Why 230,000 People Died in the Tsunami – but Almost No Animals
An instructive example of the importance of intuition
On December 26, 2004, a tsunami in the Indian Ocean killed around 230,000 people, while almost no animals died. They moved to higher ground before the water arrived.
Follow me as I propose and justify a logical explanation for this and related phenomena.
There are many other amazing behaviors of non-human life forms. My favorite example is the annual migration of some North American populations of the monarch butterfly. They fly up to 2,000 miles from Canada to Mexico. When wind conditions are unfavorable, they stop, rest, and wait for a wind to carry them where they need to go. How does that work?
Here are a few more examples:
Animals leave their territory to find a new one when the old one no longer provides sustenance;
Migratory birds fly long distances to spend the winter; they set off at the right time, find their destination, fly back at the right time, and find their home;
Schools of fish, flocks of birds, herds of mammals, and colonies of insects often behave as a single organism;
Dogs wait at the door for their owners coming home even before they can hear, see, or otherwise sense their arrival;
Horses react to the thoughts of their riders – and they react to approaching bad weather;
Plants develop appropriate protective mechanisms when new predators appear.
Scientists usually study a single phenomenon and look for an explanation. The sun and the earth’s magnetism are popular among them. But all such theories are unsatisfactory.
Here’s a simple explanation: animals, plants, and cells know what they have to do in order to survive. Before I explain what exactly I mean by that, let’s do a thought experiment.
Imagine you are newly married. You’re spending your honeymoon in a beach hotel in Thailand. It’s Sunday morning. You wake up with the desire to go on a trip inland. You kiss your partner awake and tell him your wish. But your partner sleepily replies: “I don't feel like it today. Let’s go to the beach. We’ll do the inland trip tomorrow." You agree. But you’ll never go on this trip. It’s December 26, 2004 and in a few hours a tsunami will flood the hotel and kill everyone.
Something inside you knew that you had to leave the coast. This manifested itself as a desire to go inland.
What exactly does it mean to know? This word has the root *weid-, which means ‘to see.’ Knowing refers to seeing in a broader sense than just visually, ie including all sensory perceptions and mental vision.
To clarify: knowing is a subjective experience and has nothing to do with truth, per se. The Roman emperor and philosopher Marcus Aurelius put it this way:
"Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact.
Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.”
(Marcus Aurelius)
There are four types of knowings:
Knowing what day of the week it is today is a rational knowing. It is a thought generated by the mind, eg through a conscious act of remembering.
Knowing that it is cold is a sensory knowing. We call it feeling. It is the perception of the state of the body, which comprises the electromagnetic state of the brain and nervous system and the physicochemical state of the organs and tissues. I explain feelings in my article “Feelings Are Not the Same as Emotions.”
Knowing that someone or something has been in your life before without remembering details is a personal non-sensory knowing. The best word for this is familiarity. Repeated experiences create familiarities. The more often you have experienced a pattern, eg seen or heard something, or the more significant an experience is, such as an accident, the stronger the corresponding pattern is within your life history. The stronger a pattern is, the more familiar you are with it. The more familiar you are with something, the stronger the automatism or perhaps even compulsion to act under this pattern. Here is an example: You are familiar with trees because you have seen countless trees in your life. Tree is a strong pattern in your life history. You can’t help but recognize a tree as a tree.
Knowing that you should leave the shore without having any further information is a non-personal non-sensory knowing. The best word for this is intuition. An intuition is a perception that is not based on the five physical senses and is therefore often referred to as the sixth sense.
The four types of knowings are thoughts, feelings, familiarities, and intuitions.
Everyone has all four types of knowings at the same time – but they can conflict with each other. Let’s analyze the thought experiment. You woke up with the intuition to flee, which expressed itself in the desire to drive inland. But when your partner didn’t want to follow your suggestion, you ignored your intuition because you wanted to stay with your partner. This desire may have arisen from a program such as “we have to do everything together on our honeymoon.”
The programs we learn when growing up control thoughts. I describe these programs in my article “Why the Question 'What Am I?' is important and magical.” Programs do not influence intuition, which therefore provides access to truth. The challenge for us is to distinguish intuition from the other kinds of knowings – and to trust it.
Back to the tsunami and the animals. The simple explanation is that all life forms experience feelings, familiarities, and intuitions and behave accordingly:
They have feelings, ie they perceive the state of their body. For example, they feel pain; not only animals but also plants and probably also cells.
They experience familiarities. There is a video on the internet in which a tiger joyfully hugs a man. Many years ago, when the tiger was a baby, this man lovingly cared for it. Therefore, the tiger experiences a familiarity with its former keeper. Elephants remember people who have harmed them. This has the same explanation. Here, the elephant has a negative familiarity with its former tormentor.
They intuitively recognize dangers, food sources, and everything else that is important for their survival – as long as it is compatible with the symbiosis of all life forms. For example, not every gazelle recognizes every approaching lion, otherwise the lions would starve to death.
Animals behave unconditionally according to their feelings, familiarities, and intuitions. Therefore, their behavior is always truthful. Animals in the wild have no programs that suppress truthful behavior. This helps them to survive. This can change when humans interfere. For example, animals intuitively know that fire is dangerous. That’s why they flee from it. But one can train a lion to jump through a hoop of fire.
The primary meaning of intuition is to help a life form survive. Apart from the animals in the tsunami, children are a good example of this. We often say that children have a guardian angel because they survive many dangerous situations – or get off lightly. This is because children act intuitively; they don’t think, they just act; when they grow up, they learn to ponder from the surrounding adults. The more you think, the more you block intuition.
However, intuition does not offer 100 percent protection because, as with gazelles and lions, it is not about the survival of the individual, but about the prosperity of the whole. Intuition is the connection to the universal order of all things. I discuss this aspect of intuition in my article “Intuition is Much More Than Just a Sixth Sense.”
You can access your intuition more easily if you free yourself from your programs. I explain how to do this in my forthcoming article “How to Become What You Truly Are in 7 Steps" and in my book “Being Free – Get Out of the Box.”
Further readings:
Article “Feelings Are Not the Same As Emotions”
Article “Why the Question 'What Am I?' is important and magical”
Article “Intuition is Much More Than Just a Sixth Sense”
Article “How to Become What You Truly Are in 7 Steps" (forthcoming)
Book “Being Gree – Get Out of the Box”