Meta-What!

"So I'm gonna bring you out, ok?" Maggy comin closer to him, a little 5 year old black labrador retriever he still calls 'his puppy'. That's because she looks like one; and he thinks that because he gave her lots of love as a puppy. Plus she's the runt of the pack.

"You love it, don't you?" he says again, exuberantly releasing each statement, causing a perk-up in Maggy's attention: she needs to know.

"Come here then! Come! Come!" She races forwards to me, and as she comes I let out more motherese type slang; "come here my boo boo; my punky brewster!" Why he says this he can't say. Or maybe he can locate it along his own childhood fascinations with the character of Punky Brewster. Something cute; innocent. Clearly, this is why I do it.

Shifting from 1st person to the 3rd person to the 2nd person. Different vantage points that can be assumed as I open the door and let her outside. I crawl out the door, becoming conscious of my boots which I apparently put on while I was clearly unconsciously working through the closet. Picked up these big kerplunks; timberlands. Dirty. F*****g payed 280 bucks for these b******s and they keep leaching jean dye so that they have a blue hue now along the top. A simple curl of the boot during a normal gait has caused permanent creases. No matter.

Catch her sitting at the end of the driveway as I come out of my most recent reverie. I have been walking from doorway to the driveway; I'm awake to myself and to the present and to her, my beloved canine, a name we give for a creature we've domesticated for thousands of years. She waits there; she knows the rules. She don't understand them, but she understands me and our relationship enough to know that she has to do it.

I say "good girl" because I can't hold off compassionate feelings for too long. I can resist not celebrating her awesomeness. Totally ignorant of herself; of her kind. The only thing she knows is the world I make available to her. For all intents and purposes, I am her God. The vantage point I - humans - possess, grants us a sort of meta-awareness to be "above" the animals who walk on all fours, head - or consciousness? - attuned to the ground, to the smells of nature.

I can't encounter her without thinking this way when I get high. Being high heightens. It heightens some meta-awareness. All of a sudden you feel more attuned. And aware. Of course it isn't by any means a 'sine quo non' of compassionate awareness, but I do find myself feeling this way, very strongly, and to be drawn into a deeper field of perception, when I indulge in a little bit of marijuana.

In contemplating their smelling nature, I know that the walk is all about the smells for her. Her nose wages from side to side like a guy searching for treasure with a metal detector. I leave her off leash for as long as I can. I can't f*****g stand the laws which prevent dog owners from letting their dogs control their own movements according to their own interests; and not to force them through the uncomfortable indignity of having your head pulled every two seconds cause you're not allowed to 'sniff' there. I abhor the culture that commodotizes living creatures and puts ahead or own paltry 'needs' - such as the infrequent dog biting, a circumstance that only emerges from a dog that was raised in a threatening environment (yet another ignored faux-pas human beings do which create effects that force upon us indignifying strictures); anywho. I try to avoid it up until I meet a person. Some people are fine; and even dare to stick out their hand to communicate with the dog; but others will rush to the side, unconsciously enacting a fact of their relational history, something at 4 years old perhaps, which has "sealed" itself into a mind opaque to the fact that it could, if it simply knew better, exorcise that demon out of itself. But not to be - not in this society, at least. The asian woman rushes to the side, while I do my best to keep the now unsure Maggy from coming too close to you.

How silly is that? The woman is a human being, a member of a species that can cultivate meta-awareness, or awareness of its own awareness. The dog on the other hand is simply a blind creature unable to influence or work with the facts of its experiences. There is no 'central' consciousness in a dog like in our mind. The dogs mind is literally dragged by environmental stimuli - smells, presence of other dogs, an unusual sound; and if left to itself, it'll either sleep or stare blankly. It's imagination is limited to the things it's experienced and the types of responses they have to those experiences as a species (which are unconsciously impressed and unconsciously reactivated). Unconsciousness, in short, is what a dogs life is. A consciousness unconscious to it's consciousness, to be more precise.

The human, if it fully cultivated its humanness, could know that it's response determines the dogs response. Unlike the dog, who can only react according to past behaviors and what is usual for dogs as a species, the human can actually extract itself, see itself and its thoughts and feelings, and determine, by committing itself, to another way of being.

But in a narcissistic culture illiterate to the language of emotions, woman sees dog, woman gets scared, dog interprets strange behavior as threatening, and a bite may occur. In the end, the dog is blamed although the dog had no power in this situation to begin with. It was the human being; the human culture, and ultimately the human system collectively held together by an unconscious human pact: capitalism is awesome; all the negative stuff that results from it, lets just ignore that (of course never make this known to ourselves, of course: we need to feel good about our behavior!!)

Ah, I am still walking with her, totally oblivious to what I have been doing. Got dragged away by thoughts about dogs and capitalism. I try to attend to the moment, but right now I am addressing the ontological basis of my commitments. I am just too easily awed and thrown into philosophical rumination about the world. Why else would it be there if not to contemplate and stand in wonder before? The other is a treasure, the highway implicitly taken by the self to its own selfishness. That's why explicit awareness is better: attending to the phenomenology of things as they are and as they appear to be to the senses can be such an awesome experience. It's like you redeem all things around you by coalescing them into the fabric of your attention; acknowledging them; understanding them as nodes in the web of existence.

The human mind attends to relations, to the secret relations which abound between all things, in endless circles and feedback loops and waves of energy; bound in a context of division, of body in world; of mind in body. The self and world. Our source of abundance is the body, our lowest factor, but the real creme dela creme is the mind that can perceive context and part. And order the world, literally build the world, in submission to nature and its patterns of activity.

We're at the end of the walk, the end of my thoughts, and a return to the home. I labor for minutes trying to get Maggy to pay attention. I indulged, once again, in my playful side as I cajoled her to pass through my legs."Come on, Maggy, this way!" pointing through my legs, tapping my thights "Go!". Instead of getting the message, she gets the idea that we can play. But play on the way home? Friggen dog takes advantage of my beneficence to explore in different directions. Her attention schemes! takes advantage! What a brilliant little creature!