The suppression of awareness required by our universal practice of commodifying, enslaving, and killing animals for food generates the ‘built-in mental disorder” that drives us toward the destruction not only of ourselves but of the other living creatures and systems of this earth. Because this practice of exploiting and brutalizing animals for food has come to be regarded as normal, natural and unavoidable, it has become invisible. Though it is fundamental, it continues to be virtually ignored in the ongoing public discourse about why we have the problems we have and how we can solve them. This lack of mindfulness is tragic in the classical sense.
Our culture encourages us all to be omnivores, “Eating everything” has become an apt description of our culture as it consumes and ravages global ecosystems. … We relentlessly pressured by corporate advertising to swallow anything and thanks to our well-practiced ability to insulate our awareness from the horror we regularly consume during our meals, it’s easy for us to similarly block our awareness of the toxic chemical preservatives and residues in our food. We may even pride ourselves on not being choosy about what we eat.
Practice makes the master. If we practice golf and tennis, we become proficient at golf and tennis, and golf and tennis become part of us and part of our way of being. If we practice music, art, drama, or martial arts, we become proficient in these, and they influence us and become part of our way of being. If we practice generosity, kindness, and thoughtfulness, we become skilled at being more generous, kind, and thoughtful of others, and these qualities become part of our way of being. If we practice killing, lying and stealing, we become adept at killing, lying and stealing, and these activities become part of us and part of our way of being. By relentlessly and assiduously practicing the ability to disconnect the reality of the flesh, cheese or egg on our plate from the reality of the misery a feeling being endured to provide it, we have become masters at reducing feeling beings to mere objects, to tools, to means, to property. We have become skilled at being numb and switching off, at not feeling sympathy for the suffering that we demand by our desire to eat animals foods. We have become masters of denial, absolutely refusing to register in consciousness the consequences of our actions. This denial becomes a sort of paralysis that prevents effective and innovative action. Practiced since infancy, our daily rituals of eating have made us highly skilled in the art of objectifying others. This is an enormous tragedy and we have hardly allowed ourselves to become aware of it.
We all know in our bones that other animals feel and suffer as we do. If we use them as things, we will inevitably use other humans as things. This is an impersonal universal principle, and ignoring it doesn’t make it go away.
All self-organizing systems are seen as having intelligence, and these systems interrelate with each other in complex ways that promote life. Simpler systems, like cells, make up larger and more complex systems, like organs and circulatory systems, which constitute even larger and more complex systems like oaks, ducks, tuna, sheep and humans, which make up groves, flocks, schools, herd, and villages, which make forests, riparian, communities, marine ecosystems, prairies and societies. These make up larger systems, like planets, which are parts of even larger systems. Each system is a whole contributing to larger wholes, and composed of smaller wholes. Simply stated, intelligence is the ability of any system to make connections that are meaningful and helpful for that system in its relations with other systems.
Reality as we know and experience is made up of wholes that are parts of larger wholes, and that these larger wholes are parts of even larger wholes. Every part is connected with every other part by including it or being included along with it in a larger whole. Intelligence lies in the ability of every whole part to receive feedback from and make connections with all the other systems that are related to it, and to thereby unfold its inherent potential to serve the larger wholes.
The largest whole that includes every atom, every cell, every creature, community, planet, star, galaxy and universe is, to the part, say an individual human, inconceivable, and is intuited as divine, infinite, eternal, omniscient, and beyond all dualisms.
The intelligence of this universal wholeness embraces all apparent parts down to the tiniest, and lives within all the parts as their intelligence. Our dualistic thinking cannot grasp this directly, for it is beyond existence or experience as we know them. This universal intelligence can only be sensed non-dualistically, through intuitive receptivity in inner silence that is not clouded by concepts and conditioned thinking.
When we forcefully remove a chicken, fish, pig, cow or any animal from her natural life in order to confine and manipulate her for food, we systematically thwart and frustrate her innate intelligence. The universal intelligence within her can no longer operate freely and contribute to and enrich the many levels of larger wholes that she serves.
As Inheritors of a herding tradition, we naturally try to rationalize this, saying that the animals we raise for food never would have existed without our herding and factory farm operations, and that they therefore do not exist for their purposes, but for our purposes. …Of our own wounding, we cannot see the blindness and cruelty that always accompany our thinking that others exist for our purposes. …If we humans were the ones born into miserable confinement and routinely castrated, branded, raped, shocked, mutilated, and driven insane because we were viewed merely as tasty meat by a stronger and more “intelligent” species, we would certainly hope that this “superior” species would recognize that we have a greater purpose than being mere commodities to be imprisoned, killed, wrapped, sold, and eaten.
We become more aware of our connection with the human family, the whole web of life, and the infinite source of all life, and yearn to serve these larger wholes. As our intelligence decreases, we disconnect from our serving of the larger wholes, becoming less sensitive to feedback from them, more self-centered and self-preoccupied. This insensitivity becomes stupidity, inevitably bringing violence, disease, unhappiness, suffering and death.
Cells that no longer serve the whole or respond appropriately to feedback have become, in essence, self-preoccupied, and give rise to cancerous tumors that are dangerous and counterproductive. Our body’s intelligence knows that these cells would eventually destroy the larger whole upon which they live and depend, and works constantly to eliminate them and to rectify conditions that lead to their proliferation.
Human intelligence is the ability to make meaningful connections, and if we are not serving the larger wholes, the larger wholes will let us know. Individuals who damage society are removed from it and, we hope, rehabilitated; what happens when societies irresponsibly damage the earth? If our intelligence is impaired, we lose sight of our purpose and become increasing numb to the healthy feedback from the larger wholes that is vital to us as intelligent systems and subsystems. If our culture’s intelligence is impaired enough, we become the rogue cancer cells that we fear so much within ourselves.
Every animal species is unique, it is clear that each species has its own particular type of intelligence that is distinctly suited to its telos, or purpose, and to the types of feedback it receives and the connections it makes. To say that one type of intelligence is higher than another ignores this by imposing an arbitrary standard, and is usually part of an assumption that enshrines the human mode of intelligence at the top of an imagined hierarchy.
There are literally countless varieties of animal consciousness, and that they have many types of intelligence that human seem not to have. People with companion animals, such as dogs and cats, are often amazed by the intuitive abilities of these animals. For example, as studies show, these animals can often know the precise moment their human companion, many miles away, decides to return home. There are countless other examples of nonhuman animals having intelligence that we can only marvel at, in being able to home and navigate infallibly to migrate thousands of miles, and to communicate in ways that are utterly unexplained by our materialistc science. It is sadly ironic that while we look longingly to space in search of other intelligent life forms, we are surrounded by thousands of species of intelligent life sharing our earth with us whose awareness, abilities, and subjective experiences we have barely begun to understand and appreciate.
The diversity of intelligence in nature is astonishing because species, subspecies, and individuals all have unique qualities of intelligence. However, scientists, like most people in our culture, have typically been loath to recognize or respect the diversities of intelligence in nature because they participate both consciously and unconsciously in a society that requires an almost complete domination of animals. …The great irony is that by ignoring, trivializing and repressing the intelligence in other animals, we have actively reduced our own intelligence.
It is the socially driven act of eating animals that is primarily responsible for this loss of cultural and personal intelligence. Confining, mutilating and killing animals for food is so fundamentally cruel and ugly that we must deaden large aspects of our private and public intelligence to do it, especially on the grand scale that animaals are slaughtered and abused today.
The most universal spiritual teaching, found cross-culturally in virtually all the world’s religious traditions, is based on the truth of our interconnectedness. It is presented both positively, in what we refer to as the Golden Rule, and more neutrally as the law of cause and effect. Simply stated, we can never expect to be happy if we cause suffering to others, to be free if we confine others, to be healthy if we cause sickness in others, to be prosperous if we steal from others, or to have peace if we are violent to others and cause them to be afraid.
As we free others, we become free; as we love others, we are loved; as we encourage others, we are encouraged; as we bless others, we are blessed; as we bring joy and healing to others, we find joy and healing in our lives. This timeless wisdom is the foundation of intelligence and compassion, because it is firmly based on the truth of interconnectedness.
As we ignore animal suffering, we ignore each other’s suffering. As we deny animals their dignity and privacy, we deny our own dignity and find our privacy being increasingly eroded. As we enforce powerlessness on them, we feel increasingly powerless. As we reduce them to mere commodities, we become mere commodities ourselves. As we destroy their ability to fulfill their purpose, we lose track of our purpose. As we deny them rights, we lose our own right. As we enslave them, we become slaves ourselves. As we break their spirits, our own spirits are broken. As we sow, we reap.
May we ponder deeply the wisdom of the Golden Rule before it’s too late, and begin to actually live it with respect to the animals who are at our mercy. Otherwise, our future may be horribly grim; all that we force others to experience, we will eventually end up experiencing ourselves.
