I Haven’t Taken a Life in Years Until Now
This story will not burden you with the disasters I’ve been involved in
Just how seriously do we want to take this thing of taking no lives?
Seriously, I should think.
It was late afternoon, no, it was more early eve. Happy Holidays, as this happened in my house last Christmas. I was sitting in blissful meditation, no one bothered me, required my presence, or had a beef with me.
Suddenly I heard a snap.`
The snap was audible, as clear as a bone-dry breaking branch. Heard from my sitting place before my altar where the Buddha, Shiva, Ganesh, Hanuman, and the loving heavies all watched me. They watched me as though nothing happened, perhaps in utter compassion.
A rat had just got caught in the toothy rat trap I’d set an hour before. My meditation was immediately invaded by unmistakable throws of impending mortality.
Death had been just around the corner.
The furry creature was a big one. I’d forgotten to tie the big, toothy metal trap to something solid. It is not unusual for the big rats to run off with the trap closed and tightening down on their breaking necks. I know this from many years ago when killing rats at our rented Illinois farmhouse was just routine house cleaning. It was either you or the marauding rats in the soy fields!
The lethal, sharp-toothed trap snapped, and in a microsecond, I felt that ancient sense of relief, the ancient hunter’s elation, did it! Yes, like a hunter’s experience after killing another harmless rhino.
Thank God I’ve got the rat, but instantly followed by a welling up sense of sickly remorse.
At least I feel… then the audible, inevitable, tortured struggle.
The rats we have here in Antigua, Guatemala are called black rats, in Spanish, not known for their size, not like some that get to be almost the size of a possum. No. The black rats are smaller and I dare say far tougher, hardy souls.
The tough black rat thrashed and kicked. I haven’t killed one in years until now. He rolled around on the concrete floor, trying in vain to rid himself of his shock, this iron grip about his skull.
The rat was only doing what all of us do all along the food chain: eating. The metal trap rattled ceaselessly, the rat crazily in pain beyond imagination.
My heart stopped.
If you will, if you do not wish, then I suggest you skip the next paragraph. Gives a yet fuller picture.
You are in the supermarket; you get close to a block of cheese on the refrigerated display. Oddly, you are the only one present. Though you sense life around you. Those are other creatures. Suddenly, you just touch the cheese block and all hell unleashes. A huge, metal bar with teeth comes down with the force of a bear trap onto the back of your neck. Bear traps will deliver thousands of pounds per square inch upon snapping closed. You pull away and fall on the floor, no one is around, maybe someone, something watching. You struggle, twisting, turning on the shiny floor. Way off that damned house music sticks to its maddening mellow tempo. As you twist around the bright lights in your eyes, blood everywhere, your blood. Questions rush as part of the panic: why? What is this? Your hands cannot reach around this metal atrocity crushing down ever harder on the back of your neck. You hear a break, a bone, and you continue to fight, your legs grow numb. You pull, and twist, completely disregarding what this might do to your face. Somehow, incredibly, you pull free, and there next to the now smashed cheese are the remains of your nose and cheeks, impossibly it seems. The thought: an eye for an eye. You look around as you spit blood and pieces of teeth and make a grotesquely lopsided run for the store entrance. The black rat, somehow, was strong enough to climb the vines where he lives on the second-floor porch. He somehow twisted free from the toothy metal, leaving a piece of him, whiskers too, and then was gone.
I’m a Buddhist now but please let it be known: There is no meditation in the middle of such a killing and that’s what it was — a killing. The karmic debt is there, I can feel it.
Unfortunately, by this act, I cannot call myself a Buddhist. My first ‘sit’ was in ’68. One could ask what was it all for but I must continue my practice of meditation, for it is all I know to do.
If I don’t continue my meditation practice, then I’ll never evolve. I will remain a servant to that part of me that kills, or, serves the wrong master.
Some would have us believe, in a hopeful way that we don’t need to worry, that nothing happens. No. Something does happen. It’s as simple as cause and effect, there is a perfect accounting taking place. Unfortunately, I cannot decipher these incredibly complicated things such as what the debt is.
Meditating, oh lofty activity, ah me, ah my calmness, my Upekka, so smug, so sure of myself.
So I sat in meditation imagining this rat whose life I took sitting in some bushy hideout, shivering in pain and a never-before-felt terror. If a rat wonders, he must be doing lots of that right now. If he does not wonder, does not reflect, does not attempt to reason, he then sits in the moment, in his pain, and only knows without knowing that something horrific has happened to him. His life’s decree, his species is that to survive against all odds, he will now try to. I have to meditate on the fact that I was the cause of his pain, a weight hard to relate to. My heart was with him in a flash, his or hers very real agony, unimaginable pain. Thanks to me. It was my destiny, my utter misfortune to separate him, his body, from its life force, the ‘God spark’.
What will be my inevitable price?
I accept this. I have carried so many of these debts and put them on these shoulders. I can handle it.
Can I?
This story will not burden you with the karmic disasters I’ve been involved in. It is, was, my fate.
The best I can do, as we all can do, is continue forward, learn and practice compassion, and try to avoid these mistakes in the future.
We need to hold on to that which is good and move forward. Learn as we go. But no more traps.
Not for me.
Am I satisfied now? Do I rub my nose in it? At least I still have a nose. The rats’ got ripped off.
You, me, we cannot take a life. It is not ours to take.
