Attempt to build Animal-Human-Buddha scale

That's an attempt to roughly scale instinct/spirit quotient and assign some order and names on the scale.

Disclaimer

It's very primitive, and I don't find that being at any point on the scale is somehow 'better' than at another and I understand that each person has it's presence distributed on it - each moment you are a mass somehow spreaded on it and with time that changes radically. Yet, the notion of this scale helps me gain a basic understanding of my conditions and their interplay.
All numbers are just for illustrative purposes. And I'm a noob at anthropology, so correct me if this is of any interest to you. That scale correlates history, but I planned it as out-of-history-thing. Everything's - IMO.

~Scale

| -∞ Unicellular organism (the most raw instinctive form of life we know)
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| . . .
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| -200 Wild Wolf
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| -150 Domestic Dog
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| -100 Tribe men
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| -50 Cave men who bury the dead
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| -40 Primitive settlers who know agriculture and treat nature sacred
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| -30 Antic times w/ legends and pantheon of gods
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| -20 Medieval times with organized and politicized religions
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| -10 Renaissance times and humanistic philosophies
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| 0 Contemporary average human - postmodernism, mix everything, old ways die, new ways in dev
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| +5 Contemporary spiritually aware - knows yoda/buddhism/"old ways"/psychology
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| +10 Genuine Initiate (Jedi after honestly working through IP, sincere novice monk in old ways)
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| +15 Experienced Practitioner (Worthy Jedi Knight, sincere monk of any old tradition, experienced yoga practitioner)
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| +20 Known Master (True Jedi Masters who can lead up to +40, Masters of old traditions - yogins, monks etc.)
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| +30 Established Guru (Spiritual Authority without intention on being such, hermit, passionary)
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| +100 Part of the Myth (saints of the Old Ways, Heroes of Antic times)
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| +200 Transcendent Being (limit of spirituality humans are thought to reach - Lao Tzu, Buddha, Prophets of Old Ways)
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| . . .
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| +∞ The Force (the most sacred spiritual form of life we sense)

den385 wrote: Yet, the notion of this scale helps me gain a basic understanding of my conditions and their interplay.

How does it help in this regard? Just curious...

den385 wrote: | -200 Wild Wolf
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| -150 Domestic Dog
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| -100 Tribe men
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And women are cats!!!! :lol:

Just kidding, I understand its probably a personal view of self. Otherwise I think dog might be better replaced with ape perhaps, but I know nothing of anthropology so just guessing.

Arkayik wrote: How does it help in this regard? Just curious...

I'm going through stress and learning to deal with it. I understood that the ability to resist stress comes out of healthy instincts, the animal part of my brain/mind. So I try to somehow make my perception in some things more primitive - like that of a wolf. Know hunger, danger, but not stress. I do sports every day - exercises, small run, basketball shots. Try to respect the needs of the body, primitive stuff. Watch videos of wild life, contemplate ocean waves and camp fire, read a little Jack London's "Call of the Wild" before sleep. I understood that having good spirit and bad instincts, I have to use latter to improve former. So I fuse spiritual stuff - like meditation/prayer/music with this primitive. Try to get friends with my inner wolf )

E.g. I always hated dinner time - I do programming for living and eating in the midday makes sleepy, thoughts become slow. But now, that I embrace the inner beast (wolf, ape, cat whatever - just a visualization) - I learned to love dinnertime. To let the savage part of me have pleasure of such simple thing as food and a little nap.

I now understand the title of that mainstream bestseller "eat, pray, love" - eat is for instinct, pray is for spirit, love is for emotion. I'd add 'code' for rational to the title, but then this book won't sell. 'eat, pray, love, code' sounds not vanilla enough, I guess.

I don't believe animals are any "less evolved" than humans (or Buddha, for that matter)... they are usually perfectly adapted to their lives and they live without the neuroses and self-created problems humans are so plagued with. They live in the moment, they are connected to all around them in a way few humans are. They are not engaged in illusion, but get on with the day to day business of living their lives.

It's my belief we can learn a lot about how to live a good, happy, peaceful life from animals, moreso than we can from the vast majority of humans.

Which of these looks closer to Buddhahood to you?:

Animals are different - that's what I can say for certain. Humans are animals with complex brain and therefore, motivation, actions and culture.

I think, my scale sucks. But the idea behind it was correct: there is much to learn from animals. They have the Force in them. They adapted naturally. They don't have neurosis.

Simple and correct idea. The very rational me tends to over-engineer everything That is why I seek understanding of animals.

Now, let's just ignore how speciesist this is and obviously completely arbitrary.

I wonder, what does the scale represent exactly? You say it is instinct/spirit quotient. What does that mean? Typically a quotient is a ratio, and the way you worded it it seems you mean the ratio between instinct and spirit. Now how do you quantify either, let alone measure them? How do you know they are divisible by each other in any remotely coherent way? Unless at least one of the two parameters is negative, how do you get negative values as a result? What does it mean if any parameter is negative to begin with?

I could stop right here... but I'm kind of in the mood to let out the physicist inside.

What are the units of instinct and spirit respectively? They have to cancel out if you are going to leave numbers behind only. What does "20" mean? Is it twenty electronvolts or twenty blue mana points for a level 2 protective spell? Is it perhaps twenty thousand dollars per year (k$/a, lol) or just a mere twenty apples?

During the course of writing this I changed my mind, btw. Let's not ignore the speciesist attitude. You say you can say for certain that animals are "different". What does that mean and why do you think you can say that with any certainty? Also, different from what exactly? Humans? I guess they are. They are also different from giraffes. All the animals except giraffes, that is.

Many animals have highly complex brains and not all of them are even vertebrates. Indeed, I am as of yet still uncertain whether we can say that ours is the most complex one we know of. Some octopodes have remarkably sophisticated nervous systems, easily on par with our own. More social animals sometimes display ritualistic behaviour , that could potentially be extrapolated to what we would call cultural habits and norms, though they seldom do because they mostly happen not to stick well and long enough for that. Then again, neither do most of our daily rituals either.

I think these sorts of things have important value in exercising one's mind and a concept of trying to understand spiritual energy. I don't think its meant to be empirical. In fact I think these can be so non-empirical that the attributes/items become irrelevant, and the benefit of the exercise (its structure and transformation of values through it) translates across to everything else. So I saw it more as an exercise in contemplative analysis with a heavy biological adjunct - seems like a good foundation to have since we are biological as well, certainly the subconscious processes like fear and hunger can relate with non-human animal behaviour.

What is this scale based on?
Awareness? Sentience? Connection to the force?

As an anthropologist and theologian who studied buddhism since I was 6, I find these scales limited and "dangerous". They can inspire people to think that different life forms have different values instead of respecting them all because they all exist.

i know that Samsara states that animals are lessor than humans, but so are "gods" and Demigods. The scale put forth by Samsara is about escaping the wheel. It states that human's have the easiest chance to achieve Nirvana in one life time.

So I am wondering what your criteria for this scale is?

I would state that a wild wold is far smarter and more connected to the force than a domestic dog or human.

I want to be a "fish" on this scale. That way I can just swim, and eat, and focus on breathing.