an easy one. Talking himself out of the difficult task, the cowboy puts away his gun and drives on down the road.
Cowboys act tough and they sometimes talk rough, but they love their horses.
Occasionally, like Polly, a cowboy has called me to do the job. Once, a man hired me to euthanize a six-month-old, rye-nosed filly because she had trouble breathing. When I arrived, his older brother wanted to know why I was there. He asked his younger brother about the foal, “Why don’t you just shoot her?”
“I don’t want to shoot her. Do you want to shoot her?” he asked gruffly.
“I don’t want to shoot her,” said the older brother.
“Okay then.”
Enough said, it was decided. I did the dirty work by lethal injection as the younger cowboy held back his tears, saying, “I should have put her down at birth, but I just couldn’t.”
I could tell Polly loved this black quarter horse, too, as she started reminiscing. “He was my husband’s roping horse. People offered us up to ten thousand dollars for him; he was the best roping horse in the county. My husband died in my arms two winters ago. He didn’t feel well one night, so I held him, and he just passed away.”
Polly and I climbed the hill to the place she chose to bury the horse. Though almost twice my age, Polly surprised me with how briskly she could hike that rocky pasture. The horse surprised me with how quickly he died. He fell off the needle just as I completed the injection of euthanasia solution.
“Now he and your husband are together,” I said.
“No, they’re not!” shrieked Polly. “My husband’s in heaven and that horse is just dead!”
“Well, what happened to the energy that was just there?” I asked, pointing to the body.
“I don’t know. It’s just gone,” she said. And she started quoting Bible verses.
I know my way around a Bible, being raised a Christian, and although I’ve never seen a Bible passage that says animals do not have souls, I knew Polly believed they did not. I gave Polly a ride back to her little ranch house, while we discussed suffering and death and the laws of energy. She seemed to have all the answers according to Baptist teachings, until I asked, “Do you believe in reincarnation?”
“No, that’s when you come back as an animal,” she said.
“No, it’s not. Well, not necessarily.”
Then she quoted the Bible again. “There will be a new heaven, a new earth, and a New Jerusalem, and body and soul shall be reunited.”
“That sounds like a description of reincarnation,” I said.
“Well, maybe it is,” Polly said with conviction.
Six months later, I tried to find the verse Polly quoted about the body and soul being reunited, but could not. I wanted to ask Polly, but I learned she had died. A friend suggested I speak to Polly’s son, John. So I invited him to have tea with me.
John said the verse came from the book of Isaiah. He also told me about Polly’s painful back injury. Surgery had not helped, and the pain medication made her sick. Then one day, no one could find her. John called out telepathically to his mother, asking her to tell him where she was. He walked across their many acres and found her, perhaps somewhere near where their old horse died. She had shot herself.
John also remembered the horse fondly; only he and his father could ride him. The steed had indeed saved his father once by carrying him safely out of a deep bog. He may have had some chronic foot pain, so maybe Polly ended his suffering, or maybe she was getting things in order before she killed herself. Or maybe there is more to the story than I know. For me, it was all as clear as the mud and dust that covered my truck.
I wondered how Polly had come to terms with the Christian teaching that suicide is a sin. I supposed that her belief about not letting horses get old and suffer also applied to her. This is where church dogma and her personal beliefs parted ways. Somehow, she must have reconciled the issue with God.
These two women, one a Buddhist and one a Baptist, made me wonder about the spirits of animals. Somewhere between the Buddhist notion that animals can reincarnate as humans and the Baptist belief that a dead animal is just gone, there must be the truth. . . and I aimed to find it.
Remove judgment and pain disappears.
— THICH NHAT HANH
People tend to frown or laugh whenever they hear about Margaret the Buddhist and Polly the Baptist, and they judge the women as either cruel or crazy. The topic of religious beliefs stirs up strong opinions, childhood wounds, and deep emotions. Wars over belief kill millions. People cling to their faith, believing theirs is right and other faiths are wrong.
Similarly, numerous people have at times been upset with my interest in certain religious teachings. So, it was with trepidation that I began to write this book. I initially stood somewhere between Margaret and Polly, a Christian who believed in reincarnation. I had no idea how many other ideas existed. After much contemplation, I hoped that at the highest level of each teaching, a truth common to all existed. Hence, I searched for common elements among spiritual beliefs and found many positive, unifying themes. For example, the golden rule, “Love your neighbor as yourself,” appears in the texts of African beliefs, Persian teachings, Buddhism, pagan practices, Christianity, Confucianism, Hinduism, Islam, Jainism, Judaism, Native American stories, Sikhism, Taoism, and Zoroastrianism.
Each religion or philosophical belief has an ultimate ideal or supreme spiritual power for which there are many names: God, Goddess, Truth, Yahweh, Allah, the Universal Life Force, the Lord, Brahman, Absolute Bodhicitta, Christ consciousness, the Tao, the Higgs boson, Source Energy, the Great Spirit, Buddha-nature, Adonai, the Force, DNA, All That Is, Wakan-Tanka, the Inscrutable, the Divine. As different as these names seem at first, they have a lot in common. Many teachings, including some Christian and Buddhist teachings, state that the supreme power resides inside us. Jesus said, “The kingdom of God is within you” (Luke 17:21), and each Buddhist has his or her own inner Buddha-nature. Because the divine is within us, we are encouraged to look there for the truth. The Buddha said, “You should trust the truth that is within you.”2
In this book, when I refer to the “Truth” with a capital T, I mean the ultimate in spiritual teachings. The other kind of “truth” is a slippery, shifty, ever-changing viewpoint from a particular perspective. Ask ten people what they saw at the scene of a crime, and you’ll hear ten different answers, all true. In fact, if multiple stories of a crime are identical, the police consider them to be contrived. We each see things differently, and our story changes with time.
I originally intended to report the Truth about the spiritual nature of animals, but this became more challenging as a myriad of opinions surfaced for each religious teaching. Wide variation of beliefs exists even within a religion, sect, denomination, or church. With no agreement, no simple statements can be made about Catholic, Hindu, pagan, scientific, or psychic beliefs.
Dilemmas also mounted as I encountered my own negative judgments regarding spiritual teachings new to me. In order to present a fair and impartial view, I had to open my mind to new ideas, and the project quickly became entertaining.
Letting
