The Two Limited Perspectives
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
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
Our culture’s enormous, intractable, overriding shadow is the cruelty and violence toward animals it requires, practices, eats, and meticulously hides and denies.
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.
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.
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 day, we cause over thirty million birds and mammals and forty-five million fish to be fatally attacked so we can eat them, 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.
Ends and Means
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Some Traditions of Intuition and Compassion
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Is Shamanism an Answer
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.
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.
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 coopted 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.
The Vegan Imperative
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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,” that we need to be more understanding of boys, use less harsh discipline, and encourage them to express and connect with their feelings.
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.
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 Birth of Post-Rational Consciousness
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.
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.
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.
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.
