Adventures in Kinship with All Life
by J. Allen Boone

Talking With The Animals by Bill Thomas
Book Report

Behaving As If the God In All Life Mattered
by Machaelle Small Wright

Animal Talk
by Penelope Smith

Conversations with Animals
by Lydia Hiby

NH and Icelandic Horses

Music and Horses

Little Hummingbird
Resources for Joyful Living

Noah's Ark
Holistic Animal Resources

The Soul of a Horse--Metaphysical Discourse

Talk About That Whispering

Controlling the Herd Boss Instinct

You Look for the Horse You Ride On

Inside the Window of the Soul

Jan's Essays

Karen Noble, Equine Parapsychologist,
Metaphysical, Spiritual, Absent-Healing

Cusimano
Metaphysical Surrealist Artist

I've always been puzzled about the predator/prey aspect of life. There's always that sense of horror at the brutality and suffering of the hunt. How can I make sense of this? What way of understanding must there be to reconcile these reactions with the ideas of trust and love that give meaning to my efforts? These questions are always lurking when people talk about the predator/prey relationships with our horses. When horse people mention that humans are predators, I always feel a kind of implied shame. And I usually feel a similar recoil imbedded in talk about becoming alpha to the horse; requiring his respect. How is this related to trust? There's a teasing sense that there is a way to look at this that will make a whole picture.

I found an approach that immediately felt meaningful to me in a book by Elisabeth Haich. I know for many people this will be utter nonsense. But since it makes sense to me, I thought I would share it with you:

...God's highest gift to man is the right of self-determination, and I know this right must never be infringed. That's why I never use my will-power against a person. Often enough it would be so easy to help a person solve a difficult problem if I were merely to fill him with my will! But this would mean that I would be taking on the responsibility myself, and the solution of the problem would be mine not his. In this way I would be robbing him of an opportunity to pass a test. Every person must solve his own problems, for only in this way can he gather experience, develop his will power and widen the horizon of his consciousness.

Animals are directly subject to natural forces. They automatically and instinctively carry out the will of nature and possess no self-determination. So I can [direct my animals with] my will. It's wonderful how these magnificent animals immediately carry out my thoughts. They react to the slightest impulse of my [unselfish] will, and I often have the feeling that they belong just as much to my SELF as my hands and feet do. The same divine SELF is the life of every living creature, and the 'love' animals feel is nothing but the unconscious striving to achieve the unity of the self on the lowest, physical plane of consciousness.

A child going through the phase of awakening consciousness also tries involuntarily to achieve this same unity and identity by putting into its mouth everything it can get its little hands on. Animals have the same instinct. The unity and the love between me and my lions is so great that they want to take my hand between their jaws as if they were going to eat me... I can understand that when they eat a gazelle for example they are only following out their instinctive striving for unity. The instinct for self-preservation has the same source as the instinct for the preservation of the species: striving for the divine state of unity.

That's why the manifestations of both instincts are so close together and often overlap. Nature exploits this primordial tendency towards unity in order to create progeny through the instinct for procreation and propagation of the species, and in order to preserve the body through the satisfaction of hunger. This is the reason why the meat lions get from their keepers never tastes as good as the flesh they tear from the body of fresh-killed prey; for in this latter act they are unconsciously experiencing a form of union with the living -- with life itself. With dead flesh they can satisfy only their hunger but not their subconscious striving toward union.

Amie Slate