We are animals.
In as much as we carry the legacy of billions of years of evolution, we are animals. The brief hiccup of time since we split from the chimpanzees has not been sufficient to allow us to escape our origins even though that same time span has caused enough change in us to fool ourselves into thinking we have left the animal realm behind. Cosmetic changes aside, is there any true aspect solely ours? Any aspect that no other animal can claim, either in fact or by analogy? There may be. It may lie in our minds. But, apart from those myriad thought processes we label as ours alone that are simply glorified and reprocessed animal thoughts, what part of our mind is it? It is that part that comes out when the body is fed, the urges are sated, and the mind is at ease and rested and allowed to roam untethered. It is that Inquiry, beyond pure feline curiosity, beyond the scientific method. It is that Inquiry that seeks to clarify and understand and to synchretize all our animal aspects, all our glorified animal thoughts and all our learning into a consistent and truthful Perception.
Being mostly animal, most of us never attempt that Inquiry, or if we do, rapidly fall back into the coziness of our animal selves. And cozy our animal selves are. Our animal selves carry in their code the evolutionary memory of all our progenitors, down to the pre-microbial molecular age. Our human self is young and fragile, barely walking freely, hardly recognized, not completely free from animal dominance. Our human self must work hard and still face illogical dichotomies and painful spectrums while trying to learn and grow. Our animal self knows and does with the reassurance of ingrained memory. Our human self is still developing and establishing methods and materials, a set back is devastating. Our animal self has perfected its style over millennia; a set back is patiently countered by slight changes in bone or bite, fin, fur, or feather.
But the few of us who do successfully delve into that obscured Inquiry gain something that can only be describes as completeness, smugness?, the state where we know and perceive more than before and where part of the anxiety of being is removed, assuaged.
The spark of Inquiry usually comes suddenly. We undergo an event, a defining event, that gives us a glimpse of something intangible that we recognize as different, much as we can recognize a misspelled word without knowing the misspelling. Our perceptions alerted, we are briefly lifted to a different perspective, above the fog, and when we return, try to capture that perspective again. That Inquiry is the never ending climb, back to that vantage point, back to the place where perception was a little clearer, the past a smidgen more understandable, the future a tad more hopeful, the present a bit more bearable. If our minds are closed at the time when we are briefly shown the different perspective, as is common, the opportunity is lost, the Inquiry forgotten, or worse, we are left with a deep sense of emptiness, a deep feeling of a missed accomplishment, a desire to regain a fleeting feeling without knowing how or why. Somewhere in between the two extremes of being alert for the spark of Inquiry and being totally oblivious to it is where one knows one saw something, knows one missed it, knows there is something more, something beyond and is willing to work hard at the climb, following the unmarked trail.
