The Inner Frontier

We are more animals than we believe; that's the mark of humanness, perhaps, to think we're special somehow.

If you present a dog with a freaked-out chicken--a running, shrieking, panicked bird--only one outcome is really possible: dog chases prey. Pretty soon there are feathers and blood everywhere.

It doesn't matter how "good" the dog is: chicken runs, dog chases.

So many of our lives are just like this. Or they were like this once. In a dog, this is instinct. In a human, this is heedlessness. Because we do have a choice. If we don't chase the chicken the way we used to, it's because we had the good fortune to 1. encounter painful consequences and 2. to make the connection between unthinking action and resulting pain, and to learn from that.

Animals kill and cuddle and mate and don't know why. We do too--waking up to find ourselves in the middle of fight, flight, feeding, or f-ing. Dogs are hunters. Men are hunters. Whom do you cheer for on the nature show, the cheetah or the antelope?

And women? I don' t know them so well. I suspect that we run shrieking from warriors, only to be slaughtered--or to become warriors ourselves, with a strength men fear to meet.

In meditation, in sesshin, there is hope. The possiblity of mindfulness, of knowing what we do. We set up a disconnect between the chicken and the bloody, feathery mess.

It's one thing not to chase a physical chicken, looking and smelling so right; but how not to chase the delicious fowl of your own mind? How to turn inward and look into oneself with dignity? At the end, what nobility I manifiest is known only to myself; at the end, I can only be true to my own values, regardless of how I look to others. There is one who knows everything about me; that is the one whose standards of conduct must be satisfied.