I have spent most of today making up some terrariums in which to keep a collection of insects. This is something I have wanted to so since I was a child, but only now, half a century on, am I finally able to fill that particular dream --- and, now that I have worked out a few things I could not have known then, I can really have some fun with my new pets!

First, I would just like to make the point that there is a 'serious' reason for doing this: as I said previously, I am recovering from what has been diagnosed as schizophrenia. The BIG PROBLEM is ANXIETY. Post-traumatic-stress disorder, the professionals would probably label it today, shell-shock it would have been called about the time of the first world war, but whatever you call it, the experience is that you get scared shitless and dive for cover at the drop of a hat.
Even before I became psychotic, I was scared of heights, and spiders and things like that, but now --- unbelievable! So, in order to get free of the lingering effects of my experience, I need to get on top of panic-level fears, and I am calling on an old witches trick to do it: witches use what are known as familiars, and it is notable that these are often animals that people usually fear. Well, if you keep an animal as a pet, even if it is a spider, bat, or snake, then you will, eventually, come to like it, and then you cannot fear it any more. So, by making a pet of some of my old nightmare creatures, I am facing up to, and out-facing, some of my oldest fears, and the confidence I gain from that, will do for all the others.

But, to return to the things I can do now that I could not have done then. Current ethics adjure us to be kind to our feather/furred/many-legged brethern, where by kind is meant: cuddle, coddle and be nice. Your pets need TLC ! So, what I have discovered meanwhile allows me to say," bollocks to that."

This is not the place to explain the whole thing; I intend to publish a full account quite soon. However, in essence, I have discovered that the existence we experience is of the nature of a virtual reality. This works through a symbiotic relationship between people, us, who experience (live in) the virtual world, and other, bigger minds, I have called the Que (pronounced like the letter q), who design and create the virtual worlds. This is best understood by analogy with the game dungeons and dragons. The minimum requirement for a game of D&D is that there is one player and one dungeon master. The dungeon master is someone who knows the rules of the game, and whose job it is to create scenarios for the player. Likewise, in order for our existence to work, we need one Que to create the scenarios of our lives, and one person to live the life.
If you think about the implications of this arrangement, it contains all sorts of implications for how we live out lives. But, in particular, under circumstances, it would obviously be of huge advantage to be able to communicate with one's symbiotic partner. The establishment of the ability to do so, is indeed, the next evolutionary step for humanity; the reason it has not been done thus far, is because the method of communication, for reasons that I cannot go into here, is much more complex than the languages we use to communicate among ourselves. However, we are all, albiet unknowingly, in receipt of communications from our partners. The one that stands out is dreams. The dreams that we experience are not the products of our own minds, but of our symbiotic partners. We do produce dreams in our own minds, but these are for output to our partners, so we do not see them ourselves.

So, to return to the subject of my new pets. Among the things I have found out through communication with my own Que, is that animals are only biological machines! Thus they do not experience pain or distress of any sort. They merely mimic those feelings. Quite what all the reasons for this are I have not grasped yet, but one of them is this: we, humans, need to learn about feelings. We need to learn to experience them and how to deal with them. When you mimic a feeling, you experience that feeling, if only at a relatively low level. But that is where it starts, and that is how we begin to acquire feelings. So, by living in a world surrounded by creatures that behave as though they had feelings, we learn to mimic and experience them for ourselves.

So, having learned that these creatures are biological machines, obviously I am freed from the restictive ethics that have come to surround animals. That gives me a great deal of freedom, but not as much as a thoughtless conclusion might lead one to think. The fact is that if my pets are sickly looking, or torpid or viscious, then that does not make me happy. Animals make people happy, but only if they are healthy, lively and happy-looking. So, for my own sake, I still must treat them well.