Vegan lifestyle articles that discuss ways of living in peace with humans, animals, and the environment.
We are all inherently wise, compassionate, powerful, and creative, but we’ve had the faculties of our hearts and minds slammed so hard by a violent culture that we have succumbed to complacency and gullibility. Let’s no longer be tools in the hands of violence. Let’s wake up, grow up, and act up, and live and spread the unyielding truth of our interconnectedness, and freedom and peace for all.
The World Peace Diet: Eating for Spiritual Health and Social Harmony
OK, everyone! It’s time for us to pay attention. It’s long been obvious
that there are apparent forces spreading economic, environmental, and social
devastation. Since 9-11, the pace has accelerated noticeably, and since
Obama took office, the frequency and intensity of direct attacks on our
freedom, our ecosystems, our health, peace, and economic security have
further increased.
The question that everyone throughout our local district in the galaxy must
be asking (and maybe placing bets on) is whether the humans on Earth will
wake up, grow up, and act up, or feebly submit to de facto enslavement and
ecocide. Will we awaken from our seeming complacency and distractedness, and
grow up out of our disempowering gullibility? And how do we do this?
The precious and hidden key to everything is learning to understand and
remove the toxic program that has been injected into all of us through our
meals since infancy. It is a program of disconnectedness, elitism,
exploitation, infantilization, numbing, and ultimately, our own enslavement.
The vegan meme of radical inclusiveness, awareness, kindness, and concern
for others is studiously ignored (and feared) in the mass media and popular
discourse, but I believe that we know deep down it’s the only gate that
leads to a positive future. Everything else is disaster, and horrific
disaster at that.
Let me explain. I’ll try to summarize the essence of it in a few paragraphs.
There is no question that we are facing systemic breakdown and collapse
across the entire spectrum, including environmental, economic, cultural, and
medical. Environmentally, rainforest clear cutting is accelerating to over
one acre per second to clear land for meat and dairy production, excess
fishing capacity is utterly devastating marine ecosystems, animal
agriculture is driving habitat destruction and the consequent spike in
species extinction and loss of genetic diversity, and is the primary driving
force behind climate destabilization, as well as water scarcity and
pollution, air pollution, and soil erosion, just for starters. Economically,
the gap between the super rich and everyone else is exploding, as jobs and
housing opportunities evaporate and the world’s two main currencies, the
dollar and the euro, destabilize and head increasingly into
hyper-inflationary disaster. Culturally, the U.S. is now engaged in six
wars, with increasing rates of post-traumatic stress disorder and violence
that ripple throughout our planetary culture, added to the economic and
environmental stresses that cause the increased breakdown of family
structures. Medically, we find the general physical and psychological health
of the world’s population declining in the face of environmental breakdown,
nuclear and electromagnetic radiation, polluted and dwindling water
supplies, forced vaccination programs, and increased meat and dairy
consumption leading to epidemics of obesity, starvation, diabetes, cancer,
heart disease, kidney disease, osteoporosis, and autoimmune disease.
Embedded within this multidimensional crisis are many other factors, such as
the despair and genetic damage caused by genetically engineering organisms,
the emergence of super bacteria and viruses through antibiotic resistance
and corporate-military engineering, increasing violence toward women and
children, with proliferation of pornography, pedophilia, and slavery rings,
as well as spreading famine and malnourishment, and the rampant increase in
psychiatric drugs for depression, anxiety, insomnia, autism, ADD, OCD, PTSD,
bipolar disorder, and so on.
There are two main points that must be understood in looking at all this so
that we can change the causative behavior and attitudes. One is that the law
of cause and effect is in operation here: as we sow, we inevitably reap. Our
routine violence toward trillions of animals for meat, fish, dairy products,
and eggs is the primary driving force behind not just the environmental
devastation on our planet, but also behind the cultural, economic,
psychological, and physical disease we experience as well. We sow seeds of
not just cancer, obesity, diabetes, and heart disease with our violence
toward animals, but also of drug abuse, family breakdown, war, hunger,
slavery, and exploitation because this is precisely how we behave toward
cows, chickens, fish, and other animals for food, by the hundreds of
millions every day. We are killing over sixty billion mammals and birds for
food annually, plus an estimated one to two trillion marine animals, as well
as untold billions more animals who are killed as collateral damage as their
habitats are destroyed and pesticides ravage global ecosystems. Three
quarters of the food we grow is fed to imprisoned animals for meat and
dairy, while roughly a billion people are chronically hungry and starving.
The scale of the industrial killing machine of animals for food is so vast,
it is mentally incomprehensible. Inevitably, the violence and
heart-hardening required by this killing machine boomerang in countless
ways.
We are called to understand that animal agriculture is not only the driving
force behind the many crises we are facing, but is also the driving force
behind the underlying mentality that both causes these crises and is unable
to effectively deal with them. On the surface level, eating animal foods is
the primary contributor to forest and ocean destruction, species extinction,
climate destabilization, resource depletion, genetic pollution (corn, soy,
and cotton, the main GMO crops, are used mainly as feedstock), air and water
pollution, disease, hunger, sheer violence, and yet even these obvious and
critical connections are minimally made and discussed in either the mass
media or the alternative media, or in popular culture.
The deeper level is virtually completely invisible: that eating
animal-sourced foods is the primary contributor to the way of thinking and
being that creates these problems. For example, what is the mentality
required of a culture that routinely kills and eats 75 million animals daily
(very conservatively) as we do in the U.S.? It is precisely the mentality
that devastates the landscapes we inhabit, ecologically, culturally,
psychologically, and spiritually. We are all forced from our earliest days
to participate in ongoing daily rituals in which beings are reduced to
things—pieces of meat—and this mentality of reductionism, commodification,
exclusion, privilege, domination, and exploitation, routinely injected into
us in the most powerful ways, by literally eating them, creates an essential
inner environment of disconnectedness, numbing, low self-esteem, insecurity,
and competitiveness that lead inevitably to complacency, gullibility, and
the planetary disasters we are creating. This is our essential wound: the
brutal suppression of our inner feminine wisdom, which I refer to in The
World Peace Diet as Sophia (the Greek goddess of wisdom). With Sophia
repressed by forcing us all to eat the flesh and secretions of enslaved,
terrified animals, we become complacent and gullible, and in fact, according
to sociologists, there is literally more human slavery today, both actually
and proportionately, than in the nineteenth century before human slavery was
supposedly abolished.
The second main point is that the environmental, economic, cultural, and
medical disasters are not just befalling us; they are being consciously
engineered in order to enslave us, and our ongoing violence toward animals
for food, and the complacency and gullibility that follow, drain our power
to resist. Because we have been forced to eat meat and dairy from infancy,
and have been wounded in countless ways by the many ramifications of this
toxic cultural program, we tend to be easily dominated. Unable to stop the
basic indoctrinated behavioral violence that defines our culture—paying for
(causing) and eating animal cruelty and murder—we tend to be complacent, and
have difficulty challenging the violence we see enacted around us, because
we know deep down we are also guilty of being agents of violence ourselves.
We tend similarly to be gullible and easily distracted. We’d rather not see
the truth of the violence and misery we are consuming and causing daily, so
we regularly practice not looking deeply, being willingly deceived by
corporate, governmental, and institutional lies, and pretending blindness to
what is actually happening because of our food choices.
This is our culture’s essential dilemma. Eating animal foods is not anyone’s
free choice. It is behavior engaged in only because every institution in our
culture has indoctrinated us from birth to do so, and it is behavior that is
profoundly antithetical to our own best interests. Our complacency,
gullibility and distractedness are effectively increased by corporate
messages and governmental policies that constantly infantilize us. One
primary characteristic of emotional maturity is the ability to delay
gratification, but we are bombarded with messages to buy now, have now, and
pay later. The media serves us a continuous stream of images treating us all
like children who want only to be entertained and distracted with sports,
celebrity scuttlebutt, sex scandals, and fragmented news bites, and the
government increasingly warns us and controls us “for our security” as if
we’re frightened, helpless children, while increasingly attacking our
sovereignty. Underlying all this is a truly massive dairy industry that
keeps us as adults still sucking at the breast we never got, drinking milk
like infants who can’t bear to grow up, eating cheese, cream, and butter
from violently abused mothers whose babies are stolen from them, whose milk
and lives and purposes are stolen from them, and as we drink and eat the
milk of these sexually abused mothers, we tend to remain gullible infants,
believing and trusting the false and disempowering official stories
concocted by the parental authorities. Until we question the false official
stories we’ve internalized, especially those normalizing eating animal
foods, we remain merely ironic in our quests for ethical maturity, social
justice, and spiritual evolution.
Eating the large quantities of animal foods that we do is wasteful and
expensive, and this leads inevitably to massive economic inequity. The
medical/pharmaceutical bills are expensive. The fossil fuels, chemical
fertilizers, pesticides, water, and other resources are expensive. The
resultant wars are expensive. Every year, this amounts to hundreds of
billions of dollars transferred from the many to the few—the
military-industrial-meat-medical-pharmaceutical-media complex and the banks
in the background. With their ballooning wealth, it is easy for the wealthy
elite to buy legislation and governmental policies, and saturate and control
the media conversations to the point where now in the U.S., just one-tenth
of one percent of the population now owns more wealth than 90% of the entire
population combined!
The apparent forces that would steal our lives, dignity, freedom, and
purposes, and reduce us to dumbed-down micro-chipped servants that do their
bidding are taunting us openly now, blatantly stealing from us, lying to us,
and openly trashing our economy and ecology. We seem to be so gullible and
compliant that we apparently don’t see their clumsy ruses to enslave us—the
multiple false flag operations such as the 9-11 controlled demolition, the
ongoing flood of assassinations and media charades, the chemtrail skies,
fluoridated drinking water, mandatory toxic vaccinations for helpless
infants, growing Homeland Security police state, the banker bailout and
wholesale looting of our treasury and stealing of our homes and retirement
funds, and the mocking irony that laughs while enslaving us under a black
president.
By far the most empowering and effective action anyone can take today to
halt this violence and inequity, and to reverse the enslavement of humanity,
is to go vegan. As we sow, we reap. As long as we enslave and terrorize
nonhuman animals, stealing their purposes for our own ends, we will find
ourselves enslaved and terrorized and our purposes stolen from us by others
for their own ends. As we say yes to kindness, respect, compassion, freedom,
health, sustainability, mindfulness, justice, and peace in our actual
behavior toward others, then and only then will we be worthy of living in a
world that mirrors this.
Our world is a mirror. Our massive violence toward animals for food
boomerangs ineluctably, and each and every one of us can be part of the
vegan solution. We can actually remove the toxic program that has been
injected into us by our dysfunctional culture since infancy, and switch to a
healthy organic, plant-based diet that uses a fraction of the resources and
opens our heart to the interconnectedness of all living beings and the
amazing beauty of life on our precious Earth. And we can dedicate ourselves
to spreading the vegan message of radical inclusion and compassion, and help
others to remove the toxic indoctrinated food program from their body-mind
as well. There is no more noble and vital activity than this! Ultimately, it
is the path to freedom, joy, abundance, and peace. What we want for
ourselves we are called to give to others. Animals are not mere props in the
human drama; their suffering is as significant to them as ours is to us, as
we know in our bones.
We have today an unprecedented opportunity to transform our culture and
ourselves by recognizing, living, and sharing the truth that we can all
thrive on plant-based diets. Acting on this realization, we can launch a new
human awareness rooted in and expressing compassion, health, inclusiveness,
and freedom. Out of the ashes, a new world yearns to be born, and needs
every one of us to contribute by going vegan, understanding why, and
spreading the word.
We are all inherently wise, compassionate, powerful, and creative, but we’ve
had the faculties of our hearts and minds slammed so hard by a violent
culture that we have succumbed to complacency and gullibility. Let’s no
longer be tools in the hands of violence. Let’s wake up, grow up, and act
up, and live and spread the unyielding truth of our interconnectedness, and
freedom and peace for all.
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