Off the beaten path the snow was
deep, so I was looking down at my feet as I walked to keep from
accidentally straying off the path into the knee-high snow. When I got
to the edge of the pigs’ fence, I looked up at the pigs, and was swept
up immediately into the experience.
The pigs and the space around them
were glowing deep gold. Waves of what I perceived to be energy were
emanating out from them in all directions. When the waves reached me, I
was wiped clean as they flowed over me. The particulars of my life
vanished instantly, followed immediately by my identity. I no longer had
any sense of myself as an individual standing in a frozen field
surrounded by 30 pigs. I found myself nowhere and everywhere. I felt
what I can only call my “energy body” begin to stir. Then I felt — and
even saw in the waves — my energy body, which I believed to be my very
being, move away from me and merge with the energy bodies — the very
being — of the pigs. I felt, saw and knew in that instant that the pigs
and I — despite our radical difference, our complete alterity — were
interconnected, so deeply interconnected that we were one continuous
being. I felt a momentary, intense vibration as this all sunk in. And
then, with much less fanfare than one might expect given the intensity
of the experience, it simply ended, as if a light switch had been
flipped. I found myself standing inside of the pigs’ paddock, surrounded
by 30 pigs jostling around me, eager for their food, with those just
underfoot biting at my boots. The pigs weren’t glowing. There were no
waves of energy. I was I. And the pigs were the pigs.
And yet, while apparently nothing had
changed, in fact, everything had. I could no longer feel it or see it,
but I could remember what it looked like and how it had felt, and more
important, I understood clearly “the message” as I have come to think of
it.
Pigs, the things that I had been
having more or less casually killed for nearly 10 years, were not things
at all, they were beings, as richly and profoundly as I myself am a
being. As beings, we were equals, more than equals. Their being and my
being — all being — was continuous. My being did not end and the pigs’
being begin. My being was always already the pigs’ being and the pigs’
being mine.
The implications of the message
drilled down easily to the deepest reaches of my understanding. I
resolved on the spot, without a moment’s deliberation, to quit pig
farming and stop eating meat of any kind (a year later I also gave up
dairy and eggs, becoming a vegan).
I have always been an open-minded
person, but only on the rarest of occasions have I ever been a spiritual
one. I have never found questions of spiritual being terribly
interesting. Today, however, that has all changed. Spiritual being is
not anymore a question that might or might not be of intellectual
interest or curiosity because it is no longer a question at all. I had,
no matter how fleeting, a direct, lived experience of unmediated
spiritual being, and the resonant power of that experience blew me wide
open: In the merging of my energy body with the energy body of the pigs,
I felt and saw the motive force of the universe in the radiant flash of
a microsecond. I felt and saw unconditional love
pulsing — waving — through an infinite complex of pathways
interconnecting a universe of beings.
Until that experience I had been
living quite contentedly in a world where small farmers like I raised
happy pigs outside where they grazed and played on verdant fields. And,
in that world, on every happy pig’s fateful day, they were killed
expertly in a small-scale, slow-paced slaughterhouse where I think one
can rightly believe that they had no experience of dying.
However, when I returned from that
mystical experience I found myself face to face with an incredibly
powerful idea that I could not rationalize away, that I could not scoot
around with mental gymnastics as I had all of those previous crises of
conscience, that I simply had to acquiesce to: Happy pigs are indeed
real — there are many thousands, tens of thousands of them out
there — but happy meat, the fundamental tenet of conscientious
omnivorism, is a total myth.