Quantum physics tells us that everything in our universe is energy. The stars, suns, planets, inhabitants and the space between them are all energy. Some energy is more dense than others and it forms matter, while others are more subtle; thoughts, emotions, feelings and so on.
The basic structure of energy is a wave, often referred to as a sine wave, with a crest and a trough. The trough is nothing more than the crest turned upside down. As energy manipulates its waves, it creates new things, each unique from the other. We have all seen pictures of waves and the one consistency of all waves is the straight line that never changes even though the waves and troughs change consistently.
As wave patterns change and create new forms, people, pets and so on, there is still the presence of that imaginary straight line in all of us. That straight line represents our awareness of ourselves and the life that we live. The mystics call this the Tao (pronounced Dao), that center of self that is always there in awareness no matter what happens. If I were to ask you to think back over your life and remember the many changes that have occurred, you might realize that the one and only thing that has never changed is your awareness of yourself in each of those experiences.
Life presents itself, as it should, in wave forms, with crests and troughs. We often refer to them as the good and bad or good and evil. Maybe the peaks are good and the troughs are bad. What life must do, being waves, is to have an equal amount of peaks and troughs. This will not be denied.
M. Scott Peck, in his powerful book, The Road Less Traveled, says in the first sentence, Life is difficult. Then, he goes on to examine that if one can really accept this and allow life to do as it will, the difficulty seems to subside. The underlying truth is that resistance to life is what causes the suffering.
We humans have developed the ability to not only have experiences, but to judge them as good or bad. So, we spend most of our lives, judging experiences, categorizing them as one or the other, and attempt to control our lives in hopes that we will have more good experiences than bad. As I mentioned above, this can’t happen. It goes against the laws of the universe.
I read a story the other day about a lady who won an 18 million dollar lottery. She was a poor, single lady with four children. She struggled to make ends meet and relied on her mother to support her. When she won the lottery, she believed all of her troubles would end. The money that she did not have, represented security, peace and happiness. After receiving the money, she learned about the laws of life, nothing good comes without and equal amount of bad. In not time, she was surrounded by problems that she had never imagined. A year later, she gave the money back. It had almost ruined her life.
Our pets are not like us. They don’t judge experiences and categorize them as good or bad. They have good experiences and bad, like all of life, but they don’t attach a story to it and suffer trying to make the good ones outweigh the bad. They are aware of the center line of the wave, the Tao. It is good to think that if M. Scott Peck is right that perhaps their bad experiences aren’t as bad as we would believe them to be.
Maybe one of the purposes of our pets coming into our lives is to teach us how to stay on the middle pathway as well, to allow the good and bad and accept them equally as part of life. It might help relieve some of the suffering.
