We may become irate that someone would even suggest that our mother’s loving meals and our father’s barbecues were a form of indoctrination.
Our mother and father didn’t intend to indoctrinate us, just as their parents didn’t intend to indoctrinate them.
Nevertheless, our old herding culture, primarily through the family and secondarily through religious, educational, economic, and governmental institutions, enforces the indoctrination process in order to replicate itself in each generation and continue on.
It is not simply a sense of caring and kindness toward the being before you.
It isn’t merely a warm-hearted feeling of empathy for the suffering of others.
It is also the determined and practical resolve to do whatever is possible to relieve their suffering, the sustained urge to reduce and eliminate the suffering they are experiencing.
May all beings be free and at peace, Will
New offering: Prayer Circle for Monday
Today, let us send our prayers to all farmed animals.
May compassion and love reign over all the earth for all farmed animals―Dear ducks, geese, turkeys, chickens; cows, pigs, lambs, bison, elk, deer, and all of you who are suffering today in tiny cages or crowded into feedlots, being beaten, fed poisoned and unnatural food, and for those of you languishing without water or food on trucks or entering the slaughterhouses.
We bear witness to your suffering, we take action to permanently end it, and we continually send out an energy field of love and compassion to comfort you and to transform the hearts and souls of those who support this violent oppression. We send our tears and our prayers on wings of love to you.
Compassion encircles the earth for each of you and for all beings.
( 7 daily prayers by Judy Carman)
We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals.
Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creatures through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion.
We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man.
In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear.
They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.”
~ Henry Beston, from “The Outermost House”
If our only motivation for not eating animal foods is our own health, it's easy to “cheat” a little here and there and pretty soon go back to eating them again.
When our motivation is based on compassion, it is deep and lasting, because we understand that our actions have direct consequences on others who are vulnerable.
May all beings be free and at peace, Will
Looking deeply, we see that the perpetrators are themselves victims of violence―that’s why they’ve become perpetrators―and their violence hurts not only the animals but themselves and the bystanders as well.
All three are locked in a painful embrace, and it is the bystanders who have the real power.
They can either turn and look away, thus giving their tacit approval, or they can witness and bring a third dimension of consciousness and awareness to the cycle of violence that has the victims and perpetrators hopelessly enmeshed.
Women should be protected from anyone’s exercise of unrighteous power…but then, so should every other living creature.”
~ George Eliot
With awareness, our behavior naturally changes, and individual changes in behavior, rippling through the web of relationships, can lead to social transformation and bring new dimensions of freedom, joy, and creativity to everyone.
It all begins with our most intimate and far-reaching connection with the natural order, our most primary spiritual symbol, and our most fundamental social ritual: eating.
Love animals: God has given them the rudiments of thought and joy untroubled.
Do not trouble their joy, don’t harass them, don’t deprive them of their happiness, don’t work against God’s intent.” ~ Fyodor Dostoevsky
The pollution of our shared consciousness-field by the dark agonies endured by billions of animals killed for food is an unrecognized fact that impedes our social progress and contributes gigantically to human violence and the warfare that is constantly erupting around the world.
Our cultural predicament―the array of seemingly intractable problems that beset us, such as chronic war, terrorism, genocide, starvation, the proliferation of disease, environmental degradation, species extinction, animal abuse, consumerism, drug addiction, alienation, stress, racism, oppression of women, child abuse, corporate exploitation, materialism, poverty, injustice, and social malaise―is rooted in an essential cause that is so obvious that it has managed to remain almost completely overlooked.
Henry Salt
When we turn to the protection of animals, we sometimes hear it said that we ought to protect men first and animals afterwards.
By condoning cruelty to animals, we perpetuate the very spirit which condones cruelty to men.”
~ Henry Salt
Our meals and institutions reflect each other and reinforce the delusion that we are violent and competitive by nature.
Spiritual and religious teachings say otherwise. The Bodhisattva ideal that Buddhists emulate, for example, embodies the understanding that our true nature is wisdom, loving-kindness and cooperativeness.
Our greatest joy comes in helping others and blessing them, and we hurt ourselves the most when we harm others for our own gain.
Veganism is the essence of inclusiveness and nonviolence: seeing sacred beings when we see others, never reducing them to objects or commodities for our use.
It is the ancient wisdom of the interconnectedness of the welfare of all, and is also the dawning mentality that is foundational to sustainability, freedom, and lasting peace.
Our children’s world will be vegan, or the alternative is unpleasant to contemplate.
VegInspiration
If lab-grown “meat” becomes available, that will reduce our killing and waste of resources.
And it may help us move toward veganism, since our meals will no longer require us to disconnect from the suffering we’re causing animals.
However, there are countless ways we oppress and abuse animals besides eating them, and if our culture doesn’t evolve to the vegan ethic of compassion to all beings, and continues to use and prey on animals, our technology will magnify our violence and we’ll do the same to each other.
VegInspiration
The great philosopher Schopenhauer, in criticizing how some Christians treat animals, wrote, “Shame on such a morality that fails to recognize the eternal essence that exists in every living thing, and shines forth with inscrutable significance from all eyes that see the sun.”
All of us are celebrations of infinite mysterious Spirit, deserving of honor and respect.
As we evolve spiritually, we become more awake to the truth of interbeing, that all living beings are profoundly interconnected, and that by harming others, I harm myself because the life in that apparent ‘other’ is the same life that lives in this apparent ‘me.’
As our hearts open to deeper understanding, our circle of compassion thus automatically enlarges, and spontaneously begins to include more and more ‘others.’
Not just our own tribe, sect, nation, or race, but all human beings, and not just humans, but other mammals, and birds, fish, forests, and the whole beautifully-interwoven tapestry of living, pulsing creation. All of Us.
I hope that all vegans or aspiring vegans have the opportunity at some point in our lives to live in a vegan community for a while.
I have had this opportunity a few times and it’s been transformative.
Many of the difficulties we encounter in living a vegan lifestyle, for our families and ourselves, arise because we are basically alone in a culture that is hostile to our values.
I found when I was immersed in large-scale vegan communities, contradictions and complications evaporated in a remarkable feeling of inner wholeness.
As we practice leaving home by examining our own societal indoctrination and questioning all the propaganda continually spewed forth by the military-industrial-meat-medical complex, we can liberate ourselves and live a life of greater compassion based on vegan ethics and a plant-based diet, and be a voice for those vulnerable sentient creatures who have no voice.
In this we fulfill the universal teachings that promote spiritual living. We are practicing compassion and making connections, and our life can become a field of freedom and love as we continually affirm our interdependence with all life, and practice non-cooperation with those forces that see beings as mere commodities.
Veganism, which is a committed effort to live the ideals of mercy and kindness to others, is indispensable to all spiritual paths, because it emerges from and deepens the understanding that all beings are completely interconnected and interdependent.
It is an inclusive movement that advocates a plant-based diet because it includes all sentient creatures within its sphere of concern.
The towering spiritual geniuses who have blessed this earth have typically been vegan but have been little concerned whether their foods were cooked or not.
For example, when we look at the great Zen masters of China and East Asia of the last 1,500 years, we find people who invariably ate a vegan diet of both cooked and uncooked foods.
The desert fathers of the Christian tradition are similar.
Veganism is the essential healing force that our culture desperately needs, because the mentality of domination that starts on our plates reverberates through our various cultural institutions as authoritarianism, oppression, and violence.
Healing this mentality requires cultivating vegan values: concern and caring for others weaker than us, and refusing to exploit them.
As vegans, the improved health we naturally experience is a side-benefit; it’s not the main focus because we sense there’s a higher purpose in life than just being physically healthy.
The real secret to personal and planetary peace and happiness is veganism rightly understood as the ancient and timeless teaching to include all living beings within the sphere of our kindness and respect, and never to treat any being as a mere object to be used or abused.
This is the awakening of our true human heart, not for a self-centered happiness, but for a happiness that includes everyone.
This is positive thinking beyond mere positive thinking; it’s living the truth that we are, and being the transformation we long to see in our world.
Now let’s imagine that!―and live it.
The secret to happiness and inner peace is thus not just the Law of Attraction and being mindful of our thoughts, although this is certainly important.
The secret is being mindful of our actions as well, because just as our thoughts condition our behavior, our behavior conditions our thoughts, and regular daily actions of instigating violence and eating the results of that violence keep our consciousness and thoughts confined to a relatively low vibrational level.
When we come to this earth, we find ourselves in a culture that is at its very core organized around confining and killing animals for food.
We are forced virtually from birth to look at beings as mere commodities and to treat them as such by eating them in the most powerful daily rituals we engage in: our meals.
All cultures naturally propagate themselves through their various institutions, and ours is no different.
Our scientific, religious, governmental, educational, and economic institutions all reflect the same underlying mentality and reinforce it, which is why veganism is so strenuously resisted, and also why it is so urgently needed as well.
Fortunately, as we awaken and stop disconnecting from the suffering we cause others by our choices, we resensitize ourselves and begin to be a force for kindness and respect that can impact others, and we can work through our culture’s institutions to raise consciousness and spread the light of inclusiveness.
The more clearly the inner light shines in us, the more clearly we can shine it into the world.
Veganism is, I’ve found, a litmus test of religious teachings and religious teachers.
To the degree that religious teachings do not explicitly encourage veganism, which is the practice of nonviolence and lovingkindness, to that same degree these teachings are hypocritical and disconnected from their spiritual source.
What goes around comes around.
We must as a species stop the violence that is inherent in our meat habit.
This should be of paramount importance for all religious movements and teachers. It is the call of spirituality.
If our religions don’t hear this call, we must revitalize them or create new ones that do.
The act of regularly eating foods derived from confined and brutalized animals forces us to become somewhat emotionally desensitized, and this numbing and inner armoring make it possible for us as a culture to devastate the earth, slaughter people in wars, and support oppressive social structures without feeling remorse.
By going vegan, we’re taking responsibility for the effects of our actions on vulnerable beings and we’re resensitizing ourselves. We’re becoming more alive, and more able to feel both grief and joy.
Kahlil Gibran points out in The Prophet that unless we are able to feel our grief and weep our tears, we will not be able to laugh our laughter, either. Turning our pain and outrage into action on behalf of vulnerable beings will bring healing to us and to our world.
Like other animals, we are not fundamentally physical beings; we are essentially consciousness.
We are all expressions of the infinite creative mystery force that births and sustains the universes of manifestation, and our bodies and minds are sacred, as are the bodies and minds of all creatures.
Like us, animals have feelings and yearnings; they nest, mate, hunger, and are the conscious subjects of their lives.
They make every effort, as we do, to avoid pain and death and to do what brings them happiness and fulfillment.
We are taught as children to practice certain ways of seeing the world and of relating to others, and we gradually become adept in these practices.
In our culture, we are taught to practice disconnecting the reality of animal flesh and secretions in our meals from the actual reality of the animal cruelty required to get them onto our plates.
Going vegan is a commitment to practice something else, to practice in a completely different way than we were taught by our culture.
Instead of practicing desensitizing, disconnecting, and reducing others, we practice reconnecting, resensitizing ourselves, and respecting others.
This commitment comes from deep within us, from our inherent compassion and our inner urge to evolve spiritually and to live with awareness, kindness, freedom, and joy.
The word vegan, newer and more challenging than the word vegetarian because it includes every sentient being in its circle of concern and addresses all forms of unnecessary cruelty from an essentially ethical perspective, points to an ancient idea that has been articulated for many centuries, especially in the world’s spiritual traditions. It indicates a mentality of expansive inclusiveness and is able to embrace science and virtually all religions because it is a manifestation of the yearning for universal peace, justice, wisdom, and freedom.
The roots of our crises lie in our dinner plates.
Our inherited food choices bind us to an obsolete mentality that inexorably undermines our happiness, intelligence, and freedom.
Turning away is no longer an option. We are all related.
Our study suggests that the closer one approaches a total plant food diet, the greater the health benefit….
It turns out that animal protein, when consumed, exhibits a variety of undesirable health effects.
Whether it is the immune system, various enzyme systems, the uptake of carcinogens into the cells, or hormonal activities, animal protein generally only causes mischief.”
~ Dr. T. Colin Campbell, Author, The China Study
Eating the flesh and secretions of animals is so fundamentally repulsive to us as humans that these animal foods make especially powerful placebos.
We find vultures repulsive because they eat carrion, but we eat exactly the same thing!
Sometimes it’s euphemized as aged beef. And yet, because we’ve been taught to attribute strength and energy to eating animal foods, that expectation helps our quite miraculous and flexible psychophysiology to partially overcome the essentially disturbing and toxic nature of these foods so we can survive and function.
As children, we had no other choice.
It’s actually quite obvious why heart disease and cancer “run in the family.” Everyone in the family has their legs under the same dinner table!
As children we not only eat like our family but also soak up our inner attitudes from them. Unless we metaphorically leave home and question our culture’s food mentality and the enslaving propaganda of the meat-medical complex, we will find it difficult to discern our unique mission and grow spiritually.
Spiritual health, like physical and mental health, urges us to take responsibility for our lives, and to dedicate ourselves to a cause that is higher than our self-preoccupations.
Eighty percent of grain grown in the U.S. and about half the fish hauled in are wasted to grow billions of animals big and fat enough to be profitably slaughtered, or to produce dairy products and eggs at the high levels demanded by consumers.
And over ninety percent of the protein in this grain turns into the methane, ammonia, urea, and manure that pollutes our air and water.
A conservative estimate is that the amount of land, grain, water, petroleum, and pollution required to feed one of us the Standard American Diet could feed fifteen of us eating a plant-based diet.
As far as taste goes, those of us who follow a plant-based diet invariably report that we discover new vistas of delicious foods that we hardly knew existed. Plant-based cuisines from the Mediterranean, Africa, India, East Asia, Mexico, and South America all offer delicious and nutritious possibilities.
As our taste buds come back to life, we discover more subtle nuances of flavor, and as our hearts and minds relax and rejoice in supporting more cruelty-free foods, the foods become increasingly delicious.
Due to the mind-body connection, they also become more nutritious as we begin to enjoy partaking of the attractive and regenerating fruits and herbs of our earth.
Mindful eating is the essential foundation of happiness and peace.
As people learn more about the consequences of eating animal foods, we see increasing numbers of individuals and groups acting creatively to raise consciousness about this, thus helping to eliminate the roots of hunger, cruelty, pollution, and exploitation.
Food Not Bombs, for example, organizes volunteers and food donations to feed disadvantaged hungry people organic vegan food in over 175 cities throughout the Americas, Europe, and Australia. It is intentionally decentralized and web-like in its approach, with autonomous local units organizing their own compassionate operations.
The worldwide followers of Ching Hai, a noted Vietnamese spiritual teacher with students numbering in the hundreds of thousands, have set up vegan restaurants in many cities and contribute vegan food, clothing, shelter, and aid to disaster victims, prisoners, children, and the elderly in countries around the world
These are but two encouraging examples of the vegan revolution of compassion, justice and equality taking firmer root in our culture and in the world.
VegInspiration
We can transform this culture we live in, and which lives in us, by transforming our own motivations and exemplifying this to others. We owe this to the animals.
In the end, we are not separate from others, and we each have a critical piece to the great puzzle of cultural awakening to contribute, and our success and fulfillment depend on each of us discovering this piece and presenting it persistently.
As Albert Schweitzer said, “One thing I know. The only ones among you who will find happiness are those who have sought, and found, how to serve.”
Because of herding animals, we have cast ourselves out of the garden into the rat race of competition and consumerism, ashamed of ourselves.
It is this low self-esteem that drives the profits of corporations enriching themselves on our insatiable craving for gadgets, drugs, and entertainment to help us forget what we know in our hearts, and to cover over the moans of the animals entombed in our flesh.
The choice is set before us at every meal between the garden of life or the altar of death and as we choose life and eat grains and vegetables rather than flesh, milk, and eggs, we find our joy rising, our health increasing, our spirit deepening, our mind quickening, our feelings softening, and our creativity flourishing.
VegInspiration
By confining and killing animals for food, we have brought violence into our bodies and minds and disturbed the physical, emotional, mental, social, and spiritual dimensions of our selves in deep and intractable ways.
Our meals require us to eat like predators and thus to see ourselves as such, cultivating and justifying predatory behaviors and institutions that are the antithesis of the inclusiveness and kindness that accompany spiritual growth.
Prayer Circle for Monday
Today, let us send our prayers to all farmed animals.
May compassion and love reign over all the earth for all farmed animals―Dear ducks, geese, turkeys, chickens; cows, pigs, lambs, bison, elk, deer, and all of you who are suffering today in tiny cages or crowded into feedlots, being beaten, fed poisoned and unnatural food, and for those of you languishing without water or food on trucks or entering the slaughterhouses.
We bear witness to your suffering, we take action to permanently end it, and we continually send out an energy field of love and compassion to comfort you and to transform the hearts and souls of those who support this violent oppression. We send our tears and our prayers on wings of love to you.
If our only motivation for not eating animal foods is our own health, it's easy to “cheat” a little here and there and pretty soon go back to eating them again. When our motivation is based on compassion, it is deep and lasting, because we understand that our actions have direct consequences on others who are vulnerable. ~Dr. Will Tuttle
As children, through constant exposure to the complex patterns of belief surrounding our most elaborate group ritual, eating food, we ingested our culture’s values and invisible assumptions.
Like sponges, we learned, we noticed, we partook, and we became acculturated.
Now, as adults, finding our lives beset with stress and a range of daunting problems of our own making, we rightly yearn to understand the source of our frustrating inability to live in harmony on this earth.
Until we are willing and able to make the connections between what we are eating and what was required to get it on our plate, and how it affects us to buy, serve, and eat it, we will be unable to make the connections that will allow us to live wisely and harmoniously on this earth.
When we cannot make connections, we cannot understand, and we are less free, less intelligent, less loving, and less happy.
The most crucial task for our generation, our group mission on this earth, perhaps, is to make some essential connections that our parents and ancestors have been mostly unable to make, and thus to evolve a healthier human society to bequeath to our children.
Eating animal foods is a fundamental cause of our dilemmas, but we will squirm every which way to avoid confronting this.
It is our defining blind spot and is the essential missing piece to the puzzle of human peace and freedom.
Because of our culturally inherited behavior of abusing the animals we use for food and ignoring this abuse, we are exceedingly hesitant to look behind the curtain of our denial, talk with each other about the consequences of our meals, and change our behavior to reflect what we see and know.
This unwillingness is socially supported and continually reinforced.
The song of the new mythos that yearns to be born through us requires our spirits to be loving and alive enough to hear and recognize the pain we are causing through our obsolete food orientation.
We are called to allow our innate mercy and kindness to shine forth and to confront the indoctrinated assumptions that promote cruelty.
While we are granted varying degrees of privilege depending on our species, race, class, and gender, we are all harmed when any is harmed; suffering is ultimately completely interconnected because we are all interconnected, and socially-constructed privilege only serves to disconnect us from this truth of our interdependence.
The inner feminine is our intuition, our sensitivity, and our ability to sense the profound interconnectedness of events and beings, and it is vital to peace, wisdom, joy, intelligence, creativity, and spiritual awakening. With every baby calf stolen from her mother and killed, with every gallon of milk stolen from enslaved and broken mothers, with every thrust of the raping sperm gun, with every egg stolen from a helpless, frantic hen, and with every baby chick killed or locked for life in a hellish nightmare cage, we kill the sacred feminine within ourselves. By ordering and eating products from the industrial herding complex that dominates the feminine with an iron fist, we squelch our opportunities for maturing to higher levels of understanding, sensitivity, and compassion. We remain merely ironic in our quests.
Food is not only a fundamental necessity; it is also a primary symbol in the shared inner life of every human culture, including our own.
It is not hard to see that food is a source and metaphor of life, love, generosity, celebration, pleasure, reassurance, acquisition, and consumption. And yet it is also, ironically, a source and metaphor of control, domination, cruelty, and death, for we often kill to eat.
Every day, from the cradle to the grave, we all make food choices, or they are made for us.
The quality of awareness from which these inevitable food choices arise―and whether we are making them ourselves or they are being made for us―greatly influences our ability to make connections. This ability to make meaningful connections determines whether we are and become lovers and protectors of life or unwitting perpetuators of cruelty and death.
Looking deeply into food, into what and how we eat, and into the attitudes, actions, and beliefs surrounding food, is an adventure of looking into the very heart of our culture and ourselves.
As surprising as it may seem, as we shine the light of awareness onto this most ordinary and necessary aspect of our lives, we shine light onto unperceived chains of bondage attached to our bodies, minds, and hearts, onto the bars of cages we never could quite see, and onto a sparkling path that leads to transformation and the possibility of true love, freedom, and joy in our lives.
A plant-based diet cannot be patented, so it is of absolutely no interest to the pharmaceutical complex.
It is an enormous threat, in fact, and huge campaigns are waged to keep us distracted and believing that complex carbohydrates are bad for us while animal protein is absolutely necessary, and that science can save us from diabetes, cancer, and the other diseases brought on by our callous domination of animals for food.
Animal-based meals are the source of the complacency and sense of disempowerment that permit the environmental and social holocaust that our media prevents us from seeing and comprehending.
Eating animal foods diminishes our sensitivity, paralyzing us by reducing our ability to respond―our response-ability.
Eating the violence on our plates requires an evasion of responsibility so that we come to believe our actions don’t make much difference.
This erroneous belief is actually rooted in our semi-conscious understanding that with every meal we cause exactly the kind of suffering and pollution that we would naturally want to prevent.
Billions are spent searching for drugs and other material means to cure what is actually an ethical and spiritual disease.
Sowing disease and death in animals at our mercy, we reap the same in ourselves.
Much of medical research today is actually an apparently desperate quest to find ways to continue eating animal foods and to escape the consequences of our cruel and unnatural practices.
Do we really want to be successful in this?
Our lives flow from our beliefs, and our beliefs are conditioned by our daily actions. As we act, so we build our character and so we become. By consciously making our meals celebrations of peace, compassion, and freedom, we can sow seeds in the most powerful way possible to contribute to the healing of our world.
Prayer Circle for Animals Weekly Update
Our prayers for all animals continue to circle the earth, to
uplift humanity's consciousness, and to bless the animals themselves.
Thank you for joining people around the world who are praying this
prayer in many different languages but all with the same love:
"COMPASSION ENCIRCLES THE EARTH FOR ALL BEINGS EVERYWHERE"
Memorial Day is coming up soon!
Memorial Day is a time to honor those serving in war, harmed by war, killed by war. It's become increasingly obvious that war has always been a tool of oppression and of wealth and power accumulation by a small elite, and Memorial Day is one of many ways war is legitimized in the public stories that are told to us from birth. The real war, again becoming increasingly obvious, is against the capacities for wisdom and compassion that are inherent within us, and the ultimate victims of this war are the most vulnerable: animals, ecosystems, children, women, hungry people, and future generations. Especially animals.
How many animals are we killing daily in the U.S. for food? Roughly seventy-five million! How many is that? Basically ungraspable, at least by me. For example, if we take just part of the ongoing slaughter of animals--the slaughter of four species: cows, pigs, chickens, and turkeys--and leave out all fish, sheep, goats, ducks, geese, and other animals killed by us daily in the U.S., and do the relatively simple math, we realize that we are causing a daily flow of blood that amounts to about 8.5 million gallons!
Who is accountable for this relentless blood gusher? It rings hollow to blame corporations and politicians, though we might be tempted, but that is just part of it. Ultimately, every drop of blood, misery, feces, and pollution spewing from the industrial meat grinder is generated because of personal choices by responsible individuals who pay for meat, dairy products, and eggs. Without these millions of daily choices, the blood gusher would dry up instantly and the ongoing war against animals for food would cease. The healing, joy, and celebration when this gusher is finally plugged is barely imaginable. Its stopping is inevitable, for whatever has a beginning has an ending. The question is: how will it be stopped - voluntarily or involuntarily?
The relentless blood gusher must, like the oil gusher, be stopped quickly and soon, or humanity and most life forms will be destroyed. Our violence toward animals and the Earth is a boomerang that is increasingly ferocious. We absolutely do not have the right or luxury to eat animal foods, or to think in the exclusivist ways that eating animal foods requires. This is the message underlying all the news headlines, if we can see it. Our future is beckoning and drawing us ever onward. What kind of future will it be? We cannot build a tower of love and harmony with bricks of cruelty and indifference. Our bodies, our lives, and our relationships are the towers we build daily and inhabit.
May we have a Memorial Day for Animals, whose bodies, minds, and spirits bear the full fury of our culture's indoctrinated cravings and numbness. Their blood, gushing relentlessly in the hidden gulf of agribusiness machinery, is devastating the heath of our entire world. Remembering animals every day, let's be and spread the vegan message of love and compassion for all with, as JFK used to say, renewed vigor. We have no other choice. I propose a Memorial Day for Animals, which is a Memorial Day for all of us, and is the next step in our cultural evolution.
May all beings, including all people, be happy and free.
With Love, peace, and gratitude from Will
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Please visit the website www.circleofcompassion.org often to see updates and special prayers, and also to join in our "A prayer a day for animals" which features a prayer for a different group of animals each day of the week. It is also a place to send ideas or prayer requests. Please forward this widely so that we may continue to add more people to our ever-expanding worldwide circle of compassion.
We grow to appreciate the nearly miraculous beauty of cabbages and cauliflower, the fragrance of roasted sesame seeds, sliced oranges, chopped cilantro, and baked kabocha squash, and the wondrous textures of avocado, persimmon, steamed quinoa, and sautéed tempeh.
We are grateful for the connection we feel with the earth, the clouds, the nurturing gardeners, and the seasons, and the tastes are delicious gifts we naturally enjoy opening to, as we would open to our beloved in making love and appreciating the beloved fully.
In contrast, eating animal foods is often done quickly, without feeling deeply into the source of the food―for who would want to contemplate the utter hells that produce our factory-farmed fish, chicken, eggs, cheese, steaks, bacon, hot dogs, or burgers?
Since our culture denies animals used for food any inherent value in their own right, limiting their worth simply to their value as commodities to those who own them, animals have no protection.
Ordering a steak earns us approving nods, and our friends rave over the barbecued ribs at the office picnic.
The actual confinement, raping, mutilating, and killing are kept carefully hidden as shameful secrets that would make us profoundly uncomfortable if we had to witness them or, worse, perform them ourselves.
To be free, we must practice freeing others. To feel loved, we must practice loving others. To have true self-respect, we must respect others.
The animals and other voiceless beings, the starving humans and future generations, are pleading with us to see: it’s on our plate.
It is well known that animal foods are heavily contaminated with viruses and bacteria such as salmonella, listeria, E. coli, campylobacter, and streptococcus, which can be harmful if not fatal to people, especially given our already overworked immune systems.
The urea in animal flesh also contains toxins. It has furthermore recently been shown that cooked animal flesh contains heterocyclic amines, which are carcinogenic chemicals that form during the cooking process.
Thus, by not cooking flesh enough, we may expose ourselves to salmonella, E. coli, and other pathogens, and by cooking it, we end up eating cancer-causing chemicals formed by heating the animal fat.
Even those who acknowledge that our treatment of animals is indeed a great evil may feel that it is, like the other evils in our world, simply a product of human limitations, such as ignorance, pride, selfishness, fear, and so forth.
According to this view, the horror we inflict on animals is a problem, but not a fundamental cause of our problems―and, because it’s a problem for animals, who are less important than us humans, it’s a lesser problem.
If we fail to make the connection between our daily meals and our cultural predicament, we will inevitably fail as a species to survive on this earth.
By refusing to make this essential connection, we condemn others and ourselves to enormous suffering, without ever comprehending why.
How could it ever be to our purpose to rob another living being of his or her purpose?
~ Will Tuttle ~
Our actions condition our consciousness; therefore forcing our children to eat animal foods wounds them deeply.
It requires them to disconnect from the food on their plates, from their feelings, from animals and nature, and sets up conditions of disease and psychological armoring.
The wounds persist and are passed on to the next generation.
The human cycle of violence will not stop until we stop the underlying violence, the remorseless violence we commit against animals for food.
We teach this behavior and this insensitivity to all our children in a subtle, unintentional, but powerful form of culturally approved child abuse.
Compelling our children to eat animal foods gives birth to the “hurt people hurt people” syndrome. Hurt people hurt animals without compunction in daily food rituals.
We will always be violent toward each other as long as we are violent toward animals―how could we not be?
We carry the violence in our stomachs, in our blood, and in our consciousness. Covering it up and ignoring it doesn’t make it disappear. The more we pretend and hide it, the more, like a shadow, it clings to us and haunts us. The human cycle of violence is the ongoing projection of this shadow.
The spiritual and cultural revolution that calls us must begin with our food.
Food is our primary connection with the earth and her mysteries, and with our culture.
It is the foundation of economy and is the central inner spiritual metaphor of our lives.
As our culture adopts veganism, the change in our consciousness will usher in the first revolution since the herding revolution began with the domestication of sheep and goats 10,000 years ago.
That revolution propelled us out of the garden into an existential sense of separateness, promoting competition and the cultivation of disconnected reductionism and materialistic technology.
The evolutionary thrust is obviously now in a completely different direction, toward integration, cooperation, compassion, inclusiveness, and discovering our basic unity with all life.
The ripples that radiate from our choices to eat foods from animal sources are incredibly far-reaching and complex.
They extend deeply into our essential orientation and belief system, and into our relationships with each other and the created order.
From every perspective we can possibly take, we discover that our culturally imposed eating habits are numbing, blinding, and confining us.
Even if we are benumbed to the degree that we are not concerned about the suffering of animals, and we are only able to care about other humans, we soon realize that the human anguish caused by eating foods of animal origin requires us to choose a plant-based diet.
Human starvation, the emotional devastation required to kill and confine animals, the pollution and waste of water, land, petroleum, and other vital resources, and the injustice and violence underlying our animal food production complex all compel us to abandon our acculturated eating habits.
Once a vegan, we are always so, because our motivation is not personal and self-oriented, but is based on concern for others and on our undeniable interconnectedness with other living beings.
The more we connect, the more we understand and the more we love, and this love propels us not only to leave home, questioning our culture’s attitude of domination and exclusion, but also to return home, speaking on behalf of those who are vulnerable.
The opposite of love is not hate but indifference.
When we lift the veil and see the suffering our food habits cause, when we connect with the reality of the defenseless beings who suffer so terribly because of our food choices, our indifference dissolves and compassion―its opposite―arises, urging us to act on behalf of those who are suffering.
We all have unique gifts we can bring to the most urgent task we face at this point in our human evolution: transforming our inherited dominator mentality by liberating those we have enslaved for food.
The crucial elements are adopting a vegan lifestyle, educating ourselves, cultivating our spiritual potential, and plugging in to help educate others.
To meditate for world peace, to pray for a better world, and to work for social justice and environmental protection while continuing to purchase the flesh, milk, and eggs of horribly abused animals exposes a disconnect that is so fundamental that it renders our efforts absurd, hypocritical, and doomed to certain failure.
Though we are born into a culture that emphasizes our differences from other animals, our actual experience tells us differently.
Those of us with companion animals, for example, know without doubt that they have distinct personalities and preferences, emotions and drives, and that they feel and avoid psychological and physical pain.
Besides the enormous amount of anecdotal evidence that animals behave altruistically, both toward members of their own species and also to animals outside their species, there is clinical evidence as well, such as the typically cruel experiments in which monkeys were given food if they administered painful shocks to other monkeys.
Researchers found that the monkeys would rather go hungry than shock other monkeys, especially if they had received shocks earlier themselves.
The researchers were surprised (and perhaps somewhat ashamed?) by the monkeys’ altruism. Though it is our true nature, one wonders if we humans would be so noble.
As food production industries brought their herds and flocks indoors into concentration camps, the extreme form of herding known as factory farming emerged.
A new extreme form of factory farming is now emerging through genetic engineering, in which the animals are being tampered with at the genetic level, thus losing their biological integrity and identity.
This is coupled with unparalleled destruction of habitat for wild animals and decimation of their populations for bush meat, pharmaceuticals, research, entertainment, and other human uses.
Animals have thus gone from being free from human interference to being occasionally hunted, to being herded, to being imprisoned, and finally to being either forced into extinction or genetically mutated and confined as mere patentable property objects for human use.
Heavens and hells are of our own sowing.
We live in a culture that mindlessly exploits animals and encourages the domination of those who are vulnerable by the strong, the male, the wealthy, and the privileged.
This culture has naturally created political, economic, legal, religious, educational, and other institutional vehicles to shield those in power from the effects of their actions, and to legitimize the violence and inequities required to maintain the system.
Over the centuries it has developed an elaborate scientific and religious framework that in its reductionism and materialism denies the continuity of consequences in many ways.
It seems we’re still so benighted as a culture that we’ll refrain from committing violence only if we fear punishment or retaliation―and since animals are incapable of either, they have no protection from us at all.
Albert Einstein articulates it in this way: “A human being is a part of the whole, called by us the ‘Universe,’ a part limited in time and space.
He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest―a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness.
This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us.
Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”
Wealth, gender, and race determine the extent of our privilege in a human hierarchy between rich white men on one end and impoverished non-white women and children on the other.
Even poor humans have some privilege compared to animals, however, and it is this hierarchical, authoritarian social structure―pervasive, transparent, and taken for granted―that is the unavoidable outcome of commodifying animals and eating them.
The message ritually injected into us by our culturally mandated meals is, at a fundamental level, the message of privilege.
As humans, we see ourselves as superior to animals, whom we view as objects to be enslaved and killed for our use and pleasure, and with this herder mentality of our special and privileged position over animals, we inevitably create other categories of privilege.
WPD Blog
Justice, equality, veganism, freedom …
By refusing to dominate animals, we make the essential connections and open inner doorways to understanding and deconstructing the abuse of privilege in our own lives.
Justice, equality, veganism, freedom, spiritual evolution, and universal compassion are inextricably connected.
We have a new video up on YouTube about the the main ideas in the World Peace Diet (thanks to help from our friends!!) Please share widely - thanks!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SE13t7LEiJY&feature=youtu.be
http://vegworcester.com/2012/07/23/will-tuttle-author-of-the-world-peace-diet-at-worcesters-loving-hut-review/
Be prosperous and free
Even those at the top of pyramid, the rich white men who have the most privilege, are ironically enslaved.
Planting seeds of fear and domination, they cannot reap inner peace, joy, love, and happiness.
The misery, drug addiction, suicide, and insanity rampant among the wealthiest families illustrate the obvious and inescapable truth that we are all related, and spiritual health, our source of happiness, requires us to live this truth in our daily lives.
Humanity’s last days of eating animals
While it’s easy to become discouraged in the face of the immense cultural inertia that propels the continued practice of eating animal foods, it’s helpful to realize that it carries within it the seeds of its own destruction.
At the rate it’s ravaging our planet’s ecosystems and resources―and our sanity and intelligence―it cannot last much longer.
These may very well turn out to be humanity’s last days of eating animals.
Remember who you are
To awaken from the cultural trance of omnivorism we need only remember who we are.
We have neither the psychology nor the physiology for predation and killing, but due to the culturally indoctrinated mentality required by our daily meals, we eat like predators.
We become desensitized, exclusivist and materialistic, forgetting that we are essentially consciousness manifesting in time and space.
As consciousness, we are eternal, free, and benevolent.
A spontaneous expression of who we are
When we are drawn toward a plant-based way of eating, it is in no way a limitation on us; rather it is the harmonious fulfillment of our own inner seeing.
At first we think it’s an option we can choose, but with time we realize that it’s not a choice at all but the free expression of the truth that we are.
It is not an ethic that we have to police from outside, but our own radiant love spontaneously expressing, both for ourselves and for our world.
Caring is born on this earth and lives through us, as us, and it’s not anything for which we can personally take credit. It is nothing to be proud of.
We are one
We are interconnected with all other manifestations of consciousness, and at a deep level we are all united because we share the same source.
This source is the infinite intelligence and consciousness that permeates and manifests as phenomenal reality.
Basis for Creating World Peace - New Ideas for a New Generation - Dr. Will Tuttle
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RV60jLykk2w
Our nature is light
Metaphorically, we are all part of the movie of life on earth, and while we may appear to be the images on the screen, at a deeper level we share a common heritage―we are all also the light that makes the movie possible.
This light is consciousness, and it is our fundamental nature, emanating from an infinite and inconceivable source.
Family
Recognizing that we are all profoundly related, the greatest blessing we can give others, both animal and human, is to see their beauty, innocence, and uprightness, and address that in them.
An inner field of peace, kindness, joy, and unity
By creating an inner field of peace, kindness, joy, and unity, we contribute to building a planetary field of compassion that reflects this consciousness.
Living prayer
The spiritual connection between animals and humans grows out of understanding that we are all expressions of eternal benevolent consciousness, and as we acknowledge this interconnection and live in harmony with it, our lives become prayers of compassion and healing.
Thich Nhat Hanh on inner peace
The most powerful antidotes to cruelty, abuse, and indifference are not anger and sadness, but love, peace, joy, and openhearted creative enthusiasm for this precious gift of a human life.
Just as Thich Nhat Hanh has wisely said that without inner peace, we cannot contribute to the peace movement, so it is also that without inner freedom, we cannot contribute to the liberation of animals, which is the essential prerequisite to meaningful human freedom.
Buddha : Ahimsa, the avoidance of violence and harm
All beings tremble before violence. All fear death. All love life. See yourself in others. Then whom can you hurt? What harm can you do?”
~ Buddha
The mentality required to eat animals
Our inherited meal traditions require a mentality of violence and denial that silently radiates into every aspect of our private and public lives, permeating our institutions and generating the crises, dilemmas, inequities, and suffering that we seek in vain to understand and effectively address.
A new way of eating no longer based on privilege, commodification, and exploitation is not only possible but essential and inevitable. Our innate intelligence demands it.
Every one
As our hearts open to deeper understanding, our circle of compassion naturally enlarges and spontaneously begins to include more and more “others”―not just our own tribe, sect, nation, or race, but all human beings, and not just humans, but other mammals, and birds, fish, forests, and the whole beautifully interwoven tapestry of living, pulsing creation. All beings. All of Us.
I see you everywhere in everything
From the outside, it may look like and be called “veganism,” but it is simply awareness and the expression of our sense of interconnectedness. It manifests naturally as inclusiveness and caring.
It’s no big deal, for it’s the normal functioning of our original nature, which unfailingly sees beings rather than things when it looks at our neighbors on this earth.
Happy now!
We owe the animals our profoundest apologies. Defenseless and unable to retaliate, they have suffered immense agonies under our domination that most of us have never witnessed or acknowledged.
Now knowing better, we can act better, and acting better, we can live better, and give the animals, our children, and ourselves a true reason for hope and celebration.
A cow-nundrum
We have all been born into a herding culture that commodifies animals, and we have all been affected by the cruelty, violence, and predatory competitiveness that our meals require and that our culture embodies.
We’ve also been taught to be loyal to our culture and relatively uncritical of it, to disconnect from the monumental horror we needlessly perpetuate, and to be oblivious to the disastrous effects this has on every level of our shared and private lives.
Weed
When we uproot exclusion and domination from our plates, seeds of compassion can finally freely blossom, and this process depends primarily on us watering the seeds and fully contributing our unique journey.
We depend on each other, and as we free the beings we call animals, we will regain our freedom. Loving them, we will learn to love each other and be fully loved.
Preserve the sacred feminine
The inner feminine is our intuition, our sensitivity, and our ability to sense the profound interconnectedness of events and beings, and it is vital to peace, wisdom, joy, intelligence, creativity, and spiritual awakening.
With every baby calf stolen from her mother and killed, with every gallon of milk stolen from enslaved and broken mothers, with every thrust of the raping sperm gun, with every egg stolen from a helpless, frantic hen, and with every baby chick killed or locked for life in a hellish nightmare cage, we kill the sacred feminine within ourselves.
Honoring self, honors all
Honoring our natural place in the web of life by eating the foods intended for us will plant seeds of abundance, love, and freedom, whatever our religion may be.
Our prayers for peace will bear fruit when we are living the prayer for peace and, most importantly, when we offer peace to those who are at our mercy and who also long for peace and the freedom to live their lives and fulfill their purposes.
Our plates looking back at us
When we look deeply enough, we discover a disturbing force that is fundamental in generating our dilemmas and crises, a force that is not actually hidden at all, but is staring up at us every day from our plates!
It has been lying undiscovered all along in the most obvious of places: It is our food.
Mercy
Achieving peace between human beings, from the household to the international battlefields, depends upon treating each other with respect and kindness.
This will be possible when we first extend that respect and kindness to those who are at our mercy and who cannot retaliate against us.
Our path of freedom must include them
If we are sincere in our quest for human peace, freedom, and dignity, we have no choice but to offer this to our neighbors, the animals of this earth.
Cultivating awareness, we can transcend the imposed view that animals are mere food objects.
With this, we will see consumerism, pornography, and the disconnectedness that leads inexorably to slavery and self-destruction evaporate.
Everybody, soon or late, sits down to a banquet of consequences.”
~ Robert Louis Stevenson
The prayer of action
Joining together to pray for and visualize world peace is certainly a noble idea, but if we continue to dine on the misery of our fellow neighbors we are creating a monumental and ongoing prayer for violence, terror, and slavery.
It is the prayer of our actions, and it is the experienced reality of billions of sensitive creatures who are at our mercy and to whom we show no mercy.
Where may we find peace?
Until we live our prayers for peace and freedom by granting peace and freedom to those who are vulnerable in our hands, we will find neither peace nor freedom.
The price of an ice cream cone
Joy, love, and abundance are always available to us, and will manifest in our lives to the degree that we understand that they are given to us as we give them to others.
The price we must pay for love and freedom is the ice cream cone, the steak, and the eggnog we casually consume.
Saint Isaac the Syrian
The seventh-century Christian mystic Saint Isaac the Syrian asks, “What is a charitable heart?
It is a heart which is burning with love for the whole creation, for men, for the birds, for the beasts . . . for all creatures.
He who has such a heart cannot see or call to mind a creature without his eyes being filled with tears by reason of the immense compassion which seizes his heart; a heart which is softened and can no longer bear to see or learn from others of any suffering, even the smallest pain being inflicted upon a creature.
That is why such a man never ceases to pray for the animals . . . moved by the infinite pity which reigns in the hearts of those who are becoming united with God.”
A new spirit of protecting
As we cultivate awareness and question the death orientation that stares at us from our plates, we create a field of freedom and compassion, and as we move to plant-based meals, we can become agents of life, breathing a new spirit of protecting and including into our world that, by blessing the animals who are at our mercy, will bless us a hundredfold.
This is a radical transformation because it goes, as the word radical implies, to the essential root of our unyielding dilemmas, the commodification of animals for food.
John Wesley, founder of Methodism
John Wesley, the eighteenth-century founder of Methodism, has written, “I believe in my heart that faith in Jesus Christ can and will lead us beyond an exclusive concern for the well-being of other human beings to the broader concern for the well-being of the birds in our backyards, the fish in our rivers, and every living creature on the face of the earth.”
This only makes sense .. right?
The key to reclaiming our birthright and harmony, hidden in the most obvious of places―our plates―requires (as appropriate to mythic wisdom) that for us to be free, we must first free those whom we chain.
To reclaim our purpose, we must restore the purposes we have stolen from others.
Thriving loving food
We will only survive and thrive if we recognize the central power of our meals to shape our consciousness.
Food is eaten and becomes the physical vehicle of consciousness, and consciousness chooses what to incorporate into itself from itself.
Do we cultivate and eat fear or love? Terrorized animals or nurtured plants? We cannot build a tower of love with bricks of cruelty.
2.5 acres feeds 20 people or 2 people?
If we all ate a plant-based diet, we could feed ourselves on a small fraction of the land and grains that eating an animal-based diet requires.
For example, researchers estimate that 2.5 acres of land can meet the food energy needs of twenty-two people eating potatoes, nineteen people eating corn, twenty-three people eating cabbage, fifteen people eating wheat, or two people eating chicken or dairy products, and only one person eating beef or eggs.
The military-industrial-meat-medical-media complex
The military-industrial-meat-medical-media complex has and offers no incentive to reduce animal food consumption.
Poisoning the earth with massive doses of toxic chemicals and petroleum-based fertilizers is highly profitable for the petroleum and chemical industries.
These toxins cause cancer, which is highly profitable to the chemical-pharmaceutical-medical complex.
While the world’s rich omnivores waste precious supplies of grain, petroleum, water, and land feeding fattened animals, the world’s poor have little grain to eat or clean water to drink, and their chronic hunger, thirst, and misery create conditions for war, terrorism, and drug addiction, which are extremely profitable industries as well.
The richest fifth of the world’s population gets obesity, heart disease, and diabetes, also highly profitable for industry.
The herding culture’s connection to misery
Marx’s “Workers of the world, unite!” never questioned the underlying ethic of dominating animals and nature, and hence was not truly revolutionary.
It operated within the human supremacist framework and never challenged the mentality that sees living beings as commodities.
Veganism is a call for us to unite in seeing that as long as we oppress other living beings, we will inevitably create and live in a culture of oppression.
Class struggle is a result of the herding culture’s mentality of domination and exclusion, and is just part of the misery that is inevitably connected with eating animal foods.
Knowing them we love them
We have not begun to scratch the surface of understanding animals.
How can we know what it is to swim as whales, at home in the ocean depths and migrating thousands of miles, speaking in underwater songs and breathing together in conscious harmony, or to fly in a flock of sandpipers, whirling in an effortless synchronicity, fifty birds as one, or to burrow as prairie dogs, creating complex underground communities with virtually endless chambers, passageways, and interactions?
Eating animals is cruel and it is unnecessary
Confronted with the problems that characterize our herding culture, we are perhaps like the metaphorical man wounded by an arrow that the Buddha discussed with his students.
He said that the man would be foolish if he tried to discover who shot the arrow, why he shot it, where he was when he shot it, and so forth, before having the arrow removed and the wound treated, lest he bleed to death attempting to get his questions answered.
We, likewise, can all remove the arrow and treat the wound of eating animal foods right now. We don’t need to know the whole history.
We can easily see it is cruel and that it is unnecessary; whatever people have done in the past, we are not obligated to imitate them if it is based on delusion.
Truth shines, lies seen
It is the height of irony that eating a diet based on animal foods, which are complicated, wasteful, cruel, and expensive to produce, is seen as simple in our culture, and that eating a vegan diet based on plant foods, which are simple, efficient, inexpensive, and free of cruelty to produce, is seen as complicated and difficult.
Nevertheless, the truth is slowly coming to light, and the pressures within the old paradigm are building as more of us refuse to see animals as objects to be eaten or used for our purposes.
Veganism is a choice to listen to your heart
Rather than relying on science to validate veganism and our basic herbivore physiology, we may do better by calling attention to universal truths: animals are undeniably capable of suffering; our physical bodies are strongly affected by thoughts, feelings, and aspirations; and we cannot reap happiness for ourselves by sowing seeds of misery for others.
Nor may we be free while unnaturally enslaving others. We are all connected.
These are knowings of the heart and veganism is, ultimately, a choice to listen to the wisdom in our heart as it opens to understanding the interconnectedness and essential unity of all life.
The Buddha and Islamic Sufi saint Misri
The Buddha says in the Mahaparinirvana-sutra, “Eating meat destroys the attitude of great compassion.”
The ninth-century Islamic Sufi saint Misri says, “Never think of anyone as inferior to you. Open the inner Eye and you will see the One Glory shining in all creatures.”
The vegan ideals of mercy and justice for animals have been articulated for centuries, often from within the religious establishment, and it is fascinating and instructive to see how these voices have been almost completely silenced or marginalized by the herding culture.
It seems to be an unconscious reflex action. For example, if we read Jesus’ teachings, we find a passionate exhortation to mercy and love, yet the possibility that the historical Jesus may have been a vegan is a radical idea for most Christians.
Jesus’ message was intolerably radical, for it was the revolutionary vegan message of mercy and love for all creatures that strikes directly at the mentality of domination and exclusion that underlies both the herding culture we live in today and the culture of Jesus’ time.
All of us are celebrations of infinite mysterious Spirit, deserving of honor and respect.
If our religions don’t emphasize this and include all of us, it’s time to replace them with spiritual teachings and traditions that do.
Anna Sewell, Black Beauty
There is no religion without love, and people may talk as much as they like about their religion, but if it does not teach them to be good and kind to beasts as well as man it is all a sham.”
~ Anna Sewell, Black Beauty
What if it was someone you knew?
As omnivores, we may resent vegans for reminding us of the suffering we cause, for we’d rather be comfortable and keep all the ugliness hidden, but our comfort has nothing to do with justice or with authentic inner peace.
It is the comfort of blocking out and disconnecting, and it comes with a terrible price. We may rationalize our meals by saying that we always thank the animal’s spirit for offering her body to nourish us.
If someone were to lock us up, torture us, steal our children, and then stab us to death, would we acquiesce as long as they thanked our spirit?
Religion’s turning away has allowed the atrocities to continue and legitimized the turning away of the general population.
This turning away is the paradigmatic learning that our culture specializes in, particularly with regard to the plight of the animals we eat and use; it is the everyday teaching of not seeing, not caring, disconnecting, and ignoring.
If you have men who will exclude any of God’s creatures from the shelter of compassion and pity, then you have men who will deal likewise with their fellow men.”
~ St. Francis of Assisi
Free the shadow
The shadow is a vital and undeniable force that cannot, in the end, be repressed. The tremendous psychological forces required to confine, mutilate, and kill millions of animals every day, and to keep the whole bloody slaughter repressed and invisible, work in two ways.
One way is to numb, desensitize, and armor us, which decreases our intelligence and ability to make connections. The other is to force us to act out exactly what we are repressing. This is done through projection. We create an acceptable target to loathe for being violent, cruel, and tyrannical―the very qualities that we refuse to acknowledge in ourselves―and then we attack it.
Unchained
We become spiritually and psychologically free only as we are able to see and integrate the shadow aspects of ourselves, and this will only be possible when we stop eating animal foods, relaxing and releasing the irresistible need to block our awareness.
In unchaining animals, we unchain ourselves.
As we eat, we are
We will only survive and thrive if we recognize the central power of our meals to shape our consciousness. Food is eaten and becomes the physical vehicle of consciousness, and consciousness chooses what to incorporate into itself from itself.
Do we cultivate and eat fear or love? Terrorized animals or nurtured plants? We cannot build a tower of love with bricks of cruelty.
Spirituality 108
The lesson is quite basic.
If we can’t stop the cruelty of eating animal foods, how can we presume to develop the sensitivity, the spiritual consciousness, the joy, peace, and creative freedom that are our potential?
They, like us
We are not predatory by nature, but we’ve been taught that we are, in the most potent way possible: we’ve been raised from birth to eat like predators.
We’ve thus been initiated into a predatory culture and been forced to see ourselves at the deepest levels as predators. Farming animals is simply a refined and perverse form of predation in which the animals are confined before being attacked and killed.
It doesn’t stop with animals, however.
Weeding our garden and revealing compassion
When we uproot exclusion and domination from our plates, seeds of compassion can finally freely blossom, and this process depends primarily on us watering the seeds and fully contributing our unique journey.
We depend on each other, and as we free the beings we call animals, we will regain our freedom. Loving them, we will learn to love each other and be fully loved.
Eating animal flesh makes you numb
The desensitizing of millions of children and adults―on the massive scale that consuming millions of tortured animals daily requires―sows countless seeds of human violence, war, poverty, and despair.
These outcomes are unavoidable, for we can never reap joy, peace, and freedom for ourselves while sowing the seeds of harming and enslaving others.
Thoreau questioned and understood
The American roots of deeply questioning food and developing the philosophical foundation for a more compassionate relationship with animals can be traced to the progressive writers clustered around Emerson in Concord in the mid-nineteenth century.
Thoreau wrote, “I have no doubt that it is a part of the destiny of the human race in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals as surely as the savage tribes have left off eating each other when they came into contact with the more civilized.”
Buddha: How to know what you know
“First, live a compassionate life. Then you will know.”
~ Buddha
We are light + consciousness
So what are we, and what are animals? Our concepts only reveal our impeding conditioning. We are neighbors, mysteries, and we are all manifestations of the eternal light of the infinite consciousness that has birthed and maintains what we call the universe. The intuitive knowing that would reveal this to us, though, is mostly unavailable because as a culture we are outer-directed and fail to cultivate the inner resources and discipline that would allow us to access this deeper wisdom.
Getting quiet in here
By ceasing to eat animal foods and thus causing misery to our neighbors, and by practicing meditation and quiet reflection, which can eventually extract our consciousness out of the brambles of compulsive thinking, we can begin to understand what consciousness actually is. We will see that to the degree we can be open to the present moment and dwell in inner spacious silence, beyond the ceaseless internal dialogue of the busy mind, we can experience the radiant, joy-filled serenity of pure consciousness.
Who am I, why am I here?
Who are we? What is our proper role on this earth?
I submit we can only begin to discover these answers if we first take the vegan imperative seriously and live compassionately toward other creatures. Then peace with each other will at least be possible, as well as a deeper understanding of the mysteries of healing, freedom, and love.
Dream a field of peace
By living the truth of compassion in our meals and daily lives, we can create a field of peace, love, and freedom that can radiate into our world and bless others by silently and subtly encouraging the same in them.
Cardinal John Henry Newman: it is satanic
Cruelty to animals is as if man did not love God…there is something so dreadful, so satanic, in tormenting those who have never harmed us, and who cannot defend themselves, who are utterly in our power.”
~ Cardinal John Henry Newman
Mercy mercy
Because of our herding orientation and our unassuaged guilt complex due to the misery in our daily meals, we have warped our sacred connection with the infinite loving source of our life to an ultimate irony: comparing ourselves to sheep, we beg our shepherd for mercy, but since we show no mercy, we fear deep down we’ll not be shown mercy either and live in dread of our inevitable death.
We bargain and may proclaim overconfidently that we’re saved and our sins are forgiven (no matter what atrocities we mete out to animals and people outside our in-group), or we may reject the whole conventional religious dogma as so much absurd pablum and rely on the shallow materialism of science.
However it happens, our spiritual impulse is inevitably repressed and distorted by the fear, guilt, violence, hardness, competitiveness, and shallow reductionism that herding and eating animals always demands.
They are in our hands
We can argue that animals are largely unconscious, decreeing that because animals seem to lack the complex language that allows them to formulate thoughts in words as we do, their experience of suffering must therefore be less significant or intense for them.
This same thinking, however, could be used to justify harming human infants and senile elderly people. If anything, beings who lack the ability to analyze their circumstances may suffer at our hands more intensely than we would because they are unable to put the distance of internal dialogue between themselves and their suffering.
Buckminster Fuller: recognize destructive attitudes and practices as obsolete
Buckminster Fuller often emphasized that the way of cultural transformation is not so much in fighting against destructive attitudes and practices, but in recognizing them as being obsolete and offering positive, higher-level alternatives.
The competitive, violent, commodifying mentality of the ancient herding cultures is, in our age of nuclear weapons and global interconnectedness, profoundly obsolete, as is eating the animal foods of these old cultures, which are unhealthy in the extreme both to our body-minds and to our precious planetary ecology.
Animals are sentient beings
All the world’s major religions have their own form of the Golden Rule that teaches kindness to others as the essence of their message. They all recognize animals as sentient and vulnerable to us, and include them within the moral sphere of our behavior.
There are also strong voices in all the traditions emphasizing that our kindness to other beings should be based on compassion. This is more than merely being open to the suffering of others; it also explicitly includes the urge to act to relieve their suffering.
We are thus responsible not just to refrain from harming animals and humans, but also to do what we can to stop others from harming them, and to create conditions that educate, inspire, and help others to live in ways that show kindness and respect for all life.
This is the high purpose to which the core teachings of the world’s wisdom traditions call us.
It is an evolutionary imperative, a spiritual imperative, an imperative of compassion, and, in reality, a vegan imperative.
Veganism is compassion in action
The motivation behind vegan living is the universal spiritual principle of compassion that has been articulated both secularly and through the world’s religious traditions; the difference lies in veganism’s insistence that this compassion be actually practiced.
The words of Donald Watson, who created the term “vegan” in 1944, reveal this practical orientation and bear repeating:
Veganism denotes a philosophy and way of living which seeks to exclude, as far as is possible and practical, all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing, or any other purpose; and by extension promotes the development and use of animal-free alternatives for the benefit of humans, animals, and the environment.
Shojin + Samadhi
Shojin is “religious abstention from animal foods” and is based on the core religious teaching of ahimsa, or harmlessness, the practice of refraining from causing harm to other sentient beings.
Shojin and samadhi are seen to work together, with shojin purifying the body-mind and allowing, though certainly not guaranteeing, access to the spiritually enriching experience of samadhi.
Outer compassion and inner stillness feed each other. Shojin and veganism are essential to our spiritual health because they remove a fundamental hindrance on our path.
Roots of agitation and craving or the roots of stillness?
We can see that in general, the more a culture oppresses animals, the greater its inner agitation and numbness, and the more extroverted and dominating it tends to be.
This is related to the scarcity of meditation in Western cultures, where people are uncomfortable with sitting still. Quiet, open contemplation would allow the repressed guilt and violence of the animal cruelty in meals to emerge to be healed and released. Instead, the very activities that would be most beneficial to people of our herding culture are the activities that are the most studiously avoided.
We have become a culture that craves noise, distraction, busyness, and entertainment at all costs. This allows our eaten violence to remain buried, blocked, denied, and righteously projected.
Influence
The more forcefully we ignore something, the more power it has over us and the more strongly it influences us.
Thought leaders Emerson and Alcott
Emerson’s “You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity,” shows the esteemed Concord sage’s ability to make the connections that elude most.
Bronson Alcott’s daughter, Louisa May, wrote, “Vegetable diet and sweet repose. Animal food and nightmare. Pluck your body from the orchard; do not snatch it from the shambles. Without flesh diet there could be no bloodshedding war.” She makes explicit the connection between the violence inherent in eating animals, nightmares, and the nightmare of human violence turned against ourselves.
Paul Watson: We are eating bush meat
Seafood is simply a socially acceptable form of bush meat.
We condemn Africans for hunting monkeys and mammalian and bird species from the jungle yet the developed world thinks nothing of hauling in magnificent wild creatures like swordfish, tuna, halibut, shark, and salmon for our meals.
The fact is that the global slaughter of marine wildlife is simply the largest massacre of wildlife on the planet.” – Paul Watson
Open up
None of us ever consciously and freely chose to eat animals. We have all inherited this from our culture and upbringing.
Going into the baby food department of any grocery store today, we see it immediately: beef-flavored baby food, chicken, veal, and lamb baby food, and even cheese lasagna baby food.
Well-meaning parents, grandparents, friends, and neighbors have forced the flesh and secretions of animals upon us from before we can remember.
A revolution of one
When we cultivate mindful awareness of the consequences of our food choices and conscientiously adopt a plant-based way of eating, refusing to participate in the domination of animals and the dulling of awareness this requires, we make a profound statement that both flows from and reinforces our ability to make connections. We become a force of sensitivity, healing, and compassion. We become a revolution of one, contributing to the foundation of a new world with every meal we eat. As we share our ideas with others, we promote what may be the most uplifting and healing revolution our culture has ever experienced.
Pythagoras and Loving Kindness
The contemporary vegan movement is founded on loving-kindness and mindfulness of our effects on others. It is revolutionary because it transcends and renounces the violent core of the herding culture in which we live. It is founded on living the truth of interconnectedness and thereby consciously minimizing the suffering we impose on animals, humans, and biosystems; it frees us all from the slavery of becoming mere commodities. It signifies the birth of a new consciousness, the resurrection of intelligence and compassion, and the basic rejection of cruelty and domination. It is our only real hope for the future of our species because it addresses the cause rather than being concerned merely with effects.
Food works
It’s funny how we want transformation without having to change! Yet the fundamental transformation called for today requires the most fundamental change—a change in our relationship to food and to animals, which will cause a change in our behavior.
Inherent narcissism
“It should not be believed that all beings exist for the sake of the existence of man. On the contrary, all the other beings too have been intended for their own sakes and not for the sake of anything else.”
~ Maimonides
It is a subtle yet powerful influence
In our churches, ministers often speak about the tragedy of loving things and using people, when we must instead love people and use things. After the services, people eat meals in which animals have become things to be used, not loved. This action, ritually repeated, propels us into using people just as we use animals—as things.
Honoring the beauty within
Instead of reducing our intelligence and compassion by denying and destroying the intelligence and purpose of animals, we could celebrate, honor, and appreciate the immense diversity of intelligences, beauties, abilities, and gifts that animals possess and contribute to our world.
We could liberate ourselves by liberating them and allowing them to fulfill the purposes that their particular intelligences yearn for. We could respect their lives and treat them with kindness. Our awareness and compassion would flourish, bringing more love and wisdom into our relationships with each other.
We could live in far greater harmony with the universal intelligence that is the source of our life. To do so, however, we would have to stop viewing animals as commodities, and this means we would have to stop viewing them as food.
Mindscape
Most of us resist being told we’ve been indoctrinated. After all, we live in the land of the free, and we like to think we’ve arrived freely at the belief that we need to eat animal products and that it’s natural and right to do so.
In fact, we have inherited this belief. We’ve been indoctrinated in the most deeply rooted and potent way possible, as vulnerable infants, yet because our culture denies the existence of indoctrination, the reality of the process is invisible, making it difficult for most of us to realize or admit the truth.
Self destruction
“This is dreadful! Not only the suffering and death of the animals, but that man suppresses in himself, unnecessarily, the highest spiritual capacity—that of sympathy and pity towards living creatures like himself—and by violating his own feelings becomes cruel.”
~ Leo Tolstoy
Breaking free of the past
In questioning our culture’s most fundamental and defining practice, that of imprisoning and brutalizing animals for food, we practice leaving home and embark on a spiritual journey that will put us fundamentally at odds with our culture’s values, but that at the same time makes it possible for us to be heroes who can help uplift and transform our ailing culture.
Having left home, we arrive
By questioning our inherited cultural conditioning to commodify, abuse, and eat animals, we are taking the greatest step we can to leave home, become responsible adults, and mature spiritually, and by actively helping others do the same, we return home with a liberating message of compassion and truth that can inspire and bless others.
By leaving home we can find our true home, contribute to social progress, and help the animals with whom we share this precious earth have a chance to be at home again as well.
The American Journal of Cardiology: Human beings are not natural carnivores
When we kill animals to eat them, they end up killing us because their flesh, which contains cholesterol and saturated fat, was never intended for human beings, who are natural herbivores.”
~ William C. Roberts, M.D., Editor-in-Chief,
The American Journal of Cardiology
The carnivore’s paradox and the kindness connection
A basic reason that billions of animals suffer confinement and slaughter is our cultural belief that we need to eat animal-derived foods to be healthy, yet one of the most common motivations many of us have to reduce or eliminate animal food consumption is improving our health!
Illuminating this paradox requires us to investigate our human physiology and the animal foods we eat, and to reconnect with the perennial understanding that cultivating kindness and awareness improves physical and mental health, while harmfulness and unconsciousness lead ultimately to physical and mental disease.
Nietzsche on simplicity
“All ancient philosophy was oriented toward the simplicity of life and taught a certain kind of modesty in one’s need. In light of this, the few philosophic vegetarians have done more for mankind than all new philosophers, and as long as philosophers do not take courage to seek out a totally changed way of life and to demonstrate it by their example, they are worth nothing.”
~ Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)
Trivial pursuit
Geniuses like Pythagoras, Leonardo da Vinci, and Mahatma Gandhi abstained from eating animals.
Plutarch wrote, “When we clog and cloy our body with flesh, we also render our mind and intellect coarse. When the body is clogged with unnatural food, the mind becomes confused and dull and loses its cheerfulness. Such minds engage in trivial pursuits, because they lack the clearness and vigor for higher thinking.
Animals are essentially spiritual beings
Like all animals, we are essentially spiritual beings, manifestations of a universal, loving intelligence that has given us bodies designed to thrive on the abundant foods that we can peacefully nourish and gather in orchards, fields, and gardens.
Cows milk is the new tobacco
The protein in milk, particularly casein, while perfect for baby cows, is too large and difficult for us to digest. Calves have a particular enzyme, rennin, not present in humans, that coagulates and helps breaks down casein. According to renowned nutrition researcher T. Colin Campbell, “Cows’ milk protein may be the single most significant chemical carcinogen to which humans are exposed.”
Feminists! Arise!
All four of the possible paths that a calf born on a dairy may take are paths of abuse and early death. Since cows in the wild easily live twenty to thirty years, the industry, in killing calves, steers, and dairy cows at the ages of several months to several years, is really killing infants and children.
In this it is the same as the industries that confine and kill lambs, pigs, chickens, turkeys, and fish: all are pushed to grow abnormally quickly and are slaughtered young. Similarly, in the wars we inflict upon each other, children suffer and die the most, and more than ever they are even forced to do the killing.
The animal food culture promotes domination and exploitation of the female and the feminine, which are full of life-giving and nurturing powers, and of infants and children, who are full of the powers of innocence and growth.
As we do to them
“Can one regard a fellow creature as a property item, an investment, a piece of meat, an ‘it,’ without degenerating into cruelty towards that creature?”
~ Karen Davis
Love them
The suffering that food animals undergo, the suffering of those who eat them and profit by them, the suffering of starving people who could be fed with the grain that feeds these animals, and the suffering we thoughtlessly impose on the ecosystem, other creatures, and future generations are all interconnected. It is this interconnectedness of suffering, and its reverse, of love, caring, and awareness, that calls out for our understanding.
Buy Organic and non-GMO
Buying organically grown produce, grains, beans, and nuts is important not just because they’re higher in vitamins and minerals, but also because the toxic runoff from conventional agriculture poisons streams and people, and kills birds, fish, insects, and wildlife.
The amount of toxins used to produce a head of lettuce or bowl of rice is still, however, far less than that used to produce a hot dog, cheese omelet, or piece of catfish because animal foods require enormous quantities of pesticide-laden feed grain to produce.
Veganism is an awakening and a life-long path
“At the moment our human world is based on the suffering and destruction of millions of non-humans. To perceive this and to do something to change it in personal and public ways is to undergo a change of perception akin to a religious conversion.
Nothing can ever be seen in quite the same way again because once you have admitted the terror and pain of other species you will, unless you resist conversion, be always aware of the endless permutations of suffering that support our society.”
~ Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually free of pollution
Enslaving and eating animals is relentlessly polluting our mental and bodily environments, hardening our hearts and blocking feelings and awareness, instigating fear, violence, and repression in our relationships, laying waste our precious planet, gruesomely torturing and killing billions of terrorized beings, deadening us spiritually, and profoundly disempowering us by impeding our innate intelligence and our ability to make essential connections.
Experience the difference :-)
There is no way to overstate the magnitude of the collective spiritual transformation that will occur when we shift from food of violent oppression to food of gentleness and compassion.
Activist
The key to veganism is that it is lived. No one can be a vegetarian in theory only!
Unlike many religious teachings that are primarily theoretical and internal, veganism is solidly practical. The motivation of veganism is compassion.
It is not at all about personal purity or individual health or salvation, except as these bless others. It is a concrete, visible way of living that flows from, and reinforces, a sense of caring and connectedness.
Inspire others
As we make connections and become open to feedback, it will be increasingly obvious that one of the greatest gifts any of us can give to the world, to the human family, to future generations, to animals, to ourselves, and to our loved ones is to go vegan and dedicate our lives to encouraging others to do the same.
Ripples of compassion and love
Being willing to look, see, respond, and reconnect with all our neighbors and live this interconnectedness inspires us naturally to choose food, entertainment, clothing, and products that cause a minimum of unnecessary cruelty to vulnerable living beings. As we do this, we become more mindful of the ripples our actions cause in the world. Our spiritual transformation deepens, and as our sensitivity increases we yearn to bless others more and to be a voice for the voiceless.
Question everything
The more we connect, the more we understand and the more we love, and this love propels us not only to leave home, questioning our culture’s attitude of domination and exclusion, but also to return home, speaking on behalf of those who are vulnerable.
Looking down or looking within
We are only comfortable eating animals when we exclude them from the categories we use to define ourselves, but our differences from animals are far less than our eating habits force us to believe they are.
Root rock extreme compassion and freedom
The new extremes to which animals are now subjected without remorse or awareness require that we adopt a more radically conscientious orientation that addresses the roots of our violent mentality. While it may seem extreme to our mainstream culture to advocate for a vegan revolution that utterly rejects our commodification of animals, it is only such an apparently extreme position that can be an antidote to the extreme abuse we now force upon animals.
Our true nature longs for love
In fact, veganism is not extreme from the point of view of our innate nature, which longs for love, creativity, and spiritual evolution.
Improvement? Not so much.
It is problematic to determine whether our lives as humans have actually improved over the centuries and millennia, for all our valiant efforts.
Although we have comforts and possibilities undreamt of by our forebears, we also have stresses, diseases, and frustrations that they could not possibly have imagined.
For animals, however, the situation has plainly deteriorated, especially over the more recent human generations.
Compassion is recognition and forgiveness
None of us is completely innocent, because to some degree we all are, and have been, in all three roles as victims, perpetrators, and bystanders.
“An American doesn’t need any will power to keep from eating dog meat – dogs are not seen as food in this culture. We must never underestimate the power of cultural programming. It’s everything! The only reason people are eating animal flesh and cow mammary secretions is the massive indoctrination we all receive at the hands of every institution in our culture. Ultimately, whatever we do to animals, we end up doing to ourselves and each other. This is another important lesson that we can see; that our violence toward animals boomerangs – sowing obesity and osteoporosis in animals, we reap the same. The question is: What is our purpose, as human beings? It’s amazing to me how few people think deeply about this question!”
- Will Tuttle, author of The World Peace Diet –
Lets create new results
We exhibit not only hubris but remarkable obtuseness in caging, torturing, and infecting animals in the name of improving our health. We can see the outcome of our actions already, as new diseases continue to arise and old ones spread, often becoming impervious to our increasingly devastating drugs.
Discovering our purpose
As we research, discuss, and deepen our understanding of the mind-body connection, of the human-animal connection, and of our connection with all the larger wholes in which we are embedded, our spiritual purpose will become manifest.
Jesus’ vegan ethic
Jesus’ exhortation that we love one another and not do to others what we wouldn’t want done to us is the essence of the vegan ethic, which is a boundless compassion that includes all who can suffer by our actions.
Cultivating inner silence
Rising above anger and despair while still keeping our hearts open to the ocean of cruelty, indifference, and suffering on this earth is not easy. It requires cultivating wisdom and compassion—both the inner silent receptivity that links us to the eternal truth of our being and the outer actions of serving and helping others that give meaning to our life.
A next step on this path
Glimpsing this essential nature that we share with all beings not only deepens our yearning to relieve their suffering but also strengthens our ability to work effectively to do so. Seeing victims and perpetrators not merely in these roles but in their spiritual perfection and completeness is profoundly healing.
We see that there are no enemies—no essentially evil people or completely hopeless or destructive situations. There are, rather, opportunities to grow, learn, serve, and work together to raise consciousness and bring compassion and understanding to the painful and unjust situations we may see unfolding around us.
Thou art
As we bless others, we are blessed, and seeing beings rather than things, our own being is liberated and enriched.
Sacred feast
The metaphor of eating is central to spiritual communion with the divine presence.
It is universally recognized that eating food is both a literally and symbolically sacred action: it is directly partaking of the infinite order that transcends our finite lives.
Expensed
The transnational corporations profit from animal food consumption, as do the big banks, which have made the loans that have built the whole complex and demand a healthy return on their investments.
The system spreads relentlessly and globally, and while corporate and bank returns may be healthy, people, animals, and ecosystems throughout the world fall ill and are exploited and destroyed.
Being mindful
We are conditioned mentally to disconnect our food from the animal who was mindlessly abused to provide it, but the vibrational fields created by our food choices impact us profoundly whether we pretend to ignore them or not. Practicing mindful eating illuminates these hidden connections, cleanses our mind, heart, and actions, and removes inner masks and armor so that it becomes quite plain to see.
Loving kindness towards animals
The lesson is plain: when we harden ourselves to the suffering we inflict on animals in our own interest, and justify it by proclaiming our superiority or specialness, it is but a short and unavoidable step to justifying and inflicting the same kind of suffering on other humans in our own interest while likewise proclaiming our supremacy or specialness.
Healing a divisive world
As we remove the violence from our daily meals, we will naturally increase our ability to heal our divisions, nurture our creativity and joy, restore beauty and gentleness, and be role models of sensitivity and compassion for our children.
Abundance
Everyone on earth could be fed easily because we currently grow more than enough grain to feed ten billion people; our current practice of feeding this grain to untold billions of animals and eating them forces over a billion of us to endure chronic malnutrition and starvation while another billion suffer from the obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and cancer linked with eating diets high in animal foods.
Healing pain
As the mentality of domination and exclusivism fades, we will be able to heal divisions of gender, race, and class.
Redefining what it is to be a man
The unremitting conflict and oppression of history are unavoidable byproducts of confining and killing animals for food, as is the male role model of macho toughness that is required of both the professional animal killer (herder) and the soldier. If we desire to eat animal foods, this suffering is the unavoidable price we must pay.
The same person inside as outside
If we believe absurdities, we will commit atrocities, and we pass it on to our children, generation upon generation. Our violent actions speak so much more loudly than our peaceful words, and this is the unyielding dilemma of the herding culture we call home.
The only way to solve this dilemma is to evolve cognitively and ethically to a higher level where our actions do not belie our words and force us into unconsciousness and denial, but rather align with and reinforce our words and the universal spiritual teachings that instruct us to love one another, and to have mercy on the weak and vulnerable rather than exploiting and dominating them.
Love them as ourselves
To stop the atrocities, we must awaken from the absurd belief that animals are insentient, trivial, soulless property objects and challenge our religious institutions to extend ethical protection to animals.
This of course will mean challenging the meals at the center of social and religious life and the atrocities “hidden in plain sight” within those meals.
Jesus questioned this paradigm too
Jesus questioned the foundation of war and oppression, which was then, as it is now, the killing and eating of animals.
Back then it was animal sacrifice performed by priests at the temple, which was the main source of wealth and prestige for the Jewish religious power structure, as well as being the source of meat for the populace.
Jesus’ confrontation at the temple in which he drove out those selling animals for slaughter was a bold attack on the fundamental herding paradigm of viewing animals merely as property, sacrifice objects, and food.
How and when did this become a gift?
Perhaps in the past people thought they needed to enslave animals and people to survive, and that the cruelty involved in it was somehow allowed them.
It’s obviously not necessary for us today, as we can plainly see by walking into any grocery store, and the sooner we can awaken from the thrall of the obsolete mythos that we are predatory by nature, the sooner we’ll be able to evolve spiritually and discover and fulfill our purpose on this earth.
Look back on this day
Our knowledge and understanding of nonhuman animals is polluted far more than we acknowledge by our belief in our own superiority, our unrecognized cultural programming, and our separation from nature.
Our theories about animals will be seen in the future as quaint balderdash, as we now view the medieval theories of healing through bleeding and leeches and of an earth-centered solar system.
Grain for the poor
Grain that is now fed to the livestock of the world’s wealthy could feed the starving poor.
Why Are Few Spiritual Teachers Vegan?
Cause
Only by going beyond “it’s no big deal” and “it’s just a problem like our other problems” will we be able to step outside our conditioning and see the full import of our relentless abuse of animals, recognizing it as the motivating, hidden fury behind our global crisis.
Planetary healing from the ground up
http://agnvegglobal.blogspot.ca/2012/05/planetary-healing-from-ground-up.html
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