The Jeweled Web of Journey
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.
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, in to our consciousness.
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 up on 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!
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.
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.
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…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.
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.
Being born into a newspaper family was another significant seed in my life journey…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.
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.
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 informed us that she could not give enough milk and we would therefore be using her for meat…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.
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.
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… 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.
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.
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.
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?”
There were fishing poles there and I had learned to fish at Camp Challenge, I decided to catch a few fish… 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 within tent 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.
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.
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.
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.
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… Over the next several years, I continued living in Buddhist meditation centers in Atlanta and then in San Francisco.
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.
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.
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.
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…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.
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.