chapter fifteen LIVING THE REVOLUTION

“My aim is not modest. I see that nothing short of the transformation of humanity is necessary at this point in time.” - Jill Purce

“Every day forty thousand children die in the world for lack of food. We who overeat in the West, who are feeding grains to animals to make meat, are eating the flesh of these children.” - Thich Nhat Hanh1

“True human goodness, in all its purity and freedom, can come to the fore only when its recipient has no power. Humanity’s true moral test, its fundamental test, consists of its attitude towards those who are at its mercy: animals. And in this respect humankind has suffered a fundamental debacle, a debacle so fundamental that all others stem from it.” - Milan Kundera, author, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

The Holograph

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. 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.

To come to terms with our multifaceted human dilemma is to come to terms with the mentality of oppression that our meals demand. Looking away, as we chronically do, our existence and our projects become ironic, self-deceptive, destructive, and suicidal. Seeing our eating habits for what they are, though, and answering the call of our spirit to understand the consequences of our actions, we become open to compassion, intelligence, freedom, and to living the truth of our inter-connectedness with all life. There is an enormously positive revolution implicit in this, a spiritual transformation that can potentially launch our culture into a quantum evolutionary leap, from emphasizing consumption, domination, and self-preoccupation to nurturing creativity, liberation, inclusion, and cooperation. Are we ready for such a spiritual revolution? If we refuse, the strife, stress, and destruction will almost certainly intensify due to our ascending numbers and exploitive technology. When is a caterpillar ready to transform? The most obvious sign is the passing of its voracious appetite because an inner urge turns its attention to new directions.

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. 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. 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.

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. 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.

This requires questioning the underlying assumptions and attitudes of our culture and freeing ourselves from them not just in theory, but in practice. This inner action of leaving home necessitates in many ways a spiritual breakthrough. The essential action is to stop turning away and disconnecting from the suffering we impose on others by our food choices. 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. 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.

This urge to show mercy and to protect those who are vulnerable is rooted deeply in us, and though it has been repressed by our herding culture, there is enormous evidence that it longs to be expressed by virtually all of us. We will collectively donate millions of dollars, for example, to help just one animal if we know the animal’s story and our intelligence and compassion have been awakened by our connecting with this animal. 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. A primary danger is that we might leave home but not return; that is, we could awaken to the harmfulness inherent in our culture’s commodification of living beings but fail to bring this awakening to our culture by becoming a voice for these beings. If our understanding isn’t articulated in ways that are meaningful for us, it can become imprisoned within us and turn sour, becoming cynicism, anger, despair, and disease. This doesn’t serve us or anyone else.

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. The spiritual revolution needs all of us, whatever our religious beliefs, ethnicity, class, or other variables may be. Every one of us has a piece of the puzzle to contribute, and our overall success depends on each of us discovering our talents and passion and persistently contributing them.

Victims, Perpetrators, and Bystanders

As we go vegan and begin to live much more lightly on the earth, we may also start to realize how powerfully we’re affected by the omnivorous eating habits of the vast majority of our fellow citizens. Our freedom as omnivores to eat almost any non-human being we’d like limits others’ freedom in many ways. For example, we find rivers and lakes polluted by animal agriculture so we can no longer enjoy or swim in them. We discover our air and groundwater needlessly polluted by animal abusing industries. We have to endure seeing our friends hunted and tortured by hunters and fishers, or view billboards with disgusting images of cooked animal flesh. Our money is taken from us by the government to support ranchers and dairy, factory farm, and feedlot operators, as well as predator control operations that needlessly kill more of our friends, and forests we could enjoy are destroyed to provide the immense desolate monocultures of livestock feed grains. The prices of the products and services we buy are higher than necessary because they have to include not just the government taxes that subsidize animal foods and make them artificially cheaper than they should be, but also the enormous medical insurance costs borne by corporations for their omnivore employees that are passed on to all consumers in higher prices for everything. The expensive medical procedures required by omnivores for heart disease, cancer, kidney disease, obesity, and so forth raise health insurance rates beyond the reach of many with lower incomes. The U.S. war machine is also forced upon us all; we must not only help pay for it but also see it destroy the lives of impoverished people to supply the cheap oil that wasting so much grain and energy on animal foods requires. When, as vegans, we become sensitized to the violence of the food system, we can also see that omnivores are victims of this food system as well.

There are many ways we can be part of the solution rather than part of the problem. When we buy or eat animal foods, we ourselves become the agents of our cultural perpetration of unnecessary and gruesome violence. (If we have any lingering doubt about this, we can view some of the videos listed in the resource section of this book and behold just the smallest tip of an iceberg of ongoing horror so vast and ghastly it overwhelms the mind.)

In violent crimes committed publicly, there are three roles acted out: that of the perpetrator, that of the victim, and that of the bystander or witness. It is well known that perpetrators hope bystanders will be silent and look the other way so they can successfully continue their hurtful actions, and that victims hope the bystanders will speak up, act, get involved, and do something to stop or discourage perpetrators from their harmful actions. With regard to eating animal foods, there are many perpetrators and victims and just a few bystanders. The perpetrators always encourage each other and regard the bystanders with suspicion and hostility, and the victims’ voices cannot be heard.

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. The bystander offers an example of nonviolence and speaks on behalf of the victims who have no voice (and, on a subtler level, on behalf of the perpetrators who are also victimized by their own actions). Perpetrators may condemn bystanders for judging them and making them feel bad or guilty, but the bystanders are merely acting as the perpetrators’ conscience, asking them to please become more aware and stop their violence, for everyone’s sake. The guilt and shame perpetrators feel for their violent actions stem from their natural sense of kindness and caring, which they have blocked and are violating. Their attitude toward bystanders may even be indignation: “If you want to be a vegetarian, that’s fine, but don’t tell us what to do.” While at first blush this seems reasonable, we quickly see that it is only because of the disconnections and bias inherent in our culture. Perpetrators wouldn’t dare say, “If you don’t want to beat and stab your pet dog, that’s fine, but don’t tell me not to beat and stab mine.” We all recognize that we aren’t entitled to treat others, especially those who are defenseless, however we like, and that if we are responsible for doing harm, people have every right to ask us to stop.

As perpetrators, we are thus profoundly challenged by the truth-field established by attentive and articulate bystanders. Eventually, we may respond to the challenge, examine our attitudes and, recognizing our behavior as morally indefensible, cease it and join the ranks of the bystanders. As bystanders, we are also deeply challenged to respond creatively to the situation with love, understanding, and skillful means, and to strive to live in ever more complete alignment with the values of compassion, honesty, and integrity. The more we live in alignment with our values, the stronger the truth-field we emanate will be, and the more our words, gestures, and actions will carry weight with perpetrators. None of us is completely innocent, because to some degree we all are, and have been, in all three roles. As non-vegans, we are challenged by our spiritual and ethical disconnection to slow down, stop, pay attention, reconnect, embrace our disowned shadow, and begin the healing process. As vegans, we are challenged by our inconsistencies and fear of reprisal to pay attention and deepen our healing and awakening process by making the effort to align our thoughts, words, and actions with our understanding of interbeing and to ever more fully embody peace and courageous love. Cultivating awareness is essential to realizing happiness, peace, and freedom.

What about the victims, the animals? Who are these beings, so defenseless and unable to retaliate, so punished by a heartless, mechanized system developed for self-gratification and profit?

Our Connection with Animals

Though we are born into a culture that emphasizes our differences from other animals, our actual experience tells us differently. 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. 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.

In addition to having the capacity for empathy, animals have the capacity to suffer psychologically, and often exhibit stereotypic behavior when they are forced into mental illness by our cruel treatment of them. The extreme confinement of animals used for food, fur, research, and entertainment causes such deep damage to their emotional and physical health that they repeat the same behaviors continuously, something they never do in the wild. Chimpanzees and pigs will bang their heads for hours against the metal bars of their cages, elephants will constantly sway their heads and lift their feet, and foxes confined in cramped cages in fur farms will circle manically and sway pathetically, driven insane by the impossibility of fulfilling their natural purposes. Like these animals, we humans may repeat stereotypic behaviors when we become deranged and lose our connection with the purpose we were born to fulfill.

It’s illustrative to watch how the attributes we have proclaimed make us unique, such as using tools, making art, experiencing “higher” emotions, having a sense of the ludicrous, using language, and so forth, have all collapsed under the evidence as we get to know animals better. Of course, we have certain unique attributes and abilities. Every species has certain unique attributes and abilities. Eating animals makes us so subconsciously nervous that we neurotically overemphasize our uniqueness and our separateness from them. This allows us to exclude them from our circle of concern.

Besides sharing a common home on this beautiful planet here in outer space, animals share with us the vulnerability of mortality and all that entails. 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. 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.

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. 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. In fact, veganism is not extreme from the point of view of our innate nature, which longs for love, creativity, and spiritual evolution.

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. One of the many manifestations of this is its refusal to acknowledge the idea that we as consciousness may experience multiple dimensions and lifetimes, and especially the idea that human consciousness can be reborn as the consciousness of animals. These ideas are strenuously blocked for obvious reasons by our herding culture, but they are held as logical and true by many cultures that don’t abuse animals as viciously and systematically as ours has for the past eight to ten thousand years. Perpetrators and victims are known to exchange roles over and over again in countless subtle and obvious ways. The cycle of violence may span larger dimensions than we in our herding culture would like to admit, and there are many wisdom traditions that affirm that it does. Until we see from the highest level, we had best heed the counsel of every enlightened spiritual teacher from every time: be ye kind to one another.

Paths Away from and Back to Sanity

The underlying assumptions of the culture into which we have been born are faulty and obsolete. If not questioned and changed, they will continue to drive us into deeper cultural insanity, just as they do the animals we mercilessly dominate. Recognizing the insanity of our actions and beliefs is the first and essential step to healing and awakening. The signs are evident: producing and using weapons of mass destruction while millions of people starve to death, attacking our living earth so savagely that within the space of just twenty-five years more species are forced into extinction than in the previous sixty-five million years combined, and genetically scrambling organisms with reckless disregard for the consequences these artificial creatures will have on the delicately interconnected living strands of our planet’s biocommunities.

The powerful financial and media forces that block us from seeing any of this are continuing the spread of the herding culture and its obsolete and oppressive assumptions throughout the world. The transnational corporations that profit from abused animals are one example, and include gigantic retailers as well as the huge animal agriculture conglomerates that relentlessly push to expand their factory farm and slaughterhouse operations into the less industrialized cultures. In typically eating far fewer animals per person, these less wealthy societies represent markets with enormous potential for lucrative growth. The chemical, pesticide, and pharmaceutical corporations all profit from and encourage this same expansion. Charitable organizations like the Heifer Project, which introduces animal agriculture into developing countries, often contribute directly to the same inhumane mentality that teaches people to see animals merely in terms of what the Heifer Project terms “the four Ms”: meat, milk, manure, and money. The Heifer Project is simply another front for the iron fist of cruelty, indoctrinating the herding culture’s regime of domination and abuse as far and wide as possible and hardening the hearts of indigenous children as it does so. Like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, the U.S. government in its foreign aid programs serves as an agent for our nation’s powerful animal agriculture industry, buying their products for foreign distribution and concocting loans and programs that force impoverished countries to embrace the American model of petroleum-based industrial agriculture (which profits U.S. banking and petroleum companies and provides markets for the U.S. meat, dairy, egg, chemical, pharmaceutical, and medical industries). Two thirds of U.S. grain exports go to feed livestock rather than to feed hungry people.2

There are numerous uplifting and noble movements, organizations, and efforts that work to promote peace, social justice, equality, environmental protection, and to relieve the suffering of people who are disadvantaged, vulnerable, or marginalized. Unfortunately, virtually all of these efforts fail to address the underlying source of these problems in our domination of animals for food. As people learn more about the consequences of eating animal foods, however, 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.3

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.4 Though she requires students to meditate two and a half hours per day, vow to eat no flesh or egg products, refrain from alcohol and non-prescription drugs, and not work in jobs that promote the exploitation of animals or people, her movement continues to spread. It shows the effectiveness of a spiritual approach, because in less than twenty years she has been the proximate cause of hundreds of thousands of people’s transition to veganism. Rather than impede her movement, her insistence that her students reduce the cruelty in their meals may paradoxically promote it. People who are serious about spiritual growth are apparently capable of embracing fundamental change in their lives, and may even welcome the opportunity.

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. A positive momentum is unquestionably building in spite of the established forces of domination and violent control that would suppress it. Like a birth or metamorphosis, a new mythos is struggling through us to arise and replace the obsolete herding mythos, and the changes occurring may be far larger and more significant than they appear to be. They are ignored and discounted by the mass media, but what may seem to be small changes can suddenly mushroom when critical mass is reached. It is vital that we all contribute to the positive revolution for which our future is calling.

Implications for Further Research and Conversation

More thorough and open research and discussion of the implications of our food choices would increase our cultural awareness of the negative health, economic, environmental, psychological, and social consequences of eating animal foods, and illuminate the multiple benefits for everyone of a natural plant-based way of eating. There are virtually unending opportunities for further research and public discussion to deepen our understanding of our practice of commodifying and eating animals, and to explore more positive alternatives. Some examples include further research on the benefits of plant-based diets for individual health, and, on a larger scale, what moving to plant-based diets would mean in terms of improved air and water quality, increased food for hungry people, reduced demand for petroleum, antibiotics, drugs, chemicals, resources, and the implications of freeing up millions of acres of land currently being enslaved to graze livestock or grow their feed. The potential for enormous ecosystem healing and wildlife regeneration could be researched and discussed, as well as the economic, social, political, medical, psychological, and spiritual dimensions of these changes.

The psychological connections between abusing and killing animals and doing the same to human beings are already being explored and publicized, and this could certainly be taken further by researching the linkages between eating animal foods and obesity, teen pregnancy, collapse of family structures, disease, stress, emotional numbing, anxiety, suicide, and so forth. One particularly glaring inconsistency that should be further investigated is the underlying assumption of vivisection, that we can become healthier by destroying the health of other living beings. Our welfare is tied to the welfare of all beings; we cannot reap health in ourselves by sowing seeds of disease and death in others. 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. Another example of such research would be to investigate the connection between eating animal foods and the escalating use and abuse of damaging drugs like alcohol, narcotics, and pharmaceuticals. In 1915, during the temperance movement that led eventually to the prohibition era, Charles Fillmore wrote,

The assertion has been made, and we have not heard it disproved, that there never was a vegetarian drunkard. Here then, is a remedy for intemperance far more effective than all the drug cures that men take. That the discontinuance of flesh eating will also carry off the craving for strong liquids, like beer, whiskey, wine, tea and coffee, anyone can test for himself. Stop eating meat for even one month and that unnatural thirst which accompanies and follows a diet of flesh will disappear. There is a physiological reason for this. Meat is always in a certain degree of putrefaction, and the decay is increased when it is introduced into the stomach. The juicy steak which lovers of flesh smack their lips over is saturated with salty urea, which in the stomach calls for liquid. Physiologists say that this juice in the steak is the urine of the animal arrested on its way to the kidneys. In eating this mess man not only makes his system a sewer for the corrupting animal flesh, but he also puts into his stomach an irritant that demands a cooling solvent at once.

With this constant fever of rotting flesh in the stomach calling for a cooling draught, it is marvelous that any escape drunkenness. Blot out flesh eating and men will soon become temperate without the enactment of a single law. No one who eats the food that Nature prepared will have any desire for strong drink, not even tea or coffee. Then the sure cure for the drink habit is to stop eating meat and all animal products. This includes butter and eggs. Cereals, vegetables, nuts and oils have all the elements necessary to the body’s sustenance.5

In addition to the physiological connection Fillmore describes between eating animal foods and craving strong drink, there are several other possible links that could be explored and discussed more broadly in our culture’s battle against the horrendous effects of addiction to drugs and alcohol. There are the rather obvious psychological connections that were discussed earlier. Our herding culture is by its very nature abusive to its children, forcing them to disconnect from whom they’re eating and to distance themselves from their natural feelings of empathy. This abuse, with its attendant hardening and disconnectedness, must certainly be a powerful contributing factor to substance abuse and to other pathologies as well. The drugs, hormones, artificial colors, preservatives, and toxic chemicals contained in animal foods may contribute to alcohol and drug addiction, as well as the fact that animal foods are filled with the vibrations of grief, misery, hopelessness, and despair.vibrations that would tend to push sensitive people who eat them into substance abuse and addiction. And, since we inevitably reap what we sow in others, we will unavoidably find ourselves reaping the consequences of our misguided “research” experiments on animals, which is more human addiction. Finally, there is also the macrobiotic perspective that animal foods are extremely yang in their energetic impact on the body, contracting the energy field, and that the body will then naturally and inevitably crave foods and substances that are extremely yin and expansive. These extreme yin foods are alcohol, white sugar, drugs of most every kind, tobacco, and caffeine. Grains, legumes, and vegetables tend to be neither excessively yin nor yang, but are more balanced, and so create few cravings. Eating extreme foods forces the body to gyrate continuously between the two poles, alternatively craving contracting foods like meat, cheese, eggs, and salt, and then expansive substances like sweets, coffee, alcohol, drugs, and tobacco, ad nauseam.

How can these connections be brought to attention in public forums? Perhaps, for example, the popular Twelve-Step programs could be made more effective by recognizing the insidious power of eating animal foods in driving the mental, emotional, and physical urge to consume alcohol and other harmful substances. The twelve steps of Alcoholics Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous, Overeaters Anonymous, and similar programs are all grounded in the timeless principles of relying on support from others with similar aspirations by creating ongoing support groups and relying on “a Power greater than ourselves to restore us to sanity.” Twelve-Step programs are effective because they take a basically spiritual approach, urging people to rise mentally and spiritually to a higher level of consciousness than the level at which they created the problem. They encourage introspection, humbly recognizing the harmful effects of past actions on other people and making amends to them, and improving conscious contact with the higher Power, and relying not on self-will but on the desire to fulfill the will of the higher Power.

Unfortunately, animals are not included in the moral inventory of those harmed by former actions, and eating and using animals isn’t questioned. This helps explain perhaps why people in AA groups are taught they will always be alcoholics and can never take just a small drink, because in continuing to eat animals, the underlying pressures remain. The body and mind naturally still crave alcohol, drugs, sweets, extreme yin, and distraction from the horror that is being consumed every day at meals. By including animals within the circle of relevant beings that we harm with our actions, we can get to the root of the destructive addictions that plague people in our culture. This is not to imply that all patterns of addictive behavior will necessarily disappear with the adoption of a vegan orientation to living, but it is a powerful start; inner weeding, mindfulness, and cultivating inner silence, patience, generosity, and gratitude are also essential dimensions of spiritual health.

If we decrease our practice of exploiting animals for food, we will find our levels of disease, mental illness, conflict, and environmental and social devastation likewise decreasing. Rather than ravaging the earth’s body and decimating and incarcerating her creatures, we can join with the earth and be a force for creating beauty and spreading love, compassion, joy, peace, and celebration. When we look with a relaxed eye at nature, we see an absolutely irrepressible celebration of living beauty. Animals in nature are both celebratory and inscrutable. They play, sing, run, soar, leap, call, dance, swim, hang out together, and relate in endlessly mysterious ways.

Freeing animals, we humans will be able to rejoin the celebration and contribute to it with our love and creativity. Competition and exploitation of other people can melt away as we regain our natural sensitivity. Our earth will naturally heal when we stop killing fish and sea life and polluting and wasting water in such unsustainable ways. Forests and wildlife will return because we’ll need far less farmland to feed everyone a plant-based diet, and the whole earth will be relieved of the unbearable pressure exerted by omnivorous humans. We will be released from the paralysis that prevents us from creatively addressing the looming depletion of fossil fuels and the other challenges we face.

This change in our consciousness would usher in the first revolution since the herding revolution began with the domestication of sheep and goats ten thousand 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. 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.

Privilege and Slavery

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. 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 wealthy elite exerts its privilege and authority through all our social institutions, using food as a method of maintaining control. Because the quality of our food is directly connected to our mental and physiological health and to our quality of life, diminishing the quality of our food can make us sicker, weaker, and more distracted, violent, stressed, drugged, confused, and disempowered. This is perhaps the real agenda behind the vicious efforts to weaken the standards for organic foods and to introduce highly toxic foods through irradiation, genetic engineering, addition of artificial dyes, noxious flavor-enhancers like MSG, chemical preservatives, known carcinogens like aspartame, and dangerous genetically engineered hormones like rBGH and carcinogenic growth hormones. This is in addition to promoting animal-based meals, which concentrate the largest variety and intensity of toxins and are inherently confusing and disempowering. By controlling food and disseminating junk food and food sourced from animals, those with the most privilege can confuse and sicken our entire population, especially those who are most vulnerable and uninformed. There are well-documented connections, for example, between the deterioration of our food supply and certain newly invented pathologies like attention deficit disorder.6

We must explore these connections further and discuss them, and also take a hard look at our own abuse of privilege. As a culture, we regularly fail to make the connections between the suffering directly imposed on others and our privileged status. Those others may be fishes, chickens, pigs, or slaves on chocolate plantations. By refusing to dominate animals, we make the essential connections and open inner doorways to understanding and deconstructing the abuse of privilege in our lives. Justice, equality, veganism, freedom, spiritual evolution, and universal compassion are inextricably connected.

As long as we dominate others, we will be dominated. 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. As we bless others, we are blessed, and seeing beings rather than things, our own being is liberated and enriched.

he Last Days of Eating Animals

Is there adequate time for us as a human family to make the transition to compassionate vegan living? It’s a matter of education and reaching critical mass. Every one of us has an essential part to play in this greatest of all tasks. The resistance from the dominant culture is understandably intense and manifests in a seemingly endless profusion of ways. Besides the ubiquity of the practice of eating enslaved animals, and all the media and cultural support that inevitably accrues to such a universal practice, and the justifications obediently fabricated by the religious and scientific institutions of our culture, there are predictable attempts to use governmental and legal means to protect the animal foods complex from any questioning. Many states have already passed “food disparagement” laws at the insistence of powerful meat, dairy, and egg interests, which actually disallow and criminalize public criticism of foods! The states with the strongest animal agriculture industries are also pushing to pass laws making it a felony to take pictures or videos inside farms, dairy operations, stockyards, fishing operations, and slaughterhouses without the permission of the industries and owners. There’s obviously a lot to hide, and the fact that we live in a supposedly open society is a potent threat to the forces that would continue our omnivorism and block all discussion, questioning, and understanding of its consequences. There are also laws being passed making it illegal for people to talk about food publicly unless they are certified dieticians! An educator in Columbus, for example, was recently notified by the State Investigator of the Ohio Board of Dietetics that she couldn’t show the video Diet for a New America publicly because “that could be construed as the practice of Dietetics because somebody might change their lifestyle habits as a result of seeing that movie.”7

In addition to these strong-arm tactics, there are more subtle methods emerging. The National Eating Disorders Association has now listed a new type of eating disorder, which it calls “orthorexia nervosa”:

Orthorexia Nervosa. Though not clinically recognized as an eating disorder, some health professionals are coming to believe that a pathological fixation on eating proper food, and obsession with “righteous eating” may eventually be considered a condition requiring treatment.8

Obviously, anyone unquestioningly eating the cruel and toxic Standard American Diet of fast-food burgers and hot dogs will be considered by mental health professionals to be psychologically healthy and normal, while those who refuse to do so may be considered to have a “pathological fixation on eating proper food” and an “obsession with ‘righteous eating’ ” and may be obliged to undergo some kind of “treatment.” It’s hard to overestimate how subversive switching to a plant-based way of eating is to the established mentality of domination and exclusion, and to what lengths our culture will go to block and suppress open discussion and questioning of its defining rituals!

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.

The Movie of Life on Earth

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. 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. To free the animals we are abusing, we must free ourselves from the delusion of essential separateness, doing both the outer work of educating, sharing, and helping others, and the inner work of uncovering our true nature.

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. 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. 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.

The world we see is a product of our thoughts and way of seeing. Looking deeply into the animal-derived food on our plates, we see enormous suffering, abusive hands, and hardened hearts. Looking more deeply, we see that these hands and hearts have themselves been abused and wounded but yearn to be comforted and loved, and to comfort and love. As we see that abusers have always been abused themselves, we seek less to judge and more to understand, and to protect the vulnerable from abuse. As we heal our wounds and stop eating animal foods we become better able to contribute to the healing of our culture. We see that we need less to be the hands of judgment and punishment.for pain willfully inflicted is unavoidably received again in the fullness of time.but rather to be the hands of mercy, help, and healing.

As we realize our interconnectedness with all living beings, our purpose naturally becomes to help and bless others, and it is a role we can carry without burnout or anger. The terrible suffering we see may certainly disturb and outrage us, but the outrage turns to compassion and creativity rather than to anger, despair, or vindictiveness. 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. By creating an inner field of peace, kindness, joy, and unity, we contribute to building a planetary field of compassion that reflects this consciousness.9

As we hold steadfastly to the truth of being, knowing that compassion is irresistible and that it encircles the earth through us and many others, and as we live this understanding in our daily lives and share it with others, we create a field of kindness and sow seeds of cultural transformation. There are no enemies because we are all related. 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. A positive approach is essential because it mobilizes our spiritual resources, generates enthusiasm, and brings more joy and love into our world.

Just as waves are manifestations of the ocean and inseparable from it, we are both the light that makes the movie possible and the images on the screen illuminated by that light, each of us unique and contributing our voice, passion, and spirit to the unfolding story. With this understanding, we can live to help and bless others with both a sense of urgency, which is required and appropriate, and a sense of spaciousness that doesn’t blame others or fight with them. Blaming and fighting only generate resistance and reinforce the delusion of separateness. Our human spiritual evolution is a calling to liberate ourselves and the animals we hold in bondage. It’s founded upon recognizing the unity of cause and effect: whatever seeds we sow in our consciousness we will reap in our lives. The ancient teaching holds true: “Hatred ceases not by hatred, but by love. This is the everlasting law.”10 In the end, as Mahatma Gandhi emphasized, we must be the change we want to see in the world.

The Elk’s Message

One August night in 1991, high in the Olympic mountains of western Washington, I was climbing up a seemingly endless and steep series of switchbacks, trying to get back to my van parked at the trailhead. I had gone too far to reach an alpine lake, and now returning many miles in steep terrain, without food or water, I was as physically exhausted as I’d ever been in my life. Every step took enormous effort, and in the dim moonlight I prayed for the strength and energy to continue the arduous climb back up to the top of the ridge. Feeling almost completely spent, I thought I might have to bivouac on the cold barren slope when I felt a presence beside me. Plodding along in the eerie light, dragging each foot with all my strength, I looked to my right and saw, only four or five yards away, a magnificent elk walking slowly along beside me. In the somewhat surreal mental state I was already in from being exhausted and alone on the mountain in the moonlight, it somehow wasn’t surprising. We continued along together for several minutes, and just having this powerful animal walking so close to me gave me an enormous boost. Mentally thanking him as we walked for caring and for helping me, I felt a profound sense of kinship, beyond the usual concept of that term. I felt our utter relatedness as a basic fact. With him beside me, it was natural to feel my energy increasing, and soon I was able to walk faster and with more confidence. Before long, the elk picked up his pace and crossed over in front of me, disappearing into the night. Within another ten minutes, I made it to the top of the ridge and could descend to the parking lot.

Though I was enormously thirsty and hungry, and my little van was well stocked with food and water, I waited and silently thanked the elk and the benevolent mystery of this universe. My heart was filled with gratitude for the overwhelming presence of love and compassion I felt shining on me through the elk. I saw I didn’t need to thank the elk, my brother, with thoughts or words, for he understood our connection. Any thanks I could give him could only be through my actions to protect him and all my brothers and sisters of this earth, sacred expressions of an infinite love that smiled at me that evening from the elk, the stars, the moon, and the night mountain air.

The elk taught me to take time every day to be grateful, to feel my connection with the great Mystery, and to open to the inner wellsprings of joy and 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.

The experience with the elk is one of many blessings I have found that being vegan brings. Veganism kindles a deep sense of peace in nature and of kinship, fellowship, and harmony with all life. It encourages a sense of inner richness that keeps growing and deepening as years go by, a sense of gentleness and of purpose. Becoming vegan is not so much a decision made with our intellect as it is a natural consequence of inner ripening. While it’s certainly helpful to comprehend intellectually the vast mandala of negative consequences of eating animal foods, we find that we are propelled into veganism by our intuition. As our intuitive heart opens, it opens to understanding our connection with others and to including them within the sphere of our concern.

In our culture, which is so permeated by the mentality of domination and exclusion, veganism requires a spiritual breakthrough. This breakthrough cannot be forced in any way by others, but it can definitely be encouraged. Looking behind the curtain to the horrific suffering inherent in animal foods, asking questions, contemplating spiritual teachings, cultivating the higher knowing of intuition, and observing the example of other vegans all contribute to the ripening process. Once we can clearly see the universal law or principle underlying veganism, we can experience a spiritual transformation that allows greater possibilities of freedom and happiness. Once we see and understand, we become a voice for the voiceless, a note in the glorious chord of healing and awakening that is unfolding in our shared consciousness.

From Obsolete Exclusivity to All of Us

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.

Vegan congressman Dennis Kucinich said in a speech in 2002,

I have seen groups of people overcome incredible odds as they became aware they are participating in a cause beyond self and sense the movement of the inexorable which comes from unity.

Violence is not inevitable. War is not inevitable. Nonviolence and peace are inevitable. We can make of this world a gift of peace which will confirm the presence of universal spirit in our lives. We can send into the future the gift which will protect our children from fear, from harm, from destruction.11

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.

When we are then 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 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. Refraining from eating and using animals is the natural result of seeing that is no longer chained within the dark and rigid dungeon of narrow self-interest. 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 because 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.

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.