9

Something behind the Eyes

WHEN ONE FEELS A CONNECTION WITH ANOTHER BEING—human or dog or another sentient being—one has a sense of their emotions and how they're experiencing themselves in the world. We get an idea of who they feel themselves to be. I had certainly come to know Brio and how he saw himself. He obviously never doubted who he was. From that first day I met him as a tiny puppy waving at me, to when he trotted out onto the New York City sidewalks, to his strong spirit that never wanted during illness, he showed utter confidence in himself. Nothing and no one could diminish or defeat him. I think it was that clarity of self-knowledge that so many people recognized in him. He was always present within himself and in the moment he was living.

Once I took Brio sailing on a friend's boat. He'd never been out to sea. He had to get into a dinghy for the trip from the dock and then jump up onto the sailboat. No problem. Then he sat beside me in the cockpit as we took off, happily smiling into the wind and riding the waves like a veteran as the boat heeled over. He was in his element—as he always seemed to be! There's no other word for it: he had that presence—consciousness of himself—fully at home in his own skin as well as the living moment.

Any belief that our fellow animals are able to communicate telepathically or through some extrasensory ability must rest on one assumption—that they have consciousness.

Many philosophers have grappled with the concept of consciousness over the centuries. What is it? How do we define it? There is still no conclusive agreement about the nature of consciousness—human or otherwise—although it's generally accepted that a defining characteristic or prerequisite of consciousness is awareness. That means awareness of the surrounding world and awareness of other beings. It's about experience and feeling. But is it purely a creation of the physical brain? Is it just about neurons processing information?

Neuroscientists wrestle with theories and struggle to find evidence for those theories. Does consciousness derive from something else? Or is it something fundamental, something that just is? The debate continues with no conclusion. As Christof Koch, a well-known consciousness researcher and neuroscientist said, “I am conscious. Any theory has to start with that.”¹

Recently, there's been mounting interest among scientists wanting to conduct empirical studies examining the intelligence, cognitive abilities, memory, and emotion of nonhuman animals. Some of these studies have been noted in earlier chapters. There's the study by the Comparative Ethology Research Group in Hungary (referenced in chapter 3) that found dog and human brains lit up in similar locations when they heard emotional sounds—crying or happy barks or human laughing.

Also, there are the dog brain scans done by neuroscientist Gregory Berns of Emory University (referenced in chapter 3 as well). These too indicate that dogs have emotion. There's the booming research field studying animal cognition and intelligence, with the amazing evidence that dogs can learn the names of hundreds—even a thousand and more—objects, and show that they're able to use the names in short sentences.² These are only some of the recent studies. Many more are ongoing.

The concept of awareness—consciousness—goes beyond experience of the outside world and other beings. It also refers to self-awareness, experience of what's going on inside us and a sense of our true identity. The classic research test for self-awareness is the mirror test—that is, the ability to recognize oneself in a mirror. Chimps can do this. Dogs cannot. So because of that finding, it was believed until very recently that chimps have the ability to recognize themselves but that dogs do not. In 2001 it occurred to Marc Bekoff, Professor Emeritus of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Colorado, to see if researchers were testing dogs for the wrong sense. What if we were to test dogs for self-recognition using the sense for which they're known to be naturally skilled—smell?

Bekoff tested his own dog and others over a number of years to record the time they spent sniffing their own urine and that of other dogs. The results showed a clear ability to tell the difference between their own urine and that of other dogs.³ That certainly showed that dogs know their own smell as distinguished from other dogs' smells. But did they truly know their own identity?

Just recently, Alexandra Horowitz, a professor at Columbia University and researcher at Barnard's Dog Cognition Lab, decided to try to answer that question. Can dogs truly recognize themselves as beings, as selves? The study found that the dogs spent more time sniffing canisters in which a strange smell had been added to their own urine than they did smelling their own urine alone. To a scientist, this means that the dogs could tell the difference between the smell “image” of themselves alone and the modified scent. Hence—self-identity.⁴

New research has also indicated that self-awareness—consciousness—exists, through tests done of how a dog's memory works. A study by the Family Dog Project at Eotvos Lorand University in Budapest, showed that dogs have memory that goes beyond just remembering a command or the name of an object. They have what's called episodic memory. The scientists tested dogs with so-called do-as-I-do training, in which they learn, when prompted by a verbal cue, to imitate a trainer's specific action. But the dogs turned out to be able to imitate the trainer's behavior even when it was something brand new and when no verbal commands were given. What's more, the dogs in the study could remember and imitate the humans' actions up to an hour later. They could relive the experience in the same way that people do.⁵ That experience was taking place in their inner awareness.⁶

Studies with other species are also finding evidence of consciousness in nonhuman animals. In addition to working with the brain scans of dogs, neuroscientist Gregory Berns performed brain scans of stranded sea lions to see what might have caused the spatial disorientation they were experiencing. He found that there was damage in the hippocampus. In humans with temporal lobe epilepsy, that's the same area of the brain that's damaged. Berns found this comparison significant. “The sea lions taught me that consciousness disorders in animals can look very similar to consciousness disorders in people,” he told Claudia Dreifus of the New York Times. “In fact,” Berns has concluded, “the aggregate of my research has made me realize how similar many animals are to us.”⁷

All this research on the feelings and understanding of dogs and other nonhuman animals does lead to the conclusion that other species possess consciousness. In 2012, a group of scientists gathered for the conference “Consciousness in Humans and Nonhuman Animals.” They then signed the Cambridge Declaration of Consciousness in Nonhuman Animals, which stated, “Convergent evidence indicates that nonhuman animals have the neuroanatomical, neurochemical, and neurophysiological substrates of conscious states along with the capacity to exhibit intentional behaviors. Consequently, the weight of evidence indicates that humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness. Nonhuman animals, including all mammals and birds, and many other creatures, including octopuses, also possess these neurological substrates.”⁸ Modern Western science is, of course, coming late to the game with efforts to unravel the nature of consciousness.

And then there's the matter of soul. Brio's quality of presence certainly spoke to his awareness of himself and the world around him. But there was more. There was that quality that others saw in him—a knowledge that seemed to reach beyond this earthly moment, into a different dimension, a consciousness of another realm. Some call this the realm of spirit or soul.

If a being has consciousness, does that mean it has a soul? Does a soul survive only in this earthly life—or forever? These questions stymie the human intellect when it seeks evidence to support one answer or another. Still, when we look to ancient cultures and religions we find specific details about the soul and whether it survives death.

The original name of Egyptian Book of the Dead, a funerary text used from around 1550 BCE to around 50 BCE,⁹ was actually Book of Coming Forth by Day or Emerging Forth into the Light, then mistranslated.¹⁰ It was a collection of texts that put forth ideas about the immortality of the soul that had arisen much earlier in Egypt—in the period around 3000 BCE.¹¹ The text lays out the detailed stages or spells of how the soul journeys through the afterlife.¹²

In India's Hindu scriptures, the Katha Upanishad also asserts that the soul exists and endures—although it cannot be seen and remains mysterious.¹³

The Bardo Thodol, known in the West as The Tibetan Book of the Dead, provides a guide to experiences that the soul—or consciousness—has after death. The bardo is the interval between death and the next life.¹⁴

For those guided completely by inner conviction—like many philosophical and religious leaders—pure belief trumps any need for justification beyond referencing the religion's historical texts. Nevertheless there is wide disagreement within philosophical and religious thought—and even within a single faith—about whether animals are feeling, thinking beings with consciousness and even souls.

Consider Christianity. It's often believed today that the Bible and later Christian texts actually supported human domination over animals. Genesis 1:26–28 (King James version) does in fact state:

Then God said, “Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” So God created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them. Then God blessed them, and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it; have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”

Here these creatures are clearly viewed as inferior to humans. There is no consideration of possible intelligence, emotional capacity—and consciousness—comparable to ours.

Also, the philosophy known as “The Great Chain of Being,” which ran through Western thought from the Middle Ages into the latter part of the eighteenth century, argues that there is a hierarchical structure of all matter of life—with humans above other animals.¹⁵

This view of dominion over animals—according to some interpretations of Christian doctrine, was a notable shift from the view of animals in earlier civilizations. Consider the texts of ancient Egypt—from the Old Kingdom (the third millennium BCE) forward. One such text was the Forty-Two Questions, which called for the soul of the person who had just died to answer in all honesty the questions of forty-two spiritual assessors (deities) who each asked one question. The answers reveal whether they were following ethical and moral principles according to the doctrine of the goddess Maat—personifying concepts of truth, harmony, and morality.¹⁶ Their answers determined how they would proceed on their spiritual journey.

Translations of the Forty-Two Questions vary.¹⁷ But question forty is often translated as a mandate to care for animals: “Hast thou remembered the brethren of the Earth, and been compassionate to those younger brethren who serve thee as beasts in the field and home?”¹⁸

“Brethren of the Earth” refers to animals.

Question forty-one also addresses the treatment of animals. Sometimes it is translated as “Hast thou ever worked man or beast beyond its strength in greed?”¹⁹

Another translation by the twentieth-century English clairvoyant and writer Joan Grant is “And the forty-first shall say: Hast thou to all animals as thy master is to thee, using wisdom, kindness, and compassion unto them who were once thy brothers?”²⁰

The Egyptians ate meat and used domestic animals in their work. But they revered these fellow beings and believed they had souls that had an afterlife and that they possessed spiritual equality with humans in this life. These beliefs were reflected in how they honored animals in death. Many were mummified. Some mummies were placed in decorated cases—like a large cat in a case with the title Osiris–the Cat. Osiris was the god who ruled the afterlife. The Egyptians did worship individual animals as incarnations of certain gods. And there was a touching discovery when Osiris–the Cat was recently put through a CT scanner. Its front paws were crossed, just as a human mummy's hands would be placed.²¹

To return to Christian doctrine regarding our fellow creatures, there are those who argue that a more complex view of the nature of non-human animals and their rights can be found in Christianity. Passages in the Bible draw from the pastoral culture of its time, incorporating a concept of nonhuman animals who could be used for human purposes but nevertheless respected and cared for. The Hebrew scriptures especially focused on the responsibility of stewardship for animals, even if they were used for human purposes. For example, King David's care for his sheep was a sign of his worth as a leader (1 Samuel 17:35; New English Bible).

Other passages champion care for our fellow animals as a metaphor for divine love.

For these are the words of the Lord God: Now I myself will ask after my sheep and go in search of them. As a shepherd goes in search of his sheep when his flock is dispersed all around him, so will I go in search of my sheep and rescue them no matter where they were scattered . . . I myself will tend my flock, I myself pen them in their fold, says the Lord God. I will search for the lost, recover the straggler, bandage the hurt, strengthen the sick, leave the healthy and strong to play, and give them their proper food. (Ezekiel 3:11–17; New English Bible)²²

Then there was St. Francis of Assisi, known as the patron saint of animals, who tamed the wild beasts. In one of his prayers he held that our duty toward our “brethren”—animals—goes even further than just stewardship of creatures who serve us.

Not to hurt our humble brethren

Is our first duty to them, but to stop there is not enough.

We have a higher mission:

To be of service to them whenever they require it.²³

These words of St. Francis, reflecting his deep understanding of our fellow animals and his compassion, are words that I hold in my heart. I aim to serve the mission that St. Francis defines.

But back and forth we go when looking at Christianity's view of animals. St. Augustine argued that man has no duties toward animals except to make sure that any harm to them doesn't cause a financial loss to their owners.²⁴ He quoted Genesis: “Everything that moves and lives shall be meat to you.”²⁵

Liberal Protestants hold the general view that nonhuman animals have souls. There's no consensus though on whether they have an afterlife. Evangelicals do not believe that our fellow species live on after physical death.²⁶

Judaism too reflects some ambivalence regarding animals. It's generally held that nonhuman animals have souls—but souls as defined in terms of life force. The spiritual concept of soul is reserved for humans. There's no idea that nonhuman animals have eternal life.²⁷ But it's also true that while the Torah accepted the slaughter of wild animals so long as the animal's blood was buried, rabbinic interpretation strengthened laws regarding animal welfare. And Judaism's Kabbalah mysticism, as well as orthodox Hasidic ideology, proposes the idea of the transmigration of souls; that is, that the souls of human sinners need to rise again through other beings—plants and nonhuman animals—before regaining human life. So a cow that is slaughtered in an improper manner may embody the soul of a human.²⁸

In Islam, it's generally believed that nonhuman animals do have souls, though opinion differs on whether they have an afterlife.

Buddhists do believe in the eternal life and rebirth of all beings. Robert Thurman, the renowned Buddhist scholar at Columbia University, points out that the great French German theologian and humanist Albert Schweitzer, who was “very Christian,” believed strongly that Jesus Christ never intended to say that nonhuman animals have no soul. Schweitzer, Thurman reports, really objected to that idea in Christian theology.

The clairvoyant Joan Grant once expressed a similar conviction. She was asked if animals are precursors of human beings or separate beings. She answered:

The soul of an animal is just as much of God as the human being and very often much more so, because the only way one can judge the value of any particular stage in one's journey is its closeness to the divine pattern of evolution. So Eloise [her dog at the time] is much closer to the Deity than most people one will ever meet who are envious or jealous or miserly. If Christ were in the room, he would recognize Eloise as part of himself very much more easily than he would recognize some miserly tycoon, because they would have much more in common.²⁹

Robert Thurman tells what he calls “a Buddhist shaggy dog story.” It's a story about Maitreya, seen in Buddhist tradition as a bodhisattva—a being who seeks Nirvana and is on the path to becoming a Buddha but remains on Earth to help others. Thurman explains that the name Maitreya “comes from two words in Sanskrit—Mater or Mother, and also friend. Maitreya means ‘altruistic love,' the loving Buddha coming in one hundred thousand years or so.” In the meantime, Maitreya can manifest in many different bodies.

So here's the “shaggy dog” tale. “There's a very famous story,” Thurman recounts, “about a man who wants to have a vision of Maitreya who's believed to dwell in a heavenly place until coming to Earth. So this man wants to search for him. The man tries for years and is despairing. Finally, one dark night, the man saw a bedraggled, sick dog by the side of the road.

“He decided to do something about it,” Thurman continues, “and the dog turned into Maitreya. The man bowed to Buddha. He'd been trying to see him for twelve years. He said, ‘What took you so long?' Maitreya replied, ‘It wasn't until now that you had genuine compassion to treat a dog well and help to heal him. So I am the Buddha of love and you can see love when you have compassion.'”

So, Thurman says, the story is about the way Maitreya emanates as dogs in the world to demonstrate compassion and love. The tale of Maitreya as a dog continues to influence Buddhist treatment of dogs. For example, Thurman told me, “Tibetans really love their dogs. In Tibetan monasteries they kept a lot of stray dogs. They cared for them and tried to feed them. They were horrified when the Chinese came in and started eating the dogs.”

I heard another shaggy dog story about dogs and the soul. This one began in Nepal, where Hindus also believe that nonhuman animals have soul and that every human being has already existed as other forms of life. The story came from Lynn Moore, a life coach and dog lover. Some years ago, she was living in Nepal and teaching at a monastery. Every day she would walk from her guesthouse to work, past an area where there were stray dogs. One day she noticed one very thin, scraggly looking dog. “Even though I'd seen many abandoned dogs,” Moore told me, “this one caught my attention. She happened to look up at me, and there was something about her eyes in her very skinny body. She looked at me and I thought, Oh my God!”

Here again—there's that gaze from a dog who somehow seems to see inside one. Moore couldn't get the dog out of her mind. The next day she saw her again, shivering in the rain. “Again, my heart broke. That night I couldn't sleep,” Moore remembers. “Next morning I said, ‘Okay. I did it. I'm supposed to take her home.'”

So she looked for her and at first couldn't find her again.

Finally, the little dog appeared. Moore sat down next to her. The dog had a rash and fleas and might have had rabies so Moore just gently touched the pad of her paw. She found a cardboard box and managed to get the frightened dog into it with the help of a friendly passerby. She got a taxi and took the dog to a vet who cleaned her up and gave her shots. Back to Moore's guesthouse they went.

“We've been Velcroed together ever since,” Moore says. “It was a wonderful, wonderful experience. She's a very calm dog, quiet, extremely loving, a very old soul. She knows exactly what I'm saying. It's hard to describe. I know I saw her soul when she first looked at me. I would say she entered my heart. That's why I could not leave her there. Sometimes I discover that when it comes to an intuition from the universe, I can reason myself out of it, but the universe was not going to give up. I said, ‘Okay, I'm doing this.'”

Moore had had other dogs before, and had close relationships with them—but nothing like her connection to Atma, as she named the dog she met in Nepal. In Hinduism, atman refers to the personal soul or self.

There's a common thread in these stories of people who feel they've met their “soul dog.” It's something set apart from close relationships they've had with other dogs, something beyond the bond they've felt in those cases. The recurrent experience one hears in these stories is that the person felt in meeting their soul dog that there was a sense of being thunderstruck by an instant and very deep connection.

I began to notice other similar relationships around me. Early on summer mornings on Martha's Vineyard, when dogs and their people walk on the beach, it was beautiful to observe their bonds. One that I noticed in particular was the close tie between Alison Oestreicher and her border collie, Sen.

Sen had initially belonged to Alison's ex-boyfriend, and when Alison had initially met this dog, she told me, “I immediately felt a connection but I don't really know what it was. His breed is a very connecting kind of dog. I was also in a very present place. I was very present with him.” Then their relationship took a turn that revealed how deep it actually was. First, Alison was in a motorcycle accident and broke five bones. When she was recovering, Sen would come lie with her. “He helped me by just being with me. I was in so much pain,” Alison remembers. “He just knew. People say that, but I swear he followed me everywhere. He jumped on the bed and hung out with me. He put his head on my chest and would stare at me, things he hadn't done before.”

Then, sometime later, it was Alison's turn to take care of Sen. He was hit by a truck and suffered near-fatal injuries, necessitating several surgeries to save him. It was a long recuperation. Alison had left her boyfriend, but moved back in to care for Sen. “He couldn't walk. It was really harrowing. I had to figure out how to cheer him up,” Alison told me. “I would do things with my hands—signals. I'd throw the ball in the air. He would follow it with his eyes. That's all he could do.”

Sen's rehab took three months, and he and Alison have rarely been apart since. She fought to get legal ownership of him. They go everywhere together, and she almost never leaves him alone at home. “Sometimes I think I can read his mind. I feel like I think like Sen. I don't know where I begin and he stops.” Those words of Alison's are those of a person who recognizes her soul dog.

It happened to animal communicator Cindy Brody too—that inner knowledge of a powerful connection. One December day Brody got a phone call from a woman who knew of a man whose daughter had died of a drug overdose. He was temporarily keeping his daughter's dog in his barn. He wasn't sure what to do. He had heard about Brody and wanted her to come assess this frightened pit bull. His family had suggested that he put the dog to sleep. But he believed the dog deserved a second chance.

Brody went to meet Cuddles, as the dog was then named. She was in a barn stall, her tail wagging out of control when Brody went up to her. Brody heard: Help me! Please let me out! I'm scared! Help me! Please help me! With that plea, and after she'd seen the dog's sweetness, Brody was able to secure placement for Cuddles in a pit bull rescue.

On the next day, Brody went to pick her up from the barn. Again, she heard the dog speak: I'm going home with you. PLEASE!!! I'm good. I love you! Don't leave me! Let's go! Brody already had two dogs at home and thought she wasn't in a position to take another, although her heart went out to Cuddles.

She took her first to a veterinarian to be spayed and several hours later returned to pick her up. The vet said, “You're not going to take her to the rescue tonight, are you? She could really use a couple of days in a quiet environment. She's such a nice dog.” The vet continued, “I would keep her if I could.”

Brody says, “I swear I saw that dog wink at the vet.”

So they headed home. Within minutes of arriving, Brody found her husband and the dog—who she would rename Lilly—spooning together on the floor. That was that. The connection had been made—as Lilly apparently knew it would be.

Soul dogs—soul animals, however they may appear to us—make themselves known not through our five human senses and not through reason and intellect. We recognize them in ways we ourselves often cannot understand. We feel them; we sense their presence. We know them.

No matter what I considered accepting intellectually, I knew in my heart that now, as I faced the fear of losing Brio, I had to try my utmost to listen, to hear him as never before. I needed to know when it would be time to set him free and send him into that next gust of wind.

There is a wonderful term in Celtic mysticism—mo anam cara. Anam is the Gaelic word for “soul,” and cara is the word for “friend,” rendering “soul friend.” The Irish poet, philosopher, and scholar John O'Donohue writes, “The anam cara was a person to whom you could reveal the hidden intimacies of your life. This friendship was an act of recognition and belonging. When you had an anam cara, your friendship cut across all convention and category. You were joined in an ancient and eternal way with the friend of your soul.”³⁰

I had my anam cara.