The cat sleeps more. It jumps up onto things less. It takes longer to get comfortable and doesn’t race around the way it used to. This reads as an obvious story: the animal is getting old. It’s natural. It’s expected. Most owners I know accept this narrative without a second thought because it’s tidy and it requires nothing of them.
What veterinary research keeps saying, with increasing insistence, is that the tidy narrative is almost certainly wrong.
The numbers are difficult to ignore
Studies consistently find that between 64% and 92% of cats over the age of ten have arthritis. By the time a cat reaches twelve, the figure for osteoarthritis alone is around 90%. In cats older than fourteen, 82% show joint involvement in imaging studies. These are not marginal findings from a single outlier study. They replicate across research institutions and countries.
The gap between those numbers and what most cat owners believe about their pets is enormous. And it exists almost entirely because cats are extraordinarily good at not telling you they are hurting.
Why cats conceal pain
This is not stubbornness or stoicism in any meaningful sense. It is evolutionary architecture. Cats occupy an unusual ecological position — they are predators, but they are also prey. A wild cat that signals injury or weakness invites attack. Over millions of years, the ones that survived were the ones that showed nothing.
That instinct does not disappear in a domestic animal sleeping on a heated blanket in a flat in Amsterdam. The cat that is quietly arthritic does not limp dramatically, does not vocalise its pain, does not do anything that reads obviously as suffering. It just… adjusts. It stops jumping to the high shelf. It grooms itself less around the hips. It finds a position and stays in it. To an owner watching casually, this looks indistinguishable from the ordinary changes of age.
Researchers from the University of California Davis and others have noted that owners frequently report these behavioural changes during routine vet visits, describe them as age-related, and don’t flag them as pain indicators — because they don’t know that’s what they are. The cat isn’t complaining. The owner isn’t alarmed. The pain goes unmanaged.
What to actually look for
The clinical picture of a cat in chronic pain is subtle, almost by design. The American Animal Hospital Association lists the signs: reduced activity, reluctance to jump, changes in grooming patterns, altered sleep positions, irritability when touched in certain places, and withdrawal from interaction. None of these is dramatic. All of them can be read as “just getting older.”
The distinguishing question a vet will ask is not whether any of these things are happening but whether they represent a change from the cat’s baseline. A cat that has always been calm and low-energy is probably fine. A cat that used to leap to the windowsill every morning and now doesn’t is a different conversation.
The treatment gap
There is now a real and expanding range of interventions for feline chronic pain — including newer monoclonal antibody treatments specifically approved for cats — but they require a diagnosis, which requires a vet visit, which requires an owner who suspects something is wrong.
That chain breaks at the first link when owners are operating on the assumption that the slowdown is natural. I find myself thinking about how many cats are spending years in unmanaged pain while their owners interpret the stoicism as contentment. The cat doesn’t complain. The owner assumes it’s fine. Nobody’s lying. But the outcome is the same as if both of them were.
If your cat is over ten and has changed its movement patterns in the last year or two, the veterinary consensus is clear: don’t wait for obvious signals. The species you’re dealing with evolved specifically not to give you any.
Chris Butler, the Honolulu-born surfer who renamed himself Siddhaswarupananda Paramahamsa and built a global Krishna-derived movement called Science of Identity, has reportedly not appeared in a verified public photograph since the mid-1980s. He reportedly stopped giving sit-down media interviews in 1977, the year his Hawaii following went from beach gatherings to organized ashram life, and the handful of grainy images that still circulate online, including the cover portraits used on his own audio cassettes, are now roughly four decades old. He is reportedly 78 years old, and almost no one outside his inner circle claims to know what he currently looks like.
That absence is the point of the movement, and the engine of its mystique.
The surfer who became a guru
Butler reportedly grew up in Honolulu in the 1950s, the son of a prominent local doctor and anti-war activist. He was reportedly a competitive surfer on Oahu’s North Shore in the 1960s, drifted through LSD and Vedanta, and around 1970 became a disciple of A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, the founder of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, who gave him the Sanskrit name he still uses on cassette labels and book jackets.
By the early 1970s Butler was running his own offshoot in Hawaii, drawing a few hundred followers to lectures in Honolulu apartments and Kailua living rooms. He was photographed often during this period. He wore the saffron robes, the shaved head with the single tuft of hair at the back, and the painted clay markings on the forehead common to ISKCON monks.
1977: When the in-person guru began to recede
Something shifted in 1977. By most accounts from former members, Butler scaled back his public lectures that year and moved into a residence in Kailua, and the movement reorganized around audio cassettes of his talks rather than in-person darshan. Followers gathered in homes to listen to the tapes together. He did not disappear overnight, though. Through the 1980s he hosted a late-night Hawaii television program, Chris Butler Speaks, on which he delivered spiritual and theological lectures. It was only from the 1990s onward that he withdrew from public view almost entirely.
He reportedly gave one extended interview to a Honolulu reporter around the late 1970s. He has reportedly given no comparable on-the-record interview since. Requests from major media outlets over the following decades were reportedly either ignored or routed through intermediaries who declined on his behalf.
The clearest surviving portraits of him date from a small window in the early-to-mid 1980s, the same era as the television show. After that, the visual record essentially stops. A 1990s photograph occasionally surfaces in former-member forums, but its provenance is disputed.
A movement built on cassettes, then MP3s
Science of Identity Foundation, the nonprofit Butler reportedly founded in 1977, distributes his teachings through recorded lectures, books published under the Siddhaswarupananda name, and a network of affiliated yoga and meditation studios. The movement has claimed adherents across Hawaii, the Philippines, Australia, and New Zealand.
Followers describe a structure in which Butler’s voice is constant and his face is absent. New initiates may spend years inside the organization without ever seeing a recent photograph of him. The cassettes carry the same 1980s cover portrait. The MP3 files that replaced them carry the same portrait scanned to digital.
The pattern is a familiar one in accounts of charismatic movements: the deliberate cultivation of distance. The leader becomes a voice, a doctrine, a felt presence. The body recedes.
The Gabbard connection
Most of what the wider public knows about Butler arrived through political coverage of Tulsi Gabbard. Gabbard was reportedly raised inside the Science of Identity community in Hawaii. Her father, Mike Gabbard, was reportedly a prominent Butler follower before his own political career. When Tulsi Gabbard ran for Congress in 2012, then for president in 2020, then was nominated as Director of National Intelligence in 2024, reporters tried to photograph her childhood guru and were unable to do so.
Major publications including The New Yorker, The Intercept, The Daily Beast, and New York Magazine have published profiles attempting to describe Butler. None of them included a current photograph. Every illustration in those pieces used the same handful of decades-old images, sometimes cropped, sometimes color-corrected, always old.
Why old photographs make a person larger
The psychology of absence has been studied for years in the context of celebrity, romance, and authority. The scarcity principle in social perception holds that people assign greater value and intensity to figures who are harder to reach. The harder it is to see someone, the larger they tend to become in the imagination of those who wait. A guru you cannot photograph is, by that logic, more compelling than one who shows up on Instagram.
A related strand of work on attraction and what psychologists describe as love’s scarcity principle suggests that limited availability tends to signal importance, and that the absence of fresh information can produce a more intense bond than constant presence does. The pattern, first mapped in romantic relationships, translates to spiritual organizations with little distortion.
What former members describe
Accounts collected over the past decade from people who left the movement describe a community organized around a leader they rarely saw. Senior followers, sometimes called the inner circle, would occasionally travel to meet him. Rank-and-file members would not.
Some former members say they spent ten or fifteen years in the organization without ever being in the same room as Butler. They listened to him every day on tape. They quoted him. They prayed to a photograph of him taken before they were born.
One former follower said she had no idea what her guru’s voice sounded like at his current age. Only what it sounded like in 1982.
The visual record, frozen
If you search for Chris Butler today, you will find perhaps a dozen distinct images. A young surfer at Sunset Beach. A robed monk lecturing in Honolulu in 1972. A close-up portrait used on cassette covers, undated but stylistically consistent with the early 1980s. A long-lens photograph that may be from the 1990s and may not be him at all.
There is no verified photograph of him aged 60. None aged 70. None aged 78, which is his current age. The man who has shaped the daily life of thousands of households for half a century is, visually, a person who stopped existing during the Reagan administration.
Historical figures whose visual record is incomplete tend to be remembered through whichever image dominates the archive. Lincoln is the bearded president, not the clean-shaven lawyer. Einstein is the white-haired Princeton sage, not the patent clerk. Butler is the young Hawaiian monk on the cassette cover, because that is the only Butler the archive contains.
The Honolulu compound
Butler is widely reported to live in Kailua, on the windward side of Oahu, in a residential property owned through trusts associated with the Science of Identity Foundation. Reporters have described high walls, mature vegetation, and no visible activity. Neighbors have reportedly said they have lived next door for decades and have never seen him.
The property is roughly seven miles from Waikiki Beach, where he learned to surf in the 1950s.
A face the size of a generation
Forty years of visual silence is an unusual span. It covers the entire commercial history of the internet. It covers the introduction of the camcorder, the digital camera, the camera phone, the selfie, and the doorbell camera. A person who has not been photographed in forty years has, in effect, opted out of the visual era of human history.
The cassettes still play. The yoga studios still open in the mornings. The portrait on the cover, taken when Ronald Reagan was in his first term, is still the face that thousands of followers picture when they close their eyes to chant. The man himself, somewhere behind the wall in Kailua, is now closer in age to his own teacher Prabhupada at death than to the young surfer in the photograph.
The image does not age. The movement, organized around it, does not need it to.
The Chinese word for gunpowder is 火藥 (huǒyào), which translates as “fire medicine.” The name preserves the original purpose. Gunpowder was not invented as a weapon. It was discovered as a chemical accident in the course of medical and alchemical research, by practitioners of a religious-philosophical tradition that had been systematically experimenting with mineral combinations for several centuries in pursuit of two parallel goals: the transmutation of base metals into gold, and the formulation of a chemical substance that, when ingested by a human being, would grant immortality. The two goals were related. The general framework of Chinese alchemy, like the broadly contemporary tradition of European alchemy, held that the physical properties of matter could be transformed through the application of correct chemical procedures, and that the same principles governing the transformation of metals might also govern the transformation of the human body from its mortal to an immortal form. The alchemists pursued this programme by combining essentially every available natural substance with essentially every other available natural substance, heating the mixtures, observing the results, and recording which combinations produced which effects.
According to Britannica’s overview of gunpowder’s chemistry and historical origins, the specific combination that eventually produced gunpowder involves three ingredients. Saltpeter, also known as potassium nitrate, was called “Chinese snow” in Tang Dynasty alchemical texts and was considered to have spiritually significant properties because of its unusual chemical behaviour — it dissolves easily in water, recrystallises into geometrically perfect forms, and produces a vigorous oxidising reaction when heated. Sulfur, the yellow mineral the European tradition would later call “brimstone,” was associated in Chinese alchemy with the principle of vital fire and was already in widespread use in skin-disease and parasitic-infection treatments. Charcoal, the carbon-rich residue of partially-burned wood, was a routine material in alchemical kilns. None of the three substances, taken individually, behaves in an unexpected way. The combination, however — particularly when the saltpeter constitutes approximately 75 percent of the mixture, the sulfur approximately 10 percent, and the charcoal approximately 15 percent — produces a chemical reaction in which the saltpeter rapidly releases oxygen, the charcoal and sulfur rapidly combust in that oxygen, and a substantial quantity of hot gas is produced in a very short period of time. The result, in confined spaces, is an explosion.
The earliest written warning
The earliest surviving Chinese document that describes the explosive properties of the three-ingredient mixture is a Taoist alchemical text called the Zhenyuan Miaodao Yaolüe — “Classified Essentials of the Mysterious Way of the True Origin of Things” — which dates to approximately 850 CE, in the middle of the Tang Dynasty. The text is not a recipe for gunpowder. It is, in essential respects, the opposite of a recipe for gunpowder. As detailed in a published lecture by the Cambridge historian of science Joseph Needham on the development of gunpowder in medieval China, the text is a compilation of elixir recipes that the author considered too dangerous to recommend to practising alchemists. The relevant warning, translated from the classical Chinese by Needham, reads: “Some have heated together sulfur, realgar and saltpeter with honey; smoke and flames result, so that their hands and faces have been burnt, and even the whole house where they were working burned down.” The text is, in other words, a 9th-century health-and-safety document. The fact that an explicit warning against this particular ingredient combination existed in writing by 850 CE strongly suggests that the discovery itself had been made some time earlier, that multiple alchemists had been injured experimenting with the mixture, and that the broader alchemical community had begun circulating the information as a cautionary tale long before any practical application of the explosive properties had been considered.
Needham — whose multi-volume Science and Civilisation in China remains the definitive English-language academic treatment of the history of Chinese scientific and technological development — described gunpowder explicitly as the product of “the systematic if obscure investigations of Taoist alchemists” rather than of any military or engineering research programme. The alchemists who made the original discovery had no apparent interest in weaponising it. They had been looking for the substance that would prevent death. They had found a substance that produced fire, smoke, and injury. From their perspective, this was a failed experiment — a chemical combination to be added to the list of things one should not, under any circumstances, attempt to ingest. The mixture remained, for approximately the next half-century, a curiosity. It was used in entertainment contexts, in some preparations as a skin treatment, and as a fumigant. It was not yet, in any sense that a 9th-century reader would have recognised, a weapon.
How it became a weapon
The transition from accidental alchemical discovery to systematic military application took approximately a century. As described in a Clemson University academic resource on gunpowder in medieval China that draws on Needham’s authoritative treatment of the subject, the first documented military use occurred in the late 9th to early 10th century, with gunpowder-based “flying fires” or fire arrows appearing in late-Tang military records. The systematic weaponisation of gunpowder began in earnest under the Song Dynasty (960-1279 CE), which faced sustained military pressure from the Khitan Liao, the Tangut Western Xia, and ultimately the Jurchen Jin and the Mongol Empire — each of which made conventional defensive warfare increasingly difficult and provided substantial incentive to develop unconventional alternatives. Song military engineers progressively refined the gunpowder formula, developing fire arrows, fire lances (a kind of proto-flamethrower mounted on a pole), early bombs (the “thunderclap” and “heaven-shaking” varieties), incendiary devices, smoke-screen weapons, and eventually, in the 13th century, the first true firearms.
The earliest published gunpowder formulas — three of them, all developed for military use — appear in a Northern Song military encyclopedia called the Wujing Zongyao (武經總要, “Complete Essentials for the Military Classics”) compiled between 1040 and 1044 CE. Per an EBSCO research summary of the invention of gunpowder and the development of early firearms, the three formulas specified in the text contained substantially less saltpeter than the optimal proportion for explosive propulsion — closer to 50 to 55 percent rather than the eventual 75 percent — which means they functioned more as incendiary devices than as the true propellants that later gunpowder formulations would become. The optimisation took several more centuries. By the 13th century, gunpowder weapons had spread west across Eurasia via the Mongol conquests, with written formulas appearing in the Middle East between 1240 and 1280 in a treatise by the Syrian chemist Hasan al-Rammah, and in Europe by 1267 in the Opus Majus of the English friar Roger Bacon. By the 14th century, the first European cannons were being manufactured. By the 16th century, the firearm had displaced the bow and the crossbow as the dominant infantry weapon of European warfare. By the 19th century, gunpowder-based explosives were being used to blast tunnels through mountains, demolish buildings, and reshape the physical landscape of the planet on a scale that would have been inconceivable to the Tang Dynasty alchemists who had originally discovered the substance.
The historical irony, which the literature on gunpowder has remarked on extensively over the past several centuries, is that the substance that has been more directly responsible for the deaths of human beings in warfare than any other single chemical compound was discovered by people whose entire research programme was organised around the goal of preventing human death. The alchemists pursuing the elixir of immortality had not, in any sense, succeeded — no Taoist practitioner achieved physical immortality through any chemical preparation, and several Tang emperors are now believed to have died from mercury poisoning caused by drinking immortality elixirs prepared for them by court alchemists. The Taoist programme, as a programme for the prevention of death, was a complete failure. The accidental byproduct of that failed programme has since killed more human beings than essentially any other artefact ever produced by any civilisation in human history. The fire medicine, in the long historical record, has been used to do approximately the opposite of what its original inventors were trying to achieve.
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