Horse: A Spiritual Keystone Species
Horse is a spiritual keystone species. Just as an ecological keystone species has a special significance in landscapes of the Earth, a spiritual keystone species holds a special significance in the landscapes of the soul. A spiritual keystone species holds together entire sacred ecologies of mind, ecologies of soul. Relating skillfully with these species can offer us special access to insight and inspiration, love and liberation.
Horse was perhaps the first slave of humans, those who had begun to fall into conquest consciousness, and the enslavement of horses perhaps served as model for the enslavement of other beings. Today, in the relative comforts of the dominant culture, we can too easily forget that we got here on the backs of countless horses, whose great suffering still echoes somewhere in the human psyche. We need to heal the entire history and present existence of enslavement and suffering. The horse can help us to do this urgent work.
In order for Horse to empower us, we must empower Horse. Part of that comes to acknowledging that we lost a great deal over the millennia, in and through our unskillful relationship with Horse. The great anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss pointed out that non-human beings appear on totem poles not because they are good to eat, but because they are good to think. Our ancestors ate horses, then enslaved them, and now we use them for labor and leisure. We used Horse as a vehicle for cultivating an attitude of consumption and conquest.
To this day, we continue to consume horses, directly and indirectly, and we continue our attitude of conquest, right down to how we treat and train horses. We entertain ourselves with horses, and apply them to fulfilling human agendas.
Here, the words of Levi-Strauss can stay our grasping hands: “Good to think” means letting go of our agendas. While our habitual thinking perpetuates agendas and attempts to subdue the world in accord with our agendas, skillful thinking—truly original thinking—subdues our agendas in accord with the world and in attunement with larger ecologies of mind. Good thinking always transcends the personal, the atomizing, the possessive, the aggressive.
The horse has a vital role to play right now—beyond enslavement, as a profound part of healing the burden of enslavement, the burden of bad thinking and the conquest and consumption that comes out of bad thinking.
Horse has much to teach us about compassion, dignity, grace, natural wisdom, and our own original goodness. And we must keep in mind that so many humans cannot yet approach their own species with a sincere heart. In other words, many of us cannot learn compassion, love, dignity, and other crucial values from human beings, because we have experienced too much wounding from other human beings. Various experiences with human beings have closed us off, made us feel alienated in countless ways. The natural dignity of the horse heals us, because horses don’t prey on us as other humans have, horses don’t judge us, and they don’t ignore our intentions or our deeper nature.
Horse can teach us acceptance in the spiritual sense—not giving in, not giving up, not becoming passive, but genuinely embracing what is, and working with it.
Horse can teach us that the lives we oppress, ignore, or take for granted matter, that the lives we keep closing ourselves off to can shine forth the sacred mystery of life, if only we can let go of our reactiveness and open. Horse shows us the limits of our open-mindedness. That can feel humiliating. It takes humility to face our ignorance, our fear, our aggression, and to accept a supposedly “lesser” being as our teacher. Our culture has made so many people experience themselves as less. In fact, Horse is our elder, and, like so many of those oppressed in the dominant culture, Horse is our kin and our equal.
It can feel impossible to look into the eyes of someone whose ancestors suffered oppression at the hands of our ancestors, whose kin currently suffer oppression at the hands of people who look and think so much as we ourselves do. We may say, “I didn’t enslave your people!” Or, we may say, “I am not a racist! The other people are racists, the ones who use the derogatory terms, the ones who attack you physically . . .” We have all sorts of rationalizations. We experience so much discomfort, because we sense how much everything might change if we more honestly lived the values we claim to hold dear. The culture has taught us so much fear and competitiveness, has taught us life as a self-centered zero-sum game.
To live our values, we would have to leave the world we know, and enter the unknown. Yes, the known world confronts us with extinctions, catastrophes, massive inequalities, all manner of world-breaking suffering—but we know this world (or think we do). As for the joy, peace, creativity, wisdom, love, justice, health, and healing promised by our own spiritual, religious, and philosophical traditions . . . they remain unknown—and thus threatening. We prefer the devil we know.
Horse can help us. Horse is a medial being, a figure at the boundary, at the edge of the known. Horse carries us into our fuller destiny, helps us cross the threshold we otherwise draw back from or avoid altogether.
Horse can even carry us across the gulf that seems to separate one human being from another. “The mind creates the abyss; the heart crosses it.” Horse carries the heart in its mysterious crossing.
The horse on the flag above is the Windhorse of the Soul, the Space Horse—as in, the spaciousness of the heart, the spaciousness that we are, the spaciousness that has room to welcome those we do not yet understand, room to breathe and see more clearly, room to face our fears and our challenges, room to give birth to a better world.
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