Respect for Life on a Sliding Scale
As soon as I had laid the coat of paint down, a bug landed in it. “Not your day, pal” I said out loud. Then Other Vinnie rebuked my callous attitude and we both felt sorry for the innocent victim of property maintenance.
Our compassion for life tends to be graded according to the consciousness level of the creature, unless we highly conscious creatures give it an honorary level of awareness. An example would be talking to plants to cheer them up (it works, of course). We not only have no problem wiping out billions of life forms with Lysol or an antibiotic, we feel it’s a just war. Rodent or insect poisons don’t rattle our consciences but higher up the evolution escalator, there is a growing human retaliation to cruelty towards horses, alligators, domestic pets and the list goes on.
What about us? The creature with the impressive brain size; the one capable of giving so much? The destruction of a life form with the outstanding abilities humans have surely must be near the top of of our protected species list. But it isn’t. The human versus human contempt of our time puts “certain” humans at the level of rodents or insects. In the extreme, people can be regarded as viruses that should be righteously exterminated. If you can promote your dog, cat, horse, or pet bird to people-status, you can as easily create the delusion that another human is no more than vermin or a disease carrying microbe with neither a soul or a name.
We have widespread paranoia on Earth — Fear that a multitude of agents might attack us. We’re on the defensive against disease, terrorism, shortages, extreme weather, poisoned food, and of course, each other. With those thoughts surrounding us and the fear clenching our gut, we eventually see everyone as a potential enemy. We jump into the imaginary battle at the first cracking twig and take part in the destruction.
What is there to do but fight that overwhelming tendency? If I set my will to reverse whatever level of violence is present in me, I will not float downstream with the flotsam. First I have to admit that I have some level of aggression that potentially hurts others. Just because it was only a degrading sarcasm existing only in my head, doesn’t mean it’s effects wont manifest outside of it. I brought this up with a friend who replied, “But at least I don’t cut people’s heads off!” True, but is that just because you know you wont get away with it? What if it was not against the law? What if, in fact, your leaders encouraged you to snuff an unrighteous person? That there’s honor in it. Some of you are thinking of someone you’d like to decapitate as we speak. I know it.
In all seriousness, we have the opportunity of the millennium to get ourselves back to making laws that are based in love and respect for all sentient beings, instead of rules based on fear, mistrust and inevitable corruption. I’m not here to talk about political parties. I’m exhorting spiritual beings in human houses to remember that we change internally before we change a world. I have the freedom to control only one person. Me.
