I don't know how to process this

[cookiemonster]

 

First of all, please don't watch this if you are ultra-sensitive to graphic wildlife. It depicts the termination of a stork chick by its own mother.

I am having great difficulty processing it, and have spent the past few days thinking over how I feel about it and how it fits into the bigger picture of God, consciousness, love and reality.

Here's what I can process:-

I can process it objectively. In this respect the narrative is very straight forward. The mother stork determines that the survival of the strongest three chicks is dependent on the termination of the weakest chick. Maybe the incoming food supply is too low to feed all four chicks, or perhaps the weakest chick has an illness that could spread. In any event, the mother stork appears to make her judgement and the little one is thereafter killed.

This is all understood. I also understand that this isn't just some rogue outlier, but rather that the phenomenon of animal infanticide is common to the species and common to other species also.

All of this is objectively logical within the context of the natural world.

But when it comes to processing it subjectively I run into problems.

I invoke an exercise I sometimes use for the purposes of empathy and compassion: To virtualize the experience in my mind from the perspective of the subject (to the extent that I'm able to guess). That is to say: "Okay, here I am as God, currently incarnate into the body of this little chick." How is this experience going to play out in this moment?

So let's talk actual suffering metrics-

I can just about process the premise of physical pain and physical suffering.

I can just about process the premise of animal vs animal violence. The natural world is rife with it after all.

I can just about process the objectivity of the mother having to kill one of her own chicks in order to save three.

But what I cannot process is the total subjective sensation of lovelessness that appears within a vehicle ordinarily designed for the very opposite: The loving trust and bond of a parent/child relationship.

Indeed at one point quite far in to the video, the little chick who is now on the very outside of the nest instinctively tries to huddle back toward the protection of his mother despite the injuries she has already afflicted on him. And with that, suddenly I'm crying my eyes out.

And I cannot process.

When people use the phrase Worship God, I always prefer the phrase Protect God. And so when I see that little dude struggling as he does, I know who that little dude is. It's GOD! And so now every atom of my being is screaming in the darkness. Screaming and screaming and screaming.

Am I projecting? Do humans take death and suffering far too seriously? Is this just a game? Do animals have ontological instincts just as much as they have soci-industrial instincts? Does it not work like that?

I sometimes theorize that ants function as a kind of hive mind. Each little ant doesn't have its own finite mind per se, but functions like a braincell in a larger brain (the ant colony) albeit that each brain cell just happens to have legs and its own mobility.

Perhaps the 4 storks and 1 mother stork functions in a similar way. That is to say they are not 5 independent minds, but a kind of singular maternal hivemind that shares the suffering of the little chick between them.

I don't know. Maybe that's just crazy talk. But like I said: I'm having difficultly processing it. 

 

[kinesin]

1 hour ago, cookiemonster said:

Do humans take death and suffering far too seriously?

It isn't 'humans', it's specifically modern humans.  Prior to the past hundred years or so attitudes toward parenting were a lot different because it wasn't a tragic but rare possibility that your child might die, it was pretty damn likely.  Infact over the past 2000 years, around 50% of people died before age 15, and around 25% died in their first year of life, and these numbers are similar for animals living in the wild.  What this means is that people in the past didn't look at their baby and think "this will be my child, I will raise them into a good adult", to think that far ahead would be foolish considering their chances of actually surviving to such an age.

Think of it this way - if a person lives to age 100, their death isn't generally considered so tragic because they've lived a full life.  Now consider some point in the future where the average length of life is 2000 years... and dying at 100 suddenly seems quite tragic indeed, because people would have an *expectation* of something that currently seems impossible.  In this sense now when we look at a child we expect it will grow to adulthood, and for that child to die would be a tragic case of a life cut short, but people in the past (and wild animals) didn't see it that way.

https://ourworldindata.org/child-mortality-in-the-past

Edited June 25, 2021 by kinesin

[Willie]

2 hours ago, cookiemonster said:

 

First of all, please don't watch this if you are ultra-sensitive to graphic wildlife. It depicts the termination of a stork chick by its own mother.

I am having great difficulty processing it, and have spent the past few days thinking over how I feel about it and how it fits into the bigger picture of God, consciousness, love and reality.

Here's what I can process:-

I can process it objectively. In this respect the narrative is very straight forward. The mother stork determines that the survival of the strongest three chicks is dependent on the termination of the weakest chick. Maybe the incoming food supply is too low to feed all four chicks, or perhaps the weakest chick has an illness that could spread. In any event, the mother stork appears to make her judgement and the little one is thereafter killed.

This is all understood. I also understand that this isn't just some rogue outlier, but rather that the phenomenon of animal infanticide is common to the species and common to other species also.

All of this is objectively logical within the context of the natural world.

But when it comes to processing it subjectively I run into problems.

I invoke an exercise I sometimes use for the purposes of empathy and compassion: To virtualize the experience in my mind from the perspective of the subject (to the extent that I'm able to guess). That is to say: "Okay, here I am as God, currently incarnate into the body of this little chick." How is this experience going to play out in this moment?

So let's talk actual suffering metrics-

I can just about process the premise of physical pain and physical suffering.

I can just about process the premise of animal vs animal violence. The natural world is rife with it after all.

I can just about process the objectivity of the mother having to kill one of her own chicks in order to save three.

But what I cannot process is the total subjective sensation of lovelessness that appears within a vehicle ordinarily designed for the very opposite: The loving trust and bond of a parent/child relationship.

Indeed at one point quite far in to the video, the little chick who is now on the very outside of the nest instinctively tries to huddle back toward the protection of his mother despite the injuries she has already afflicted on him. And with that, suddenly I'm crying my eyes out.

And I cannot process.

When people use the phrase Worship God, I always prefer the phrase Protect God. And so when I see that little dude struggling as he does, I know who that little dude is. It's GOD! And so now every atom of my being is screaming in the darkness. Screaming and screaming and screaming.

Am I projecting? Do humans take death and suffering far too seriously? Is this just a game? Do animals have ontological instincts just as much as they have soci-industrial instincts? Does it not work like that?

I sometimes theorize that ants function as a kind of hive mind. Each little ant doesn't have its own finite mind per se, but functions like a braincell in a larger brain (the ant colony) albeit that each brain cell just happens to have legs and its own mobility.

Perhaps the 4 storks and 1 mother stork functions in a similar way. That is to say they are not 5 independent minds, but a kind of singular maternal hivemind that shares the suffering of the little chick between them.

I don't know. Maybe that's just crazy talk. But like I said: I'm having difficultly processing it. 

 

There’s a LOT of thinking here that storks don’t have the time or brain capacity for. Beyond pure survival (hot, cold, hungry, gotta migrate, gotta have sex and raise offspring), I doubt there’s even a subjective experience to be had. 

[cookiemonster]

2 hours ago, kinesin said:

Infact over the past 2000 years, around 50% of people died before age 15, and around 25% died in their first year of life, and these numbers are similar for animals living in the wild.  What this means is that people in the past didn't look at their baby and think "this will be my child, I will raise them into a good adult", to think that far ahead would be foolish considering their chances of actually surviving to such an age.

 

Great data. Thankyou.

I do feel that as modern humans we have very dysfunctional relationship with death.

It's interesting though. On the subject of infanticide, we humans are on a totally different page from the animals.

Post-utero infanticide within the human space is considered totally immoral (even evil). To many animals, apparently it is not an issue at all.

Furthermore, as humans we tend to want to protect the weak and be indifferent to the strong. For many animals it seems to be the inverse: Protect the strong and be indifferent to the weak.

This raises the question: Which position is the correct position? Humans or animals?

[cookiemonster]

1 hour ago, Willie said:

There’s a LOT of thinking here that storks don’t have the time or brain capacity for. Beyond pure survival (hot, cold, hungry, gotta migrate, gotta have sex and raise offspring), I doubt there’s even a subjective experience to be had. 

 

Thankyou for adding this. I do feel this angle also.

Aside from being a relatively simplistic organism in general it was also a very immature version of that organism.

Thus I hope that the actual suffering experienced was very minimal, to the point of triviality.

It's just a very difficult watch for us humans (or at least me!)

  

[kinesin]

11 hours ago, cookiemonster said:

This raises the question: Which position is the correct position? Humans or animals?

Both.  The 'correct' position (meaning the one which is aligned with God, aka what is good and true) is the functional one.  An animal's response to such a situation is perfectly appropriate to its situation, and a modern human's horrified response is also perfectly appropriate to our situation.  There's no one-size-fits-all solution which applies to all organisms across all situations.

[mandyjw]

It's funny how when you give birth, or at some point when you're pregnant, it's no longer your body, or your child, or what YOU gave life to, it's an independent life. But it's not like this transition ever really happens at any point. It's not like the identity "you the separate self" ever really happened either. 

I now look at the hospital care and education I received as a new mother as a horrific form of abuse, that I appreciate was actually very well intentioned. I was told that I was responsible for preventing sudden infant death syndrome, (which is not even fully understood), and my child had to sleep in a cold, distant, hard box on his back to be safe from SIDS. I ALSO had to breastfeed him for him to be safe from SIDS but, in practice, this distant sleeping in a cold hard box and breastfeeding mix like oil and water. As a new mom with a new baby I sacrificed my own sleep, lived with horrible anxiety and almost lost almost all my own emotional stability to try to abide by these guidelines perfectly. Looking back, my trying to do it right actually was far worse for my kid's health than if I'd listened to my own intuition. 

The obsession with keeping babies safe and the responsibility laid on mothers for this in our society is becoming pathological. The understanding that to some degree, her comfort, and her happiness directly benefits baby is totally disregarded. We believe that a mother can sacrifice herself for the child and it will be good for baby and society. 

It's a lot to unravel. It comes from our ideas of responsibility, fear, death and what defines the self. 

Edited June 26, 2021 by mandyjw

[tsuki]

Try imagining it from the pov of the mother without framing her as a loveless monster. Try imagining that you understand that you have to do this, or else you will lose all the other children. Try imagining doing it and feeling that your heart breaks as you do it.

Edited June 26, 2021 by tsuki

[Nahm]

16 hours ago, cookiemonster said:

 

 

Just gonna dip my toe on this here thought slip & slide….just a little thought about the whole of experience….…..  

(Clears throat)……“It depicts….”

And WHOOSH!!! ……….

 

“….the termination of a stork chick by its own mother.

I am having great difficulty processing it, and have spent the past few days thinking over how I feel about it and how it fits into the bigger picture of God, consciousness, love and reality.

Here's what I can process:-

I can process it objectively. In this respect the narrative is very straight forward. The mother stork determines that the survival of the strongest three chicks is dependent on the termination of the weakest chick. Maybe the incoming food supply is too low to feed all four chicks, or perhaps the weakest chick has an illness that could spread. In any event, the mother stork appears to make her judgement and the little one is thereafter killed.

This is all understood. I also understand that this isn't just some rogue outlier, but rather that the phenomenon of animal infanticide is common to the species and common to other species also.

All of this is objectively logical within the context of the natural world.

But when it comes to processing it subjectively I run into problems.

I invoke an exercise I sometimes use for the purposes of empathy and compassion: To virtualize the experience in my mind from the perspective of the subject (to the extent that I'm able to guess). That is to say: "Okay, here I am as God, currently incarnate into the body of this little chick." How is this experience going to play out in this moment?

So let's talk actual suffering metrics-

I can just about process the premise of physical pain and physical suffering.

I can just about process the premise of animal vs animal violence. The natural world is rife with it after all.

I can just about process the objectivity of the mother having to kill one of her own chicks in order to save three.

But what I cannot process is the total subjective sensation of lovelessness that appears within a vehicle ordinarily designed for the very opposite: The loving trust and bond of a parent/child relationship.

Indeed at one point quite far in to the video, the little chick who is now on the very outside of the nest instinctively tries to huddle back toward the protection of his mother despite the injuries she has already afflicted on him. And with that, suddenly I'm crying my eyes out.

And I cannot process.

When people use the phrase Worship God, I always prefer the phrase Protect God. And so when I see that little dude struggling as he does, I know who that little dude is. It's GOD! And so now every atom of my being is screaming in the darkness. Screaming and screaming and screaming.

Am I projecting? Do humans take death and suffering far too seriously? Is this just a game? Do animals have ontological instincts just as much as they have soci-industrial instincts? Does it not work like that?

I sometimes theorize that ants function as a kind of hive mind. Each little ant doesn't have its own finite mind per se, but functions like a braincell in a larger brain (the ant colony) albeit that each brain cell just happens to have legs and its own mobility.

Perhaps the 4 storks and 1 mother stork functions in a similar way. That is to say they are not 5 independent minds, but a kind of singular maternal hivemind that shares the suffering of the little chick between them.

I don't know. Maybe that's just crazy talk. But like I said: I'm having difficultly processing it…..” 

 

 

[mandyjw]

I had difficulty processing when my dad told me that he had hamsters as a kid, and they ate their babies and HE decided that they were so horrible they no longer deserved to live. But who decided to put a male and female hamster in too small of tank in the first place? Dad? 

What about Adam and Eve?  Who decided to put THOSE hamsters in too small of a cage? God? 

Someone better stand up and answer for all this shit. 

 

[Tim R]

17 hours ago, cookiemonster said:

But what I cannot process is the total subjective sensation of lovelessness that appears within a vehicle ordinarily designed for the very opposite: The loving trust and bond of a parent/child relationship.

@cookiemonster But don't you see that the killing of this one chick is the manifestation of love for all chicks? And believe it or not, even for the killed one! Let me try to explain;

You have correctly recognized that the stork did it for probably some good reason, like limited food supply etc. The mother loves her children and her own survival. So what is she supposed to do? Keep them all and therefore let all of them become sick or die because she couldn't provide enough food for everyone? Then where would be the love?

This act is not loveless.  

It's the other side of love that we people don't like to look at. Love isn't always pleasant, but nevertheless, it is love. You are still attached to Love as this romanticized notion of Love as a pleasant, warm, cuddly emotion. But love is much more than that. Love includes the unpleasant. 

 

When you love your children, you sometimes have to be harsh to them - not in the sense that you purposefully want to inflict something unpleasant upon them, but something that they from their limited point of view will perceive as harsh and unloving, but which actually is a manifestation of your love for them.

To give an example, let's say your child wants to eat a bunch of candy. And you say "okay, you can eat one or two snickers (or whatever)."

And then your child starts complaining because he/she wants more. But because you love your child and you don't want him/her to become unhealthy and the teeth to fall out, you have to do something which the child will perceive as unloving and harsh (forbidding more candy) - but only because he/she isn't yet mature enough to recognize the love in this act. You see?

Now you might say "but you can't compare refusing candy with killing your child!!"

Actually I can. It's the exact same principle. Both are acts of love, the question is only:

Are you mature enough to see that? Are you mature enough to get over the superficial appearance of doing something seemingly unloving and recognize the actual love behind it?

[cookiemonster]

6 hours ago, Tim R said:

@cookiemonster But don't you see that the killing of this one chick is the manifestation of love for all chicks? And believe it or not, even for the killed one! Let me try to explain;

You have correctly recognized that the stork did it for probably some good reason, like limited food supply etc. The mother loves her children and her own survival. So what is she supposed to do? Keep them all and therefore let all of them become sick or die because she couldn't provide enough food for everyone? Then where would be the love?

This act is not loveless.  

It's the other side of love that we people don't like to look at. Love isn't always pleasant, but nevertheless, it is love. You are still attached to Love as this romanticized notion of Love as a pleasant, warm, cuddly emotion. But love is much more than that. Love includes the unpleasant. 

 

When you love your children, you sometimes have to be harsh to them - not in the sense that you purposefully want to inflict something unpleasant upon them, but something that they from their limited point of view will perceive as harsh and unloving, but which actually is a manifestation of your love for them.

To give an example, let's say your child wants to eat a bunch of candy. And you say "okay, you can eat one or two snickers (or whatever)."

And then your child starts complaining because he/she wants more. But because you love your child and you don't want him/her to become unhealthy and the teeth to fall out, you have to do something which the child will perceive as unloving and harsh (forbidding more candy) - but only because he/she isn't yet mature enough to recognize the love in this act. You see?

Now you might say "but you can't compare refusing candy with killing your child!!"

Actually I can. It's the exact same principle. Both are acts of love, the question is only:

Are you mature enough to see that? Are you mature enough to get over the superficial appearance of doing something seemingly unloving and recognize the actual love behind it?

 

Great insights.

It's almost like something appearing to be nihilistic, but in actuality is the opposite of nihilism.

[cookiemonster]

@mandyjw @Nahm @tsuki @kinesin

 

Thanks. All great perspectives.