[Megan]

By Angela, Today 05:52 PM

Are you saying there's a superior, spiritual approach to cat maintenance that may lead to a proliferation of more spiritual people, as the non-spirituals get munched by cougars?

Well, good question.

I think the issue forces much bigger questions than "cat maintenance" and people getting munched.

We're here in suburbia between the cats in the back yard and the environmental people who want to protect them--on the horns, or fangs, of a dilemma, one might say.

For years we've been saying, "Think globally, act locally." The cats are making that excruciatingly difficult when they're sitting under our kids' swing set. Do we just give them the back yard, swing set and all?

As Einstein said,

The world we have made as a result of the level of thinking we have done thus far creates problems that we cannot solve at the same level as the level we created them at.

It's no longer a question of survival of the fittest, for clearly, we are the fittest, and can wipe out every last cat and the planet itself, if we will.

We are the drivers of evolution now, with our own consciousness, and we are intelligent enough to see that we are driving it into the ground.

The cats are embedded inseparably in much deeper issues, but they are bringing the issues to our own back yards and minds, forcefully, as is their nature.

Perhaps we should be grateful for this "Cougar Medicine?"

This is an inherently spiritual issue, IMO, though others differ with perfect right. Teilhard spoke of evolution having a definite direction, "Ariadne's Thread" as he called it.

Man discovers that he is nothing else than evolution become conscious of itself. The consciousness of each of us is evolution looking at itself and reflecting upon itself.
--Teilhard de Chardin

Clearly, the primitive local solutions will not work, but we have not yet advanced spiritually to global solutions, but the problems continue to drive us, as they did anciently.

May they drive us to new spiritual integration with the more-than-human world, rather than to extinction for us all.

Man is not the center of the universe as once we thought in our simplicity, but something much more wonderful--the arrow pointing the way to the final unification of the world. This is nothing else than the fundamental vision and I shall leave it at that.
--Teilhard