Anam Cara

Suffering in the Animal Kingdom

There are different forms of suffering. There is also much suffering in the world that humans are too unrefined to carry. This is where our more ancient sisters and brothers, the animals, come in to carry part of the world’s pain. This pain for which our minds are as yet too coarse. Sometimes when you look into an animal’s face, you see great pain. This is not pain brought about by the consciousness negatively targeting itself. Animal consciousness is more lyrical and free. An animal does not burden itself in the way a human can.

Many of our burdens are false. Animals do not spend years inventing and constructing burdens for themselves. You do not walk into a field and encounter a cow who is seriously self-analysing and in deep turmoil, because she is failing to connect with her inner calf! It is highly improbable that you will ever meet a cow who is seriously swamped by the fact that her project of self-improvement has unleashed this huge ancestral cow thing in her life, and now she can hardly walk because she knows she is carrying all the cow karma of her ancestry! Neither will you find a cow who is fatally depressed because she has discovered that on the night she was born the astrological structure of her destiny was negatively set, and she is just reluctantly grazing in the sweet grass knowing that soon the very fields will rise up against her! As far as we know, cows are not burdened in this manner by ultimate questions. Nevertheless, you often encounter such loneliness in animal presence; animals seem to receive it from elsewhere. It belongs somehow to the intimate pain of the world. An animal’s face can often be an icon of profound lonesomeness. It is said that Nietzsche, before one of his major breakdowns, was walking down a street in Turin. Coming up the street in the opposite direction was a horse and cart. He looked deeply into the horse’s face and went up and put his arms around its neck and embraced it. The sadness in the old horse’s face was a perfect mirror of his own torture. Every form of life participates in the light of soul and also in the darkness of suffering. A kind of voluntary kinship is made possible through suffering.