﻿If one really gets into the perspective of a different species,
to imagine what it might be like to be that species in their environment,
with their priorities,
with their dominant sense,
and with their ways of going about things,
I can literally know from the animals perspective what their motivations are.
And for any behavior, there's always a reason that's driving that behavior.
And then beyond even the species perspective,
we also need to be able to get into the perspective of the individual.
Much like humans,
different individuals have different personalities, different needs and wants.
Then to set about an empathic understanding,
it's not inappropriate to start that with an imagined activity.
What might it be like to be that goldfish in that bowl in the doctor's waiting room?
And it helps a lot to first imagine their physical reality.
Place yourself as if you were on the inside of the bowl looking out
and seeing all the surrounding furniture from that perspective.
Now imagine what it's like to be wearing that skin and scales or body covering.
Once we begin to imagine what it might be like
to be inhabiting the five sensory world of that creature,
we are laying the very good foundation for us to be able to perceive
that individual being's particular experience and thoughts and feelings about things.
When one drops into the relational field that's already there,
perception and information just sort of arises
and maybe seeps into our awareness more because
we are quiet for once and we are focused.
Whatever is reverberating through the field becomes available for perceiving
and is being done so on the unconscious level.
Our instinct isn't something that we have to switch on, nor is it entirely individual.
Our instinct is contextual.
And perhaps the art of asking a certain question
to sort of pull up whatever just really is important to that other being
like they're in pain, or they've got a need
is what's going to be quite loud on that energetic landscape,
speaking from a quantum physics point of view,
and so that will automatically come to my attention.
But what's happening is that those emissions of what is -
thoughts,
feelings,
circumstance,
state of dehydration of a tree,
injured left wing of a bird,
these have just been broadcast into the space
as our thoughts and feelings by the way.
And until those incoming bits of data filter through my mental database of vocabulary,
life experiences,
emotions, images,
and find a match, I wouldn’t know about it.
If I'm connecting with a young elephant
who has perhaps been found wandering around separated from the herd,
and I'm feeling their separation anxiety,
what might come first to my mind is
my own personal memory of first day at school when I was five years old
because I was experiencing separation anxiety then.
And that's because the energy is a match.
So if several people standing in front of the same animal
might translate the incoming messages differently within themselves,
and nobody will be wrong.
I might get a memory of my first day at school.
The next person might in a very dry, technical way
just see the words “separation anxiety” in their mind's eye.
Somebody else might just get the raw emotion.
We are suffering from a great separation sickness ourselves.
And in our days of rush, we're kind of crushing our spirits.
We have short attention spans,
we demand immediate gratification,
we’re permanently distracted.
We're not even long with our own pets in the evenings.
We might be there as a hollow skin bag
but we're on devices or watching something distracted in our minds.
And the animals just sit there looking at us like
"Hello, lights are on but no one's home."
If we again allowed ourselves to have the feeling of belonging,
and to surrender into that so deeply,
our very actions, our very choices would be prompted by our surroundings.
We would never dream of buying a toxic detergent to use in our worldly homes,
because we would care about the spiders further down in the drainage outside
or the ants getting poisoned.
We would deeply care.
And we would delight at how much that little stalk of moss had grown overnight.
We would delight without needing to make concepts.
And certainly without any strange view of there being relative value,
and relative importance or relative intelligence.
I wish I hadn't spent quite so much time on trying to understand it
because truly experience is the only real teacher.
And it's just so beautiful to be so directly related to these to these other beings.
Gosh, all those hours I spent ferreted away and nose in books,
I could have been just chatting with a butterfly
or lying on a blade of grass and having a conversation.