Vegan lifestyle articles that discuss ways of living in peace with humans, animals, and the environment.
Sun, Co-Founder of
Gentle World
December 2017
When we open our minds to reason and compassion, we will see with saner eyes, that their precious bodies are not ours to bend and break to our will for the sake of our pleasure, comfort, convenience or any other excuse our unreasonable, apathetic thinking can conjure up. Without veganism, we will remain trapped in our madness.
If we were to search throughout the history of human existence, in every
nook and cranny on Planet Earth, we would not find one perfectly sane mind.
Some form and degree of madness (in both senses of the word) is and has
always been a pandemic disease among our species, from which no one has been
immune, or has ever been known to fully recover.
And yet, despite the monumental ramifications of this astounding fact, it is
rarely noted by even the most serious thinkers. It seems that we are
unwilling to experience the inevitable humbling that must come with
admitting, even to ourselves, that as a species, we human beings too often
think, feel and behave as though we were not in our right minds.
Until we lift the veil of denial that blinds us to this premise, we will
continue to go about our lives in utter confusion as to why we do the crazy
things we do. But when we admit to ourselves, and one another, that the
reason we behave as though we are mad is because we are, our confusion
disappears.
We understand why we choose, of our own free will, to sacrifice clean air,
water and food essential for our survival for petty pleasures that are too
embarrassing to list and are sure to be the death of us; why we hide from
one another behind a lifetime of disguises and lies; why we settle our
disputes by fighting people we do not know, under orders from others we do
not know, in defense of what we do not know is so; and why the demons of
depression, obsession, repression, anxiety, guilt, apathy, hate and jealousy
haunt our days and nights.
The many symptoms of our shared illness are easily seen on any street
corner, in homes, schools, work places, courtrooms or anywhere else human
behavior is on display. But the most serious is our seeming obsession with
some form of violence. What greater proof that the state of our minds is
off-kilter than the fact that we commit, condone and applaud gruesome acts
of violence, on a daily basis… from slaughterhouses and laboratories to war
zones? What else, but mental illness, would explain why spiritual beings,
capable of reason and compassion, choose cruelty and violence instead?
Evolving beyond our lust for violence is the essential first step toward our
desperately-needed cure. Only by rising above our willingness to terrorize,
be terrorized by or watch anyone else terrify or be terrified by anyone
else, will we, for the first time in our history, feel safe enough to lift
the veil that hides our saner selves. When we do, we will discover that
although we are surely mad, we are not only mad. Each of us is empowered
with a reasonable mind and a compassionate heart… the golden pillars that
frame the pathway to a saner way of living.
When we embark on that pathway, we come face to face with veganism, which is
non-violence in action. The concept, as simple as it is profound, is that
the violent, unbelievably cruel custom of enslaving, torturing and killing
our fellow earthlings must and will end when we stop supporting it, and we
will do so when we see the innocent victims for who they really are…
mysterious beings like us, who feel pain and love life as we do, and have
done us no harm. When we open our minds to reason and compassion, we will
see with saner eyes, that their precious bodies are not ours to bend and
break to our will for the sake of our pleasure, comfort, convenience or any
other excuse our unreasonable, apathetic thinking can conjure up.
Without veganism, we will remain trapped in our madness.
With it, we will be the sanest we have ever been.
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