Spiritual teachings of our interconnectedness and the vegan ethic of universal compassion, besides being vital and transformative, are in profound alignment with the core instruction of the world’s religions, which is to love others.
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, which is understanding.
With love and understanding awakening in us, compassion expands to include ever-larger circles of beings.
Compassion may be seen as the highest form of love, for it is the love of the divine whole for all its parts and is reflected in the love of the parts for each other. It includes the urge to act to relieve the suffering of apparent others, and this urge requires us to evolve greater wisdom and inner freedom to relieve suffering more effectively.
Compassion is thus both the fruit of evolution and the driving force behind it. Love yearns for greater love.
Living a consequent vegan life naturally encourages us to awaken from the consensus trance that brings unquestioning conformity and allows cruelty and slavery to continue. Refusing to see animals as commodities, we are able to see through countless other pretenses. And, as transformative as this is for an individual to experience, it would be infinitely more transformative for our culture to do so, and to evolve beyond the obsolete orientation that sees animals as mere food commodities.
Judging by the generally small numbers who have actually gone vegan in our culture, it appears that this commitment requires a certain breakthrough that has been generally elusive because of the mentality of domination and exclusion we’ve all been steeped in since birth. There is something about veganism that is not easy, but the difficulty is not inherent in veganism, but in our culture.
Learning to look the other way brings spiritual death in everyone who practices it. In encouraging it, religious institutions show how far they have strayed from the passionate mercy and all-seeing kindness taught and lived by those whose spiritual evolution and illumination inspired the institutions themselves.
• Book – The Plant-Based Solution: America’s Healthy Heart Doc’s Plan to Power Your Health
At his core, Dr. Joel Kahn believes that plant-based nutrition is the most powerful source of preventative medicine on the planet. Having practiced traditional cardiology since 1983, it was only after his own commitment to a plant based vegan diet that he truly began to delve into the realm of non-traditional diagnostic tools, prevention tactics and nutrition-based recovery protocols. These ideologies led him to change his approach and focus on being a holistic cardiologist. He passionately lectures throughout the country about the health benefits of a plant-based anti-aging diet inspiring a new generation of thought leaders to think scientifically and critically about the body’s ability to heal itself through proper nutrition.
One of the world’s top cardiologists, Dr. Joel Kahn has treated thousands of acute heart attacks during his career. He’d like all that to stop. He’d like to prevent ALL future heart attacks by breaking through to the public to educate and inspire a new holistic lifestyle. Now is the time to focus on educating the public to eat clean, sweat clean and apply cutting edge science to their lifestyle.
• Book – Healthspan Solution: How and What to Eat to Add Life to Your Years: 100 Easy, Whole-Food Recipes
There is nothing Julieanna loves more than diving into a colossal bowl of salad. Known as The Plant-Based Dietitian, Julieanna has a Bachelor of Arts degree in Theatre from UCLA in and a Master of Science degree in Nutrition from Cal State Northridge, bridging her three biggest passions for food, performing, and helping people. As a Registered Dietitian, Julieanna has authored five books, including The Healthspan Solution, Plant-Based Nutrition (Idiots Guide), Vegiterranean Diet, and two peer-reviewed journal articles on plant-based nutrition for healthcare professionals (in Journal of Geriatric Cardiology and Permanente Journal), and is the nutrition columnist for VegNews Magazine.
Past projects have included being the host of What Would Julieanna Do?; giving a TEDx talk; and teaching the eCornell Plant-Based Nutrition Certification Program. She recently co-hosted Science and Saucery and Facebook Watch’s Home Sweat Home, and has appeared on Harry, The Dr. Oz Show, The Steve Harvey Show, Reluctantly Healthy, The Marie Osmond Show, and E! News. New adventures include speaking, presenting, traveling, helping a wide variety of clients achieve their goals, and sharing her passion for healing and happiness eating a whole food, plant-based diet.
The pharmaceutical industry exerts a huge amount of influence on health policy. Some companies develop highly profitable drugs with public money, while others have been found to have covered up serious side effects.
The fight against Covid-19 is further fueling the greed of pharmaceutical companies. Does the industry’s influence threaten public health systems?
The industry has seen major changes in the last decade. Most of the world’s pharmaceuticals are produced by a handful of large corporations, so-called Big Pharma. They’re richer and more powerful than ever. In some cases, they can even call the shots on governmental health policies.
This documentary is the result of more than a year of research, and brings together patients, whistleblowers, lawyers, doctors and politicians, as well as representatives of the industry. Large laboratories are accused of concealing or downplaying research results to maintain their monopolies. Take the manufacturer Sanofi, whose epilepsy drug Depakine triggered a scandal throughout Europe. In the US, Johnson & Johnson has had to stand trial for driving millions of people into opioid addiction. And Novartis is one of several companies now facing huge fines over improper practices in the treatment of macular degeneration, an eye disease.
The pharmaceutical industry gets support from influential doctors. But only one-fifth of German doctors declare what they receive from drug companies. As the world battles the Coronavirus pandemic, this documentary also looks at the lobbying efforts of manufacturer Gilead, as it seeks approval for a promising drug developed largely with public money. Every company is vying to find the next miracle treatment that will help it succeed against the competition.
DW Documentary gives you knowledge beyond the headlines. Watch top documentaries from German broadcasters and international production companies. Meet intriguing people, travel to distant lands, get a look behind the complexities of daily life and build a deeper understanding of current affairs and global events. Subscribe and explore the world around you with DW Documentary.
• Book – The World Peace Diet Dr. Will Tuttle is an award-winning speaker, educator, author, and musician. His music, writings, and presentations focus on compassion, intuition, meditation, social justice, and creativity.
Creator of the best-selling The World Peace Diet as well as over a dozen other books and CDs, Dr. Tuttle presents regularly at conferences, retreats, and events throughout North America and worldwide.
A former Zen monk with a Ph.D. in education from U.C., Berkeley, he has worked extensively exploring and promoting intuition development, nonviolent living, meditation, healing music, creativity, holistic health, animal liberation, and cultural evolution. Traveling globally with his spouse Madeleine, a visionary artist from Switzerland, he present lectures and concerts of original uplifting piano music, often accompanied by Madeleine’s watercolor paintings and silver flute. In centers, he typically presents the morning special music, meditation, and message and later gives an educational seminar on developing intuition, as well as a concert of original music, “Piano Passion.” These are intended to generate inspiration for personal and planetary healing.
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, which is understanding.
With love and understanding awakening in us, compassion expands to include ever-larger circles of beings.
Compassion may be seen as the highest form of love, for it is the love of the divine whole for all its parts and is reflected in the love of the parts for each other. It includes the urge to act to relieve the suffering of apparent others, and this urge requires us to evolve greater wisdom and inner freedom to relieve suffering more effectively.
Compassion is thus both the fruit of evolution and the driving force behind it. Love yearns for greater love.
Living a consequent vegan life naturally encourages us to awaken from the consensus trance that brings unquestioning conformity and allows cruelty and slavery to continue. Refusing to see animals as commodities, we are able to see through countless other pretenses. And, as transformative as this is for an individual to experience, it would be infinitely more transformative for our culture to do so, and to evolve beyond the obsolete orientation that sees animals as mere food commodities.
Judging by the generally small numbers who have actually gone vegan in our culture, it appears that this commitment requires a certain breakthrough that has been generally elusive because of the mentality of domination and exclusion we’ve all been steeped in since birth. There is something about veganism that is not easy, but the difficulty is not inherent in veganism, but in our culture.
Spiritual teachings of our interconnectedness and the vegan ethic of universal compassion, besides being vital and transformative, are in profound alignment with the core instruction of the world’s religions, which is to love others.
Jesus questioned the foundation of war and oppression, which was then, as it is now, the killing and eating of animals.
Back then it was animal sacrifice performed by priests at the temple, which was the main source of wealth and prestige for the Jewish religious power structure, as well as being the source of meat for the populace.
Jesus’ confrontation at the temple in which he drove out those selling animals for slaughter was a bold attack on the fundamental herding paradigm of viewing animals merely as property, sacrifice objects, and food.
Perhaps in the past people thought they needed to enslave animals and people to survive, and that the cruelty involved in it was somehow allowed them.
It’s obviously not necessary for us today, as we can plainly see by walking into any grocery store, and the sooner we can awaken from the thrall of the obsolete mythos that we are predatory by nature, the sooner we’ll be able to evolve spiritually and discover and fulfill our purpose on this Earth.
It’s easier to see the gallons of fossil fuel poured directly into our cars than it is to see the gallons of fossil fuel poured into our cheese, eggs, fish sticks, hot dogs, and steaks.
Our knowledge and understanding of nonhuman animals is polluted far more than we acknowledge by our belief in our own superiority, our unrecognized cultural programming, and our separation from nature.
Our theories about animals will be seen in the future as quaint balderdash, as we now view the medieval theories of healing through bleeding and leeches and of an earth-centered solar system.
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.
Cultivating awareness is essential to realizing happiness, peace, and freedom.
We are called to shake the old stagnation and comfortable disconnections out of our minds and bodies, embrace the evolutionary urge within us to awaken compassion and intuitive wisdom, and live our lives in accord with the truth that we are connected intimately with all living beings.
In ancient Greek mythology, the three Furies (the Erinyes) were goddesses of retribution who punished human beings for committing crimes against the natural order. It is long past time for us to awaken to the basic fact that our enslavement, sexual abuse, and killing of billions of cows, chickens, and other fully sentient animals is a dreadful and massive crime against them, against the Earth and the natural order, and, ultimately, against ourselves.
It is time for us to realize that we are indeed being severely punished for this ongoing crime of animal agriculture. Animal agriculture is the hideous spinning fury at the core of our culture, sowing seeds of disease, exploitation, and conflict that we can see erupting as tyrannical oppression and as mental, physical, and social disease virtually everywhere in our world. To free ourselves from this ongoing punishment that we inflict upon ourselves and each other, we are called to liberate animals from human maltreatment. This is the essential and hidden pre-requisite to peace and freedom.
The consequences of failing to understand this basic lesson are multiplying exponentially. As we reduce animals to livestock and as we track, force medicate, and exploit them, we inevitably face retribution for these crimes and find ourselves similarly tracked, coerced, and exploited as mere livestock. As the old saying goes, the punishment fits the crime.
Although we’ve all been given the gift of physical bodies that don’t require any animals to suffer to get all the nutrients we need, the problem is that we are all born into a culture where we are compelled from infancy to participate in meals that include the flesh and secretions of severely abused animals. We are all thus wounded in profound and intractable ways. As discussed in The World Peace Diet, meals are actually rituals that inject into us, without our permission or awareness, a toxic narrative that erodes our compassion, intelligence, and self-respect. Because our meals are our most intimate connection with nature and with our culture, with every meal we effectively disconnect from discomforting implicit realities, and practice ritually dismantling our inherent capacities to look deeply, listen deeply, care deeply, and understand deeply.
The lesson is plain: when we harden ourselves to the suffering we inflict on animals in our own interest, and justify it by proclaiming our superiority or specialness, it is but a short and unavoidable step to justifying and inflicting the same kind of suffering on other humans in our own interest while likewise proclaiming our supremacy or specialness.
We are conditioned mentally to disconnect our food from the animal who was mindlessly abused to provide it, but the vibrational fields created by our food choices impact us profoundly whether we pretend to ignore them or not. Practicing mindful eating illuminates these hidden connections, cleanses our mind, heart, and actions, and removes inner masks and armor so that it becomes quite plain to see.
The unremitting conflict and oppression of history are unavoidable byproducts of confining and killing animals for food, as is the male role model of macho toughness that is required of both the professional animal killer (herder) and the soldier. If we desire to eat animal foods, this suffering is the unavoidable price we must pay.
As we look more deeply at our food, the healing of our children can begin, and our work can be resurrected as an instrument for blessing and bringing joy and caring to our world.
If we believe absurdities, we will commit atrocities, and we pass it on to our children, generation upon generation. Our violent actions speak so much more loudly than our peaceful words, and this is the unyielding dilemma of the herding culture we call home. The only way to solve this dilemma is to evolve cognitively and ethically to a higher level where our actions do not belie our words and force us into unconsciousness and denial, but rather align with and reinforce our words and the universal spiritual teachings that instruct us to love one another, and to have mercy on the weak and vulnerable rather than exploiting and dominating them.
To stop the atrocities, we must awaken from the absurd belief that animals are insentient, trivial, soulless property objects and challenge our religious institutions to extend ethical protection to animals.
This of course will mean challenging the meals at the center of social and religious life and the atrocities “hidden in plain sight” within those meals.
The Plant Strong Club 