Elephants As Individualized Creatures

Elephants As Individualized Creatures

Animals have a profound interconnection with humans and appear to have individualized. It is definitely noticeable even in my chickens who are a delight!

As a great lover of all animals, a really soft spot has developed in my heart for elephants. Care and concern for these huge animals has been encouraged and expanded by the newsletter from The Elephant Sanctuary in Tennessee.

For years the newsletter has brought Dulary and Minnie and the other “girls” home to me. For a short time I had an especially close connection to one of them. It didn’t last long because she died.

The Sanctuary rescues elephants from circuses and two-bit sideshows where these magnificent animals are seriously abused and treated with heartless cruelty. Once at the Sanctuary elephants are treated with kindness and given proper medical care.

Many of them contract tuberculosis because they are made to stand on concrete and elephants’ feet are made for the softer earth of the jungle.

The Sanctuary newsletter has taught me that elephants are very social creatures. It is not uncommon for an elephant to befriend another elephant in its youth, then have to endure the pain of a forced separation, only to find and recognize the old friend at the Sanctuary many years later. What a joyful thing it is to find that these pachyderms can continue to enjoy their friendship in a new and hospitable setting!

As I follow the lives and behavior of these magnificent creatures through the Sanctuary newsletter, their individualized behavior patterns become evident. Amazingly social creatures, elephants make friends as humans do.

One of them befriended a dog that lived at the sanctuary and they spent happy years together roaming through the forest, playing together, and just enjoying the other’s companionship.

Elephants definitely individualize. Surely their contact with man has speeded their natural tendency for socialization. Individualization, an important landmark in the evolutionary process, is evident in these magnificent animals.

Individualization also has a spiritual side. In a very real way all animals—each elephant—is a “son of God,” a creature with will, love and intelligence. Higher animals like elephants, horses, dogs and cats all have a purpose in nature. Once an animal species develops a purpose and has a “directed will” something of a higher order occurs within the animal and it becomes individualized.

Most of us humans are acquainted with one or another of these higher animals. It is then possible for us to watch these evolving forms of life and note the presence of the Divine in them. It is unmistakably present if we are willing to see it. Even a shadow of individualization is perhaps visible in chickens!

Evolving life is within animals just as it is in humans. When they get to a certain stage of being, sentient and aware creatures, the power of life itself forces them into contact and interdependence with other creatures including humans, which in turn prepares and enables them to move up the evolutionary ladder. What a glorious thing it is!

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Dear Reader, please note that some of the information contained in this article is based on comments in Esoteric Psychology, Vol. I, p. 258, Alice A. Bailey, Lucis Publishing Company, New York.

© April, 2014 Rebecca Field