot move as fast

As you do with no feet at all.

How is this done?"

The snake replied:

"I have a natural glide

That can't be changed.  What do I need

With feet?"

The snake spoke to the wind:

"I ripple my backbone and move along

In a bodily way.  You, without bones,

Without muscles, without method,

Blow from the North Sea to the Southern Ocean.

How do you get there

With nothing?'

The wind replied:

"True, I rise up in the North Sea

And take myself without obstacle to the Southern Ocean.

But every eye that remarks me,

Every wing that uses me,

Is superior to me, even though 

I can uproot the biggest trees, or overturn

Big buildings.

The true conqueror is he

Who is not conquered

By the multitude of the small.

The mind is this conqueror -

But only the mind

 Of a wise man."

~ Chuang Tzu

translation by Thomas Merton

gratitude

The sounds of engines leave the air.

The Sunday morning silence comes

at last.  At last I know the presence

of the world made without hands,

the creatures that have come to be 

out of their absence.  Calls

of flicker and jay fill the clear

air.  Titmice and chickadees feed

among the green and the dying leaves.

Gratitude for the gifts of all the living 

and the unliving, gratitude which is

the greatest gift, quietest of all,

passes to me through the trees.

~ Wendell Berry

from Leavings

Alex & Me

 

A new study shows the African grey can perform some cognitive tasks

 at levels beyond that of 5-year-old humans. 

The results not only suggest that humans aren’t the only species 

capable of making complex inferences, but also point to flaws

 in a widely used test of animal intelligence. 

The study is described in a November paper published online in Behaviour.

African Grey Parrots

Irene Maxine Pepperberg is an American scientist 

noted for her studies in animal cognition,

 particularly in relation to parrots. 

She has been a professor, researcher and/or lecturer at multiple universities,

 and she is currently an Adjunct Research Professor at Boston University.

Movies: Life with Alex

Education: Harvard University (1976), Massachusetts Institute of Technology

the haunted room

In Ireland there are many stories of haunted houses.  

There may be a room in which one senses a presence 

or hears footsteps or a strange voice.  Such haunted places 

remain uninhabited.  People are afraid to go there. 

 The place is forsaken and left to deepen ever further 

into the shadow of itself.  

 

The way you think about your life can turn your soul into a haunted room. 

 You are afraid to risk going in there anymore.  Your fantasy

 peoples this room of the heart with sad presences, 

 which ultimately become disturbing and sinister. 

 

 The haunted room in the mind installs lonesomeness at the heart of your life.

  It would be devastating in the autumn of your life to look back

 and recognize that you had created a series of haunted rooms

 in your heart.  

 

Fear and negativity are immense forces,

 which constantly tussle with us.  They long to turn the mansions

 of the soul into a totally haunted house.  These are the living conditions

 for which fear and negativity long, and in which they thrive. 

 

 We were sent here to live life to the full.  When you manage to be generous

 in your passion and vulnerability, life always comes to bless you.

  Had you but the courage to acknowledge the haunted inner room,

 turn the key, and enter, you would encounter nothing strange or sinister there. 

 

 You would meet some vital self of yours that you had banished 

during a time of pain or difficulty.  Sometimes, when life squeezes you

 into lonely crevices, you may have to decide between survival or breaking apart.

 At such times, you can be harsh with yourself and settle to be someone

 other than who you really long to be.  At such a time, 

you can do nothing else; you have to survive. 

 

 But your soul always remains faithful to your longing

 to become who you really are.  The banished self from an earlier 

time of life remains within you waiting to be released and integrated. 

 The soul has its own logic of loyalty and concealment.

 

  Ironically, it is usually in its most awkward rooms that the special blessings 

and healing are locked away. 

 

 Your thinking can also freeze and falsify

 the flow of your life’s continuity to make you a prisoner

 of routine and judgement.

~  John O’Donohue, 
from  'Eternal Echoes

clinging

I imagine one of the reasons

 people cling to their hates so stubbornly
is because they sense, once hate is gone, 

they will be forced to deal with pain. 

*

Love takes off the masks

 that we fear we cannot live without 

and know we cannot live within. 

I use the word “love”

 here not merely in the personal sense

 but as a state of being,

 or a state of grace –

  ~ James Baldwin

from The Fire Next Time

art by Jumbo Prior 

from the Museum of  Tropical Queensland

 

some friends in the sea

 

A white whale called NOC began, spontaneously, to make unusual sounds. 

We interpreted the whale’s vocalizations as an attempt to mimic humans. 

Whale vocalizations often sounded as if two people were conversing

 in the distance just out of range for our understanding. 

These ‘conversations’ were heard several times before the whale was identified

 as the source. The whale lived among a group of dolphins and socialized

 with two female white whales. The whale was exposed to speech 

not only from humans at the surface — it was present at times when divers

 used surface-to-diver communication equipment. The whale was recognized

 as the source of the speech-like sounds when a diver surfaced outside

 this whale’s enclosure and asked “Who told me to get out?” 

Our observations led us to conclude the “out” which was repeated 

several times came from NOC.

As soon as NOC was identified as the source of these sounds, 

we recorded his speech-like episodes both in air and underwater.

 Recordings revealed an amplitude rhythm similar to human speech.

 Although there was variation, vocal bursts averaged about three per second .

 The rhythm of vocal bursts also reminded us of human speech.

~ from Current Biology Vol 22 No 20

Belugas are well adapted to life in northern waters. 

They have a thick skin and a deep layer of blubber to keep them warm

 and act as an energy store. This can account for 40% of their weight.

Their stark white colouring also helps camouflage them against the ice.

 Although beluga whales are predators, feeding on fish, crustaceans,

 and molluscs, they are also hunted by polar bears and orcas.

Belugas lack the dorsal fin that stands up from the back of many whales –

 think of orcas' tall, upright fin. These fins help to keep whales upright

 while swimming. But for belugas, which swim close under ice, 

a dorsal fin might have been more of a hindrance. Instead, a dorsal ridge

 down their spine and a rotund body may help them to move through

 the water more easily. Lacking a dorsal fin may also help them keep warm,

 as fins have a large surface areas that can lose heat fast.

When looking at belugas you can't miss their bulbous heads.

 The large fatty sack between their blowhole and upper jaw is known as a melon.

 It helps them focus and project sound, making belugas especially good

 at echolocation - using sound to detect prey and communicate.

the mystery

I am the wind which breathes upon the sea,

I am the wave of the ocean,

I am the murmur of the billows,

I am the ox of the seven combats,

I am the vulture upon the rocks,

I am a beam of the sun,

I am the fairest of plants,

I am the wild boar in valour,

I am the salmon in the water,

I am a lake in the plain,

I am a world of knowledge,

I am the point of the lance of battle,

I am the God who created the fire in the head.

Who is it who throws light into the meeting on the mountain? 

Who announces the ages of the moon?

Who teaches the place where couches the sun?

(if not I)

~ Amairgen 

(chief poet of the Milesians,)

from Anam Cara, by John O'Donohue

This poem is ascribed to Amergin,

 a Milesian prince or druid who settled in Ireland

 hundreds of years before Christ 

and is from the Leabhar Gabhala, 

or Book of Invasions.

"The three short pieces of verse ascribed to Amergin are certainly very ancient

 and very strange. But as the whole story of the Milesian Invasion

 is wrapped in mystery and is quite possibly a rationalized account

 of early Irish mythology no faith can be placed in the alleged date

 or genuineness of Amergin's verses. They are of interest, because

 as Irish tradition has them as being the first verses made in Ireland, 

so it may very well be they actually do present the oldest surviving

 lines of any vernacular tongue in Europe except Greece."

 by Douglas Hyde, The Story of Early Gaelic Literature

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