whales and dolphins

I'm in New Zealand and yesterday I went out on a whale watching tour, on a boat. We saw a sperm whale, breathing at the surface, before it went for another dive. And after that we went and watched a pod of dolphins frolicking in the water, playing around.

And seeing these magnificent creatures, it reminded me of something that I have often thought, and that is that some creatures may be more intelligent than us humans. We assume we are the most intelligent life form on the planet, and we certainly seem to have changed it more than other creatures have. But I'm not sure that's a sign of intelligence at all. It seems that many other species have learned to live in a more harmonious way with their environment.

But the whales and the dolphins, in particular – the cetaceans – really make me wonder. For one thing they have large brains. The whale's brain is much larger than a human's. And of course people say, well relative to its body mass is not as big, or something like this. But I don't think a large body necessarily needs that much larger a brain. The number of muscles to control is probably not that much different. I think it's more telling that we desperately try to find some measure to prove that we are more intelligent. It reminds me of the 19th century Victorians who were trying to prove why white men were more intelligent than 'savages'. It's pathetic looking back at it. They had all sorts of theories: the shape of the skull meant that Europeans had more frontal cortex and that's where intelligence lay – all sorts of nonsense, just to try to prove something that is false. And it makes me suspicious when we look at other species. We might be making the same mistake, assuming that we are more intelligent than them.

There's is a beautiful part in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, where it was stated that men thought that they were more intelligent than dolphins, because we had invented the wheel, and built New York, and had wars and such like, whilst all the dolphins had ever done was mess about in the water, having fun. And the dolphins thought that they were more intelligent than humans for exactly the same reasons. Quite telling.

But the reason that I am particularly in awe of the whales and the dolphins is that they are mammals who have returned to the ocean. Life crawled out of the ocean millions of years ago, and mammals developed on land. And I find it amazing really, that some of these highly developed life forms eventually decided that life in the ocean was better, and simply moved back there and evolved to live in the ocean again.

And for me, of course, this symbolises our spiritual journey. We're born from the ocean of the womb, where we are innocent, we are buddhas. And somewhere after birth, in this human realm, we lose touch with that. We lose touch with our essence. We lose our innocence. And we simply forget who we really are. And the spiritual journey is, of course, all about returning to that state, returning to the ocean, remembering who we really are.

And in a way, as I watched that majestic sperm whale, and those playful dolphins, I really felt, yes, these creatures, they are buddhas They know the secret of life. We have much to learn from them.