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Several weeks after my cat had been hit by a car and killed, I began to notice another cat, apparently a stray, roaming about the neighborhood.  I started putting food out for him and, over a period of days, began to win his trust; eventually I took him in as a permanent resident of my home.  He's quite a small cat, though full grown, and as yet unneutered.  A few days after I took him in he developed an abscess from a puncture wound to his leg, which required treatment with antibiotics.  He's fine now, but it's curious to think that, had my other cat not died, I probably would either have not noticed this cat or, lacking sufficient room, been unable to take him in.  Without food, and with the wound on his leg leaking poisons into his bloodstream, his chances for survival would, I imagine, have been slim.

And so it is that I feel as if, once again, life has accorded me a specific response to my need.  My grief over the loss of my other cat was intense – so intense in fact that I was beginning to doubt my ability to recover from it.  The knowledge that that cat's life had been shortened by at least ten years from what it should have been; the wastefulness exemplified by the manner in which he died; the fact that, for me, the manner of his death acted as a symbol and personification of the wasteful deaths of so many other animals; the fact too that his death, and the manner of his death, seemed to symbolize the cul-de-sac my own life decisions have brought me to – all these factors, combined with my own personal grief at the loss of a companion whose friendship I had valued on a daily basis, and had counted on enjoying for many years to come, had brought me to a crisis point.  And though this new cat's presence in no way erases or nullifies the grief I felt, and continue to feel, for the loss of the other, still, I feel as if life has so arranged itself so as to bring me a message:  Don't give up, Simon!  Not yet, anyhow; not yet . . .  I don't wish to be taken as a solipsist, and yet I feel certain that there is a causality to these events that lies deeper than that of mere chance.  If I'm honest I would have to say that, because of my exploration of the relationship existing between self, reality, and dreams, I believe I've begun to tap into the wellsprings of a deeper causality than I had previously known to exist.

Still, if this new cat came into my life to help assuage my grief, and to demonstrate to me that all is not hopeless, that I am neither completely lost nor completely alone, this question still remains:  For what purpose was the cat who was killed taken from me?  It's possible, of course, that he died for a reason that served his purposes, not my own.  And yet I feel that his death, affecting me as profoundly as it has, must hold some meaning for me as well.  What purpose it may have served him I cannot, of course, ever presume to know.  The purpose that it served in my life was, evidently, to remind me of the ever existent presence of death.  Yet I do not, I think, have any particular need to be reminded of my own physical mortality:  of that fact I am well aware.  What I perhaps needed to be made more cognizant of was that the ego, the falsely transcendent self that is born of language and of the abstractions engendered via the use of language, also must die.  The full ramifications of this understanding I have not yet achieved.  I have not yet learned to use language as a mere tool, but still "believe" in the transcendent self that language falsely posits as a legitimate and actual truth.  I may have gone some length towards discovering the Buddha within – but I have not yet learned to kill the Buddha.  This I must somehow learn to do.

The problem, of course, lies not so much in the properties of language, but in how those properties are used.  Which is to say, language must in its symbolic guise be understood to be a false mechanism, a cheat; but it's a cheat which, if used knowingly, may also reveal truth.  However, in order to use language as a medium of truth, one must first have experienced the death of the ego.  This can be done, at least partially, by submerging oneself within the storytelling aspect of language, and of life itself; and yet, having become aware as I have of the deeper levels of interconnectedness that exist between self, reality, and dreams (by which I mean, the imagistic way in which reality unfolds to reveal the intercausality that exists between "self" and "other"), the stakes appear to have been raised on me.  I've no choice but to delve deeper into the realization of my own ego death.

I wonder if someday, in the near or not-so-near future, the human species will have evolved beyond its need for language.  Communication would then be a matter of sensing another's thoughts as a "felt reality" – understood, that is to say, through its ideational component alone, minus the encasing symbolic shell.  All these words that I have written, all the words that have been written since the beginning of recorded history, would then become outmoded, useless, impossibly archaic.  Should that happen, I wonder if there might exist at some point in the future a group of scholars who make a study of the language of words, scanning these blocks of print in such a way as to glean their meaning as a "felt sense," and by this methodology piece together a history of the past that is fully comprehensible to others, yet is not hidebound in the mind by the presence of language symbols?  I speak of reading and understanding the past as poetry, I suppose.  How I long to join them, those "silent brothers," those "patient sisters" endeavoring to undertake that task.  And how frightened I am of the gulf I must pass through in order to reach their level of knowledge.

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