Eknath Easwaran and species hierarchy

I’ve mentioned before my spiritual teacher, Eknath Easwaran, believed in reincarnation, and that’s a concept I’ve struggled with. Still, I’m coming around to the idea. It’s very forgiving. If life is God’s classroom, which I think Easwaran believed, reincarnation offers everyone the ability to retake the class if they fail.

Failure doesn’t lead to eternal separation from God. There is no hell. Some Christian understandings of the afterlife offer second chances in the form of purgatory. But reincarnation seems simpler and cleaner. God doesn’t create a new class just for those who fail. He sends you back to the one he already teaches.

One thing that initially troubled me about Easwaran’s view of reincarnation is it seemed to rely on a species hierarchy, which an individual soul climbed across multiple lifetimes on its way to God. That’s true, but I think a generous reading could show this isn’t so different from distinctions animal-rights philosophy makes between moral patients and moral agents.

There’s a recording on YouTube of one of Easwaran’s talks that covers this to a certain extent. He’s discussing the death of Charles, a cat who lived at the Blue Mountain Center of Meditation. Easwaran charmingly reminisces about trying to entice the obligate carnivore with various treats, so the feline wouldn’t hunt other animals.

“All of you know that Charles belonged to a non-vegetarian species,” Easwaran said. “In the early days, when, on one or two occasions, I used to see him, driven by his instinct, his compulsion, to kill little creatures, it upset me very much…I thought about it a great deal and started tempting him with cookies.”

Easwaran goes on to express his hope that perhaps Charles would be born as a cow or some other vegetarian species in his next life. After that, Easwaran mused, perhaps Charles would be born as an elephant, and then, finally, as a human being. There are some problems, from an animal-rights perspective, in Easwaran’s presentation.

For instance, he glorifies non-lethal forms of domestication, and talks approvingly about the service Charles could render to humans as a cow or trained elephant. But as I’ve said elsewhere, one of the benefits of viewing your spiritual teacher as fallible is you don’t have to agree with everything he or she says or does.

When I was an unhappy atheist, one of the promises I made, before I allowed myself to explore spiritual matters, was I wanted religion to serve my activism and not the other way around. If religion wasn’t making me a better activist, I didn’t want it. It wasn’t correct. And if the two ever conflicted, I promised to choose activism. I hope to keep this pledge.

That said, as I mentioned previously, looking at the broadest outline of Easwaran’s presentation, I think you can interpret the species hierarchy he describes as not so different from distinctions animal-rights philosophy makes between moral patients and moral agents.

In short, animals are typically described as moral patients, because they are deserving of moral consideration, but can’t abide by moral rules. Meanwhile, most adult humans are typically described as moral agents, because they are deserving of moral consideration, and can abide by moral rules.

In truth, I think it’s less a binary and more of a spectrum. I’m reminded of a quote from Charles Darwin: “We have seen that the senses and intuitions, the various emotions and faculties, such as love, memory, attention, curiosity, imitation, reason, &c., of which man boasts, may be found in an incipient, or even sometimes in a well-developed condition, in the lower animals.”

So I believe one could understand Easwaran’s presentation of an individual soul moving up the species hierarchy as an individual soul moving along the spectrum from being a moral patient to being a moral agent. Again, this is a species distinction that animal-rights philosophy is familiar with and generally approves.

Interestingly, Easwaran appears open to the possibility that humans aren’t the top of this hierarchy. In his writing, he approvingly quotes a poem, from the 13th-century mystic Rumi, which describes a soul being born as an animal, then a human, then an angel, before reuniting with God.

My understanding of the math is that, given the size of the universe, the existence of more advanced species than ours is likely. What is an angel, in modern terms, if not some creature more capable than humans of abiding by moral rules? Perhaps, Easwaran might say, that’s how we’ll be reborn in our next life, if we pass the test of being human.