Saving Animals from Ourselves by Andrew Harvey & Carolyn Baker

Author:Andrew Harvey & Carolyn Baker [Harvey, Andrew & Baker, Carolyn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781532074509
Publisher: iUniverse
Published: 2019-05-07T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 3

Preparing The Ground of Initiation

Our alienation from animals and nature kills our hearts, and we don’t even realize how numb we’ve become until we witness the beauty of nature and the wonder of life; something as simple as a squirrel performing acrobatics as she runs across a telephone wire, a bird alighting on a tree limb and singing a beautiful melody, a bee circling a flower, or a child reveling at a line of ants crossing a hiking trail.

— Marc Bekoff, The Animal Manifesto92

In the last chapter we offered a portion of the vision that is needed in order for us to surrender to the initiation and transform ourselves enough to live an embodied, divine life. We need to open to the most amazing possibility, one that has been hidden in the depths of many mystical traditions, but now has to be made conscious and pursued with the whole of our being. This possibility is simply that our destiny is to live in the transfigured self—a divine self that, like the Divine itself, is utterly transcendent and utterly immanent and active in lucid, wise compassion on every level. To arrive at such a vision, which is the essential vision of Jesus, of the prophet Mohammed, and of the extraordinary evolutionary mystics named above, three things are necessary.

1) We must unlearn our addiction to transcendence as a way of escaping the mess and torment of reality. We are not transformed by spiritually bypassing heartbreak, but rather, by allowing heartbreak to alchemically transmute the lead of our apathy, narcissism, entitlement, and arrogance into the gold of naked, shameless, audacious love and compassionate commitment to alleviating the suffering of all living beings.

2) We must abandon our fantasy of the uniqueness of human consciousness. For example, while an octopus is presently incapable of taking an intelligence test designed by and for humans, its awareness is complex and astonishing, and when we humbly contemplate it, we will quite naturally stand in awe.

3) We must unlearn all the religious, social, and cultural messages that have driven us to be dissociated from and repulsed by our physical and animal nature, so that the tremendous love and energy stored in them can permeate our full being.

The clearest and richest, most realistic path that has been opened up to us in many mystical systems, notably the Christian and alchemical and Sufi traditions, has essentially three stages in the journey to the full embodiment of our divinity:

~In the first stage, we need for the sake of our evolution to learn slowly how to separate ourselves from our spiritual, emotional, and physical ego-self so as to open more and more to the Light of the divine Self. This requires intense meditation, prayer, and mystical practice and the view that the greatest mystics have given us of being a hologram of the complete Divine—a drop in an infinite ocean of light, connected to the source of the ocean’s power and to every other pulsing drop. This stage ends with an unmistakable experience of the Light as the ground of reality and the presence and force living in and as everything.

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