(Original post: Je človek iba zviera?)
I love animals.
Dogs wagging their tails so happily their entire body bends right and left. Does, watching me motionlessly from a distance, only to jump off in between trees with their distinctive bark. Leopards posing royally on a tree branch with a zen-master calm. Round-eyed squirrels moving up a tree with lightning speed and caffeine high.
Every animal is fascinating for what it is. An ant is always going to be a 100% ant, eagle 100% eagle, sloth 100% sloth. They will never pretend to be something they're not, and they will never be nervous or anxious when somebody is watching them. They live in harmony with nature and what they are. You can pick any animal – it will always be a unique while at the same time a primary specimen of its kind. They are part of nature in the fullest sense of meaning; their whole behavior is self-evident and natural.
People, on the other hand, are way more complicated. There is no easy way to describe us. Maybe that's why we stray so much when we try to find our own identity. We're calling ourselves „intelligent animals“, as is the trend of our times, but is that really so?
It never occurred to people in the past to liken themselves to animals; common sense could instantly see the massive difference between us and them (behavior, relationships, way of life). The breakthrough came with the advent of evolutionary theory that should have provided the definitive proof of our origin in apes. Really bizarre, because the entire evolution of humans is one enormous act of differentiation from animals if we think about it.
The fact that we are subject to evolution is not so much a sign of us being animals but rather an attribute of how creation works. Development and maturation, external and internal, are some of its laws, even its meanings.
Differences between humans and animals are apparent from the very beginnig. Evolution, in general, is a process of natural selection and particularly adaptation to environmental conditions. But when it comes to humans, this process of adaptation goes mainly the other way – they shape their environment according to themselves, for better or for worse, although they should never be in disharmony with nature.
To say that human is only an intelligent animal is equally as erroneous as to say that animal is just a „stupid“ human. Something is „not right“ about both of those statements. Sure, we have some features in common when it comes to our biology; needs such as food intake which we have to meet for our bodies to survive in the material world. However, we cannot base our identity on our bodies. Life and Identity take place on the inside, and the result of that manifests itself on the outside.
Because unlike an animal, a human is a spiritual being. The spirit is his innermost essence; the animal only has an animal soul. Human IS spirit. He only dresses the body like a coat while being incarnated into the material world.
We can say that we are the people of science, therefore the study of the inner life of human beings is not relevant to us. Science originates from intellect and that originates from matter, therefore since science is using solely intellect for its research, it cannot go beyond the matter. All that is intangible basically doesn't exist for science; it denies it vehemently or at least doubts it. How can spirituality be researched and measured? However, if we want to see differences between humans and animals and understand our essence, we must explore the inner workings of human beings, go beyond the physical, and understand once and for all, that spiritual and the material do not exist separately but are inextricably linked and interact with each other.
The most significant difference between the spiritual and non-spiritual creature – that is between human and animal – is that human has free will. He is „burdened“ by everyday decisions. Even things he does more or less automatically, like going to work, are the result of a conscious decision, and he practically still decides on it subconsciously every day. He must constantly want something to progress forward, something to believe in, and something to reach for. He is able to judge.
The animal, on the other hand, is a creature of instinct. Its driving force is the primary instincts of how to survive, to fill the stomach, and to reproduce. An animal cannot judge what is right and what is wrong or whether its behavior is seen as good in the eyes of others. It does not feel pity for the prey it has caught and is going to consume. With its instinctive behavior, it incorporates itself automatically to the creation in a way that is harmonious and not harmful, but on the contrary beneficial. Even if something in its behavior might seem „wrong“ at first glance, and we feel the need to correct it, it is still beneficial to the environment from a broader perspective.
For example, if you put a lion to a running antelope, it would try to catch it, even if it had a full stomach at that moment. It would hunt it and leave it uneaten because the lion was not hungry at that moment. It does not mean, however, that lions are insidious and evil creatures that need to be eradicated from Earth like a vermin. Their instincts to hunt and to eat function separately; when they see a running animal, they will attempt to hunt it, they can't help it; their instinct to hunt is often triggered by the rapid movement of potential prey. Besides, nothing in nature goes to waste, and possible „carnage“ of antelopes they would leave behind will be a welcome food for jackals and hyenas.
Imagine that a human would behave this way. After all, he is „only“ an animal too and is following his hunting instinct, so he goes trigger happy and ten antelopes are down right away. Such behavior would be condemned by society as despicable and wrong.
Unlike an animal, a human can help it; as a spiritual being, he can judge and reflect, and consciously decide. Any enslavement to the instinct is painfully unworthy of a beautiful spiritual creature as a human being and below his level.
It is also important to add that free will and self-awareness are not attributes of high intelligence. There are many amazingly intelligent animals (elephants, monkeys, dolphins) and the ability of self-realizing and judging will not appear out of nowhere when the animal reaches a certain level of intelligence (no matter what the movies about Planet of the Apes tell us). It is truly a sign exclusively spiritual that is or is not in living being from the beginning.
Another crucial feature of spiritual being is the ability to create. This ability goes far beyond the normal framework of understanding creativity. Creativity in art, or inventiveness in the field of science is only a small part of it. It means to understand that human constantly influences his surroundings, his behavior, and his body with his spirit at any given moment, whether he realizes it or not. Just as long-term stress can cause chronic abdominal pain, the spirit affects his body in a much broader sense. The spirit creates the body.
To this day, it is a mystery to science why at a certain stage of development a certain species of apes „suddenly“ descended from trees, and gradually adapted relatively disadvantageous evolutionary elements such as the disappearance of hair (very impractical in cold weather), straightened up posture (movement on two legs instead of four slowed them down considerably - both when hunting and when escaping, and also made them much more visible), etc. They also began to use tools and to create. Could this not simply mean that when the apes reached the highest stage of body development, human spiritual sparks longing for evolution were incarnated to the bodies of apes for the first time instead of animal souls? That is why the "apes" began to behave differently, thus gradually influencing the development of the body, which further elevated its appearance and functionality. Many of the mysteries of our evolution would be explained very easily this way. The concept of spirituality should be officially accepted by science because it has directly affected our evolution, and on a daily basis affects our biology and even the level of our intelligence.
So, in fact, we didn't evolve from apes. We just borrowed their coat, and gradually re-sewed and remodeled it. They are not our ancestors; if we give someone a coat, that's not gonna make relatives out of us...
We look for identity on the outside, instead of going deep within. We ask our intellect who we are, but can it answer us? Our brain, in all its amazingness, is a computer that only processes the information we fed it before. We feed it mainly through teaching, observation, and experiments, and we try to draw some conclusions from that, but such knowledge will always be fragmentary and incomplete. It cannot give us anything new. Only the spirit can do that. Spirit is able to create and receive inspiration, is capable of overview and complex perspective because it does not come from matter, unlike the brain (and intellect connected to it). Therefore, all of the art that is truly beautiful, but also all the new scientific discoveries, come from the spirit and its inspiration.
Let us not fall into the trap of false modesty when we say that we are "only" intelligent animals because the term "crown of creation" sounds so haughty, doesn't it? As if we were superior to animals. We also share the planet with animals, and not rule it destructively.
But false modesty will not benefit us, neither the planet nor the animals around us, it will have no positive environmental effects. Quite the contrary. By claiming to be animals, we are descending, we are narrowing our potential to a minimum, and we are essentially seeking excuses for the lowest that is within us to silence our conscience once and for all. As a result, we descend and burden ourselves even more. It means our own destruction. We will not stand properly in creation, we will not fulfill our function, we will not elevate it and take care of it correctly. We will diminish, tie our own wings, and return to all fours. We will become useless in creation. And we know what evolution does with everything that is useless...
Let us also not fall into the trap of pride. Being spiritual does not mean being superior, it does not mean that animals are not "good enough" or that we can do whatever we want with them; it means we are of a different kind. Animals are not of a spiritual kind, they have only an animal soul, therefore they can express emotions such as anger or joy; they can even have unique personality traits – that originates from the soul (humans also possess a soul), but nothing more.
Humans stand hierarchically above animals, but that only means all the more responsibility; a responsibility that comes with that wonderful, wondrous gift of free will. Our "burden" of free will, and conscious decisions we can direct in a certain way, means responsibility for the whole of creation animals don't even dream of. A responsibility we cannot escape. Cunning and making excuses won't help. Responsibility of nations and individuals. We are called masters of creation because our ability to create has the potential to elevate this creation to unknown possibilities; something that instinct-based animals cannot do.
Let us be who we are - spiritual beings; it is the answer to all the questions and problems of our lives. If we deem ourselves to be animals, we are actually descending below the status of animals, because, unlike us, they are 100% what they should be.
A human being is NOT an animal. May it be written into our souls forever.
© Ludmila
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