Why Cats Have Claws
on holiness and morality
When people think about accomplished adepts of spiritual paths, the image of such a person tends to be an embodiment of saintly values—explicit righteousness, compassion, and most of all, meekness. Did not the most famous such person, Jesus Christ of Nazareth, utter the words “the meek shall inherit the world,” and advise to turn the other cheek when one is insulted or assaulted?
Indeed he did; but as with all embodiments of true spirituality, he was packed with paradox: He also announced that he “did not come to bring peace but a sword”; as well in the same instance that he would turn the son against his father and the daughter against her mother.
The profane ideal of a spiritual person is, as are all ideals, only a clichéd image leaving out something very essential.
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Cats
“I have lived with several Zen masters; all of them cats.”
— Eckhart Tolle
There is no animal quite as dignified and beautiful as a cat.
Cats have in many cultures, most notoriously in Ancient Egypt, been held in a venerated position of embodied spirituality. And this is no wonder to anyone traveling any spiritual path: there is a profound elegance and grace in the way a cat moves; they are able to completely relax in any environment; and they also know how to protect themselves.
Indeed, when cats are threatened or even just annoyed, they tend not to back off in fear and shame, but attack back regardless of the size of the attacker. Their reflexes are excellent; and they know how to use their sharp claws in a way that maximizes the damage they can cause. Only when cats are domesticated, neutered and rendered docile do they become meek and fearful.
Cats are also very cruel animals. Everyone who’s spent time around them knows how they hunt for fun; and when they catch a small animal, they do not instantly kill it but often spend some time playing around with it.
In the cat is embodied what comes to my mind when I think of a person actually accomplished in spirituality. Though cats are beautiful, graceful, overall very relaxed creatures, they are very deadly. Herein is what explicitly seems like a conflict, but which implicitly is a coniunctio oppositorum, a union of opposites: and the whole point of any spiritual endeavor is to detect the implicit unities of all apparently conflicting opposites, in oneself as well as the world (after all, these too are implicitly one as well!). This also explains Jesus’ tendency to be paradoxical in his sayings.
Alan Watts once referred to holy people as being like the ocean: the most beautiful sight on a calm, sunny day; but, in a raging storm, a sight provoking terror like very few others. Not to forget its profound depths and the suggestive horrors that the mind projects into them.1
Thus, the true Bodhisattva—an enlightened, liberated and whole-y human being—is not “a stone Buddha” which you can poke all day or doodle on with a marker without getting a reaction; you might well get your nose kicked for being disrespectful. Such a person is also not explicitly enlightened: according to true Chan ideals, she is quite impossible to distinguish as such save by other people on the same level of adeptness. She does not align her behavior with what she (or anyone else) thinks an enlightened person is like; she lets herself be unpredictable and inconsistent, thus expressing her attainment of freedom.
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Morality
Such a person, having accepted good and evil as co-arising counterparts, is quite uninterested in morality.
“The Tao doesn’t take sides;
it gives birth to both good and evil.
The Master doesn’t take sides;
she welcomes both saints and sinners.”
Most people derive the core purpose for their existence from pitting good and bad against each other (and, in cyclic intervals, projecting the suppressed tendency for badness in themselves to whomever happens to be a fitting scapegoat at the time—and then feeling justified in acting in all the bad ways imaginable towards the scapegoat).
The sage does not participate in this; she sees it as juvenile ignorance. She also sees that everyone explicitly or even implicitly preoccupied with righteousness is doing it with the worst intentions possible; exactly because the true intentions—which are always motivated by selfishness—are hidden from the ignorant person living them out. The instant the true intentions are made clear for oneself and others, they are under supervision and cannot inflate into destructive proportions.
But looking at a cat playing with a mouse it caught, keeping the poor little thing in a state of purgatorial anticipation of its death, is bound to raise conflicting feelings in anyone.
Hence, to say that the enlightened person has transcended morality is not to say that she is cold-blooded and lacks compassion for the suffering of other creatures when witnessing it happen. Rather, she always knows the limits of her knowledge of what could be considered good and bad in any situation—and for purely conventional reasons she does not let her heart be perpetually stirred by witnessing what seems improper to her or trying to act like she “knows what only God can know.”2
She completely allows her heart to be confused and sad at the fate of those who suffer; and thus becomes freed from confusion quickly, like a supple willow branch returns to its center after it drops a heavy weight of snow burdening it. She does not try to reason it out, because she knows that reality does not follow our mental ideas about it. And so she is free.
"Its broken wing mended, the pheasant is released to its fate. Realizing that darkness co-exists with the light in his heart, the man transcends the bonds of good and evil, and freely roams the heights of Heaven and the bowels of Hell."
— A description for the changing sixth line in the 36th hexagram of the I Ching, via ichingonline.net
Thank you for reading.
I am obviously not saying that truly holy people are violent and terror-provoking; I am saying that they—in Jungian terms—have so integrated and accepted their shadow, the potential for everything that is horrible and dark in every human being, that their presence itself can radiate the potentiality of them. The essential thing is that through accepting this shadow, they have balanced in themselves both the good and evil in all humanity, and thus neither can wander without supervision and inflate into monstrous proportions—as happens when the tendency to evil is suppressed, taking form in such tragedies as the Holocaust in Nazi Germany or the Gulags in the Soviet Union.
Thus she is also freed from the Original Sin, and returns back to the Garden of Eden, into the childlike state of innocence that unlocks the gate to the Kingdom of Heaven. This ties very deeply into the story of the Fall of Man.
I love this . Many learnings for me . My spiritual lightness and subterranean hypocrisies