chapter thirteen EVOLVE OR DISSOLVE

13장, 진화냐 멸종이냐

“If you have men who will exclude any of God’s creatures from the shelter of compassion and pity, then you have men who will deal likewise with their fellow men.” - St. Francis of Assisi

• "만일에 누구든지 신의 피조물들을 연민하고 불쌍히 여기지 않는다면, 그는 동료 인간들에게도 똑 같이 할 것이다." - 아씨시의 성인 프란치스코

“Without love the acquisition of knowledge only increases confusion and leads to self-destruction.” - Krishnamurti

"사랑없이 지식을 습득하는 것은 혼란만 증가시킬 뿐이며, 결국 자멸을 불러온다." - 크리스나무르티

“The only real valuable thing is intuition.” - Albert Einstein

"단 하나 진정으로 가치 있는 것은 직관력이다." - 알버트 아인슈타인.

The Two Limited Perspectives

두가지 제한적인 관점

Looking from a variety of perspectives at our animal-based meals, we discover that eating animals has consequences far beyond what we would at first suspect. Like a little boy caught tormenting frogs, our culture mumbles, “It’s no big deal,” and looks away. And yet the repercussions of our animal-based diet are a very big deal indeed, not only for the unfortunate creatures in our hands, but for us as well. Our actions reinforce attitudes, in us and in others, that amplify the ripples of those actions until they become the devastating waves of insensitivity, conflict, injustice, brutality, disease, and exploitation that rock our world today.

우리가 동물성 음식을 여러가지 관점에서 바라보면, 동물을 먹는 것이, 우리가 처음에 의심스러워 했을 것을 넘어서는 결과를 불러온다는 것을 발견한다.

Even those who acknowledge that our treatment of animals is indeed a great evil may feel that it is, like the other evils in our world, simply a product of human limitations, such as ignorance, pride, selfishness, fear, and so forth. According to this view, the horror we inflict on animals is a problem, but not a fundamental cause of our problems. and, because it’s a problem for animals, who are less important than us humans, it’s a lesser problem.

Only by going beyond “it’s no big deal” and “it’s just a problem like our other problems” will we be able to step outside our conditioning and see the full import of our relentless abuse of animals, recognizing it as the motivating, hidden fury behind our global crisis.

The Cycle of Violence

There is much talk today about stopping the cycle of violence, which is typically understood as the “hurt people hurt people” syndrome. Children who are violated and abused will, when they become adults, tend to violate and abuse their children in a self-perpetuating cycle of violence that rolls through generations. We address it by trying to stop the child abuse, and fail to see the deeper dynamic. This human cycle of violence will not stop until we stop the underlying violence, the remorseless violence we commit against animals for food. We teach this behavior and this insensitivity to all our children in a subtle, unintentional, but powerful form of culturally approved child abuse. Our actions condition our consciousness; therefore forcing our children to eat animal foods wounds them deeply. It requires them to disconnect from the food on their plates, from their feelings, from animals and nature, and sets up conditions of disease and psychological armoring. The wounds persist and are passed on to the next generation.

Compelling our children to eat animal foods gives birth to the “hurt people hurt people” syndrome. Hurt people hurt animals without compunction in daily food rituals. We will always be violent toward each other as long as we are violent toward animals.how could we not be? We carry the violence in our stomachs, in our blood, and in our consciousness. Covering it up and ignoring it doesn’t make it disappear. The more we pretend and hide it, the more, like a shadow, it clings to us and haunts us. The human cycle of violence is the ongoing projection of this shadow.

The Shadow

In Jungian terms, our culture’s enormous, intractable, overriding shadow is the cruelty and violence toward animals it requires, practices, eats, and meticulously hides and denies. As mentioned in Chapter 1, according to Jungian theory, the shadow archetype represents those aspects of ourselves that we refuse to acknowledge, the part of ourselves that we have disowned. To itself, the shadow is what the self is not, and in this case it is our own cruelty and violence that we deny and repress. We tell ourselves that we are good, just, upright, kind and gentle people. We just happen to enjoy eating animals, which is okay because they were put here for us to use and we need the protein. Yet the extreme cruelty and violence underlying our meals is undeniable, and so our collective shadow looms larger and more menacing the more we deny its existence, sabotaging our efforts to grow spiritually and to collectively evolve a more awakened culture.

As Jungian psychotherapy emphasizes, the shadow will be heard! This is why we eventually do to ourselves what we do to animals. The shadow is a vital and undeniable force that cannot, in the end, be repressed. The tremendous psychological forces required to confine, mutilate, and kill millions of animals every day, and to keep the whole bloody slaughter repressed and invisible, work in two ways. One way is to numb, desensitize, and armor us, which decreases our intelligence and ability to make connections. The other is to force us to act out exactly what we are repressing. This is done through projection. We create an acceptable target to loathe for being violent, cruel, and tyrannical - the very qualities that we refuse to acknowledge in ourselves.and then we attack it. With this understanding of the immense violence toward animals that we keep hidden and the implacable shadow this creates, the existence of 50,000 nuclear warheads1 becomes comprehensible. Our “never-ending” war against terrorism becomes not just comprehensible but inevitable, as does our appalling destruction of ecosystems, the rampant exploitation of the world’s poor, and the suicide, addiction, and disease that ravage countless human lives.

The shadow is the self that does the dirty work for us so we can remain good and acceptable in our own eyes. The more we repress and disconnect, the more inner disturbance we will carry that we must project on an outer evil force, an enemy or scapegoat of some kind, against whom we can direct our denied violence. We will see these enemies as the essence of evil and despise them, for they represent aspects of our self that we cannot face. In our quest to eliminate them we are driven to build the most hideous weapons imaginable, developing them throughout the centuries so that today we have the capacity to destroy all of humanity hundreds of times over. This is not just something in our past, like the generations of inquisitions, crusades, and wars. We eat more animals, project more enemies, and create more weapons than ever before. Every minute, our slaughterhouses kill 20,000 land animals and the Pentagon spends $760,000.2 This huge expenditure on maintaining and developing systems to harm and destroy other people is a particularly egregious manifestation of the tragic suppression of intelligence caused by eating animal foods. The 2004 U.S. military budget of $400 billion, spent by just five percent of the world’s population, is over forty percent of the entire world’s annual military budget of $950 billion. These are enormous resources to be squandering on death and violence. It’s estimated that an annual expenditure of just $237.5 billion for ten years would enable us to provide global health care; eliminate starvation and malnutrition; provide clean water and shelter for everyone; remove land mines; eliminate nuclear weapons; stop deforestation; prevent global warming, ozone depletion and acid rain; retire the paralyzing debt of developing nations; prevent soil erosion; produce safe, clean energy; stop overpopulation; and eliminate illiteracy!3 Yet we lack the will and understanding to use our resources constructively. Instead, we frenetically expand our bloated arsenal of biological weapons, chemical weapons, nuclear weapons, psychological weapons, and secret high-tech weapons. The disconnect between those who use these weapons and their intended victims also characterizes our cruel slaughter and abuse of animals.

The bomb pilots, generals, and politicians who make the decisions and administer the weapons never actually see the horror and agony the weapons cause. As a culture we’ve learned well how to dissociate from the violence we inflict on others because we all practice it when we eat animal foods: somewhere, because of our decision, an abused and terrified creature is attacked and stabbed to death. In war and in food production, we use similar euphemisms, like “harvesting” animals, or “collateral damage,” and we shield ourselves from the carnage of either the slaughterhouses or the bombed villages and cities. Turning away from our violence against animals, we naturally sanitize and gloss over our war violence against other humans as well. We are shown by our mass media complex the evil enemies who require us to do all the bombing and killing, and we not only agree to it; we are unconsciously instigating and demanding it through the denial and projection of the immense shadow we create through our eating habits.

Every day, we cause over thirty million birds and mammals and forty-five million fish to be fatally attacked so we can eat them,4 and it’s universally considered to be good food for good people. With these meals, we feed our shadow, which grows strong and bold as it gorges itself on our repressed grief, guilt, and revulsion. Strangely enough, the larger and more powerful the shadow becomes, the harder it is to see, though it is literally not just under our noses, but actually in our noses and all our cells. It is well known in psychotherapy that it’s liberating but difficult to see our own shadow archetypes and how they operate. We instinctively resist it, which is why the undercover videos of animal abuse on factory farms and slaughterhouses are mostly watched by vegans who never eat animal foods. The shadow is by definition what we are actively repressing, so it’s inevitable that we avoid experiences that might trigger its coming into consciousness. Even Jungian scholars who spend their time writing about the shadow fail to see the greatest shadow of all, the shadow that springs from our abuse of animals, because they’re typically eating and exploiting animals like everyone else. We become spiritually and psychologically free only as we are able to see and integrate the shadow aspects of ourselves, and this will only be possible when we stop eating animal foods, relaxing and releasing the irresistible need to block our awareness. In unchaining animals, we unchain ourselves.

Ends and Means

All sentient beings have interests, and we have created complex social and legal systems to ensure that our interests are not violated, though our ability to ensure this is strongly determined by our race, class, gender, and other factors of privilege. To be physically confined, to be subjected to painful or damaging attacks, to be starved or stolen from, or killed, or forced to perform degrading, unnatural actions all violate our interests, and anyone who does this to us will face legal and social consequences. Yet we act in precisely these ways against animals on an unimaginably massive scale with impunity. We want our interests protected, but we don’t care about theirs. This is our unconfronted shadow and the real cause of the cycle of violence beyond which we must evolve or perish. Our perishing, though tragic, would be an enormous blessing for most of the animals of this earth. That deeply disturbing thought should motivate us to examine ourselves and change.

We will only survive and thrive if we recognize the central power of our meals to shape our consciousness. Food is eaten and becomes the physical vehicle of consciousness, and consciousness chooses what to incorporate into itself from itself. Do we cultivate and eat fear or love? Terrorized animals or nurtured plants? We cannot build a tower of love with bricks of cruelty.

Mahatma Gandhi and other spiritually mature people have emphasized that the means we use and the ends we attain are one and the same. They can never be different. The devoted peace activist A. J. Muste once said, “There is no way to peace. Peace is the way.” The path of spiritual evolution is the path of focusing on this moment, and being the evolution and positive transformation we long to see in the world. To live in peace we must be peace. To experience the sweetness of being loved, we must be loving.

All of us can prove this in our own lives. Our love, to actually be love, must be acted upon and lived. Developing our capacity for love is not only the means of evolution; it is the end as well, and when we fully embody love, we will know the truth of our oneness with all life. This makes us free. Love brings freedom, joy, power, grace, peace, and the blessed fulfillment of selfless service. Our true nature, our future self, beckons irresistibly as an inner calling to awaken our capacity for love, which is understanding. With love and understanding awakening in us, compassion expands to include ever-larger circles of beings. Compassion may be seen as the highest form of love, for it is the love of the divine whole for all its parts and is reflected in the love of the parts for each other. It includes the urge to act to relieve the suffering of apparent others, and this urge requires us to evolve greater wisdom and inner freedom to relieve suffering more effectively. Compassion is thus both the fruit of evolution and the driving force behind it. Love yearns for greater love.

Evolution is the essence of life. All being is evolving, growing, transforming, and so the urge to evolve permeates our being. We thrive on opportunities to grow emotionally, artistically, intellectually, and spiritually. Our life is precious because it is such an opportunity. Our lives have meaning to the degree we answer the universal and undeniable call to evolve, the call to love.

Evolution implies not only change but transformation. In world mythology, when heroes refuse the call to leave home to take the evolutionary journey, they become sick. For us as a culture it is the same. We must shake the old stagnation and comfortable disconnections out of our minds and bodies, embrace the evolutionary urge within us to awaken compassion and intuitive wisdom, and live our lives in accord with the truth that we are connected intimately with all living beings. Achieving this transformation means living the truth of love and authentically comprehending our interconnectedness, and not merely talking about it. It means changing our thinking and our behavior.how we view animals and what we eat. As we recognize our shadow and become free of it, compassion returns and we naturally stop feeding it with our diet of hidden terror.

The Intuitive Imperative

The lesson is quite basic. If we can’t stop the cruelty of eating animal foods, how can we presume to develop the sensitivity, the spiritual consciousness, the joy, peace, and creative freedom that are our potential? Our evolution requires that we develop our intuition, the higher, post rational knowing that sees and makes wholes from parts, and that lifts us out of the prison box of self-preoccupation. Intuition is direct knowing, unmediated by the illusion of an essentially separate self, and it is knowing that brings healing, for it sees the larger wholes that the self, through logical analysis alone, can never see. Analysis and rationality rely on dividing and comparing, and are helpful tools only when subordinated to the wisdom and compassion inherent in the direct knowing of intuition. Without intuition, rationality and analysis become profoundly irrational; they become tools of exploitation and conflict, agents of confused self-destruction. Lacking intuition’s guiding sense of compassion and interconnectedness, they easily serve the hysterical fear, aggression, and scapegoating projection that invariably arise when we commodify and eat animals.

Not surprisingly, rationality and analysis are prized in our academic and educational institutions while intuition is ignored and repressed. Intuition liberates, connects, illumines.and threatens our herding culture’s underlying paradigm of violent oppression of animals and of the feminine. Intuition sees the shadow clearly, and disarms it by embracing it and not feeding it. It sees the animal hidden in the hot dog, ice cream, and omelette, feels her misery and fear, and embraces her with love. Intuition opens the door to healing. It never sees any living being as an object to be used but sees all beings as unique and complete expressions of an infinite universal presence, to be honored, respected, learned from, and celebrated. Intuition is Sophia, the beloved wisdom we yearn for and seek.

The evolutionary imperative is an intuitive imperative. Intuition is the fruit of spiritual ripening, and it is cultivated by practicing compassion, which is the sacred masculine. The ability to leave our self-preoccupied perspective and see things from the perspective of others gives rise to compassion. Through this we learn to leave the imprisoning illusion of being an isolated object, and enter into the ecstatic knowing of the interconnectedness of all life. This can bring the understanding that life is consciousness and that consciousness is, in essence, eternally free, complete, radiant, and serene. Our true nature is thus undefiled and resplendent.

We are not predatory by nature, but we’ve been taught that we are, in the most potent way possible: we’ve been raised from birth to eat like predators. We’ve thus been initiated into a predatory culture and been forced to see ourselves at the deepest levels as predators. Farming animals is simply a refined and perverse form of predation in which the animals are confined before being attacked and killed. It doesn’t stop with animals, however. As we all know in our bones, there is a predatory quality to our economic system, and competition underlies all our institutions. We prey upon each other. It may not be obvious from within our planet’s dominant society, but our culture and our corporations and other institutions act in ways that can only be described as predatory vis-a-vis those who are less industrialized, less wealthy, and less able to protect themselves. As we prey upon and “harvest” animals, we use and prey upon people, employing euphemisms according to the situation as “foreign aid,” “privatization,” “advertising,” “spreading the gospel,” “capitalism,” “education,” “free trade,” “lending,” “fighting terrorism,” “development,” and countless other agreeable expressions. The tender loving heart of our true nonpredatory nature is troubled by all this, but it shines unceasingly, and though it’s perhaps covered over by our conditioning, it nevertheless inspires the selfless giving, compassion, and enlightenment that our spiritual traditions expound.

Some Traditions of Intuition and Compassion

Although our religious institutions have generally mirrored the prevailing cultural paradigm that sees animals as commodities and have thus offered them little real relief in their suffering, there are nevertheless many spiritual teachings and traditions existing within the world’s religions that exhort us to abandon the predatory mentality and to cultivate compassion for animals. These spiritual traditions also fundamentally agree in their emphasis on intuition, or direct inner knowing, as an essential element of spiritual discipline and practice. This is true not only with regard to Eastern traditions such as the various forms of Buddhist, Hindu, Jain, and Taoist practice, but also in the more esoteric Western traditions, such as those of the Sufis, cabalists, Christian mystics, and others. These traditions typically encourage their adherents to cultivate intuition, recognizing that through compassion inspired by intuitive revelation we develop spiritually and attain wisdom, inner peace, and freedom.

The spiritual traditions also fundamentally agree that intuition is fostered by a twofold discipline. One aspect is consciously cultivating compassion as the primary motivation in our outer lives and living this as ethical conduct. The other is practicing mindfulness, awareness, and silent receptivity in our inner lives. The two are seen to reinforce each other and lead to spiritual wisdom.

The first universal aspect of spiritual cultivation is compassion and its reflection.ethical behavior. Religions are fundamentally concerned with the ethics of human conduct. This is because they are repositories of the spiritual impulse, which at its core connects us not only with the infinite mystery that is our source, but also with all the apparently other manifestations of this source, our “neighbors”.the human family and all living beings. Authentic spiritual teachings must necessarily teach an ethics of loving-kindness, because this reflects our interconnectedness and the truth that what we give out comes back to us. It leads to the harmony in relationships that is necessary not just for social progress, but also for our individual inner peace and spiritual progress.

Compassion and ethical conduct are essential to the second universal aspect of spiritual cultivation, inner silence and mindfulness. We won’t be able to approach the state of relaxed, awake, and fully aware receptivity that authentic living depends upon if we are armoring ourselves due to acting in ways that are harmful to others. If we abuse others, and then sit quietly to reflect, meditate, pray, become open, or deepen our experience of inner serenity, we will find our mind invariably disturbed and plagued with relentless self-oriented thinking. This inner agitation, the price we pay for harming others, impedes our unfolding intuition, which is born from inner stillness and compassion.

We can see that in general, the more a culture oppresses animals, the greater its inner agitation and numbness, and the more extroverted and dominating it tends to be. This is related to the scarcity of meditation in Western cultures, where people are uncomfortable with sitting still. Quiet, open contemplation would allow the repressed guilt and violence of the animal cruelty in meals to emerge to be healed and released. Instead, the very activities that would be most beneficial to people of our herding culture are the activities that are the most studiously avoided. We have become a culture that craves noise, distraction, busyness, and entertainment at all costs. This allows our eaten violence to remain buried, blocked, denied, and righteously projected.

Spiritual traditions universally recognize that we humans yearn to enter states of awareness that are more luminous and serene, where our usual anxious and compulsive thinking diminishes and recedes into the background. This yearning has given rise to a wide range of meditation practices that help people enter the present moment more deeply and perhaps experience the transcendent reality that we might call God or the Absolute. In this experience the walls that usually separate us from others and the world begin to dissolve and we can see directly that we are not essentially separate from others, that the same light that shines in us shines in everyone. This unmediated intuitive knowing reinforces and deepens our sense of compassion.

The connection between intuition and compassion has been universally recognized in both Eastern and Western spiritual traditions, and it extends not just to other humans but to animals as well. In the Buddhist tradition, for example, intuitive wisdom is the sacred feminine and compassion is the sacred masculine, and they give rise to each other and nurture each other within all of us as our true nature and potential. It’s well known, therefore, that monks and nuns are to refrain from eating animal flesh, particularly during meditation retreats. This is basically true in the Hindu, Jain, Sikh, Baha’i, and Taoist traditions also. The Catholic monastic traditions that are the most contemplative, such as the Cistercians and Trappists, tend to require monks to abstain from animal flesh, especially during periods of extended prayer and purification.

An Example: Samadhi and Shojin

Meditation is not an exotic or specific activity. It’s a fundamental human potential and simply refers to a mind that is present, open, relaxed, and aware. It can be induced and developed by all kinds of things, such as chanting, singing, sitting quietly and attending to our breathing, mindfully walking in nature, dancing, whirling, playing music, running, repeating a prayer, gardening, and so forth. Activities that we love tend naturally to bring our mind more fully into the present moment and thus can be meditative practices.

An example of the connection between meditative practice and compassion toward animals may be seen in the concepts of samadhi and shojin in the Zen tradition. Although this is an example from a specific tradition, the underlying principles are universal and can be applied to all of us, whatever our religious inclinations may be. Samadhi refers to deep meditative stillness, in which the mind transcends its usual conflicted, anxious, busy, and noisy condition, quiets down, and becomes clear, bright, free, relaxed, and serenely poised in the present moment. Shojin is “religious abstention from animal foods” and is based on the core religious teaching of ahimsa, or harmlessness, the practice of refraining from causing harm to other sentient beings. Shojin and samadhi are seen to work together, with shojin purifying the body-mind and allowing, though certainly not guaranteeing, access to the spiritually enriching experience of samadhi.

In some Zen Buddhist traditions it is taught that there are two types of samadhi. “Absolute samadhi” refers to an inner state of one-pointed, relaxed and bright awareness in which the body is still, typically seated. The mind is totally absorbed in the present moment, and the usual inner dialogue has ceased. In “positive samadhi,”5 which is based on the experience of absolute samadhi, we are functioning in the world, walking, gardening, cooking, cleaning, and so forth, with a mind that is fully present to the experiences arising every moment. This is similar to the practice of mindfulness, and to the Taoist practice of wu wei, or “nonaction,” in which the illusion of a separate doer dissolves in the immediacy of fulfilling the potential of the present moment. In Christian terms, this may be similar to “practicing the Presence” and to the practice recommended in the admonition to “pray without ceasing,” whereas absolute samadhi may be akin to a state of profound at-one-ment with the divine.

Both absolute and positive samadhi are universal human potentials that transcend the particularities of tradition and labeling. They heal the mind and body at a deep level and reconnect us with our true nature. Because of the fear, shame, and woundedness we have all experienced, however, they seem to be difficult to attain and practice, and to require an enormous ongoing commitment to diligent inner cultivation. Entering the inner stillness of samadhi requires patiently returning our attention to the present moment, and requires that our mind be undisturbed by our outer actions. This is why the spirit of shojin, which sees animals as subjects and not as commodities to be used or eaten, is so essential on the path of spiritual evolution. The spirit of shojin is compassion and allowing others to be free, and the practice of shojin in turn liberates us from the inner mental states that accompany eating animal foods. These mental states.agitation, worry, fear, panic, despair, sadness, grief, nervousness, aggressiveness, anger, disconnectedness, despair, dullness, fogginess, and stupor.are unavoidable if we are omnivores, brought into us as vibrational frequencies with the foods we are eating, and generated within us by our own undeniably violent and harmful food choices and the psychological blocking these actions demand. These negative mental states generally make meditation a negative experience and ensure that it will not truly quiet our mind or help us reach higher levels of spiritual illumination. First we must purify our actions and stop harming vulnerable creatures. This requires mindfulness, the ancient spirit of shojin that is the foundation of veganism.

To be effective, to tame the mind, this spirit of nonviolence and compassion must be actually lived; otherwise our mind will be too disturbed to enter the inner peace of samadhi. This stillness and serenity of mind lies at the heart of spiritual life, whatever religion or non-religion we may hold to, and it requires the inner purity of a clear conscience. It allows the old inner wall, splitting “me” here from “the world” out there, to dissolve. With this, a deeper understanding of the infinite inter-connectedness of all life can blossom.

Shojin and veganism are vital because they foster the inner peace required for spiritual maturity. They are forms of inner and outer training and discipline that lay the foundation for the meditative exploration that opens us to the truth of interbeing. This is why shojin is so essential to samadhi, and why veganism and nonviolence are essential for deep prayer, meditation, and spiritual awakening. Outer compassion and inner stillness feed each other. Shojin and veganism are essential to our spiritual health because they remove a fundamental hindrance on our path.

Though veganism is often denigrated and opposed by our mainstream Western religious institutions, its spirit actually underlies them, as Steven Rosen, Norm Phelps, Keith Akers, J. R. Hyland, Andrew Linzey, Tony Campolo, Steven Webb, and many others have pointed out. Rosen reports, for example, that Mohammed is acknowledged to have eaten a strictly vegetarian diet, and that there are numerous passages in the Koran and in Mohammed’s teachings that urge or require refraining from cruelty to camels, cows, birds, and other animals.6

Many writers have approached this subject from the Judeo-Christian perspective and concluded that there is a strong mandate, from both the teachings in the Bible and related commentaries and from the practices and lives of influential Jews and Christians, to extend vegan compassion to nonhuman animals. For example, Norm Phelps points out in The Dominion of Love that both the Old and New Testaments of the Bible contain what he calls two Prime Directives.7 These two fundamental spiritual teachings, to love God and to love our neighbor, are the essence of the Judeo-Christian spiritual tradition. Because God is the infinite whole in which we all have our being, and because there is no way to extend our love to God concretely since God transcends us completely, it follows that loving God means loving and caring for God’s creation. This leads directly to the second Prime Directive, to love our neighbor. There is no reason, biblical or otherwise, to exclude animals from our neighborhood, because they are our neighbors on this earth and we know they suffer and feel emotions. Loving God concretely thus means loving and caring for God’s creation and all our neighbors in this world, and loving God abstractly means opening through the inner silent receptivity (samadhi) of meditation and prayer to a direct experience of God’s presence through which we can be God’s loving hands and voice in the world. The core biblical teachings can thus be seen to point insistently to compassion for all creatures, and toward a vegan ethic of responsibility and caring for all creation.

Is Shamanism an Answer?

Human welfare, animal welfare, and environmental welfare are completely and inextricably interconnected. Our dilemmas can be resolved to the degree we evolve into a living understanding of this, awakening a sense of universal compassion as articulated by Pythagoras, Jesus, Buddha, Plotinus, Gandhi, Schweitzer, and countless others. The shamanic traditions, while containing many valuable teachings and in some ways revealing a more multidimensional view of the world and of human potentials than that of conventional Western science and religion, are nevertheless products of hunting and herding cultures. While they typically seem to view animals with less disdain than in our culture, they also seem to treat animals as food and ritual objects. They often rely on plants to induce the altered states of consciousness that are central to the shaman’s ability to walk between worlds, perform extraordinary feats, and heal.

It seems enormously ironic, but it appears that cultures that eat animals and use them for clothing, entertainment, and ritual sacrifice, whether they are industrialized herding cultures or the more indigenous shamanic cultures, use plant foods as drugs to escape ordinary reality. Obvious examples of this are the use of heroin and other opium products, psilocybin and other mushrooms, ayahuasca, peyote, marijuana, tobacco, cocaine, and alcoholic products from the fermentation of fruits and grains. There are many others as well. Users of these plant-based substances have forgotten that the mind is the source of its experiences. Visions and altered states of consciousness that are induced by relying on plants can also be attained directly.

Our mistreatment of animals is a spiritual problem. It reflects a misunderstanding that reduces beings to things. The shamanic traditions, though born in cultures less overtly exploitive than ours has become, still view animals as objects to be used and killed for food, apparel, healing ceremonies, and other uses. They may perhaps be able to teach us about respecting animals more than we currently do, and about not taking more from the earth than we need, but, at the risk of overgeneralizing a vast subject, shamanic traditions seem to tend toward parochialism, in being devoted primarily to the welfare of a particular tribe or group of people, and to humans more than nonhumans. Motivated by “noble savage” stereotypes and disillusionment with modern culture, we may want to revert to what must seem like the good old days of more primitive life, before factory farms, zoos, mechanized production, nuclear weapons, and so forth.

However, the way out is not to go back, but to go through. We must go forward. For one thing, primitive cultures are often not as we would romanticize them, and some American Indian cultures, for example, practiced cannibalism, genocidal warfare on other tribes, and horrific ritual torture on captives from other tribes. For another, shamanic traditions may be co-opted by the animal abuse industries, as we see beef producers linking eating meat to romanticized images of the plains Indians, and the Japanese whaling industry using the whaling by Makah Indians of the Pacific Northwest to undermine the global whaling moratorium and justify their whaling practices.8

This is not to say that the shamanic traditions didn’t serve their people well, or that they don’t have profound truths to teach us today. If the American Indian sentiment of concern for “all my relations” is taken to its spiritual and practical limits, in some ways it approaches the noble Bodhisattva ideal of Mahayana Buddhism, which is to dedicate one’s life to be of benefit and service to all sentient beings by realizing complete spiritual enlightenment. Both bring universal compassion into the heart of our motivation on the spiritual path.

However, attending an American Indian gathering today, we would find dead animals being served as food, likely from the same producers as those served at a Christian or Jewish function - and we would find the participants at any of these events prepared to vehemently justify their meals.

The Vegan Imperative

We can see that the essential teachings of the world’s major religions support the cultural and spiritual transformation that veganism calls for. All the world’s major religions have their own form of the Golden Rule that teaches kindness to others as the essence of their message. They all recognize animals as sentient and vulnerable to us, and include them within the moral sphere of our behavior. There are also strong voices in all the traditions emphasizing that our kindness to other beings should be based on compassion. This is more than merely being open to the suffering of others; it also explicitly includes the urge to act to relieve their suffering. We are thus responsible not just to refrain from harming animals and humans, but also to do what we can to stop others from harming them, and to create conditions that educate, inspire, and help others to live in ways that show kindness and respect for all life. This is the high purpose to which the core teachings of the world’s wisdom traditions call us. It is an evolutionary imperative, a spiritual imperative, an imperative of compassion, and, in reality, a vegan imperative. The motivation behind vegan living is this universal spiritual principle of compassion that has been articulated both secularly and through the world’s religious traditions; the difference lies in veganism’s insistence that this compassion be actually practiced. The words of Donald Watson, who created the term “vegan” in 1944, reveal this practical orientation and bear repeating:

Veganism denotes a philosophy and way of living which seeks to exclude, as far as is possible and practical, all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing, or any other purpose; and by extension promotes the development and use of animal-free alternatives for the benefit of humans, animals, and the environment.

Buckminster Fuller often emphasized that the way of cultural transformation is not so much in fighting against destructive attitudes and practices, but in recognizing them as being obsolete and offering positive, higher-level alternatives. The competitive, violent, commodifying mentality of the ancient herding cultures is, in our age of nuclear weapons and global interconnectedness, profoundly obsolete, as is eating the animal foods of these old cultures, which are unhealthy in the extreme both to our body-minds and to our precious planetary ecology. Eating animal foods is an indefensible holdover from another era beyond which we must evolve, and with the ever-increasing profusion of vegan and vegetarian cookbooks and vegan foods like soy milk, soy ice cream, rice syrup, tofu, veggie burgers, and so forth, as well as fresh organically grown vegetables, legumes, fruits, grains, nuts, pastas, and cereals, we see alternatives proliferating. Books, videos, websites, vegetarian/vegan restaurants and menu options, animal rights groups, and vegan organizations are also multiplying as we respond to the vegan imperative.

Seeing the role of our systemic violence against animals in creating our problems, we can begin to comprehend and solve them. To truly solve a problem, we must rise to a higher level and, in fact, transcend it with our understanding. As long as we abuse and commodify animals, we chain ourselves to the same deluded evolutionary levels as our problems and thus continually re-experience them as violence, stress, bondage, and disease.

The Emotional Miseducation of Boys

For example, a best-selling book entitled Raising Cain: Protecting the Emotional Life of Boys, written by two experienced psychologists, contains a wealth of understanding about the enormous suffering boys experience in our culture, but it does not and cannot begin to address the underlying causes of this suffering rooted in our socially approved brutalization of animals for food. The authors, Kindlon and Thompson, build a powerful case that boys in our culture are emotionally damaged by our culture’s male stereotypes of toughness, and that these wounds not only cause them misery but warp them for life and cause enormous suffering to females as well.

The two authors blame the culturally imposed image of stoic, unfeeling masculinity as the fundamental cause of boys’ pain and stress. They document and discuss how boys are taught to disconnect from their feelings by cultural forces on every side: their parents, their teachers, cultural institutions, the media, and each other. They call the culture of adolescent boys “the culture of cruelty” and write powerfully about the emotional devastation caused by the psychological and physical cruelty and teasing that boys inflict on each other.

The book offers poignant glimpses into the rage, pain, despair, shame, hopelessness, depression, numbness, and embattled solitude that boys experience, making the connections between these inner emotional torments and the outer problems of adolescent suicide (the third leading cause of death), drinking, drugs, illicit sex, violence, and cruelty. As a solution, it emphasizes that we need to “provide boys models of male heroism that go beyond the muscular, the self-absorbed, and the simplistically heroic,”9 that we need to be more understanding of boys, use less harsh discipline, and encourage them to express and connect with their feelings.

Yet Raising Cain makes a contribution that is acceptable to the herding culture in which we live, for it never makes the connection with the real source of the “emotional miseducation” of boys, which is our cultural practice of eating cruelly confined and slaughtered animals. Ironically, in order to build rapport with boys they work with, the two researchers often have lunch with them and may take them out for hamburgers.10 Neither these omnivores nor their omnivorous culture, it seems, can begin to make the deeper connections between the violence we impose on animals and the “emotional miseducation” of our youth, particularly boys. Nor do they recognize the more obvious surface connections, for example that boys are generally pushed to eat animal flesh.and thus to identify themselves as predatory and privileged - more than girls are. Boys are also more commonly hardened by being encouraged to deceive and attack animals through hunting and fishing activities. Even if they could see these connections, though, the authors probably knew better than write about them in a book that they and their publishers hoped would make the best-seller list. It seems that the shadow of animal food cruelty is too enormous and dangerous to be faced directly by the mass consciousness of our culture, though in order to evolve as a culture, this is precisely what we are called to do.

The entire testimony of Kindlon and Thompson in Raising Cain reflects profound and obvious evidence that the herding culture mentality of domination, exclusion, and cruelty to animals that forces boys to disconnect from their feelings is alive and well today, so that like their fathers and their fathers before them, boys can grow up to kill competing herders, vie for power through the accumulation of live stock/capital and, at the end of the day, eat the flesh and/or secretions of their confined and killed animals as a ritual celebration. What drives this entire heartless enterprise, generation after generation, so that we are powerless not just to challenge it but even to recognize and discuss it intelligently? The cruelty we routinely inflict on animals haunts our boys and the cycle continues, ravaging the earth, the generations, and the landscape of our feelings.

The Birth of Post-Rational Consciousness

We have looked from many perspectives at our ongoing practice of eating animals and have seen how it creates an internal mental climate of distractedness and disconnectedness that reduces our inherent intelligence and ability to make meaningful connections while numbing and paralyzing us emotionally. The resulting cycle of violence keeps us confined to patterns of competition and acquisition that drive the same commodifying and destructive elitist economic system that began emerging ten thousand years ago with the herding culture. Even though many people and traditions have urged us to practice compassion and develop direct intuitive knowing, we have remained mired in omnivorism, self-preoccupation, and disconnected analytical thinking. This has allowed us to develop technologically but has blocked our emotional and spiritual progress with painful results for us, for our children, and for our children’s children.

Pre-rational processes may be called instinctual, and many of us enjoy believing we’ve progressed beyond instinct - and thus beyond animals - in our development and use of the complex symbolic languages that give us the ability to think conceptually. Matthew Scully points out in his book, Dominion, that some scientists and theorists, such as Stephen Budiansky, John Kennedy, and Peter Carruthers, claim that our human language gives us the ability to think, and that without language and thus thinking, we would not be conscious.11 We have to wonder how they would construe this statement by Albert Einstein:

The interaction of images is the source of thought. The words of the language as they are written or spoken do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought. The physical entities which seem to serve as elements of thought are . . . clear images which can be voluntarily reproduced or combined.12

We can argue that animals are largely unconscious, decreeing that because animals seem to lack the complex language that allows them to formulate thoughts in words as we do, their experience of suffering must therefore be less significant or intense for them. This same thinking, however, could be used to justify harming human infants and senile elderly people. If anything, beings who lack the ability to analyze their circumstances may suffer at our hands more intensely than we would because they are unable to put the distance of internal dialogue between themselves and their suffering. As long as we remain imprisoned in the maze of self-oriented thinking, we can easily justify our cruelty to others, excuse our hard eyes and supremacist position, discount the suffering we impose on others, and continue on, rationalizing our actions and blocking awareness of the reality of our feelings and of our fundamental oneness with other beings.

Spiritual health requires introspection and that we practice quieting the disturbed waves of our compulsive verbal thought processes in order to contact directly the deeper reality of being that shines always in our heart. Without this inner practice and its twin practice of compassionate behavior toward others, our mind runs along, acting out its preprogrammed thinking, unable to stop or even witness its basic self-centered delusion. We mistake this state for being “conscious,” whereas it is actually profoundly unconscious. Yet we condescendingly proclaim that since we can “think” (compulsively chatter to ourselves) we are conscious, and since animals can’t they must be unconscious.

By ceasing to eat animal foods and thus causing misery to our neighbors, and by practicing meditation and quiet reflection, which can eventually extract our consciousness out of the brambles of compulsive thinking, we can begin to understand what consciousness actually is. We will see that to the degree we can be open to the present moment and dwell in inner spacious silence, beyond the ceaseless internal dialogue of the busy mind, we can experience the radiant, joy-filled serenity of pure consciousness. Post-rational intuitive knowing can be born as a sense of being connected with all beings. No longer being merely a parade of conditioned thoughts revolving around a sense of being a separate self, we can sense more deeply into the nature of being and begin to know outside the limitations of linear thinking. With this comes an understanding that our essential nature is not evil, confined, selfish, or petty, but is eternal, free, pure, and is of the essence of love. When we lower our vibration from this clear state and begin verbal thinking again, we see that the mind busy with conditioned thinking can never attain the understanding that pours in when the mind is able to be still.

So what are we, and what are animals? Our concepts only reveal our impeding conditioning. We are neighbors, mysteries, and we are all manifestations of the eternal light of the infinite consciousness that has birthed and maintains what we call the universe. The intuitive knowing that would reveal this to us, though, is mostly unavailable because as a culture we are outer-directed and fail to cultivate the inner resources and discipline that would allow us to access this deeper wisdom. Our minds and consciousness are almost completely unexplored territory because we have been raised in a herding culture that is fundamentally uncomfortable with introspection. Our science blatantly ignores consciousness as an unapproachable, unquantifiable and unopenable “black box” and distracts us with focusing solely on measurable phenomena. Our religions discourage meditation and reduce prayer to a dualistic caricature of asking and beseeching an outside, enigmatic, and projected male entity.

Because of our herding orientation and our unassuaged guilt complex due to the misery in our daily meals, we have warped our sacred connection with the infinite loving source of our life to an ultimate irony: comparing ourselves to sheep, we beg our shepherd for mercy, but since we show no mercy, we fear deep down we’ll not be shown mercy either and live in dread of our inevitable death. We bargain and may proclaim overconfidently that we’re saved and our sins are forgiven (no matter what atrocities we mete out to animals and people outside our in-group), or we may reject the whole conventional religious dogma as so much absurd pablum and rely on the shallow materialism of science. However it happens, our spiritual impulse is inevitably repressed and distorted by the guilt, violence, and reductionism that herding and eating animals requires.

For all our scientific and theological theorizing, we know little of human consciousness, because as a culture of omnivores we are uncomfortable with ourselves. We have lost touch with our innate urge to learn to remain quiet and undisturbed long enough to become open to the greater light and higher wisdom that lie beyond the narrow margins of conceptual thinking. Entering the joy, peace, and wonder of the present moment requires an inner stillness that allows us to experience directly. This is a practice that benefits both others and us. Clear awareness requires us to cease from harmful actions that keep our minds agitated, and to practice inner silence.

As an improvisational pianist, I can attest from personal experience that thinking stops the flow of musical creativity. It is when I’m able to be more fully conscious, beyond thought, in the present moment, and allow the music to pour through that the most creative and inspired music arises. People now call this being in “the zone” and it is seen as a requirement for “peak performance.” Compulsive verbal thinking turns off the flow of the zone and constricts consciousness. Perhaps animals are always in the zone. As Joseph Campbell once said, watching birds speeding through webs of branches and never even grazing a wing tip, animals may dwell in a realm beyond mistakes, totally present to life in ways our concept-crowded thinking cannot fully understand.

By living the truth of compassion in our meals and daily lives, we can create a field of peace, love, and freedom that can radiate into our world and bless others by silently and subtly encouraging the same in them. We may discover that we can “think” with our hearts, without words, and we may learn to appreciate the consciousness of animals and begin to humbly explore their mysteries. There is perhaps much we can learn from animals. Not only do they have many powers completely unexplainable by contemporary science, but they are fellow pilgrims with us on this earth who contribute their presence to our lives and enrich our living world in countless essential ways. In fact, without the humble earthworms, bees, and ants whom we relentlessly kill and dominate, the living ecosystems of our earth would break down and collapse - something we certainly cannot say about ourselves!

Who are we? What is our proper role on this earth? I submit we can only begin to discover these answers if we first take the vegan imperative seriously and live compassionately toward other creatures. Then peace with each other will at least be possible, as well as a deeper understanding of the mysteries of healing, freedom, and love.