The Holograph
The ripples that radiate from our choices to eat foods from animal sources are incredibly far-reaching and complex. They extend deeply into our essential orientation and belief system, and into our relationships with each other and the created order. From every perspective we can possibly take, we discover that our culturally imposed eating habits are numbing, blinding, and confining us. Enslaving and eating animals is relentlessly polluting our mental and bodily environments, hardening our hearts and blocking feelings and awareness, instigating fear, violence, and repression in our relationships, laying waste our precious planet, gruesomely torturing and killing billions of terrorized beings, deadening us spiritually, and profoundly disempowering us by impeding our innate intelligence and our ability to make essential connections.
To come to terms with our multifaceted human dilemma is to come to terms with the mentality of oppression that our meals demand. Looking away, as we chronically do, our existence and our projects become ironic, self-deceptive, destructive, and suicidal. Seeing our eating habits for what they are, though, and answering the call of our spirit to understand the consequences of our actions, we become open to compassion, intelligence, freedom, and to living the truth of our inter-connectedness with all life. There is an enormously positive revolution implicit in this, a spiritual transformation that can potentially launch our culture into a quantum evolutionary leap, from emphasizing consumption, domination, and self-preoccupation to nurturing creativity, liberation, inclusion, and cooperation. Are we ready for such a spiritual revolution? If we refuse, the strife, stress, and destruction will almost certainly intensify due to our ascending numbers and exploitive technology.
This urge to show mercy and to protect those who are vulnerable is rooted deeply in us, and though it has been repressed by our herding culture, there is enormous evidence that it longs to be expressed by virtually all of us. We will collectively donate millions of dollars, for example, to help just one animal if we know the animal’s story and our intelligence and compassion have been awakened by our connecting with this animal. The more we connect, the more we understand and the more we love, and this love propels us not only to leave home, questioning our culture’s attitude of domination and exclusion, but also to return home, speaking on behalf of those who are vulnerable.
Victims, Perpetrators and Bystanders
As we go vegan and begin to live much more lightly on the earth, we may also start to realize how powerfully we’re affected by the omnivorous eating habits of the vast majority of our fellow citizens. Our freedom as omnivores to eat almost any non-human being we’d like limits others’ freedom in many ways. For example, we find rivers and lakes polluted by animal agriculture so we can no longer enjoy or swim in them. We discover our air and groundwater needlessly polluted by animal abusing industries. We have to endure seeing our friends hunted and tortured by hunters and fishers, or view billboards with disgusting images of cooked animal flesh. Our money is taken from us by the government to support ranchers and dairy, factory farm, and feedlot operators, as well as predator control operations that needlessly kill more of our friends, and forests we could enjoy are destroyed to provide the immense desolate monocultures of livestock feed grains.
In violent crimes committed publicly, there are three roles acted out: that of the perpetrator, that of the victim, and that of the bystander or witness. It is well known that perpetrators hope bystanders will be silent and look the other way so they can successfully continue their hurtful actions, and that victims hope the bystanders will speak up, act, get involved, and do something to stop or discourage perpetrators from their harmful actions. With regard to eating animal foods, there are many perpetrators and victims and just a few bystanders.
Looking deeply, we see that the perpetrators are themselves victims of violence—that’s why they’ve become perpetrators—and their violence hurts not only the animals but themselves and the bystanders as well. All three are locked in a painful embrace, and it is the bystanders who have the real power. They can either turn and look away, thus giving their tacit approval, or they can witness and bring a third dimension of consciousness and awareness to the cycle of violence that has the victims and perpetrators hopelessly enmeshed.
The bystander offers an example of nonviolence and speaks on behalf of the victims who have no voice. Perpetrators may condemn bystanders for judging them and making them feel bad or guilty… Their attitude toward bystanders may even be indignation: “If you want to be a vegetarian, that’s fine, but don’t tell us what to do.” …Perpetrators wouldn’t dare say, “If you don’t want to beat and stab your pet dog, that’s fine, but don’t tell me not to beat and stab mine.” We all recognize that we aren’t entitled to treat others, especially those who are defenseless.
None of us is completely innocent, because to some degree we all are, and have been, in all three roles. As non-vegans, we are challenged by our spiritual and ethical disconnection to slow down, stop, pay attention, reconnect, embrace our disowned shadow, and begin the healing process. As vegans, we are challenged by our inconsistencies and fear of reprisal to pay attention and deepen our healing and awakening process by making the effort to align our thoughts, words, and actions with our understanding of inter being and to ever more fully embody peace and courageous love.
Our Connections with Animals
Though we are born into a culture that emphasizes our differences from other animals, our actual experience tells us differently. We are only comfortable eating animals when we exclude them from the categories we use to define ourselves, but our differences from animals are far less than our eating habits force us to believe they are.
It’s illustrative to watch how the attributes we have proclaimed make us unique, such as using tools, making art, experiencing “higher” emotions, having a sense of the ludicrous, using language, and so forth, have all collapsed under the evidence as we get to know animals better. Of course, we have certain unique attributes and abilities. Every species has certain unique attributes and abilities. Eating animals makes us so subconsciously nervous that we neurotically overemphasize our uniqueness and our separateness from them. This allows us to exclude them from our circle of concern.
It seems we’re still so benighted as a culture that we’ll refrain from committing violence only if we fear punishment or retaliation—and since animals are incapable of either, they have no protection from us at all. The new extremes to which animals are now subjected without remorse or awareness require that we adopt a more radically conscientious orientation that addresses the roots of our violent mentality. While it may seem extreme to our mainstream culture to advocate for a vegan revolution that utterly rejects our commodification of animals, it is only such an apparently extreme position that can be an antidote to the extreme abuse we now force upon animals. In fact, veganism is not extreme from the point of view of our innate nature, which longs for love, creativity, and spiritual evolution.
Heavens and hells are of our own sowing. We live in a culture that mindlessly exploits animals and encourages the domination of those who are vulnerable by the strong, the male, the wealthy, and the privileged. This culture has naturally created political, economic, legal, religious, educational, and other institutional vehicles to shield those in power from the effects of their actions, and to legitimize the violence and inequities required to maintain the system.
Paths Away from and Back to Sanity
The underlying assumptions of the culture into which we have been born are faulty and obsolete. If not questioned and changed, they will continue to drive us into deeper cultural insanity, just as they do the animals we mercilessly dominate… The powerful financial and media forces that block us from seeing any of this are continuing the spread of the herding culture and its obsolete and oppressive assumptions throughout the world.
There are numerous uplifting and noble movements, organizations, and efforts that work to promote peace, social justice, equality, environmental protection, and to relieve the suffering of people who are disadvantaged, vulnerable, or marginalized…We see increasing numbers of individuals and groups acting creatively to raise consciousness about this, thus helping to eliminate the roots of hunger, cruelty, pollution, and exploitation.
A positive momentum is unquestionably building in spite of the established forces of domination and violent control that would suppress it. Like a birth or metamorphosis, a new mythos is struggling through us to arise and replace the obsolete herding mythos, and the changes occurring may be far larger and more significant than they appear to be. They are ignored and discounted by the mass media, but what may seem to be small changes can suddenly mushroom when critical mass is reached. It is vital that we all contribute to the positive revolution for which our future is calling.
Implications for Further Research and Conversation
More thorough and open research and discussion of the implications of our food choices would increase our cultural awareness of the negative health, economic, environmental, psychological, and social consequences of eating animal foods, and illuminate the multiple benefits for everyone of a natural plant-based way of eating…The potential for enormous ecosystem healing and wildlife regeneration could be researched and discussed, as well as the economic, social, political, medical, psychological, and spiritual dimensions of these changes.
One particularly glaring inconsistency that should be further investigated is the underlying assumption of vivisection, that we can become healthier by destroying the health of other living beings. Our welfare is tied to the welfare of all beings; we cannot reap health in ourselves by sowing seeds of disease and death in others… We can see the outcome of our actions already, as new diseases continue to arise and old ones spread, often becoming impervious to our increasingly devastating drugs.
Another example of such research would be to investigate the connection between eating animal foods and the escalating use and abuse of damaging drugs like alcohol, narcotics, and pharmaceuticals.
Stop eating meat for even one month and that unnatural thirst which accompanies and follows a diet of flesh will disappear. There is a physiological reason for this. Meat is always in a certain degree of putrefaction, and the decay is increased when it is introduced into the stomach… With this constant fever of rotting flesh in the stomach calling for a cooling draught, it is marvelous that any escape drunkenness. Blot out flesh eating and men will soon become temperate without the enactment of a single law. No one who eats the food that Nature prepared will have any desire for strong drink, not even tea or coffee. Then the sure cure for the drink habit is to stop eating meat and all animal products. This includes butter and eggs. Cereals, vegetables, nuts and oils have all the elements necessary to the body’s sustenance.
If we decrease our practice of exploiting animals for food, we will find our levels of disease, mental illness, conflict, and environmental and social devastation likewise decreasing. Rather than ravaging the earth’s body and decimating and incarcerating her creatures, we can join with the earth and be a force for creating beauty and spreading love, compassion, joy, peace, and celebration. When we look with a relaxed eye at nature, we see an absolutely irrepressible celebration of living beauty. Animals in nature are both celebratory and inscrutable. They play, sing, run, soar, leap, call, dance, swim, hang out together, and relate in endlessly mysterious ways.
Privilege and Slavery
The message ritually injected into us by our culturally mandated meals is, at a fundamental level, the message of privilege. As humans, we see ourselves as superior to animals, whom we view as objects to been slaved and killed for our use and pleasure, and with this herder mentality of our special and privileged position over animals, we inevitably create other categories of privilege. Wealth, gender, and race determine the extent of our privilege in a human hierarchy between rich white men on one end and impoverished non-white women and children on the other… This hierarchical, authoritarian social structure—pervasive, transparent, and taken for granted—that is the unavoidable outcome of commodifying animals and eating them.
The wealthy elite exerts its privilege and authority through all our social institutions, using food as a method of maintaining control. Because the quality of our food is directly connected to our mental and physiological health and to our quality of life, diminishing the quality of our food can make us sicker, weaker, and more distracted, violent, stressed, drugged, confused, and disempowered.
We must explore these connections further and discuss them, and also take a hard look at our own abuse of privilege. As a culture, we regularly fail to make the connections between the suffering directly imposed on others and our privileged status.
The Last Days of Eating Animals
Obviously, anyone unquestioningly eating the cruel and toxic Standard American Diet of fast-food burgers and hot dogs will be considered by mental health professionals to be psychologically healthy and normal, while those who refuse to do so may be considered to have a “pathological fixation on eating proper food” and an “obsession with ‘righteous eating’ ” and may be obliged to undergo some kind of “treatment.” It’s hard to overestimate how subversive switching to a plant-based way of eating is to the established mentality of domination and exclusion, and to what lengths our culture will go to block and suppress open discussion and questioning of its defining rituals!
While it’s easy to become discouraged in the face of the immense cultural inertia that propels the continued practice of eating animal foods, it’s helpful to realize that it carries within it the seeds of its own destruction. At the rate it’s ravaging our planet’s ecosystems and resources—and our sanity and intelligence—it cannot last much longer. These may very well turn out to be humanity’s last days of eating animals.
The Movie of Life on Earth
Metaphorically, we are all part of the movie of life on earth, and while we may appear to be the images on the screen, at a deeper level we share a common heritage—we are all also the light that makes the movie possible. This light is consciousness, and it is our fundamental nature, emanating from an infinite and inconceivable source. Glimpsing this essential nature that we share with all beings not only deepens our yearning to relieve their suffering but also strengthens our ability to work effectively to do so. Seeing victims and perpetrators not merely in these roles but in their spiritual perfection and completeness is profoundly healing. We see that there are no enemies—no essentially evil people or completely hopeless or destructive situations. There are, rather, opportunities to grow, learn, serve, and work together to raise consciousness and bring compassion and understanding to the painful and unjust situations we may see unfolding around us.
The world we see is a product of our thoughts and way of seeing. Looking deeply into the animal-derived food on our plates, we see enormous suffering, abusive hands, and hardened hearts. Looking more deeply, we see that these hands and hearts have themselves been abused and wounded but yearn to be comforted and loved, and to comfort and love. As we see that abusers have always been abused themselves, we seek less to judge and more to understand, and to protect the vulnerable from abuse.
The ancient teaching holds true: “Hatred ceases not by hatred, but by love. This is the everlasting law.” In the end, as Mahatma Gandhi emphasized, we must be the change we want to see in the world.
The Elk’s Message
One August night in 1991, high in the Olympic mountains of western Washington, I was climbing up a seemingly endless and steep series of switchbacks, trying to get back to my van parked at the trailhead. I had gone too far to reach an alpine lake, and now returning many miles in steep terrain, without food or water, I was as physically exhausted as I’d ever been in my life… I felt a presence beside me. Plodding along in the eerie light, dragging each foot with all my strength, I looked to my right and saw, only four or five yards away, a magnificent elk walking slowly along beside me.
We continued along together for several minutes, and just having this powerful animal walking so close to me gave me an enormous boost. Mentally thanking him as we walked for caring and for helping me, I felt a profound sense of kinship, beyond the usual concept of that term. I felt our utter relatedness as a basic fact. With him beside me, it was natural to feel my energy increasing, and soon I was able to walk faster and with more confidence. Before long, the elk picked up his pace and crossed over in front of me, disappearing into the night.
My heart was filled with gratitude for the overwhelming presence of love and compassion I felt shining on me through the elk. I saw I didn’t need to thank the elk, my brother, with thoughts or words, for he understood our connection. Any thanks I could give him could only be through my actions to protect him and all my brothers and sisters of this earth, sacred expressions of an infinite love that smiled at me that evening from the elk, the stars, the moon, and the night mountain air.
The experience with the elk is one of many blessings I have found that being vegan brings. Veganism kindles a deep sense of peace in nature and of kinship, fellowship, and harmony with all life. It encourages a sense of inner richness that keeps growing and deepening as years go by, a sense of gentleness and of purpose. Becoming vegan is not so much a decision made with our intellect as it is a natural consequence of inner ripening. While it’s certainly helpful to comprehend intellectually the vast mandala of negative consequences of eating animal foods, we find that we are propelled into veganism by our intuition…In our culture, which is so permeated by the mentality of domination and exclusion, veganism requires a spiritual breakthrough. This breakthrough cannot be forced in any way by others, but it can definitely be encouraged.
From Obsolete Exclusivity to All of Us
When we are then drawn toward a plant-based way of eating, it is in no way a limitation on us; rather it is the harmonious fulfillment of our inner seeing. At first we think it’s an option we can choose, but with time we realize that it’s not a choice at all but the free expression of the truth that we are. It is not an ethic that we have to police from outside, but our own radiant love spontaneously expressing, both for ourselves and for our world. Caring is born on this earth and lives through us, as us, and it’s not anything for which we can personally take credit. It is nothing to be proud of. Refraining from eating and using animals is the natural result of seeing that is no longer chained within the dark and rigid dungeon of narrow self-interest. From the outside, it may look like and be called “veganism,” but it is simply awareness and the expression of our sense of interconnectedness. It manifests naturally as inclusiveness and caring. It’s no big deal because it’s the normal functioning of our original nature, which unfailingly sees beings rather than things when it looks at our neighbors on this earth.