Good Afternoon Gertabelle and thank you for the reply: I certainly agree that that all religions seek an expression of something beyond the senses, or at least beyond conscious experience. With regard to whales and dolphins, I do think that they have archetypes that operate in their collective consciousness. The difference between them and us is our ability to apply linguistic tiles to them, which is simply a function of our left-brained orientation or cognitive abilities.
Archetypes emerge form the unconscious, which is probably pretty much the same for all living things, or at least mammals. In our hubris, we as human always pride ourselves on the practical and complex nature of our left brain oriented minds and for the most part we assume that these attributes are more sophisticated than the unconscious which is shared by all animals. But this is only a later adaptation. In truth, the very recency of it’s development (humans have been around only for about 200,000 years) makes it likely to be less complex than the subconscious which has attended mammals and been under development for 83 million years. So, while we have gained some novel utility from our cognition, there have been corresponding losses on the intuitive level where most other animals excel over us.
There have been a good many peer reviewed and published studies on the intuitive capabilities of animals. Some of the more interesting involve how animals are able to sense earthquakes and tsunamis before they show up on any sort of instrumentation, or how flocks of birds can turn at the exact same time, suggesting a mental connection much deeper and faster than communication can offer, or dogs who know that their owners are coming home. These have been explored closely and call into the question the superiority of the human intellect. In fact, when considering the atomic bomb, our ability to mass-murder, our ability to propagate beyond the capabilities of the planet to sustain us, and the ever flimsier social and economic scams we have a proclivity to create and our ability to pollute our environment, it calls one to wonder whether or not the human intellect will in the end prove to be a terminal or fatal mutation.
All the best!
