Zen and the Art of Tube Feeding

Overall my family and I have been pretty lucky with pets. My parents had two cats when I was growing up. The “baby” had a heart condition and I guess my mom had to give it medicine. That usually translated into my sister giving the cat the medicine, as she was destined to eventually work at a vet’s office.

When my husband and I had cats in the ’90’s through the early 2000’s, both passed after relatively short illnesses at 15 and 17 years of age. Until then, the most exciting veterinary experience we had with them was giving thyroid medication to our calico cat, Sheila. She also needed percutaneous fluids near the very end, but that was only a week or so and only once a day.

Nothing could have prepared us for…tube feeding a cat.

The cats we have now, Ichigo and Angel are total sweethearts. At least when Ichigo is not beating up his brother, they are sweethearts. They’re six years old. We were told at their last veterinary appointment in the summer that they were a little pudgy. So, we tried a few things changing their food around. We tried to exercise them more, but discovered that we really have no idea what is amusing to a cat. Most of our attempts resulted in us getting far more exercise than our fuzzy friends. So, when Ichigo looked like he’d lost a little weight, we weren’t that concerned. For some reason, Angel was spending a lot of time sitting next to him and we thought that was so cute! 

Cats are small animals though. So when things start going downhill (we discovered), they go downhill fast. Next thing you know, Ichigo was lethargic and not engaging in any of his normal activities. We were getting  concerned, but it wasn’t until one of our friends commented on how terrible he looked that I called my sister. Rather than waiting until the next day, she advised us to take him to an emergency vet right away.

• Resorptive lesions on his teeth - six extractions
• Pancreatitis - pain meds
• Hepatic lipidosis (fat stuck in the liver from all the weight loss)
• Three days in the animal hospital AND

…wait for it…

• the feeding tube

Those of you who have had infants will laugh at my adventure, I’m sure. Certainly, the idea of chasing down a cat, plunging 48 ml of “slurry” into it’s esophagus…one…milliliter…a…time…six…times…a…day seems like nothing to you. Cleaning the splattered slurry off of the walls after he’s shaken his head vigorously with the tube cap off? Piece of cake. Making the slurry…smelling the slurry…crushing medications and mixing into the slurry? Eh - that’s nothing.

Dreaming about slurry...

In those moments at 2:30 am, after finally figuring out the sequestering the cat in the bathroom for tube feeding is best for everyone involved, there is time to ponder.

I started thinking about mortality and expectations. Pena Chodron once said (quoting someone I believe) “since death is certain and the time of death is uncertain, what is the most important thing?” This is a phrase I consider frequently when I’m faced with difficult situations. In this flurry of activity taking care of the cat, however, I was reminded that I actually do take each day for granted. That “the time of death is uncertain” has translated to my subconscious as “some time in the very distant future that I don’t have to worry about now.” I expect everything to keep clicking along just fine.

I’ve been fortunate in life. I’ve mentioned elsewhere that I had the opportunity to have relationships with three of my great grandparents and that three of my grandparents lived well into their 80’s and 90’s. My father recovered completely from his cardiac arrest - which rarely happens in real life. My parents’s cats lived to be well over 10 years old - even the one with the heart condition. Our last cats lived into their teens. In my good fortune, I lost perspective on the precariousness with which we greet each day. It simply never occurred to me that Ichigo could die, but he almost did.

I’m trying to hold this thought in my head for a while, think about and manipulate it a little, let it sink in. The tube came out last week and my husband, daughter and I are currently obsessed with his gustatory rhythms. It would be easy to forget now and just go on as I did before. At some point, this lesson too will fade. For now though, I bring my palms together and bow to it’s wisdom. Katz!

 

Something there is to be a dog that only a dog knows but that we need try to understand

"Twinkle, twinkle little bat.
How I wonder what you're at."
-- first lines of a poem recited by the Mad Hatter at his tea party
in Alice in Wonderland [written by Lewis Carroll, 1865]

Umwelt is a century-old concept introduced to ethology, the study of animal behavior, by Jakob von Uexküll. It's the recognition that every animal exists in a unique perceptual universe that's closed to human beings other than through inference: Much of a bee's world is ultraviolet; a dog's nose does a lot of what we use our eyes to accomplish. Then there are the electric fish which perceive their world through a sense we lack entirely.

Thirty-seven years ago, the philosopher Thomas Nagel asked "What is it like to be a bat?," picking up on the Mad Hatter's curiousity, perhaps.

Nagel wrote:

To the extent that I could look and behave like a wasp or a bat without changing my fundamental structure, my experiences would not be anything like the experiences of those animals. On the other hand, it is doubtful that any meaning can be attached to the supposition that I should possess the internal neurophysiological constitution of a bat. Even if I could by gradual degrees be transformed into a bat, nothing in my present constitution enables me to imagine what the experiences of such a future stage of myself thus metamorphosed would be like. The best evidence would come from the experiences of bats, if we only knew what they were like.

So if extrapolation from our own case is involved in the idea of what it is like to be a bat, the extrapolation must be incompletable. We cannot form more than a schematic conception of what it is like. For example, we may ascribe general types of experience on the basis of the animal's structure and behavior. Thus we describe bat sonar as a form of three-dimensional forward perception; we believe that bats feel some versions of pain, fear, hunger, and lust, and that they have other, more familiar types of perception besides sonar. But we believe that these experiences also have in each case a specific subjective character, which it is beyond our ability to conceive. And if there's conscious life elsewhere in the universe, it is likely that some of it will not be describable even in the most general experiential terms available to us.* (The problem is not confined to exotic cases, however, for it exists between one person and another. The subjective character of the experience of a person deaf and blind from birth is not accessible to me, for example, nor presumably is mine to him. This does not prevent us each from believing that the other's experience has such a subjective character.)

And so it is with our best non-human friends, dogs: Deeply understanding their experience is "incompletable." But thanks to research in recent years, pulled together for lay dog lovers by cognitive scientist Alexandra Horowitz, PhD, in her new, wonderful book Inside of a Dog, we can get a good handle of what dogs are like, even if their subjective experience of being alive, their umwelt [read caption to graphic, above], is significantly unknowable to us.

Umwelt of Unitives

And now let us look at the umwelt (subjective experience) of the highest spiritually-developed humans [or, I should say, the highest development that has been identified], Unitives.

This from Bill Harris's The Blog that Ate Mind Chatter:

Unitives, though they still have a sense of being a center of awareness in a body, no longer experience themselves as a separate “me.” The separate me isn’t just an idea, a construct, a way of looking at things [(as it is for other high and rare developmental stages), here] it is also felt and experienced as [a choice in how to experience the world]. …

This is, quite obviously, an entirely new and different way of experiencing human existence and consciousness – a more cosmic or universal perspective. All the paradoxical aspects of existence are now integrated. Polar opposites, such as good and evil, being and not being, self and other, subject and object, existence and non-existence, are experienced without the sense of oppositional tension experienced by those at previous [i.e., lower] developmental perspectives. Instead, these seeming opposites are just part of the flow of how things are. …

The Unitive is able to take any previous developmental perspective or point of view and shift between perspectives and states of awareness effortlessly. All experiences — joy, grief, life, death, being, not being, pleasure, pain, having, not having — are seen as natural parts of the flow of existence, to be noticed and experienced as they are. The rational mind is not seen as a limitation; rather, as just another manifestation of being human — sometimes useful and allowed to be more prominent, and at other times not needed and allowed to recede into the background.

The Unitive is able, then, to cherish all humans as part of the grand dance and flow of the universe, not needing others to be different than [as] they are. “Higher” stages of development are no longer seen as “better.” Rather, all stages are necessary, interconnected, and always-changing aspects of the human condition. …

The Unitive’s perspective is one of non-ego-involved witnessing, moment-by-moment awareness, and resourceful responses to the infinite number of systems and variables swirling around him — including all the conflicting needs, paradoxes, and constantly shifting realities of the situation. He is no longer identified with a certain “me,” a certain role or identity. He spontaneously takes on whatever persona is necessary in order to catalyze others or in some other way be appropriate to the moment. His concern is quite often outside of what most people would consider his own individual interests–a concern often expressed as an unconditional love for humanity.

… The Unitive’s low identification with the separate self and his greater identification with the rest of humanity further elevates this trust–of the way things are, where they are going, and what can and “should” be done — to an even higher (and more selfless) level. To the Unitive, there is an awareness that on an ultimate level everything is happening in a perfect way, even including the fact that the world contains much suffering and many problems. These problems, and any addressing of them, are just parts of the dance, parts of the endless going on of it all.

This is reflected in the Buddhist perspective of the bodhisattva — the awakened being who vows to stay in the world until all beings have been similarly liberated.

The Unitive sees happiness and unhappiness as part of the necessary, temporary (and endless) fluctuations inherent in the human situation. Instead of seeing life in a dualistic way, where some things are appropriate and desirable while others are inappropriate and undesirable, the Unitive experiences the world as a place where all opposites “arise together” and “go together” — in any polarity each side implies (and needs) the other. Up needs (and is defined by) down, here needs there, life needs death, good needs evil, and so on. Positive and negative are seen — and experienced — as mental constructs, as ideas, rather than as innate or intrinsic characteristics of things, events, or people. The Unitive watches as positive turns to negative and back to positive, endlessly — and necessarily. This is, indeed, a totally new and different way of experiencing the world.

In Christian mysticism, it is the ultimate stage in life, when God can be seen, "face to face." [The idea is reflected in Paul's letter to the Corinthians, in the chapter on love [or, agape], when he writes, in I Corin 13, verse 12, "For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known."

Does that mean, as Meister Eckhart said, "The eye with which I see God is the same with which God sees me. My eye and God's eye is one eye, and one sight, and one knowledge, and one love"?

Quoting William Rafe Inge's Bampton Lectures of 1899:

The last stage of [life's] journey, in which the soul presses towards the mark, and gains the prize of its high calling, is the unitive or contemplative life, in which man beholds God face to face, and is joined to Him. Complete union with God is the ideal limit of religion, the attainment of which would be at once its consummation and annihilation. It is in the continual but unending approximation to it that the life of religion subsists.

All this raises the question, of course, of what being John Malkovich is like, or what being the Buddha is like.

Twinkle, twinkle, little Buddha. How I wonder what you're at.

By the way, there is this which is somewhat the point of all the wordy words: Buddha, or the folks of his time, thought of consciousness as being another of our senses. As with other matters, it seems Big B may have been right! Right, again, Sid, you big sweet fellow, you!

While our consciousness is very much wholly dependent on the other senses to bring light to what the brain/mind/whatever thinks is going on, it is, too - like the other senses - is a part of the team of elements that inform what the mind thinks and does.  Whether there is yet another element - Free Will, or, at very least, a pair of dice rattling around in the brain/mind/whatever - is debateable.
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* [Nagel's footnote, here]:  Therefore the analogical form of the English expression "what it is like" is misleading. It does not mean "what (in our experience) it resembles," but rather "how it is for the subject himself."