chapter fourteen JOURNEY OF TRANSFORMATION

“First, live a compassionate life. Then you will know.” - Buddha

“By having reverence for life, we enter into a spiritual relation with the world.” - Albert Schweitzer

“There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the roots.” - Henry David Thoreau, Walden

The Jeweled Web of Journeys

How can we best contribute to our culture’s awakening and evolution to greater intelligence, compassion, peace, and fulfillment? We each have a unique piece of the puzzle to contribute, which emerges out of responding to the dreams, aspirations, and yearnings in our heart that develop through the course of our particular life journey. When we develop a sense of the wonder and potential of our unique life, we feel the same toward others. This emerges as respect and understanding for them and the urge to cooperate with and support them. This is a basic expression of our innate sanity. Because we value our life, we value the lives of others and naturally yearn to live to benefit them. If we feel our life to be a distasteful burden, we will most likely have a low opinion of the worth of the lives of others. We can reverse this by switching to a more compassionate diet and by contemplating and affirming the preciousness of our life.of all life. The urge of compassion will grow as we cultivate our sense of connectedness with everything. As we become freer and more grateful for our life, we naturally become a force for positive change in the world.

To better understand the unique nature and power of our journey, it may be helpful to examine our lives in order to discover the hidden seeds from our past that are now pushing, like living green shoots, into our consciousness. Small unrecognized seeds, when recognized and honored, can grow into strong and beautiful trees in the garden of our lives. I offer this chapter as a modest example of this process and encourage everyone to look into the soil of their own garden for the hidden seeds that may already be sprouting into beautiful and beneficent plants. In particular, by further discovering the seeds of veganism within us, we can nurture them and develop our understanding of our unique contribution to the healing of our world. We will touch many, for our journeys are all connected.

In the Avatamsaka tradition of Mahayana Buddhism, there is a central teaching metaphor that is referred to as the teaching of the jeweled web. It is not only a teaching but also an image to be meditated upon for greater insight into the truth of being. The universe is likened to an infinite web, and at every node of this vast web there is a jewel. Every dharma in the universe - every being, thing, or event - is one of these jewels. Thus every being, thing, and event is connected to every other being, thing, and event throughout infinite space and time. Not only that, but if we look deeply into any one jewel in this vast web, we can see reflected in this jewel all of the other jewels in the cosmic net! Each and every individual dharma contains all others, and if we truly know one, we know all of them. The ancient teaching that emerges from and sustains this metaphor of the jeweled web is known as the teaching of the conditioned arising and mutual interpenetration and interdependence of all phenomena. Everything is dependent upon everything else; nothing is ever separate, and each particle contains the entire universe. We are all profoundly and radically related!

We can see that our stories and journeys are also intimately interconnected and that each journey, though unique, miraculously contains all the other journeys of all beings. We learn from each other, though at the deepest levels we see that there are, ultimately, no others. We all share the same source, and the walls that we build to separate us are illusory. As we evolve and as the imaginary walls dissolve, compassion and freedom increase along with our deepening understanding of the interbeing of all life. This teaching of the profound interconnectedness of all life is not unique to Buddhism but has been intuited for centuries by people from many traditions and cultures. A universal teaching that is inseparable from this understanding of interbeing is mindfulness, cultivating our ability to be fully present in our actions and to see the connections between our actions and their effects. Mindfulness brings freedom and insight by increasing our awareness. The more aware and mindful we are, the more free we become.

In terms of food, in order to understand the rippling web of suffering that we as a culture create, perpetuate, and magnify through our daily sacred acts of eating, and the web of interconnection in which freedom, compassion, and love can grow and illuminate our world, we must go on a journey. A journey undertaken with mindfulness is a pilgrimage, because it has a spiritual purpose: to increase our awareness and our ability to love and understand. Our culture is in the halting first steps of a journey of transformation in which we all participate and to which we all contribute by our own journeys. It necessarily unfolds in time, but the gestalt it points to is our living, breathing situation.our shared life today. It is our pilgrimage together, and for this, mindfulness is essential.

Seeds of Inspiration

My journey toward questioning the pervasive abuse of animals for food began in a seemingly unlikely way, for I was born and raised in a family and neighborhood with no interest in plant-based eating at all. Consequently, for the first twenty-two years of my life I, like most Americans, ate large quantities of animal flesh, eggs, and dairy products. I did, however, encounter seeds of inspiration that lay dormant at first but later began to sprout vigorously. Though these seeds pertain to one unique journey, they may illumine half-hidden seeds that are sending forth new shoots of understanding for others.

For me, one seed was being born and raised in the town of Concord, Massachusetts, the home of two of the so-called revolutions that the United States has experienced: the political revolution of the 1760s and ’70s, and the literary revolution of the 1840s and ’50s. Being born and raised in Concord gave me a sense of intimate connectedness with these two revolutions and of being their descendant, with an urge to question them, understand what motivated them, and carry them on myself. I believe these two revolutions have contributed to the emerging vegan revolution, which is a cultural revolution of profound significance that can heal our culture at the deepest level.

The political revolution culminated in the beginning of the Revolutionary War at the Old North Bridge in Concord on April 19, 1775. The farmers and villagers living in Concord and the other towns surrounding Boston provided some of the strongest resistance to British imperialist rule and fought the unjust economic domination imposed by the British East India Company and other British multinational corporate forces that were being militarily and politically supported and legitimized by the British government at that time. This eighteenth-century revolution led eventually to independence from the British Empire and birthed the epic American experiment in democracy, equality, cultural pluralism, and individual freedom that continues to attract and inspire people all over the world.

It is remarkable that the literary and philosophical revolution of the following century was also based in Concord. It sprang from the lives and writings of the American transcendentalists living there - Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Bronson Alcott, Louisa May Alcott, William Ellery Channing, Nathaniel Hawthorne - and many others, like Walt Whitman, who were inspired by the transcendentalists and journeyed to visit them. We recognize these leading thinkers today for the deep questioning of traditional values that they introduced and for the artistic, literary, and spiritual inspiration they provided. Emerson’s philosophical writings, like “Nature”; his oratorical contributions, like the “Harvard Divinity School Address”; and his poetry, which pioneered bringing Eastern philosophical ideas for the first time to the United States, made him something of a living legend, a magnet that attracted writers and thinkers from many directions and whose influence is still strongly alive today, urging respect and love for nature, self-exploration, and appreciation of the essentially spiritual nature of all manifestation. He emphasized that true wisdom transcends materialistic knowledge, and that the natural world is also a manifestation of the divine. Whitman wrote: “I was simmering, simmering. Emerson brought me to a boil.”

Thoreau was strongly influenced by Emerson (and vice versa), and in some ways has eclipsed his teacher and mentor in influence. His radical experiment, to live in solitude at Concord’s Walden Pond and “to suck out the marrow of life,” continues to inspire spiritual seekers and in a powerful way pioneered the planting of introspective inner listening in the excessively extroverted American cultural soil. The Concord philosophers saw clearly that an internal element was missing from their culture, which was overly focused on external conquest and success. Thoreau had the largest library of books on Eastern philosophy in the United States at the time, and his book Civil Disobedience (still one of the primary source documents of nonviolent resistance and an enduring revelation of the power and responsibility of individuals to actively oppose unjust governmental policies) deeply influenced Tolstoy, Gandhi, King, and the lives of countless people.

Bronson Alcott’s radically progressive ideas regarding the education of children are being rediscovered and finally appreciated today. He was an ethical vegetarian and a prime moving force behind the formation of Fruitlands, an unlikely experiment in vegetarian community living in the countryside outside Concord. The Concord transcendentalists were the first Americans to explore and weave into Western thought many of the noble and subtle ideas from Taoist, Buddhist, Jain, and Vedantist writings, and to build progressive bridges that included honoring nature, emphasizing the essential goodness and vast potential of human nature, and exploring lifestyles of nonviolence, simplicity, and inner contemplation.

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.” 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 [slaughterhouse]. 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.

Perhaps as a child, wandering through the forests and along the streets of Concord and along the shore of Walden Pond, where I learned to swim, I sensed the noble and courageous thoughts of these spiritual pioneers. Though there seemed to be little in the outer world to encourage questioning the cruel food customs I was born into, perhaps the thoughts and feelings of these luminaries filtered through the inner worlds that I was exploring along with the outer world. I am sure that all of us have such memories of seed experiences, perhaps only dimly recognized, that are now unfolding in consciousness. We learn from each other and plant seeds in each other. Through examples, actions, words, expressions, writings, and gestures, we touch each other, sometimes deeply. As sensitive children, we can be blessed or wounded enormously.

Several other seeds stand out in shaping my journey. One was growing up with a noble and gentle German shepherd. Our family got Bismarck as a puppy when I, the oldest of three children, was about a year old. He was my loyal friend until he passed away in my teens, which was a sad loss for our entire family. He always accompanied us on our frequent camping and hiking expeditions in the mountains of New Hampshire and Vermont. My parents disliked animal cruelty and killing, so we never included hunting or fishing in our regular outings into nature. Besides instilling in me a loving appreciation of the outdoors from an early age, my father taught me to play the piano and to explore the mysterious power of music to relax, uplift, and express deep feelings. He was a semi-professional pianist, and his love for music and harmony was an abiding inspiration. I will always remember how he taught my brother and me to sing in harmony up in the mountains.

Being born into a newspaper family was another significant seed in my life journey. Around the time I was born my parents bought a tiny weekly newspaper in the Concord area. I grew up in the midst of a swirling world of linotype machines and printing presses, promotions, weekly deadlines, and an unending parade of local politicians and merchants. My father’s stream of editorials and stories, my mother’s painting and graphics, and the constant growth of the little newspaper were the hub of our family’s life. The newspaper, The Beacon, thrived and expanded, and my father was able to purchase or start newspapers in other towns in the Concord area as well. By the time I reached high school, we had a chain of thirteen newspapers with several hundred employees, housed in a large new building in the neighboring town of Acton. I saw firsthand the fabled power of the press and how senators, congressional representatives, and local politicians all came to my father hoping for his backing, and how the local merchants required advertising. I saw also how our newspaper needed the merchants as well and would zealously defend them. Through our immediate involvement in the town meetings, issues, and local politics, I felt as though I had an insider’s view on all that was happening in our community.

Another seed was the sense pervading our lives that we were true Americans. My father was patriotic in the extreme and loved to quote Patrick Henry and fly the flag. My mother’s relatives came over as Pilgrims on the Mayflower in 1620, and our Tuttle ancestors came from England as Puritans on the Planter in 1630. Every April 19, when thousands of people gathered at the Old North Bridge in Concord to celebrate and reenact “the shot heard ‘round the world,” the beginning of the Revolutionary War in Concord, my father dressed as one of the Minutemen and marched the six miles from Acton to Concord, retracing the original line of march and reenacting the historic battle. Growing up conscious of being descended from the Pilgrims and Founding Fathers, I felt especially connected to the American Dream. I relished and valued the ideals that the United States is supposed to stand for, and the idea of revolution. The Pilgrims and Puritans, like Emerson and Thoreau, valued simplicity, community, and viewing life essentially as a spiritual quest. When these seeds began to sprout, they transformed my view, as I began to see life more as a pilgrimage and to focus less on acquiring and competing and more on the purpose of the pilgrimage. I also began to see that such a view would be considered somewhat subversive.

The Organic Dairy at Camp Challenge

Another seed experience from my childhood that stands out vividly, and that I am grateful for having helped awaken my heart, is witnessing the killing of a cow on an idyllic Vermont dairy farm. I was about twelve years old, and attending a summer camp in the Green Mountains called Camp Challenge. The philosophy and practice of the camp was to challenge boys in positive ways, and I have many memories of these challenges: difficult whitewater canoe expeditions, five-day forays in the steep mountains, living outdoors for weeks at a time and cooking all our meals on campfires, washing in the icy brook, and even doing a two-day solo in the wilderness equipped with only three matches, a knife, and a hook and fish line.

The camp was affiliated with an organic farm in the valley below us where we would sometimes work baling or weeding. At one point all of us boys went down there and were told to catch one of the hens that roamed freely. We were shown how to put her head between two nails in a board on the ground and hold her with one hand while we chopped off her head with a hatchet held in the other hand. I was glad I was one of the few who made a clean cut with the first blow and watched the headless chicken, like the other unfortunate creatures, run around the barnyard spouting blood till she expired. We all learned how to dip the corpses in scalding water, pluck and eviscerate them, and we all ate chicken for many days afterward. I was a bit uncomfortable with the whole thing, but I was a well-trained omnivore, and by age twelve I knew I had to be tough and that certain animals were put here for humans to eat. We had to eat them or we would be unhealthy.

A few weeks later, we all went down to the farm again. There were horses and cows and fields of beans and wheat under a beautiful blue sky, and we were brought to the barn where a cow was standing alone, in the middle of the wooden floor. She was one of the dairy cows, and Tom (the owner-director of the camp and the farm, a handsome Dartmouth-educated outdoorsman we all admired enormously) informed us that she could not give enough milk and we would therefore be using her for meat. He held a rifle in his hand and pointed to a precise spot on her head where the bullet would have to hit so that she would fall. He asked if one of the older boys would like to try making the shot. One boy raised his hand, took the rifle, aimed, and fired a bullet into her head at point-blank range while we all stood and watched. The cow jolted but continued standing. Tom gave the rifle to another of the older boys who wanted to try, and he also fired a bullet into her head. Again she jolted upon the impact but continued to stand there, blinking.

Then Tom took the rifle, aimed, and fired. I was astounded as the cow instantly crashed to the floor, feces and urine gushing from her rear near where I stood. Tom immediately grabbed a long knife, jumped astride her prostrate body, and with a great strong stroke, cut her head almost completely off. I was amazed at how far the blood shot out of her open neck, propelled by her still-beating heart, long red liquid arcs flying far through the air and splattering all around us as her body convulsed on the blood-soaked floor. We all watched silently as she finally stopped moving and bleeding, and many of us had to wipe our blood-spattered arms and legs. While I stood in shock and horror at what I had just witnessed, Tom wiped his brow and calmly explained that the meat would be no good if her heart didn’t pump the blood out of her flesh; it would be soggy and useless. We spent the next hour or so disemboweling her body, pulling out all the different organs, identifying them and holding them. I noticed how the pools of blood coagulated into large globs of red jelly on the wooden floor. Tom at one point called us over to show us a part of her anatomy he held in his hand. She apparently had something wrong with her ovaries and he was showing us the defect, telling us that was why she had to be killed. We all finally got the large edible parts into the back of a truck to be taken to a butcher; we would eat her flesh for the rest of the month. Some of the boys took souvenirs: teats, tail, eyes, brain.

The following summer I again attended Camp Challenge, and though I enjoyed the hiking, canoeing, and outdoor living, I was a bit anxious when, a few weeks into the session, Tom again told everyone to walk down to the organic dairy farm. Again, there was a cow singled out, standing in front of the barn on that gorgeous summer day. It would be her last day, and she looked very uncomfortable. Tom said he didn’t want to do it in the barn this year; we would bring her up to a flat grassy area a few hundred yards away. We put a rope around her neck and tried to pull her along with us as we walked up the little hill. She didn’t want to go, and resisted strongly. The harder we pulled, the more strongly she resisted. I was surprised at her strength. There were probably thirty or so kids pulling on that rope and we could hardly get her to move at all. Seeing we wouldn’t be successful that way, Tom got a heavy chain, tied it around her neck, and attached it to the back of his four-wheel drive truck. We all rode in the back or walked along as the truck pulled her, still strongly resisting, up the hill. Then an incredible thing happened. We were getting close to the flat area, the cow still resisting with all her strength, the wheels steadily turning, when suddenly the chain snapped, the truck lurched forward, and we in the truck all fell down! The cow stood there in the road, her head at an oblique angle, looking up at us. As I saw her standing there, mute, and yet expressing herself so profoundly, I wished we could just leave her alone and let her live. Still, I believed she was our food.this was her only purpose. The tension between seeing her as a being and seeing her as meat was intense. I don’t remember much of what happened after that, except that we did somehow get her up to the flat spot and proceeded to shoot her, bleed her, disembowel her, send her to the butcher, and eat her during the following weeks. When we did it this time, though, I wasn’t shocked, because I’d seen it before. I had lost my feelings.

Seeds of Understanding

For nine more years, I continued, undaunted, to eat the flesh, milk, and eggs of animals. I simply did not know one could survive without doing so, and I had never met anyone who ate a plant-based diet. When I went away to Colby College in Maine and heard of vegetarianism, something inside me was kindled, but the programming of my inherited omnivorism was still far too strong to have me question my fundamental eating habits.

Then, while at Colby in 1974, my junior year, I heard of The Farm in Tennessee, a relatively newly formed spiritual community of about eight hundred people, mainly from San Francisco. The more I read about The Farm, the more intrigued I became, and one of the things that intrigued me most about The Farm was that everyone there was a vegetarian. It was a vegan community, actually (though that word was not yet in commom usage), for they were vegetarian not for health reasons, but for ethical and spiritual reasons, and they ate no animal products whatsoever, not even eggs, dairy products, or honey. I had yet knowingly even to meet a vegetarian in my life at that point, but I saw in the books published by The Farm pictures of happy, healthy-looking and highly creative people living with a mission to demonstrate a more sustainable and harmonious way of living. I did my senior thesis in Organizational Behavior on The Farm, examining the theory and practice of a community based on cooperation rather than competition, sharing rather than owning, and compassion rather than oppression. It was an eye- and heart-opening project for me to study their way of living. Success was measured in terms of spiritual values rather than material values, emphasizing quality of life and service to humanity and to all life rather than the accumulation of wealth and things. Their purpose was clearly stated: “We’re here to help save the world!”

In my last two years at Colby I felt a major shift happening within me. I hungered for a deeper connection with nature and with spirituality, and began exploring meditation and both Eastern and Western spiritual traditions. One book from the late nineteenth century stood out: Cosmic Consciousness by R. M. Bucke. In this book, which had a profound impact on me, the author introduced the idea that while most people operate with what he termed self consciousness - an unsatisfactory state of self-preoccupation - certain people had attained what he termed cosmic consciousness. Bucke maintained that this higher level of consciousness, which is marked by moral elevation, intellectual illumination, spiritual wisdom, and loss of the fear of death, is the next stage of human evolution. When I read these words, the world of careers that awaited after graduation looked like a bleak and unfulfilling distraction from the real goal of living, which had to be to reach a higher level of consciousness than the narrow pursuit of self-interest I saw around me. When I talked about these ideas with my brother, he responded with whole-hearted agreement. Together we formulated a plan of action.

Leaving Home

In the late summer after graduating from Colby in 1975, my brother Ed and I, aged twenty and twenty-two, decided to go on a spiritual pilgrimage. With small backpacks and large yearnings, we left our parents’ home in Massachusetts. I longed to go deeper spiritually, to discover directly the truth of myself, and to understand this life on earth more fully by consciously seeking an escape from the prison of self-consciousness through spiritual discipline.

We discovered a book about the life and teachings of Ramana Maharshi (1879.1950), a sage from South India who recommended meditating continually on the question “Who am I?” as a way of achieving spiritual understanding. This practice is based on the understanding that what we are is not merely a physical body, or feelings, thoughts, or beliefs, and that it is possible to directly experience the truth that we are, which transcends conditioning, delusion, and physical death. We need only inquire as deeply and authentically as possible into this question of who or what we actually are.

This was my focus as we traveled across the countryside, going west.perhaps, we thought, to California. After a few weeks we had gotten as far as Buffalo, and I was feeling the effect of the new experience of meditation and self-inquiry. The deeper I was able to go with this inquiry, the more profoundly I felt my connection with the trees, birds, and people I saw, and the more open I felt to our shared kinship. “What is this ‘me’ exactly, that wants always to be protected and fulfilled?” I kept asking, “and that sees itself as separate?”

In Buffalo, we decided to head south and not look for any car rides at all, simply walking fifteen to twenty miles a day, from one little town to the next, entrusting ourselves as completely as possible into the care of the universe. We had no money and stayed mostly on the floors of churches in the towns we passed through, yet food always somehow presented itself to us. I became increasingly convinced of the truth of the teaching to seek first the Kingdom of God, for then all else shall be added unto you, as minor miracles unfolded practically every day in the form of fortuitous coincidences and meetings with people who seemed to us to be angels. Ironically, they often thought we were angels. Our security seemed to be our total vulnerability and, perhaps, the force field of the inquiry on which we focused.

I found my heart opening to others and wanting to help them. Sometimes that help was in learning to receive, and other times it was in being generous with our time and energy to help and counsel people who would naturally confide in us and seek our advice. We spent several hours every day sitting quietly, contemplating and inquiring into this seemingly infinite and impossible question, “Who am I?” The question still filled my mind as we walked for hours on end. Why do I think I am in this body only, and not in the body of that person or dog? Like me, they each have self-interest and strive to get what they like and avoid what they dislike. I found myself loosening an old tight grip on an idea that I am fundamentally separate, and began to see the same “I” in others. I could look through their eyes, understand their perspective, and feel their feelings. This began to have consequences.

At one point a friendly man directed us to a quaint little summer cabin on a stream where he said we could spend a few quiet days if we wanted to. We walked there and settled in, but there was no food so we started foraging. We found lots of wild carrots and some cattail roots, neither of which were appetizing, and since there were fishing poles there and I had learned to fish at Camp Challenge, I decided to catch a few fish.

It was drizzling, and I put the first fish I caught into my raincoat pocket, confident he would die before too long. When I caught a second fish, I put her into the other pocket. I went back to the cabin to cook supper, quite proud of myself. The cattail roots and wild carrots were cooking and I went to clean the fish, but to my dismay they were both still alive and flipping about convulsively. I realized that I was killing them, but they were not dead yet, so the old patterns kicked in and I grabbed one and slammed him down hard against the floor. Like waking from a nightmare, I could not believe what I was doing. Yet I did not think I could stop. The fish was still alive! Two more times I had to slam him against the floor, and then the other fish as well, before I could clean them, cook them, and we could eat them for dinner.

I could feel their terror and pain, and the violence I was committing against these unfortunate creatures, and I vowed never to fish again. The self-inquiry worked relentlessly to expose my conditioned behavior and hypocrisy. The old programming that they were “just fish” completely fell away, and I saw with fresh eyes what was actually happening, and how I had entered their world violently and deceitfully with intent to harm. Here I was on a spiritual pilgrimage, trying with all my heart to directly understand the deeper truths of being, yet I was acting contrary to this by first tricking the fish with a lure hiding a cruel barbed hook, and then killing them.

The next day Ed and I walked on, and though I still knew little about being a vegetarian, I began to think it would be a better- even a necessary - way to live. Walking on the small backcountry roads, we wended our way south through New York and into Pennsylvania, then across Pennsylvania into West Virginia. Most every evening we would look up a local minister and stay in a church, and sometimes be offered a meal as well. We also stayed in rescue missions, jails, homes, communes, fields, and forests. Thanks to Johnny Appleseed, our little packs were almost always filled with apples, and we would occasionally see abandoned gardens with ripe zucchini. I found myself beginning to minimize eating meat when it was offered, though I worried I might not get enough protein if I refused it completely.

Dogs were an occasional threat as we walked along the backcountry roads, I suppose because they would perceive us as strangers invading their territory. One morning as we walked by a house in rural West Virginia, a large German shepherd emerged without barking and walked behind us. I shivered when I suddenly felt his nose touch the back of my leg. We walked many miles and he stayed right with us, a beautiful animal, friendly and energetic, always running before us and acting like our protector. We stopped for lunch on a little hill above the road and ate a few apples and then meditated for about a half hour as we usually did. The dog sat quietly with us, looking alertly into the distance and radiating a profound sense of peace and power. We were quite in awe of this dog! He was clearly an accomplished meditator. We continued walking and, coming around a bend in the road, we saw a house on a hill above us - and a large dog who immediately rushed down the hill right at us, looking like he meant business. Our German shepherd friend was at the moment a few hundred yards behind us, and what a thrill it was to see him streaking from behind us across the hill and bowling the other charging dog over before he could reach us! After receiving some stern growls, the other dog ran back up to his house and we three continued on together, enjoying each other’s company enormously, until the great dog eventually looked at us, turned, and trotted back toward his home. I wondered how anyone could fail to be touched by the spirit of this being - yet if he was kept in a cage or, as in China, seen only as a piece of meat to be eaten or, like a coyote or wolf, as a nuisance to be shot, his presence and individuality would be completely invisible.

Our long walk south continued through the hills of West Virginia and into eastern Kentucky, and then into Tennessee. People thought we were on an adventure to see the world, but for us it was an inner journey. Meditation and self-inquiry were the focus of every day, always coming back to the present moment and striving to approach cosmic consciousness. I felt certain that more elevated levels of consciousness than the ones I had experienced and saw displayed in people must be potentially available. Spiritual teachers and certain poets spoke clearly and passionately of their existence.

As the weeks went on, we gave up one thing after another. Extra shoes and spare clothes were all donated one by one, gradually lightening the load in our backpacks. It felt wonderfully liberating to let go of less physically bulky attachments as well, like the little address book with some friends around the country I thought we could visit on our journey. I discarded it early on in upstate New York, and soon after we gave away a $200 emergency fund we had in the form of four $50 bills hidden in our packs. I took my glasses off as well and put them away, which was quite a challenge, since my prescription was strong, with 20/400 vision in my better eye! The world was blurry for a few weeks but began clearing up noticeably as my eyes and mind gradually began to recover their natural ability to see again. I began realizing that it was my habit of wearing glasses and contacts that had caused my vision to deteriorate and would have made me a lifelong customer of the optometry industry. Though it was a bit frightening at first to remove those artificial barriers between the world and myself, it became increasingly liberating, and today I haven’t worn corrective lenses for over twenty-five years.

As the golden autumn days rolled by and we continued walking south, I began to feel more alive than I ever had before. It was as if layers of armor were peeling away. Waves of pure joy would suddenly sweep over me and I would feel as if my heart were absolutely bursting with gladness. It was a joy that seemed to have little relation to what I had always thought would bring happiness. We had no money, virtually no possessions, and no idea where the next meal or lodging was coming from, and so why would these unexplainable waves bubble up from within so vividly? One thing was certain: we were living our life, not the life that had been dictated by media images or by parents, teachers, relatives, and authority figures. It was perhaps the essential joy of being that arises spontaneously when we are true to our inner calling to evolve. It seemed to create a field of freedom and blessing around us that was protective and almost palpable.

The quest for understanding was everything. We somehow knew not to try to hang on to anything. I remember one Sunday in a small West Virginia town, when we were asked to give the morning lesson to the Sunday School children and we told them that we had found the truth of what Jesus taught us: Seek first the Kingdom of God and everything else shall be added unto you. Afterward, the church took up a special collection and gave us a surprise gift of $30 as we walked on to the next little town. The following day, after we bought two $5 lunches in a restaurant with the $30 windfall, we gave the waitress the remaining $20 as a tip and walked on again, pockets empty and hearts free. Once, when we had not eaten for quite a while and had nothing at all in our packs, I saw a plastic package up ahead by the side of the road. It was a fresh sandwich! We ate every bite as slowly and thankfully as we could. In all the months of walking, we never went seriously hungry.

Seeds of Community

Eventually we were somehow guided to a newly formed commune of about a dozen people in central Kentucky. They greeted us warmly, and we learned they were all vegetarians and were affiliated with The Farm in Tennessee! We learned how to cook soybeans and first heard of something called “tofu.” Our hosts told us they wore vegetarian shoes and tried to minimize the suffering they caused to animals. I had been dimly aware of chickens pecking each other’s eyes out in overcrowded factory farm cages, of calves being branded and castrated and pigs screaming in slaughterhouses, and I had seen the transport trucks filled with cattle, but I knew little of the details, or how to prepare healthy plant-based meals. In an atmosphere of openness and caring we talked of all these things. We worked and ate together, and played and meditated together, and it began to seem absurd and almost barbaric to even consider dining on the flesh of animals. I vowed within myself to be a vegetarian.

Soon we were heading south toward The Farm in Tennessee, continuing our pilgrimage and our practice. We eventually reached The Farm and stayed there several weeks. The experience absolutely sealed my vegetarianism and was worth the months of walking that it took to get there. Close to a thousand people, mostly living as married couples with kids in self-built homes, had created a community on a large piece of beautifully rolling farm and forest land. People wore their hair long as a statement for naturalness and against the military mindset that had been ravaging Vietnam. It was set up legally as a monastery, and it was strictly vegan to avoid harming animals, people, and the environment. The Farm had its own school, telephone system, soy dairy, publishing and printing company, rock band, Sunday morning church service, and Plenty, a blossoming outreach program that provided vegan food and health-care services both in Central America and in the ghettos of North America. Stephen Gaskin, the spiritual leader, was a student of Zen master Suzuki Roshi, founder of the San Francisco Zen Center.

The food was delicious, the atmosphere unlike anything I had ever experienced. People were friendly, energetic, bright, and there was a powerful sense of purpose: of working to create a better world, of sharing together and honoring each other and the local community. The soy dairy made tofu, soy milk, soy burgers, and “Ice Bean,” the first soy ice cream, and the schoolhouse for the children served all vegan meals. The kids, vegan from birth, grew tall, strong, and healthy. Gardens, fields, and greenhouses provided food for everyone, and people worked on different crews, building, repairing, cooking, teaching, farming, and together making The Farm remarkably self-reliant. I worked in the book printing house, taking copies of The Farm’s extremely popular Spiritual Midwifery Guide off the press. Women came from all over the country to The Farm’s spiritual birthing center to have their babies delivered by The Farm’s experienced and loving midwives. Women who were thinking of having abortions were told that if they had the baby at The Farm and decided not to keep the child, then he or she would be adopted by one of the couples on The Farm. Though many women came with this option in mind, never did a woman decide not to keep a baby after having gone through the birth process with The Farm’s caring midwives.

I was deeply touched by the loving attentiveness people showed each other, and by the courage the whole community displayed in running almost completely contrary to the values of the larger society. The people there, like myself, had all been raised in a culture of domination that killed and abused animals for food, clothing, entertainment, and research, and that emphasized competition, private property, consumerism, and limited liability for large corporations. We had been raised to view the earth, animals, and even people as commodities to be used by the market for self-centered profit. The Farm was a living example of veganism, emphasizing gentleness, compassion, and respect for all creatures, a life of voluntary simplicity and appropriate technology, sharing resources, and finding happiness through strong, healthy family and social relationships, helping others, spiritual growth, and creative expression, rather than through personal aggrandizement. To me, it seemed these people were going much farther toward actually living the teachings espoused by Jesus than mainstream religions were. The lived ideal was that all life is sacred, and the attempt was to consciously create a community and lifestyle that reflected this ideal and would be an inspiration to others and a model for sustainable living. Needless to say, banking, corporate, and governmental institutions were all extremely hostile to The Farm. Though it is still going strong, it’s smaller and somewhat less radical than it was in its heyday in the 1970s and early ’80s.

Though we seriously considered joining The Farm, we eventually received intuitive guidance to walk farther south to Huntsville, Alabama. When we got there, we discovered the local Zen center, where we could devote our energy to meditation practice, sitting about eight hours daily and helping with the upkeep of the center. This was a perfect situation for us, and we were able to focus on our meditation practice and receive excellent instruction and guidance. Over the next several years, I continued living in Buddhist meditation centers in Atlanta and then in San Francisco, but loosened up somewhat on my vegan diet, since most people at these centers ate eggs and dairy products, and I was, at that point, unaware of the extent of the cruelty involved in these foods.

In 1980, while I was living at Kagyu Droden Kunchab, a Vajrayana (Tibetan Buddhist) meditation center in San Francisco, I had the auspicious opportunity to meet the Dalai Lama and present to him a translation of an ancient Tibetan practice text I had worked on and helped our center publish. Earlier in the day the Dalai Lama had conducted a ceremony with us in which we all took the Bodhisattva Vow, which is considered the foundation of Vajrayana meditation practice: the vow to attain complete spiritual enlightenment in order to be of maximum benefit to living beings. A difficult inconsistency for me and for many others was that while we were vegetarians, many of the Tibetan lamas we sought instruction from ate meat regularly. Even the Dalai Lama himself, while strongly condemning hunting and all forms of animal abuse and encouraging vegetarianism among both the Tibetan people and Western Buddhist practitioners, was eating animal flesh every other day, purportedly on the advice of physicians. Perhaps the reasons may have been political as well, because as the highest and most visible religious authority in the Tibetan tradition, it would take considerable courage to depart from the practice of most of the lamas and follow the ethical vegetarianism enjoined by the original Buddhist teachings. Fortunately, in April 2005, he displayed this remarkable political courage, and news services reported, “Saying he has recently turned to a vegetarian diet, the Dalai Lama called on people to stop killing and destroying animals.”1 Because of the Dalai Lama’s eminence as an exemplar of peace, this is good news for all of us and there are encouraging signs that young Tibetans in India are moving in the same direction also.2

SonggwangSa Temple

In 1984 I had my second opportunity to live in a vegan community. This time it was an ancient Zen monastery in South Korea. I traveled there and participated as a monk in the summer’s three-month intensive retreat. We rose at 2:40 A.M. to begin the day of meditation, practicing silence and simplicity, and eating vegan meals of rice, soup, vegetables, and occasional tofu, and retiring after the evening meditation at 9:00 P.M. The meals were eaten in silence with each of us using a set of four bowls: three for the rice, soup, and vegetables and the fourth for tea, which we used to clean our bowls and then drink, so that not even a single grain of rice would go to waste.

The community consisted of about seventy monks, with some lay people who helped with certain tasks, and the vegan roots there were old and deep. For many centuries in that temple, people had lived the same way, meditating and living a life of nonviolence. There was no silk or leather in any clothing, and though I was there in the summer mosquito season, it was absolutely not an option to kill a mosquito or any creature. We simply used a mosquito net in the meditation hall. Through the months of silence and meditation, sitting still for seemingly endless hours, a deep and joyful feeling emerged within, a sense of solidarity with all life and of becoming more sensitive to the energy of situations.

When after four months I returned to the bustle of American life, I felt a profound shift had occurred, and the vegetarianism I’d been practicing for about nine years transformed spontaneously and naturally into veganism with roots that felt as if they extended to the center of my heart. Until then, I had mistakenly thought that my daily vegan purchases of food, clothing, and so forth were my personal choices, simply options. Now I could clearly see that not treating animals as commodities was not an option or a choice, for animals simply are not commodities. It would be as unthinkable to eat or wear or justify abusing an animal as it would be to eat or wear or justify abusing a human. The profound relief and empowerment of completely realizing and understanding this in my heart has been enriching beyond words.

When I returned from Korea I was able to begin teaching humanities and philosophy courses at a college in the San Francisco Bay Area, through connections I’d made when getting a masters degree at San Francisco State University just prior to going to Korea. After about six months of teaching I decided to apply for entrance into a Ph.D. program in the U.C. Berkeley Graduate School of Education. For this I was required to take an aptitude test, the Graduate Record Examination, and it was interesting that when the results came back they were very high. Mensa told me that the scores corresponded to an I.Q. that was in the top one-quarter of one percent of the population. In my younger years as an omnivore and non-meditator I had never scored particularly high on such tests, but it’s quite understandable. A vegan way of eating not only allows our system to run much cleaner, but more essentially, it frees us mentally to make connections. This ability is the foundation of intelligence. Regular meditative silence allows our mind to relax and connect with wellsprings of intuitive potential that also seem to increase our ability to make connections. Following a vegan diet and practicing inner silence is a powerful combination! I found, for example, that I was able to teach a full load of courses at the college and simultaneously take a full course load at Berkeley, so that I was typically juggling eight to ten courses at once. Not only did the teaching go wonderfully well, but I had only As and a couple of A-plusses in over sixty units of doctoral coursework, and my dissertation, The Role of Intuition in Education, was nominated for the Best Dissertation Award. There is nothing for me personally to be proud of or take credit for in this, because it’s just one of countless human illustrations of the underlying principle that all of us have an enormous potential that can be fulfilled as we understand and live in accordance with our intrinsic nature. The main hindrance to this is the inherited food-enforced mentality of competition and exclusion that keeps us distracted, paralyzed, and unable to make meaningful connections.

After teaching college for about six years and enjoying it immensely, I felt guided to take up an itinerant lifestyle giving concerts of original piano music and seminars on developing intuition. Though the college offered me a salary increase to stay on, I felt a strong calling to return to the open road. I had found that in the years since embarking on my pilgrimage from New England, uplifting and swirling new music had begun pouring through me on the piano, and as I focused more on the music and played publicly, it got stronger and was received with enthusiasm. Through the music, I felt my heart and inner vision opening to an inspiring spiritual energy that connected me with the earth and with the plight of both animals and our human family. The music, emerging from the mystery of inner stillness, has always seemed to be a vehicle for carrying elevating and healing energy and intuitive understanding.

Although I hadn’t been consciously aware of it at the time, while I was switching to a plant-based diet at The Farm in 1975, thousands of miles away in Switzerland, a young painter named Madeleine was simultaneously making a similar change. In 1990, while playing concerts in Europe, I met Madeleine fortuitously in a small Swiss village, and since then I have been wonderfully blessed with her presence as my life partner and loving companion.

The Power of Community

The communities we grow up in and call home affect us all profoundly. Understanding this, we can see why we view animals as commodities and often find it difficult to switch to a vegan diet and lifestyle. Our culture is completely saturated and defined by the exploitation of animals for food.

While cultures tend naturally to replicate themselves, they can and do evolve, or may be forced to change by outside pressure. The spread of the herding culture from central Asia into the Mediterranean and the Middle East and from there to Europe took several millennia and was accomplished by physical force, domination of women, and indoctrination of children, as Eisler documents in The Chalice and the Blade.3 Jeremy Rifkin’s Beyond Beef documents how the cattle culture came to North America from Europe and how European (especially British) demand for beef and its enormous financial investment in American cattle ranching supplied the capital that propelled our young country and its economy. Lynn Jacobs’ Waste of the West documents the virtually complete decimation of western grazing lands and the near eradication of Indians, bison, prairie dogs, wolves, and all non-livestock “nuisance” animals. To this day, federal and state agencies like the USDA’s “Wildlife Services” still poison, shoot, den, and trap millions of animals every year, including coyotes, bobcats, mustangs, prairie dogs, bison, beaver, raccoons, blackbirds, badgers, and bears. It is a tragedy involving unspeakable suffering.

When I was in Korea I marveled at beautiful terraced rice paddies nestled in valleys and climbing up hillsides, efficiently raising enough rice to feed the Korean people who, unlike in the U.S., could actually be seen every day in the paddies tending the crops. With U.S. and European capital investment, however, Korean culture was changing, and American food corporations and U.S. television programs and advertising were invading, creating demand for Western luxury foods, especially beef. Texas cattlemen were traveling to Korea, taking the opportunity to show investors how to convert rice paddies to cattle feedlots. Instead of feeding many people with rice, an area of land would now feed only a few rich people with beef and raise the price of rice beyond what poor people could afford, while creating the environmental nightmare of waste and pollution that modern animal agriculture always brings. The spread of the herding culture into Korea has received a strong boost from the Christian missionaries who have established a considerable presence there. It may be slowed down by the Buddhist monasteries and their teachings and example of compassion and veganism, but only to the degree they remain respected and relevant to the lives of an increasingly pressured population.

The spread of the herding culture has been going on for centuries and continues unabated today. Its wealth and willingness to use both financial pressure and physical violence make it difficult to resist, and as it spreads, so do oppression, inequality, violence, competition, and struggle. It is a culture of exploitation and predation that reinforces in all its members its core practice of herding and eating commodified animals.

To exist within the hostile environment of the herding culture, vegan communities must be strong and committed. Most, like The Farm and SonggwangSa Zen Temple, are essentially spiritual communities. Their practice of vegan living is part of a larger orientation of spiritual practice emphasizing compassionate living, cultivation of inner peace and harmony, and contributing to the moral regeneration of humanity. However, vegan community can also be experienced in many other places today, making the switch to veganism easier and more natural. The number of vegetarian and vegan communities is growing as a result of the proliferation of non-Western spiritual traditions here. There are a growing number of healing centers and religious retreat centers as well, emphasizing vegetarianism or veganism for reasons of both health and spiritual purification. There are also temporary communities, like animal rights and vegetarian conferences, as well as local vegetarian societies that provide knowledge and inspiration. Community support of some kind is vital, for it provides the context, examples, and practical guidance that are particularly essential in the beginning stages of switching to a more cruelty-free diet and lifestyle.

Seeds bear fruit after their kind. Both The Farm and SonggwangSa Temple are the blossoming of seeds planted by wise and compassionate people at least 2,500 years ago, and nurtured and replanted by countless dedicated people for centuries, often in the face of great adversity. The future generations of both humans and animals are depending on us to do what we can to nurture the seeds of nonviolence, intelligence, and compassion in our shared cultural garden so that they can inherit an earth that is healthy and a way of living that is based on freedom and caring. We can each be a field of freedom, and by the force of our example and intention we make it easier for those around us to do the same. The field will grow, spreading through our culture as a benevolent revolution.

While the journey I’ve been relating here is obviously unique, as all our individual journeys are, I believe the underlying pattern is universal. 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. We are all presented with the same evidence and hear the same call for mercy and justice.

Within us lie seeds of awakening and compassion that may be already sprouting. Our individual journeys of transformation and spiritual evolution call us to question who and what we’ve been told we and others are, to discover and cultivate the seeds of insight and clarity within us, and to realize the connections we’ve been taught to ignore. As we do this and as our web of journeys interweaves within our culture, cross-fertilizing and planting seeds, we can continue the transformation that is now well underway, and transcend the obsolete old paradigm that generates cycles of violence. 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.