Though we are born into a culture that emphasizes our differences from other animals, our actual experience tells us differently. Those of us with companion animals, for example, know without doubt that they have distinct personalities and preferences, emotions and drives, and that they feel and avoid psychological and physical pain.
The guilt and shame perpetrators feel for their violent actions stem from their natural sense of kindness and caring, which they have blocked and are violating. 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.” While at first blush this seems reasonable, we quickly see that it is only because of the disconnections and bias inherent in our culture. 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, however we like, and that if we are responsible for doing harm, people have every right to ask us to stop.
When we cannot make connections, we cannot understand, and we are less free, less intelligent, less loving, and less happy. The most crucial task for our generation, our group mission on this earth, perhaps, is to make some essential connections that our parents and ancestors have been mostly unable to make, and thus to evolve a healthier human society to bequeath to our children.
We all have unique gifts we can bring to the most urgent task we face at this point in our human evolution: transforming our inherited dominator mentality by liberating those we have enslaved for food. The crucial elements are adopting a vegan lifestyle, educating ourselves, cultivating our spiritual potential, and plugging in to help educate others.
In violent crimes committed publicly, there are three roles acted out: that of the perpetrator, that of the victim, and that of the bystander. 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. The perpetrators always encourage each other and regard the bystanders with suspicion and hostility, and the victims’ voices cannot be heard.
Are we ready for a spiritual revolution? If we refuse, the strife, stress, and destruction will almost certainly intensify due to our ascending numbers and exploitive technology. When is a caterpillar ready to transform? The most obvious sign is the passing of its voracious appetite because an inner urge turns its attention to new directions.
To meditate for world peace, to pray for a better world, and to work for social justice and environmental protection while continuing to purchase the flesh, milk, and eggs of horribly abused animals exposes a disconnect that is so fundamental that it renders our efforts absurd, hypocritical, and doomed to certain failure.
The inner action of leaving home necessitates in many ways a spiritual breakthrough. The essential action is to stop turning away and disconnecting from the suffering we impose on others by our food choices.
Once a vegan, we are always so, because our motivation is not personal and self-oriented, but is based on concern for others and on our undeniable interconnectedness with other living beings.
Actually, the taste that we prize in animal foods is more like the sex we would have as rapists, for the prostitute may at least consent and profit from our cravings, but the animal is always forced against her will to be tortured and killed for our taste and questionable pleasure.
The 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.
The opposite of love is not hate but indifference. When we lift the veil and see the suffering our food habits cause, when we connect with the reality of the defenseless beings who suffer so terribly because of our food choices, our indifference dissolves and compassion—its opposite—arises, urging us to act on behalf of those who are suffering.
A primary danger is that we might leave home but not return; that is, we could awaken to the harmfulness inherent in our culture’s commodification of living beings but fail to bring this awakening to our culture by becoming a voice for these beings. If our understanding isn’t articulated in ways that are meaningful for us, it can become imprisoned within us and turn sour, becoming cynicism, anger, despair, and disease. This doesn’t serve us or anyone else.
• Book – The Ultimate Betrayal: Is There Happy Meat?
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Hope Bohanec has been active in animal protection and environmental activism for 30 years and has published the book http://www.the-ultimate-betrayal.com/ She is the Projects Manager for the national non-profit http://www.upc-online.org/, the host of the http://www.hopefortheanimalspodcast.org/, and the Executive Director of http://www.socoveg.org/, a California based vegan advocacy organization. Over the last three decades, Hope has given countless presentations, written innumerable articles, and contributed chapters to two anthologies. She has organized hundreds of events including UPC’s annual Conscious Eating Conference and the http://www.socovegfest.org/.
• Check out our Podcasts Visit us on Apple Podcast and Itunes search: The Real Truth About Health Free 17 Day Live Online Conference Podcast Amazon: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/23a…
The human cycle of violence will not stop until we stop the underlying violence, the remorseless violence we commit against animals for food. We teach this behavior and this insensitivity to all our children in a subtle, unintentional, but powerful form of culturally approved child abuse.
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.
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 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.
The spiritual and cultural revolution that calls us must begin with our food. Food is our primary connection with the earth and her mysteries, and with our culture. It is the foundation of economy and is the central inner spiritual metaphor of our lives.
Even if we are benumbed to the degree that we are not concerned about the suffering of animals, and we are only able to care about other humans, we soon realize that the human anguish caused by eating foods of animal origin requires us to choose a plant-based diet. Human starvation, the emotional devastation required to kill and confine animals, the pollution and waste of water, land, petroleum, and other vital resources, and the injustice and violence underlying our animal food production complex all compel us to abandon our acculturated eating habits.
Centenarians in the blue zones, the longest-lived people in the world, aren’t trying to eat “healthy” or live to 100—they aren’t counting calories or reading food labels—they simply eat what is local, in season, and readily available. Unfortunately, the reality for many of us is the overly processed, colorfully packaged, sugar-saturated Standard American Diet.
Kathy Freston, New York Times bestselling author and wellness activist, has recently released her newest title 72 Reasons to be Vegan to encourage readers to try eating plant-based whether for better, skin, better sex, or maybe just a new family tradition.
Freston chatted with us about how to simplify plant-based eating, why fiber matters, and what makes family meals so special.
Blue Zones: What’s the biggest thing most Americans are missing in their diets?
Looking from a variety of perspectives at our animal-based meals, we discover that eating animals has consequences far beyond what we would at first suspect. Like a little boy caught tormenting frogs, our culture mumbles, “It’s no big deal,” and looks away. And yet the repercussions of our animal-based diet are a very big deal indeed, not only for the unfortunate creatures in our hands, but for us as well. Our actions reinforce attitudes, in us and in others, that amplify the ripples of those actions until they become the devastating waves of insensitivity, conflict, injustice, brutality, disease, and exploitation that rock our world today.
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.
If we fail to make the connection between our daily meals and our cultural predicament, we will inevitably fail as a species to survive on this earth. By refusing to make this essential connection, we condemn others and ourselves to enormous suffering, without ever comprehending why.
We become a revolution of one, contributing to the foundation of a new world with every meal we eat. As we share our ideas with others, we promote what may be the most uplifting and healing revolution our culture has ever experienced.
The fat we carry around under our skin is mainly the fat of miserable and terrified animals—it’s not surprising we’re anxious to be rid of it! If we based our diet on the whole grains, fruits, vegetables and legumes for which we are designed, we would find the obesity problem in our culture evaporating, along with many other problems.
Perpetrators and victims are known to exchange roles over and over again in countless subtle and obvious ways. The cycle of violence may span larger dimensions than we in our herding culture would like to admit, and there are many wisdom traditions that affirm that it does. Until we see from the highest level, we had best heed the counsel of every enlightened spiritual teacher from every time: be ye kind to one another.
We have all been given the gift of physical bodies that require no animal to suffer for their feeding. However, we’ve all been conditioned from infancy by our culture to reject this gift, and to unnecessarily confine, slaughter, and eat animals, and this sows the seeds of generations of misery.
More than ever, it seems that the vegan message of compassion for all, and respect for the sovereignty of animals and humans, including our “enemies,” is of critical importance. It is essential to connect with our inner wisdom to address the barrage of conflicting narratives we are continually facing. Thank you for questioning, and for living your life as an adventure of inquiry and creativity.
In this spirit of inquiry, we will be speaking in Sacramento this Sunday, exploring the big questions we are facing, and how vegan living, health freedom, and spirituality contribute to positive personal and cultural possibilities. Please join us for Time to Wake Up and/or share with friends.
We are delighted to announce that inspiration and wisdom from our celebrated Worldwide Vegan Summit for Truth and Freedom is now available to everyone. You can now listen to complimentary audio recordings of all 18 presentations featuring Dr. T. Colin Campbell, Dr. Gabriel Cousens, Dr. Joel Kahn, Clare Mann, Dr. Armaiti May, Henna Maria, Dr. Brian Clement, Dr. Pam Popper, Derrick Broze, and many others.
Our friend and colleague, the remarkably talented vegan chef and teacher, Mark Reinfeld, is offering his much-loved 4-week Vegan Cooking Intensive starting August 15th. Apply soon, and you can receive a $600 discount on this outstanding in-depth culinary training. Both in-person and virtual options are available.
We have also just posted a new Morning Musical Inspiration video of our original piano and flute improvisations: Loon Series #3, dedicated to celebrating the splendor of loons and the beauty of nature.
Finally, our self-paced online World Peace Diet Facilitator Training is going strong and is available if you’d like to join like-minded people, and dive into deep veganism, exploring how we can thrive as vegans during these unprecedented times, and be more effective in our advocacy.
We are also happy to sign copies of our books, CD albums, art cards, and paintings—all are available to order.
If you are interested in a unique gift experience, please check out our Individualized Music & Art Portraits. Yuma, our Yamaha studio grand piano, is tuned and ready, as are Madeleine’s palette and brushes. We have been creating these now for 30 years and people still tell us how much inspiration, joy, and healing they receive from their personalized music and paintings.
We are grateful to work with so many caring and committed people who are dedicated to healing and awakening, and helping others do the same. Thanks for your efforts and for your presence here on our precious Earth.
Book – Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows: An Introduction to Carnism
Dr. Melanie Joy is a Harvard-educated psychologist, celebrated speaker, and the author of six books, including the award-winning Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows; Beyond Beliefs: A Guide to Improving Relationships and Communication for Vegans, Vegetarians, and Meat Eaters; Powerarchy: Understanding the Psychology of Oppression for Social Transformation; and Getting Relationships Right. Dr. Joy is the eighth recipient of the Ahimsa Award – previously given to the Dalai Lama and Nelson Mandela – for her work on global nonviolence. Her work has been featured in major media outlets around the world, including the BBC, ABC Australia, NPR, and the New York Times, and she has given talks and trainings in nearly 50 countries. Dr. Joy is also the founding president ofhttp://www.carnism.org/.
The Plant Strong Club 