ANIMAL COMMUNION AND THE EMPATHOSPHERE
By Dr. Michael W. Fox
When we are in communion with other animals, we establish a mode of communication that is non-ordinary; not of our everyday mode of consciousness, with its rational, conditioned expectations and preconceptions. It is a non-dualistic state of being-in-awareness where subject-object dissonance and distance in space/time are bridged by the opening of heart and mind. Martin Buber termed this the unified ‘I-Thou’ state of being as distinct from the ‘I-it’ reality of our everyday perception and relation to the reality of being in the presence of other self-conscious and reflective beings.
What other beings reflect, in their health and wellbeing, and in their emotional and physical condition, can touch us profoundly when we are open and receptive. Good animal care-givers and veterinarians are like this, as are all sensitive healers.
As wild animals like the wolf and whale can inspire and inform the human spirit, so the spirit can be crushed by their suffering because of our collective inhumanity and deliberate cruelty and indifference. Brother Matthew Fox once observed that when we empathize deeply with the living world we receive the stigmata of an Earth crucified. For the traditional American Indian healer, these are the wounds of shamanic initiation. To paraphrase Australian aboriginal elder Bill Neidjie, when a tree is dying or being cut down, the people feel it because they are part of the tree.
When we have such deep empathetic intercommunion with other sentient beings, we begin to experience their physical and emotional realms of pleasure and pain, peace and distress, well-being and dis-ease; and know these states and conditions from our own because we have come to know the animals’ ethos or spirit; their natures. We become good ethologists. The late Prof. Konrad Lorenz, Nobel laureate and one of the founders of the science of ethology, the study of animal behavior, asserted that “Before you can really study animal you must first love it”. It is this kind of love, as I emphasized in my book The Boundless Circle: Caring for Creatures and Creation that can open us to the animal kingdom, species by species, and individual by individual.
The burden of empathy can bring on what I call empathic wounds, various stress related disorders associated with coping with empathizing with others’ suffering. This burden may be especially problematic for veterinarians, in which profession the highest suicide rates have been recorded in the UK. An ultimately self-limiting way of coping is to simply tune-out, to become insensitive, even to the point of indifference. Having worked in the animal rights movement for several decades, I can also attest to the toll of caring for animals and striving for humane reforms in a culture built on animal, human, and environmental exploitation and injustice. The slowness of social change and lack of effective humane education and law enforcement eroding the vestiges of hope that once ignited the best crusaders of animal suffrage can lead to despair, depression and debilitating rage when not tempered by the love and concern for the victims of inhumanity that ideally should also embrace the victimizers, the perpetrators of others’ suffering.
The study of empathy and of highly empathic people---empathology---is still very rudimentary in these times where the dominant scientific method, like the dominant medical paradigm, is limited by the objectification and abstractification of the subjective, and by the mechanistic and materialistic reductionism of complex systems and processes, from consciousness to quantum theory.
As I have discussed and shown in my own writings and in various books (such as The Boundless Circle and Dog Body, Dog Mind, also Cat Body, Cat Mind ), animals are consciously linked with what I call the empathosphere. This linkage enables them to communicate at levels and in dimensions that transcend the space/time continuum, their ability being based on their ability to empathize, to feel for others.
As I describe in these two latter books, a typical example of empathosphere awareness is the dog who begins to howl and manifest extreme distress at 10 am, and an hour later a call comes from the hospital to inform that the dog’s beloved owner and man of the house had died at 10 am that morning.
I received the following letter in July, 2009 that confirms the reality of the phenomenon of 'remote sensing' by animals through the empathosphere.
Dear Dr. Fox,
A stray dog we came to call ‘Rags’ came out of nowhere to our home, and after posting signs all over the neighborhood and nobody claimed him, we took him in. He bonded to my older brother who was in the last year of a three-year fight with leukemia. Rags took to him like they were meant for each other. He followed my brother everywhere he could and slept by his side. When my brother was hospitalized, Rags chose to spend most of his time outdoors. Around the time my brother went into a coma at the hospital, rags started howling, something he NEVER did (he had never so much as barked before this night). We could not coax him into the house, and when we returned from the hospital after my brother had died, Rags was never seen again, even though we posted signs everywhere. I’ve always felt he came out of nowhere to be by my brother’s side in his last year, and somehow left him that day.
K.M., Stratford CT
Animals are also good ethologists, knowing often instinctively/intuitively, how to interpret other’s behavior, intentions, and motivational and emotional states. Dogs are especially sensitive to our emotional sates and can become stressed by them, even to the point of developing what I call sympathetic diseases that often mimic those of one family member. This is why, in several cultures, dogs in particular are believed to take on our illnesses, and in some way help protect us. Several studies have shown that animal companions do indeed help heal us both physically and emotionally, be it during recovery from heart surgery, or from depression.
Readers of books detailing people’s conversations with animals may feel that the authors are communicating with animals at a level of intercommunion that arises from or abides within the empathosphere. This is for them to decide “Is it for real?”
Is it for real that there are people who mourn for the Earth, and who suffer the animals to come to them to be healed, made whole? Is it not for real what we feel in the presence of such natural beauty and wonder as the cresting of a school of dolphins at play, a wolf pack singing in the Northern woods, or a herd of elephants rumbling in the rustling jungle? These other beings enjoin us to participate in the celebration of being, and the life of the spirit. The deeper our communion, the greater is the sense of Self in all. We find joy and happiness in other realms beyond this mortal and materialistic plane.
It is within or through the empathosphere that we can document instances of remote sensing, remote healing and the power of prayer. The empathosphere connects us consciously through the physical with the non-physical, spiritual and metaphysical realms of universal reality, where being and non-being are forever embraced.
Harvard biologist Edward Wilson coined the term ‘biophilia’ to identify the natural affinity humans have for nature and fellow creatures. It is a first step toward an ever deepening communion that, as through the vision quest of the American Indian, an important rite of passage for all adolescents, we come to re-define what it means to be human within the broader life community of this living Earth. As Chief Dan George advised, ‘If you talk to the animals they will talk with you and you will know each other. If you do not talk to them, you will not know them, and what you do not know you will fear. What one fears one destroys.’
Louise Vajda of St Louis MO wrote to me about a remarkable dog named Shosty. She states:
“My husband’s parents lived in East Chicago, Indiana. My mother-in-law’s brother, John, lived with them. He was a diabetic. They had a dog named Shosty (short for Shostakovich, the Russian composer).
The brother John became ill and died. Immediately after the funeral, Shosty disappeared. Several days later a friend of the family found the dog, hungry and haggard, lying on John’s grave!
The remarkable and unbelievable part of this story is that the cemetery was many miles outside the city, and Shosty had never been there before. They had no idea how he had been able to find it.
I believe dogs have some special abilities of which we humans are unaware.”
After recently giving a talk in Minnesota about holistic care for companion animals, a woman came up from the audience after my seminar to share the amazing saga of her cat she had when she was a student many years ago. She left the beloved feline with her parents and moved seven miles across the city of Los Angeles into an apartment. Soon after, her parents told her the cat was gone, and to her surprise some days later she found the cat waiting for her outside her apartment where the cat had never ever been before. How the cat survived a journey across that city is a miracle of instinctual prowess in itself. But how the cat knew where to go we may never know. We do know that cats, like other animals, have micro-particles of iron in their brains that can help give them some geomagnetic compass-like directional sense, but what ever emotional sensors they must possess may forever remain part of the great mystery that leads some of us to a deeper faith that others fear or dismiss for lack of any rational explanation. Yet we live that mystery that should move us all to reverence all life, and celebrate the miracle of conscious existence!