The Sanctity of Whales
Remote and imperturbable, the lives of whales are somehow enough to match any
fantasy humanity can create. They are what we have lost, what we yearn for. They are
in some ways the last wild voice calling to the consciousness of terminally civilized
humanity, our last contact before we submerge forever in our own manufacture and
irretrievably lose the last fragments of our wild selves.
Roger Payne Among Whales
It is a rare, silent refuge one arrives at in San Ignacio
Bay in the middle of Baja California. One drives as if on
pilgrimage to a sanctuary at the edge of the world. It is
not so much the long winding beaches, the crystalline
salt lakes and the Pacific geography that entrances and
beckons so. It is the expectation of the beings that await
you, the gray whales who calve their young for the
winter months from January to March and who
welcome us, the human in a pageant that is unique on
earth. That we, their destroyers from years past, would
now be encouraged to approach them, that we can
touch and be accepted by such leviathans speaks to a
cardinal event in the world, for this is one of the great, if
not the most remarkable of interspecies exchanges on
earth.
One searches for blowholes for signs of life, on the
pangas that go out into the bay, a bay that has been a
refuge for the calving grounds of the whales for
countless millennia. In 1855, a captain from Maine
Charles Scammon, first went sealing in California and
whaling in Magdalena Bay for the grays. Then he turned
his attention to San Ignacio. By 1859-60 the grays they
had been eliminated. San Ignacio is a World Heritage
site and the desecration that has been visited upon
these whales renders the pilgrimage there all the more
remarkable. The spouting marvel explodes from the
back of blue grey giant, first a mother and then a calf,
and then one realizes that the waters are alive with
mind, that a depth charge of consciousness has just
been summoned in your psyche and that you are not
alone, that you are surrounded by others that have
entered your sphere of cognizance and heart. Some
come to your boat and you reach out, as did our 7 year
old Lysander, yearning to retrieve a part of their
essentiality. You have been baptized. They allow you,
encourage you to reach out because you need to do so.
Otherwise, our humanity, our very inhumanity would
overwhelm us and we would lose contact with one of
the very great truths of existence, that an Indra’s net of
sentience connects us with the other and that the others
are, in some ineffable way, trying to save us from our
too overbearing selves. Just maybe.
It was a local, Pachico Mayoral who nervously
extended his hand to touch a grey whale over forty
years ago. Nothing happened. It was like a communion
from a being who negotiates the longest migration of
any mammal on earth. Some scientists believe the
whales are just trying to dislodge barnacles from their
skin or maybe lice. But the reductionist model is too
simple. It is too pragmatic. It does not allow for any
crack in the armor of our narcissism or solipsism.
What if this species were actually telling us something
beyond what the rational mind is used to. That these
whales could have gone extinct makes the case for their
outreach all the more extraordinary. At the height of the
factory whaling ships just before the mid XX century,
their numbers plummeted to only a few hundred. Given
a reprieve, they started bouncing back and now the
world has over 20,000 of them. But we could have lost
them forever. More exactly we could have exterminated
them and with their species, perhaps the most rarefied
human non- human ritual on the planet. For it is a
symphony that is extended to us when the whales
breach, come up to a panga, stick their massive heads
out of the water and eye the human experiment. Some
stay long enough to allow us that extension of the hand
that says that deep down in the central core of time and
memory, we are the same. They know our kind and
unkindness and what we are capable of and still they
come. This act of commiseration, or compassion for the
havoc we represent to the life force is telling us
something critical for our sanity and survival. The
whales are telling us, “ we know who you are and what
you have been.. you have been forgiven….learn now
who we are.”
With the grey whales of Baja, humanity is being given
an ongoing reprieve, like a prayer, an act of grace that is
trying to heal history and to forge a new destiny. The
whales as agents of Creation have never been
aggressors to our kind. They are messengers of the only
true reason for being, to be coherent with Creation and
to honor it. If, as we believe, we are the only species to
have been given the gift of reason, our superiority is
being challenged in Baja. The whales are consonant
with the world and they are telling us to do the same.
The whales have been allowing us to approach them
ever since the environmental movement began over
forty years ago. They have been trying to tell us
something ever since the Russians harpooned their
cousins the sperm whales and used their oil to lubricate
ICBM’s, Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles that could
evaporate all life on earth. An act of utter madness. Are
we really sapient?
Are we sure, in our short evolutionary history, that we
are truly sentient? What the whales could be doing is
demonstrating the act of exchanging one’s mind for the
other. It is one of the central practices of higher adepts
in Buddhism. They have seen our lower selves and felt
the full depth charge of our madness. They experienced
first hand the butchery and savagery of our kind and
they are telling us we can change. That we must change.
The ritual of Baja is a covenant unlike any other on
earth. If we are willing to meet these spectacular beings
half way, a part of our conscience changes and
something ineffable in the soul is altered for all time.
We are being given a chance to rethink the human
equation. Nothing we can construct, no cultural
artefact, no mathematical equation, no invention can
match the beauty and power of coming together with
another mind that evolved tens of millions of years ago.
While we seek alien life forms in our solar system or
light years away, there is a being, the friendliest species
of whale on earth, that is urging us to shed the skin of
terror, suspicion and slaughter we have been raised on.
To be fully human, means to touch the tactile soul of the
other and to exult in an ethic and esthetic of equality. If
we meet them half way, their mindful exultation in the
world should provide a lesson to our supposed
superiority, now more than ever.
The gray whales are a carnal symphony. What
humanity has been invited to do in Baja is to celebrate a
dance between two disparate species, one that is in
evolutionary terms a relative newcomer to earth and
which does not yet know how to conduct itself and the
other which is functioning as a guide to a higher plane
of being on the only planet we know to harbor life. The
great writer Loren Eiseley once wrote,” One does not
meet oneself until one has seen one’s reflection in an eye
other than human.” No where is that more true than in
Baja where beholding the eye of the gray whale, we
touch a mirror to our psyche, a miniature earth calling
back to us. The gray whales, like all whales harbor a
mind that is profoundly coherent with the universe.
That is something our species is being asked to become.
The US navy’s sonar blasts in the Pacific and the
Bahamas have caused irreparable damage to several
species of whales, many of which have been found dead
on the world’s beaches. In January 2009, 45 sperm
whales were marooned in Tasmania. All but seven died.
In March 2009, about 90 pilot whales and bottlenose
dolphins died in Hamelin bay in Australia. In January
2005, 33 pilot whales beached themselves on Oregon’s
coast. The sonar of mayhem whether for military
exercises or to find new sources of oil to run an effete
civilization, is literally deafening the world. Are we
becoming deaf to the song of the earth? Are we
becoming existentially autistic? The war of humanity
against the other must stop, once and for all, if we are to
retain a semblance of sanity.
Native peoples all over the world, perhaps best
evinced in such testimonials as Whalerider, have
honored the other beings as incarnations, as
emanations of the larger psyche of Creation. It is a
simple imperative, we have to change the legacy of our
technologically overbearing civilization in the next few
years if we are to survive. In the sacred texts, we were
supposed to be the stewards of life. Today, that is our
most urgent task. The whales, the cetaceans run deeper
into our subconscious than perhaps any other group of
beings. The havoc we have visited upon them has to be
transformed into a conscious reverence for the
irreplaceable. That is what makes the whales of Baja
such a miracle. They are showing us the way.
Cyril Christo