The Spiritual Evolution of Animals - Stuart Wilde

Have you wondered if an animal has a soul and an even afterlife? My old teacher said that animals have group souls, one for each species or subspecies - akin to Jung’s idea of a collective subconscious for humans. My teacher also said that when a human comes into contact with an animal no matter how minimal that contact might be, it begins the formation of an individual soul for that animal.

The animal exits the group-soul of its species to begin an individual soul of its own with its own journey and personality and experiences, which are part of its animal nature and part human as it interacts in day-to-day activities with its master or mistress. So by loving your family pet you create a soul for it. My teacher didn’t say what precisely happened to the animal’s soul once ya beloved pooch carks it for the great dog-box in the sky.

The Bible says you can kill and eat anything. The men who wrote the Bible didn’t know about the human heart or the circulation of blood, in fact they knew very little about anything, and the writers of Old Testament knew absolutely nothing about being nice to others, never mind animals. They were busy smiting the Philistines and stuff like that. They lived in a masculine, survivalist’s world of cruel, violent, self-obsessed people, so it is not surprising they didn’t respect animals.

We tend to think animals are lower than us, but all the scientists in the world couldn’t design and operate a bumblebee’s wing. We can’t jump or run very fast, and we can’t carry vast weights like an ant can. We can’t see in the dark and we can’t fly except crammed in a noisy tube like sardines, which doesn’t count. Humans compared to animals are almost totally deaf, and we can’t smell a fart in an elevator by their standards.

We are finite and separate, and neurotic, while the consciousness of an animal is at peace and eternal. We strive and go crazy to become more important, animals rest and sleep and enjoy the company of each other. We think we have evolved upwards from animals but we have lost almost of their qualities and abilities.

We can make a bomb or carve a statue but it’s a statue to our importance, a power trip, none of it serves any real purpose. How do we know we have evolved upwards? If you judge us by warmth and kindness and inclusion, we are even more cruel and separatist than the people of Biblical times, who at least smote others in tribal units.

Animals usually live in collectives, we live in the suburbs.

We think animals don’t talk or communicate but that is just because we have become deaf listening to our own voice? My cat could talk. It had twelve distinct sounds, words it used and two dozen intonations of those sounds. When I opened the front door for it in the pissin’ rain at three in the morning, it had a two syllable, ‘thank-you’ type meow that had a ‘sorry’ intonation to it. If I opened the door in mid-afternoon the two syllables were still the same but the intonation was different. The cat could talk.

The cat got sick. The vet said it wouldn’t last long and that for forty quid we could murder it, “You’ll save that in cat food over time,” she said, hoping for some quick money. The cat looked at me and meowed a meow of distress; I quickly declined the vet’s offer. The cat lived another fifteen months and died peacefully in the garden under our favorite tree.

The idea animals don’t have consciousness or that they don’t have a soul is rather crass. It shows a lack of consciousness. They talk, they have families, they feel things, they act individually or together to solve problems, they often care of their young as a tribal unit. They play, they travel, and they medicate themselves when they get sick. They cry when others in the herd die, they know about us humans. Of course they have a soul, a very pristine one. We humans are only now attempting with the recent rise in consciousness to achieve the soul that animals have naturally.

The consciousness of an animal is eternal because it lives outside an awareness of time, floating in a perpetual now, while a human’s consciousness is finite and in the awareness of time. Some humans believe in eternity but their eternity is elitist and self-aggrandizing, it has only a diffused, hazy outline to it, not much at all, for in truth our human soul small and inconsequential.

A human is judged by how he or she treats others not by what they have acquired or what accolades they got in this life. And societies are also by judged in part on how they treat animals. Those societies that treat animals poorly have no long-term spiritual future. In the eternity of things, their mistreatment is indicative of their national-soul that is devolving to become ever more ghoulish.

You don’t need to kill animals to survive and if you had to butcher the family pig for breakfast you’d think twice about bacon. Because you don’t see the misery and the sacrifice involved one becomes insensitive to an animal’s pain - it’s terrible sense of loss of companionship when you kill it. Not to mention the betrayal and the futile waste.

Of course, animals have a soul and the fact they have no voice that we understand is like saying the men of the Kalahari are not human because their language includes a series of strange clicking sounds, or the Kogis are stupid because they sometimes speak silently.

For a grown human to be spiritually beautiful he or she has to work hard to become that, and sustaining that spiritual beauty for any length of time is hard for we fall off balance very easily, yet nature is effortless in its effervescence and its beauty, it make no exertion to be god-like, it is god in a Taoist way of things.

Are there animals in the afterlife? Yes? Are all the species represented? As said, I don’t know. I think so. All the animals that have been loved by us are in there, I imagine. Is it a crime to eat an animal? I’d say it is not, not in the normal sense of the word, we are excused by our lack of awareness. But it is sad, for it involves sacrifice and pain and you ingest that pain; it becomes yours. You can never hide what it says about you as a spiritual being. The bodies of those animals are all there, in the X-ray of your soul in their entirety, feathers, bones, fur, whatever, like Post-it notes that talk to God about who you are - how little you are.

Where it is may be a crime to kill animals is when you see those people that are behemoths of lard, three hundred pounds or more in weight, waddling through the parking lot at McDonalds. They are an affront to the godliness of the nature spirit and all things decent, for thousands of animals have gone down those podgy gullets for no reason at all. The people aren’t aware, they are comatose, but it doesn’t mean it’s right. And of course, being cruel to animals, like cosmetic companies are in their testing of products is also an affront, remember animals can think and hear. They know who you are, even if you are the smiling killer lulling them into a false sense of security.

I’ve wondered if animals take vengeance against humans once we arrive in the after life, I don’t know, maybe not. There is a new world descending upon ours, one that is soft and feminine and caring, and that caring will be extended to the animal kingdoms over time. I am almost sure of that.

When it's all over there will be very few humans here on earth the animals will inherit this world. It was always theirs, wasn’t it? As far as I can tell.