Animals Are People Too

“I cannot emphasise too often or too strongly that if people realised how important it is for them to make friends of all domestic animals and do their part in making them understand man, then this, last stage [of individualization] would be reached much more quickly than is often the case.”

– A Soul’s Journey by Peter Richelieu

Student: My cat died last week. Will I ever see her again?

JS: First stop thinking in such linear terms. All incarnations are concurrent, as I’ve said before, and I’m not only speaking about human incarnations, or of past and future ‘dates’ on the cosmic calendar. Do you understand the significance of this?

It means that you are very intimately connected with any and all animals in your life. And although this may sound strange to some, they are usually what you presently think of as your own human family members. That is to say, your cat may actually be your own mother – at an ‘earlier’ stage of her evolution. The past is with us, right now, remember. Often you will be able to identify traits in your pets that are mirrored in the people around you – and there’s a reason for that: They are the people around you! A pet may even be your own self. This is true on an ultimate level, of course, but I mean on a soul level.

When you truly grasp the significance of this, and of pets generally, then everything changes. An abuser of animals, for example, is simply reflecting how he/she ‘was’ treated as an animal – because he/she is that animal that’s being abused, in all likelihood. We tend to think of cause and effect in linear terms, but that’s part of the illusion. An abuser of animals is not violent because he experienced violence ‘in the past,’ as AN animal, at the hands of someone else, but rather because he is experiencing violence now – as THE animal that he’s abusing. Which happened first? Neither, because everything is concurrent. Do you see that? In other words, anyone who changes the Now also changes ‘the past’. This is Karma in action.

Any changes that we make to ourselves, in the Now, are reflected throughout the fabric of Creation, in ways we cannot possibly comprehend.