Revision of earlier post re elephants

This is another version of my post a few hours ago:

There was more news of poachers seizing elephants and scarcely minding whether they were dead before they began gouging their tusks from their faces. On Aug 9, 2011 I thought: If we continue to murder this world we murder our dreams, our future and our souls. Elephants are among the most visible exemplars of our co-inhabitants in our planetary home. Because we can kill them, we think they rank below us in life.

We human beings have rarely "seen" the lives of the infinitely variable non-humans, from microscopic to large. It is typical for each human to spend one hundred per cent of his energy and consciousness in providing for himself. Trillions of volumes, oceans of words collectively and individually spew continually out of our production facilities as we focus on our major goal: to understand ourselves. Alongside that, rare and random thoughts for them, our co-inhabitant non-humans. How strange that we have always thought of them as nothing more than food and use, to be murdered, tamed for work, or imprisoned for "study" and entertainment.

We look outward into space and think the "new" worlds lie there. The true new worlds lie around us, beneath and alongside us. We want to go "into the stars" when we have never except in rare cases traveled "In To" the world in which we live. We kill, label, capture, and experiment upon the other beings alive with us. We have never yet imagined the opportunity for what we could know, for how far we could reach, if we looked at the world of life outside of man as a great and sacred university, larger and deeper than our minds can grasp. There is no entry into that world unless we go there in a different approach than dominion, a different approach than domination.

The richness of knowledge and consciousness that we can learn from them can be described as infinite because we in our limited thoughts are stuck with denigrating and caricaturing them, stuck in our own concept of our "superiority." It is a commonplace in the world of science fiction and most other "fantastical" thought that we humans will "use up" this earth and flee "into the stars," leaving a lifeless toxic planet behind.

Rather than understanding, we will kill it. Nothing except dominion. Question: Will we remain the species we are, all matters solved by bringing death?

In the world of usual human life as it is now lived, the richness in the world we refuse to see can never come to us, the human animal, unless we make such an evolutionary turn as we have never made before. Unless we seek with intention and courage to see how to find pathways to the undiscovered richness of the world of the non-humans, the pathways to a communication that has never existed. Who can say what it would be like if we were able to look with truly new eyes upon them, our co-inhabitants, who share the brief days of life with us? Who can say that therein does not lie the chance we never yet imagined?

Francis Bacon said we should consider all questions in term of the "uses of life." He did not specify or mean "human life." He meant life itself. Life in the greater meaning that we see, if at all, in glimmers flickering from peripheral vision. The microbe, the elephant. We declaim and declare as if our much-vaunted intellects were bullhorns, louder and louder, as if to obliterate any slightest sound from where we have never been. Indeed our intellects are more like half-broken chimes on the porch of an abandoned house. We need to look outward far beyond our human eyes, our human brains, our cultures, to look outward from our bone-bound brains to life, to the parallel lives, to the lives we think of "other" and "below," to life as we have not seen it. There is more than we have ever known, worlds of wonder and wisdom so far away and separated from us by the tangle, crash and noise of egos and cultures that most of us doubt their existence.

We do not need to go there, to the unknown worlds, for sensation or distraction. We need to go there because we are lost.

Elephants Killed for Their Tusks

There was more news of poachers seizing elephants and scarcely minding whether they were dead before they began gouging their tusks from their faces. On Aug 9, 2011 I thought: If we continue to murder this world we murder our dreams, our future and our souls. Elephants are among the most visible exemplars of our co-inhabitants in our planetary home. Because we can kill them, we think they rank below us in life.

We human beings have rarely "seen" the lives of the infinitely variable non-humans, from microscopic to large. It is typical for each human to spend one hundred per cent of his energy and consciousness in providing for himself. Trillions of volumes, oceans of words collectively and individually spew continually out of our production facilities as we focus on our major goal: to understand ourselves. Alongside that, rare and random thoughts for them, our co-inhabitant non-humans. How strange that we have always thought of them as nothing more than food and use, to be murdered, tamed for work, or imprisoned for "study" and entertainment.

We look outward into space and think the "new" worlds lie there. The true new worlds lie around us, beneath and alongside us. We want to go "into the stars" when we have never except in rare cases traveled "In To" the world in which we live. We kill, label, capture, and experiment upon the other beings alive with us. We have never yet imagined the opportunity for what we could know, for how far we could reach, if we looked at the world of life outside of man as a great and sacred university, larger and deeper than our minds can grasp. There is no entry into that world unless we go there in a different approach than dominion, a different approach than domination.

The richness of knowledge and consciousness that we can learn from them can be described as infinite because we in our limited thoughts are stuck with denigrating and caricaturing them, stuck in our own concept of our "superiority." It is a commonplace in the world of science fiction and most other "fantastical" thought that we humans will "use up" this earth and flee "into the stars," leaving a lifeless toxic planet behind.

Rather than understanding, we will kill it. Nothing except dominion. Question: Will we remain the species we are, all matters solved by bringing death?

In the world of usual human life as it is now lived, the richness in the world we refuse to see can never come to us, the human animal, unless we make an evolutionary turn. Unless we can seek with intention and courage to see how to find pathways to the undiscovered richness of the world of the non-humans, the pathways to a communication that has never existed. Who can say what it would be like if we were able to look with truly new eyes upon them, our co-inhabitants, who share the brief days of life with us? Who can say that therein does not lie the chance we never yet imagined?

Francis Bacon said we should consider all questions in term of the "uses of life." He did not specify or mean "human life." He meant life itself. We need to look outward far beyond our human eyes, our human brains, our cultures, to look outward from our bone-bound brains to life, to the other parallel lives, to the lives we think of "other" and "below." Referring to the playwright, there are more things than we have ever known, worlds of wonder and wisdom we have never imagined. We do not need to go there for sensation or distraction. We need to go there because we are lost.