animal_spirituality andru235 "you must be kidding" did you read spiritual_evolution ? if spirituality predates language as seems likely, the question arises, when did reincarnation occur to the ancestral humans, and how was it communicated? and since there really is no precedent for sudden leaps from zero to gazillion; see [just about every human development occuring in little, albeit remarkable, but relatively little], one is left to assume that it was acquired (somehow) from what came before it, but we arrived at good ol' chicken and egg. do cats believe in reincarnation? dogs? cows? horses? pandas? apes? pinnipeds? if not, then reincarnation showed up out of the blue in a prehistoric people with no means to communicate it to the next generation. anyone who loves their pet will endlessly defend the idea that their pet has an awareness of sorts and is not merely an animated pile of non-sentience. this is curious, since sentience is a necessary precursor to spirituality and spirituality is a natural outgrowth of sentience. "what about nihilists? they are sentient" and they express the spiritual belief that there is nothing beyond this and it is all a meaningless fluke. their spirituality is the spiritituality of non-spirituality. "you can't actually believe that cats and stuff believe in reincarnation!?!" no? i live with two cats i have known my whole life. i have observed them a lot and played with them, interacted, etc. i have witnessed behavior highly indicative of their awareness that they will sleep, and later wake up. i have witnessed behavior that indicates they are a aware death can happen. it doesn't require a Ph.D. in Marine Biology to connect the concept of waking after sleeping to living after dying. that doesn't make it true, nor false; i'm merely saying that these ideas are not beyond the comprehensive capacity of most mammals. "but you said reincarnation was so complex" no, i said that it was absurd to think that sentient life went from no spirituality at all directly to reincarnation. and it seems equally absurd that some animal came up with that concept out of nowhere, and proceeded to share it with the others. and i seriously doubt that they sat around for millenia discussing the idea. "i suppose now your going to suggest that even fish believe in reincarnation." is that a slam against fish? i lived with fish for a while and they are fascinatingly complex. even the schoolers have unique quirks and interact differently, or as differently as is possible for a human to observe. for a while i have fish in four different tanks spread around the room. on more than one occasion i awoke silently and motionlessly, and when i looked around the fish were all facing directly towards me! this happened many times when i had four fish, but even happened several times when i had fifteen!!!!! humans like to believe that they alone alter their environment, and they are certainly incorrect. one of my betas repeatedly pushed a decorative shell off of its ledge; i had dozens of blue, green, red and yellow plastic crystals in the tank and he would push the red ones to the corner (he was red). when i removed the red ones while preparing to clean the tank, and stepped out of the room, i returned to find him pushing yellow crystals towards the same corner (there were already several there and it had been only minutes!!!) so i dropped the red ones back in and he noticed immediately and once they drifted to the bottom, he resumed pushing them to the corner and i never again saw him push a yellow one. none of the other betas i had did anything like this but one of them was obsessed with a neon tetra, following it everywhere (non aggressively); when i added a second, larger neon tetra he still followed the little one (though the two neons seldom ventured apart). so don't say fish are stupid. "so...fish are stupid" get some fish, and actively develop a relationship with them if you don't believe me. until then you really wouldn't know just how smart they can be! "so next you'll tell me that even -" yes i will. plants, bacteria, fungi, trilobites. all have been observed doing unique things from individual to individual; all species have exhibited at least some level of preference-variation from one to the next. "whatever! like ants know anything!" if you watch ants for a while, you might find otherwise. i've seen ants carrying dead or wounded ants back to the anthill. and being the tree-hugger i am, i've tried to help them more than once! now, why would a 'mindless' ant carry back its own dead in an area with an overabundance of ant-foods and construction materials? SPIRITUALITY. elephants mourn their kin and will travel hundreds - even thousand(s?) - of miles to return to the site where a comrade died. they will mourn, and supposedly they make really loud wailing noises. why would they travel so far out of their wandering to do this if they weren't spiritual? and who can possibly suggest that this behavior came about as a result of one central elephant tribe who thoroughly discussed it and then spread the idea via oral tradition as the generations passed along? there is something innate occuring here, humans; in your self-hate it is easy to deny, for it is an absolution of sorts; it is easy to take on fixed and minimalist views of life, death, and terms-of-afterlife; but it is even easier to just understand what you already know, what you knew when you came but was beaten out of you before you knew it was happening. CHILDREN REMEMBER and so do animals have you ever heard someone who lost a beloved pet, and years later gets another, say "sometimes i just know that it is [insert beloved pets name here]" wishful thinking? perhaps, but these are often accompanied by similar traits, as i observed in the case of a friend who lost a beloved dog, got another dog, and then got a cat and the cat behaves so similarily to the dog it is astounding. the cat even seemed to know me when i met it, greeting me and hanging around but avoiding someone else who had entered my friend's life after the first dog passed on. its easy to dismiss one instance, and another, but after a while the evidence piles up. how much dismissing can one do before one enters into ignorance? 050418 what's it to you? who go blather from