I read recently about a woman who sold her house to pay for clones of her beloved pet. I am not faulting her for doing so—love has no price tag—but I have to ask: Does she think that she is getting her dog back? I can’t imagine paying that much money otherwise. But if she paid that much money just to get puppies whose bodies are genetic copies of her beloved dog, but who will have their own personalities, was it worth losing her house over?
This is a mistake that I see people make all the time. They assume that a genetically identical copy of a body is all you need to have a new version of that being. Lose your beloved spouse? Clone her, and you will have her back! (Age difference aside.) Lose your beloved pet? Clone him and you have him back! In a set of five, if you want.
Those puppies may share a lot of traits of the father that are part of the breed and part of his genetic mix, but they are each their own unique spirit. To think otherwise is meat body thinking—the kind of thinking that says that we are merely bodies of meat walking around. So much easier to pretend that the spirit doesn’t exist. Makes things tidier. Makes it easier to delude ourselves in so many ways.
But the spirit does exist, and the body does not equal the spirit. The spirit continously creates and inhabits the body. You can duplicate the body, but the spirit that creates and inhabits it is not necessarily the same as the original.
I say “necessarily” because it is always possible that the same spirit will come back and inhabit that body. Especially with pets, I have noticed that the same spirit does sometimes come back again in a new body to love you some more. But there are no guarantees. So don’t go rushing off thinking that your cloned whatever is the same in every regard as the original. It most likely isn’t. Love it for who and what it is—its own unique expression on this beautiful earth.
