968. In this context "eating together with the swine" does not mean actually lying down and eating from their feeding trough. Such a state could of course, even in a given situation, be a saving lifeline in the face of critical famine or death by starvation. Meal, grain and water are still just as much nourishment for terrestrial human beings as they are for pigs. So even though it is not usual for terrestrial human beings to eat this kind of food from a pig's trough – they would rather have it served in a specially "prepared" form, on clean plates or dishes, as "cakes", "bread", "porridge" and such like (a form of preparation that is also easily digested by a pig's stomach) – one cannot deny that they do, to a certain extent, eat the same food as pigs. But being a being whose stomach or digestive organs that are largely built or equipped to take in the same food or form of nourishment as a pig, makes it evident there is indeed a certain kinship between the former being and the pig. We see that this brilliant parable refers not only to the slovenly, beggarly or destitute condition that might force a so-called "vagabond" to eat from a pig's trough, which the content of the parable might at first seem to suggest, but it also expresses a much deeper phase in the living being's evolutionary process, and is in fact the indication of a particular section in the great cycle of life itself. It is nothing less than the very section that we know from earlier descriptions in this work under the term the "animal kingdom".