“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
William Shakespeare
“Hamlet, Prince of Denmark”
I once had a best friend named Lexi. Lexi’s father was a German shepherd, and her mother was a Siberian husky. Lexi was intelligent, precocious, independent, stubbornly focused upon her own private agenda. Lexi resembled a gray wolf. Children would ask whenever I took her for a walk if she was a wolf. Lexi was a bicolor, with one blue and one brown eye. Those were not all of Lexi’s remarkable traits, however. Lexi possessed extrasensory perception.
I learned early on in our friendship that Lexi could not accompany me on my frequent sojourns into a nearby state forest. Snuffling about in the leaf cover triggered an allergy attack that would keep her up coughing and sneezing all night. And so, over the years, I drove the 25 miles or so to the forest and spent the day or the night there dogless. Nevertheless, at whatever time I began my hike back to civilization, Lexi would take up a position by the front door and wait, sentry-like, until I drove into the driveway. I often began my return trip in the early morning, after an all-night campout, frequently late at night after spending long hours solo around a friendly camper, sometimes in the middle of the afternoon. Regardless of the time, Lexi always knew when I was on my way home.
Lexi could not have identified the sound of my engine, not from such a distance. Often as not, I rode home with one of my backpacking companions. There was no way anyone at home could have known of my departure. I did not call home on a cell phone to tell anyone that I was on my way. I would never contaminate the wilderness with a cell phone.
British biologist Dr. Rupert Sheldrake believes he may have found an answer to such phenomena with his research into morphic resonance. Sheldrake concludes from his experiments that memory is inherent in nature, that natural systems inherit a collective memory from all previous members of their species. More pertinent to the mystery of Lexi’s behavior is Sheldrake’s theory that morphic resonance accounts for telepathic communication between species.
Sheldrake’s credentials are impressive. He earned his Ph.D. in biochemistry from Cambridge University, has been a Harvard scholar, a Royal Society researcher and a plant physiologist with India’s International Crops Research for the Semi-Arid Tropics.
Still, his conclusions have been vehemently rejected by mainstream science as pseudoscience. This is not surprising, given that modern industrial science remains in thrall to the Cartesian mindset, possessing a vested interest in the presumption that all creatures other than man are merely machines incapable of any thought or feeling, collections of patterns of stimulus and response and beneath consideration from any humane standpoint. The Cartesian system has led to all sorts of horrors.
As an example, I received in the mail today a plea for donations from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals exposing, yet again, the horrors that are all too often routine in some scientific laboratories. The experiments of two researchers are emphasized. Elizabeth Murray of the National Institute of Health inflects damage on monkeys’ brains, isolates the unfortunate creatures, and then proceeds to terrify them with rubber spiders and snakes. Meanwhile, Harvard researcher Margaret Livingston stitches the eyelids of baby monkeys open, forces goggles over their heads and proceeds to torture them with ceaseless strobe lights while electrodes planted into their brains measures the degree of damage she has inflicted.
The stuff of which nightmares are made. How vast is the leap from Murray and Livingston to Josef Mengele?
It would seem there is much yet that we do not know about our fellow creatures. Echolocation among bats fostered numerous superstitions until modern science uncovered the reality.
Perhaps even more mystifying are the accounts of some dogs and cats navigating solo long distances across unfamiliar landscapes in order to return to their homes and human families. The great sensitivity of cats to electromagnetic fields may help in our understanding. While many such accounts are anecdotal, the anecdotes are difficult to dismiss.
In his recent book Mind: A Journey to The Heart of Being, scientist Dan Siegel suggests that the mind is not confined to the brain or body but extends beyond the physical self. Perhaps his views have some relevance to incidents of animal ESP. Perhaps “mind” is not limited to humans.
In his classic memoir The Outermost House, Henry Beston suggests, “We need another and a wiser and perhaps more mystical concept of animals.” Perhaps “all creatures great and small” possess a wisdom beyond words, insights beyond reason, that we humans are unaware of or that we have somehow lost over the millennia.
Such a view, standing in contradiction to the purely materialistic attitude toward living things epitomized by the Cartesian mindset, provides more energy for me, a theist, to lean toward the panentheism (NOT pantheism) of 14th century contemplative Meister Eckhart of Hochheim. Eckert argues that God is in all things, and all things are in God. If correct, it would seem that the proper attitude of man would be to approach the natural world with a sense of reverence, that our advanced powers of reason demand not greater opportunity for rapacity and consumption but a greater ethic of responsibility.
The German botanist Peter Wohlleben in his book The Hidden Life of Trees proposes that even trees communicate among one another, support one another, share with those less fortunate and warn one another of approaching danger. In the end, such ideas may prove to exist not in the realm of superstition or New Age fuzziness but of sound science.
I used to ask Lexi about that sort of thing, but all I received in return was a self-satisfied silence that spoke louder than any human words as she curled up on her favorite sofa and fell soundly asleep.
My enthusiasms include fly fishing, natural history and wilderness backpacking. In 1996, I published privately a memoir, Trails of Laughter/ Trails of Tears, featuring my wilderness adventures and misadventures.I serve when needed as a Licensed Eucharistic Minister in the Episcopal Church.
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