The great delusion

Tuesday 16th March

Objects may not be living and breathing beings like us but perhaps their purpose is to reflect what a being IS; it’s as if they ‘respond’ to our feelings for them, as if they ‘read’ our feelings? Maybe this is twaddle, but you must admit that somehow objects do respond to our attitude to them; probably the planet is changing its climate in response to our profligate use of fossil fuels. More constructively, a flautist possesses a flute and the flute takes on the status of ‘a treasured possession’ and the flute becomes a living being almost. It takes on a symbiotic relationship with its player. Whatever we call it, there’s something very nice here. Isn’t it everyone’s dream to lose themselves in a relationship, to love something or someone, in a symbiotic pact of intimacy? In his attic the flautist reaches for the flute, it being the inspiration for making fine music.
But all this symbiosis and closeness isn’t necessarily the complete answer to life. For that we need more than one flute, we need many flutes; we need to ‘symbios-ise’ with several elements in our life. We need to address perhaps a vast array of dysfunctional, inherited attitudes (which are far from producing any mutual benefits). The most damaging of these is the way we use animals. Here’s a classic example of delusion, a belief in the safety of having a ‘non-relationship’. It always ends in tears.
Our contact with certain animals, our cruelty towards them, is of mutual disadvantage. It starts out badly and ends up badly. Humans and animals – we’re deluded enough to think we’ve discovered a bargain, where it’s all advantage on our side with no chance of any disadvantage. Later, too late usually, we find things don’t work out quite as we thought they would. Here we have a lop sided situation, the too strong against the too weak, the destabilising element that is made so by the determination of human intellect hungry for advantage. In this case of humans using and abusing animals we have the ultimately ugly act of enslaving, killing and consuming with a disadvantage which creeps up slowly and strikes us down when we’re not looking. It comes in two forms, shame and illness, and which does the striking-down is unimportant - vegans suggest avoiding the whole messy involvement with non-relationships. That’s a conceptual framework we just don’t need any longer. Why try getting away with adding to so much imbalance when you don’t have to?