a personal experiment of a ten year old boy
I grew up in Finland in a family where animals were always around, our dog and several cats and my little sister’s hamsters and Japanese dancing mice. For a time we also had a little farm with pigs, sheep, turkeys and chicken. The nature was always around, so much so that I remember one warm dark autumn night when my whole family was gathered around the TV to follow some late night series, when a moose cow stuck her huge head in to the living room through an open window. The head was almost three feet long, and the neck added two more, so the whole apparition that suddenly was hovering in the middle of the room with its characteristic strong cow-like moose odor, was about one meter and a half, and the giant moved its head around for some indefinite but long time, and looked at us all in turn with its gentle eyes, before it threw its head back and we heard its step as it returned to the adjacent forest. I don’t remember anyone of us commenting it with a single word, and we turned back to to the series. TV was a more curious than a living moose or its head. In the forests and around lakes I followed beavers, badgers,raccoon dogs, foxes, brown hare and mountain hare, and all smaller critters whether they were jumping, crawling, slithering, swimming or flying.
So, I could not avoid thinking of animal cognition. Animals apparently don’t have words, at least not many. I noticed, however, that e.g. turkeys did have something resembling words, because when they were feeding in the yard, at least one of them was always keeping watch, and when it saw some approaching animal, its warning sound was different depending on whether it saw a hawk, a crow, a fox, or even a human. Our dog and cats also had many different sounds for different situations, although our black and white Karelian bear dog Panu, believe it or not, seemed to show some astonishing telepathic ability. For example, it had a habit of coming to meet the school bus when I was returning from school, and I was told that it never sat by the roadside if I was not in the bus although it could not know my changing timetable, because I often stayed some time at the village after school with some of my friends.
Anyway, I was so intrigued by the question of the animals’ thinking that I started practising thinking without words.Was it possible or not? It must be possible, because quite obviously animals are not automatons but they show very complicated and competent behavior.
So, I practised doing ordinary everyday things while trying to avoid the internal verbal monologue that we use to call thinking. And to my surprise, it was much easier than I had anticipated. Already the first day I could act two to three minutes, like preparing a snack and cooking tea for myself, without using a single word in the thinking process. Thinking, in fact, was not the difficult thing. What was difficult, was preventing the verbal monologue that all the time tried to intervene, like a sportscaster who calls every single thing I do as if I myself were some idiot who needs to be told that. Quite soon, however, I learned how to keep my inner wisecranker at bay, and I could take long walks without apparently thinking anything, if we equate thinking with words, but in fact deep in thoughts, taking in my surroundings and reacting to them in a quite appropriate way. I suspect that was what they now call mindfullness. At least something that e.g. the Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh teaches about walking meditation is probably quite near what I did as a ten year old in the woods of Eastern Finland.
This is my first posting to explain why I wrote my novel Octolution 2027 and its sequel Sunrise City and what they are about. I continue in some future post.
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