Robert Thurman: Animal Spirituality
SANDIE SEDGBEER: I have read that Buddhists believe that we could be reborn as an animal, but it’s usually considered to be an unhappy rebirth. Why would that be unhappy? If we regard animals as equals to us why would anyone be unhappy about being reborn as one?
ROBERT THURMAN: It would be foolish to be reborn as an animal because an animal can’t speak, but unfortunately some humans get debased. They debase themselves. They live too much as a predator of themselves. They might idealize panthers and tigers and things and then, if they die violently, say in war or something like that, and therefore they die in a state of heightened aggression and fear they might be attracted to a life form that was more like a crystallization of hostility and fear; like a tiger or lion or a crocodile or reptile of some kind.
One of the reasons human beings are great is that humans can shift their sense of identification. We’re not stuck with identifying ourselves in this or that way. Human beings behave horribly within mobs, because they subtly identify with the mob, and they lose their normal individual self-restraint in certain ways. We identify with others in love situations. We identify with the beloved. We identify with the child in birth situations, in parental situations, or with a nation or religion. A human being can expand this sense of identification, and if they became paranoid and freaked out about others, they will become a more aggressive animal.
SANDIE SEDGBEER: Have you ever felt that deep sense of recognition or connection with a dog that Elena Mannes writes about in Soul Dog?
ROBERT THURMAN: Yes, I certainly have. We have two Pekinese dogs, and I do feel that sense of connection with one of them, Ashley. We had Tibetan dogs over the years, and I think there was one dog who took rebirth two or three times and somehow arranged to be in the right store, in the right place, in the right household to be adopted by us. It was the same dog, we think so, both of us. In our 51 years of marriage, we’ve had maybe 10 or 11 dogs. My wife and I had a wonderful dog. It was originally her dog, and she brought us together. She went out and found me in a group and dragged me off to meet my wife and that was a major thing with us, and then she unusually left us. We still don’t know for sure what it was, but she somehow disappeared, and we conceived our first child shortly after that. It was very interesting. So, we had a profound relationship with her. Since I met my wife, we have always had dogs. Dogs and kids, we would always mix them up.
SANDIE SEDGBEER: Elena Mannes says that as a result of her experience she came to believe without a shadow of a doubt that inter-species communication is possible. Do you share that belief?
ROBERT THURMAN: Yes, I think that’s possible. There are many stories.
The Buddha taught many what are called Jataka tales, or formalized tales, where he’s always some remarkable animal, like the king of the monkeys, or the deer, or the king of the turtles. Just like a Walt Disney Old Yeller or Lassie type of story, but where the Buddha is the Lassie figure doing kind things and helping people and sometimes wild animals, too. In India, there are many stories of movement between different species, and that different species can communicate with the human species. Moreover, there are many accounts, even in modern times, of great Indian Yogis who live in the mountains, and snakes won’t bite them, tigers are peaceful and sit around and won’t attack them in the jungle there because they have such a strong, friendly vibration and their energy is so good they are never molested by even the fiercest animals.
I think anyone like jockeys or animal trainers who work in zoos, horsemen, and cowboys, and so on, get a sense of communing with their animals. Of course, in our culture, you have all those prejudices against telepathy and clairvoyance. We think that’s weird. We have to watch TV, or we want to look at our iPhone, and we think that any kind of intelligence or sensitivity is supernatural and, therefore, woo-woo. It’s not supernatural; it’s just supernormal. People get messages from each other all the time. People know when somebody’s died 500 miles away. It’s just normal, but it’s not acceptable. It challenges the orthodoxy, which is nothing but an anti-religious orthodoxy that everything is material, and since we don’t count the mind as the material it can’t exist; it doesn’t matter. That’s dogma. It’s not scientific. Science is supposed to make hypotheses and look at the evidence. It’s not supposed to be dogmatic and make a rule that is more important than experience. Science is experience first and theory second, but not those materialists, they’re theory first and experience second. So, they won’t pay any attention to however much experience you have.
SANDIE SEDGBEER: The Dalai Lama ordained you as a Buddhist monk in 1965, and you’re still close friends with him. You’ve said that he is the most practical leader of world leaders with principles that must be heeded by them to avert the worst outcomes of our present global crisis. Realistically, what hope do you have that the current world leaders will heed what the Dalai Lama has to say and what we can learn from him?
ROBERT THURMAN: Realistically what I think is that people are sick of most of these lunatic leaders and the leaders have not caught up with the sensibility of the people. Facebook is now, what, 2.7 billion or something? People kind of know everything about each other, but the leaders are still operating in a militaristic, domination game that they play. You know Mr. Putin, and the KGB’s still there making problems, like with Assad, and now they’re not even hiding behind any facade of serving any people. They’re just ordering them around, and people en masse are getting killed, so I think the old-fashioned, male-dominated, militaristic last few thousand years is coming to an end and it cannot go on any longer like this. It’s propped up by the Petroleum Industry with trillions of dollars going into it every year, burning fossil fuels that are then wrecking the life base that life is produced by, and the people in control of that pretend that nobody notices, so they’re reckless. They say they care about their children, but their actions belie what they say. So, the point is that people are fed up with it.
There’s a young, 15-year-old Swedish, a girl who is suing the older generation in her country for not changing radically and drastically the way in which they’re living and wrecking the planet for the future when the young girl’s children will be living in a polluted, toxic world. So, I think that the two trends, which are greed and hatred, greed and aggression, blown up to a level of militarism and consumerism are just unsustainable. The leadership is still charging ahead in those directions, and people are feeling betrayed by those leaders. The leaders are being more and more autocratic and shooting people, destroying or imprisoning them, and brainwashing them with fake propaganda like Fox News and other such outlets like that. However, it can’t go on like this.
So, what’s unrealistic to me is the idea that it will go on – that the 21st century will be like the 20th century with a bunch of warmongers running around and driving everything off a cliff. So, democracies are not working. We have a lunatic in the United States. Brexit is ridiculous, in England. The nonsense that they’re going to fix it or they’re going to try without cutting off the connection with the rest of the world, is ridiculous. What’s realistic is that this is the only planet we have. Non-violence is where we’re going. We dialogue it out when we have conflict. We talk it through. We don’t kill each other. We don’t need excess, objects, and we don’t need to keep reproducing the same car, again and again, every year. We can drive one quietly, maybe electric, or we can hire a horse. In other words, we can live at a minimal level. We’re not going to go back to living in tents or caves, of course not. We’re going to live at a middle level and come to a kind of reasonable way of managing the materials of the world. The more spiritual kind of scientist is totally into the fact that the planet is manageable if the leadership would behave, and would listen to facts and science. Buckminster Fuller once said, “Send all the politicians to Mars and leave the engineers till I figure out how I can make everything properly,” which can be done. So, this whole money and military game business is just ridiculous and unrealistic, and human beings are going to move against it, but peacefully. I’m not predicting more violent revolutions, because they don’t work. When people get to the top with more violence, they do more violence when they’re on the top.
The women’s revolution is really important, here, because women are the ones who know when the dog is hungry, and the cat needs to be let out. The women know that you can talk things through. They deal with the Father and Son battles, the Brother and Brother battles in the household, and they try to calm them down. They often get caught in the middle. They know about connection. They release Oxytocin in a crisis, not Cortisol. They make connections with people and see things from another perspective more easily than the men who want to charge ahead and break the wall down or something. So, this is necessary.
** Photo of Robert Thurman with The Dalai Lama credit of TIBET HOUSE
