宠物之殇

Animals do not 'think' of long lives or short lives, but of a brilliant present, which in a way, compared to your framework, has no beginning or end . . . time, in your terms, does not exist for them — and in the deepest of terms, a life's quality on a human scale cannot be judged primarily in terms of its length, either.

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Time was in the present to the cat... in a way its life was eternal to it, whether it lived 10 months or 10 years, or whatever.

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My dear friends: Existence is larger than life or death. Life and death are both states of existence. An identity exists whether it is in the state of life or in the state of death. Your cat's consciousness never was dependent upon its physical form. Instead, the consciousness was itself choosing the experience of cathood. There was nothing that said: 'This consciousness must be a cat.'

Billy belonged in another probability, and in a fashion you switched probabilities for him, though without his consent, when you took him from the animal shelter, where he would have soon been 'done away with.' His three years with you represented a grace period for him. . . . He did not make this probability his own because of what you may call 'other commitments' — or rather, other purposes.

There is no such thing as a cat consciousness, basically speaking, or a bird consciousness. In those terms, there are instead simply consciousnesses that choose to take certain focuses. We have not touched upon some of these matters, and some are, again, most difficult to explain, as we wish to avoid distortions. These would have nothing to do with Ruburtper se, but simply the way you put concepts together at this stage of development.

I want to avoid tales of the transmigration of the souls of men to animals, say — a badly distorted version of something else entirely. If there is no consciousness 'tailored' to be a cat's or a dog's, then there is no prepackaged, predestined, particular consciousness that is meant to be human, either . . .

You both knew Billy was about to die. So did the plants in your house, and the trees outside your door. The cellular announcement was made that the strong possibility existed, for the birth and death of each cell is known to all cells in the world. . . .

Cellular communication is too fast for you to follow. The cat could have changed its mind, of course, but the signals were sent out, and ahead of time. [Several people who wrote to you] picked up on that probability. . . .（With some amazement Jane and I had noticed this in letters we received — from both friends and strangers — during the days immediately following Billy's death.）

The quality of identity is far more mysterious than you understand, for you assign an identity in a blanket fashion, say, to each living thing. Now your dead cat, Billy, exists in the following manner:

The units of consciousness that organized to form his identity as you knew it, still form that pattern — but not physically. The cat exists as itself in the greater living memory of its own 'larger' selfhood. Its organization — the cat's — exists inviolately, but as a part of the greater psychic organization from which it came.

That identity of Billy's remains vital, known to itself whether or not it is reactivated in your terms. This is not necessarily always the case — and there is great variation — but Billy identified with 'the larger organization' of the litter [that is, with his brothers and sisters, all of whom are also dead], and the consciousnesses of that litter are now together. They are forming a gestalt, where the five consciousnesses will merge to form a new identity.