Sharing genes with Razi
Sitting in my favorite recliner reading the paper, I was distracted by Razi, my gray tabby, rearranging his sleeping position on my lap.
Of course, I recognize that reading the paper should have precedence over my cat’s predictable habits – he shifts his weight, turns around, often returning to his original position. But I stopped to pay attention because in a holistic sense, Razi was offering me an existential gift.
As we quietly communed in my recliner, I noticed a warm, deep awareness of well-being within me. I felt Razi’s purr, a gentle humming on my thigh, until he returned to deep slumber and it ceased. I allowed myself to enjoy the moment, which for some reason felt—as it always does—curiously profound.
It served to remind me of how utterly connected we earth creatures all are—made of the exact same stardust from the big bang—and bearing many of the same or similar instincts and behaviors. In fact, people and cats share 90 percent of the same gene sequences, if Playful Kitty website is to be believed. Probably it is because a more scientific-sounding site—SeattlePi—reports that we humans also share the same genetic proportion with mice, although, oddly, with dogs it’s just 84 percent.
My point is that as far as we’ve been able to divine in a few thousand years, the “real world” (including the entire universe and beyond) is a solely material reality. This means that everything in it is concrete and non-ephemeral, everything, that is, except our substance-fueled imaginations. It’s on my mind as I’ve just finished writing a book on this matter, and as I watched Razi display his great contentment with and trust in me, this seemed important and relevant.
I doubt that Razi imagines godly feline apparitions in his dreams. Most humans, on the other hand, have long curiously envisioned gods much like ourselves, although I don’t. Yet, there we were, Razi and me, having a moment that felt almost sacred. A pure, fully material gift of existential bliss. You animal lovers know what I’m talking about.
And so I am happily reminded that the themes of my now finished manuscript are completely germane to real life. And also, as the Greek “graceful life” philosopher Epicurus contended, “It is folly for a man to pray to the gods for that which he has the power to obtain by himself.”
