by David P. Stang, May 15, 2021

[Ed. Note: Because this post was far too long to include in any of the MillersTime Favorite Reads lists, I am posting it here for those readers who have interest in this topic as well as in David’s personal experiences with telepathic communication with animals.]

Many decades ago when I first began to read ancient Buddhist texts in English translation I became quite curious about what the sage old Buddhist authors meant when they employed the term “Sentient Beings.”During my high school and college years I remember being taught that only human beings can be considered to possess consciousness. The Skinnerian Behaviorist writings asserted that the most intellectually advanced animals are capable of nothing more sophisticated than a simple reflex derived from “operant conditioning”.

Part of the reason why I became so confused about the meaning of the term “Sentient Beings” was that I got sucked into believing that B.F. Skinner knew what he was talking about. One magical and unforgettable day about a couple of decades ago I was enriched by an epiphany concerning the consciousness of animals and how we are capable of relating to and communicating with them. This sudden understanding occurred during a visit to the home of my good friend, Dan Dreyfus, who lived in McLean, Virginia. Dan was very bright, earned a Ph.D., and whose cognitive reasoning was consistently quite exceptional. Yet I discerned that neither his doctorate nor his well-honed cognitive and empirical skills constitute the energetic essence of his feeling vibrantly connected to creatures of Nature.

My friend Dan, in order to expose me to how he connects to and communicates with such lovely creatures, took me out on his patio and asked me to sit very still. Then he went inside and came out with food for the birds, squirrels and chipmunks. As he sat down in his chair the birds dropped down from the trees, perched on his arms and wrists and ate the seeds out of his hands. They also flew down to feed on those that had fallen to the patio floor next to his feet. Then the squirrels scampered down from the branches above and ate seeds out of the cup which my friend held firmly against the trunk of the tree.

After he had finished feeding the birds and the squirrels my friend noticed that a chipmunk had arrived on the scene. Dan poured some seeds into the palm of his right hand and sat down holding his hand about three inches above the patio’s red brick floor. The chipmunk headed straight for the hand holding the seeds then stopped dead in its tracks as he noticed my presence. Dan said to the chipmunk, “Don’t be afraid. He won’t hurt you. He’s just a spectator. Now come and eat your seeds.” The chipmunk trotted over to my friend, rubbed his nose against his forearm, then hopped up on my friend’s wrist and ate contentedly out of his hand. The little furry creature filled his mouth with seeds until his cheeks puffed out like little balloons. Then he hopped down and scampered over to the edge of the patio to masticate his mouth full of seeds.

Just then about seven or eight of the birds who had just previously eaten their fill re-landed on the fence at the edge of the patio chirping away as they looked down at my friend. Facing the birds Dan said, “Did you have a good feed?” He then looked at me and said, “They have returned just for the company. They do it all the time.”

He told me that several days each week a wild Fox in his neighborhood walks to the edge of his patio while he is sitting in his chair. The fox will simply stand there and look at my friend and he at the fox. Dan told me that this communion with the wild animals means a lot to him. He said, “I really feel connected to these critters and they to me. I talk to them and they understand me. You can imagine what a transformational effect my experiences with these wild creatures has had upon me.”

As I reflected upon this astounding experience it occurred to me that without a shadow of a doubt both wild and tame animals as well as humans are sentient beings.

I began to wonder if other forms of life could also be considered sentient beings. This curiosity resulted in my discovering a number of fascinating books which shed much light on my longtime quest to understand the nature of sentient beings and their diverse interconnections. I’ll discuss each publication briefly below in the form of mini-book reviews. But having read most of them over the past at least eight or ten years and begun to experiment with communicating with non-human sentient beings I became quite interested in learning more about their consciousness and our consciousness of them and the realities of how we communicate with each other.

What I discovered is that there are a number of different ways of learning about and communicating with non-human sentient beings. First, we exhibit an intensifying curiosity about them. We observe them. We read about them and we ask ourselves a number of questions concerning them. This often becomes a subject-object undertaking. By this I mean that we employ our analytical minds in the exploration of a particular object such as, for example, a dog or a cat or a horse or a cow. Then we make mental notes about what we observe as we continue our intellectual quest to learn more. Now if we become fanatically curious and therefore obsessively pursue our investigations we can spend nearly a decade earning a PhD and doing postdoctoral studies pertaining to our animals or plants of choice. There are a multitude of scientific or quasi-scientific academic disciplines of various sorts that focus on animal behavior, cognition and other faculties. There are yet comparatively few academic investigators of plant consciousness as many scientists remain persuaded that no plant possesses any kind of sensibility equivalent to an animal brain. Accordingly, they are persuaded that plants neither possess what could be called a mind or are capable of any kind of complex thought.

While some of us who are less academically inclined tend to prefer relating to animals than intellectualizing about them. Everyone who has ever had a pet of any kind quickly learned to appreciate the day-to-day experience of relating to that animal. Yet academic scientists who become fond of the animals they study usually go out of their way to prove that what they hypothesize about such animals is irrefutably empirical, avoids all subjectivity and is experimentally replicable.

Then there are psychically gifted human beings who were born with, and came to further develop, an ability to communicate telepathically with animals. They prefer to ask the animals to explain themselves telepathically rather than conduct laboratory experiments to find their answers. Beginning with the next paragraph we will briefly explore several  books written by authors devoted to all kinds of sentient beings  with a focus on the nature of the connectedness between humans and other types of living organisms.

“A Best Friend Is Someone Who Gives Me a Book I’ve Never Read”- A. Lincoln

Here are all, in one place, the 2017 mid-year favorite books by MillersTime readers. There are 205 titles, 115 fiction and 90 nonfiction. Fifty readers contributed to this wonderful list.

The first eight below ‘arrived’ in the last week or so and were not in earlier posts. They are followed by all the ones I posted earlier.

Enjoy.

Final Additions to the List:

Kathleen Kroos:

Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng (F).

Setting Free the Kites by Alex George (F).

The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson (NF), my summer project…

Charles Tilis:

Giant of the Senate by Al Franken (NF) is likely a “must read” for progressives and a “never read” for conservatives. Senator Franken exposes the seedier side of politics today with a unique combination of wit and self-reflection of which both are needed to remain sane in today’s polarized environment. He does bring to life the rigors of big-league politics with the need for fundraising and impact on families. One thing is clear though—Senator Franken has the chops to aspire to greater office.

Land Wayland:

The Lost City of the Monkey God: A True Story by Douglas Preston (NF), about the 10 day visit in 2015 to the (non-Mayan) City of the Monkey God by a team of archaeologists, film makers, photographers and writers who traveled to a lonely, lonely, lonely area of Honduras called La Mosquitias, where no human has been seen for about 500 years…a city, indeed an entire civilization of 30,000–100,000, was abandoned due to the arrival of a parasite that causes the lips and nose to develop huge ulcers and eventually causes the person’s face to erode or waste away. The infection is exceedingly difficult to (1) detect and (2) treat and 8 out of 10 team members got it (they all survived) but it will never be out of their system, as it waits for a breakdown in their immune system to finish the job.

Before they walked away, the inhabitants carefully placed their entire civilization’s cache of sacred objects, including a number of sculptures of monkeys, in the main square.  And even though these these items would be worth millions of dollars to tomb-raiders, they were still in-situ 500 years later.  No one had been there.

What they found in 2015 is like all of the best jungle exploration stories of all time—even better. Beautiful quiet rivers surrounded by towering mountains and riotous jungle with bugs and butterflies and dragonflies and frogs never seen before.  Strange noises all night long including the sounds of big animals moving through the camp. They had multiple encounters with 7 foot jaguars and 6 foot deadly aggressive fer-de-lance snakes. It rarely stopped raining. And there were no paths of even the smallest kind and every step had to macheted into submission  There were deep quicksand pits, and thousands of serious big stinging ants waiting on trees to drop off onto your skin, and ticks, ticks, ticks and deadly spiders, spiders, spiders. And the ground was very literally covered with cockroaches at night. You could get lost 15 feet in the jungle from your group. The most important piece of equipment each person carried was their cell phone with a GPS  system that was accurate within one foot  Without it on and working (double checked) you did not dare step 3 inches outside the camp boundaries.

This is a book to read while seated in a chair with its legs in buckets of bug killer, covered with three layers of the finest grade bug netting, every part, every part, every part  of your entire body slathered in DEET, breathing through grade 7 nose filters and wearing swim goggles to keep the deadly no-see-ums out of your eyes, having blood samples drawn every hour to pick up the first signs of kidney or liver failure, and tuned by radio to the priest or rabbi back home who is sending constant prayers up in your behalf because the doctor;s are praying you don’t come back and bring stuff with you that will destroy their hospital’s  plan for dealing with exotic infectious diseases. And no I don’t exaggerate  nearly enough.

Elizabeth Tilis:

All the Missing Girls by Megan Miranda (F). Your yearly mystery thriller a la Girl on the Train, Gone Girl, etc, but with a twist – the story is written backwards!

The North Water by Ian McGuire (F) is an incredible book to listen to. I hope they make a movie. Great recommendation (h/t EllnMllr).

 Previously Posted:

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“A Best Friend Is Someone Who Gives Me a Book I’ve Never read”- A. Lincoln

The MillersTime year-end “best books roundup” is my most visited post of the year. It’s a labor of love and is only possible because so many of you took the time to send in your favorite reads of the year. A sincere thanks to all of you

The funny thing is I didn’t read as much this year as in previous years, which was something a number of you said also. My major excuse was that I got ‘lost’ in baseball as my heroes the Red Sox were in the ‘hunt’ the entire 162 game season (not counting the disastrous playoffs). But I digress. Not sure about why others read less (though not my wife); some of you grumbled that you simply didn’t find as many memorable books or were having trouble remembering the titles you did read.

Nevertheless, 80 of you sent your lists and descriptions for a total of 380 books. Fiction lead the nonfiction 56% to 44%. Only a few books had much consensus (When Breathe Becomes Air, The Warmth of Other Suns, Hillbilly Elegy, Alexander Hamilton, The Nightingale, The Neapolitan Novels, The Sympathizer), and many of those were published prior to 2016.

Our youngest participant is almost 8 years old; the oldest is 95. (Maybe now that our children and grandchildren are reading we can have a special children’s subcategory next year?) The rest of you are mostly between the ages of 35- 75. Fifty-eight percent of you are women, 42% were men.

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