Albert Einstein said, "A human being is a part of a whole, called by us ‘universe’, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest... a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature and its beauty." To be vegetarian is to lay to rest the delusion of separateness; it is to pluck the thread of consciousness like a fiddle’s string, and let it vibrate the harmony of compassion.
Here, in our physical world of usable objects, food is stuff, it is the ingestible equivalent of closet-clutter. Our food comes neatly packaged in pathetic plastic containers marketed for their wasteability. Burgers are dressed in regional American themes, like paltry pageant contestants. Shake-out bacon accessorizes salads, baked potatoes, deviled eggs. Holiday turkeys are dining room centerpieces. Eating has become for many quietly destructive, as thoughtless as driving, web surfing, grooming, or text messaging. As the central feature of today’s diet, meat is carelessly left on in the background like a lonesome television set. Rarely do we ask how it serves our experience. Does it? Or is meat a part of a cultural and political landscape that has become stale and unsustainable, part of the archetypal wasteland we have come to find so comfortable?
At the heart of the movement to change the way we eat is a call to wellness. The American Heart Association reports that vegetarians enjoy a lower risk of obesity, coronary heart disease (which causes heart attack), high blood pressure, diabetes mellitus and some forms of cancer. They also point out that, “You don't need to eat foods from animals to have enough protein in your diet. Plant proteins alone can provide enough of the essential and non-essential amino acids, as long as sources of dietary protein are varied and caloric intake is high enough to meet energy needs.” Their statement includes no research to the contrary. And yet, major pharmaceutical companies spend billions each year in search of new drugs to cure heart disease, still the number one threat to human life in the United States. In the meantime, Americans continue to consume meat with every meal, eating more than three times the global average per year.
Less attention still is placed on the spiritual benefits of a plant-based diet. Each of the world’s major religions contains a passionate camp of proponents for vegetarianism as it relates to their respective belief systems. Each of these group’s arguments is about compassion and non-violence. But without disregard for vegetarianism as a religious precept, wellness spurred by compassionate living is available to everyone, outside of organized religious practice.
And so, how can we sing wellness into our being?
I’ve been wearing a simple sterling silver ring tiled with five tiny squares of turquoise for a few years now. I picked it up in a secondhand store in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and since then two of the five gems have fallen out. It’s an incomplete but still beautiful accessory that I like to admire when I twirl it on my finger.
My ring morphed into a magic wand of sorts in a recent dream. I was walking the path alongside Lake Atitlan, near where I now live in Guatemala, and I suddenly realized that when I pointed my ring-fingered fist at any object in this landscape, whether it was a mountain, an animal, a person, or the lake itself, the ring shot out an invisible ray of energy. Once I knew I had this power, I shot a ray at Volcán Tolimán, one of the three 10,000 foot-high baby volcanoes that sprout from the lake’s depths. In an instant, Tolimán “imploded” in a spiral of light, and out of its crater blasted something back at me – an invisible message. It felt like an immaculate conception of sorts, the volcano was growing inside of me at a furious pace. I looked down at my normal, plump belly-mound, and momentarily understood the life of the towering volcano – why it existed, why it was born where it was, and what its function was on the planet.
As the dream went on, I was both frightened and empowered by my new ability, and I even looked at my ring and thought, “Shit, I’ve been wearing this thing all along, and had no idea it was so powerful!”
This dream served as a reminder of something that I know in waking, and that has been enlivened since my relationship with food has changed: every person’s ability to internalize the soul of the world, with only a dose of intent to do so.
In this way, becoming vegetarian has granted me a “magic wand” of sorts. As an element built in to my belief system, it draws wellness and understanding into my daily experience.
In today’s world, to eat has many expressions – for some it is the source of stress from the moment of waking in the morning: where will my food come from, how will I afford to eat? For others it is a source of joyous creativity in deciding when, where, and what to eat. And based on the way that we speak about food, to eat is more than just to put food into our mouths, chew, and swallow. The American proverbial dialogue is full of references to food’s energetic content, and our role in shaping its value: The first Americans believed themselves to be literally made of the food they ate, primarily corn. Hopi Indian scholar Maria D. Glowacka says, “When a Hopi woman grinds corn she is aware that she touches the perfect element of life. Therefore, grinding corn is a ritual duty that should be performed with ‘pure heart,’ symbolizing the state of being morally pure, without negative, disturbing thoughts and feelings.”
Today we say, “It’s better when Mom makes it,” and “You are what you eat.” We pray before meals because we acknowledge that the food we eat has a spirit worth thanking, and that this spirit will somehow be absorbed into our own, when it becomes part of our body’s tissues.
And so, when we eat, how would we most like to engage our spirits?
I began to ask this question four years ago during a lunchtime conversation with a vegetarian friend.
I met Grant while working in East Africa, and we once took a week’s vacation to the island of Zanzibar together. On our first day, we sat down to a meal in a Thai restaurant, and with the tinge of judgment that often hides in the question, I asked, “So, why are you vegetarian?”
Grant replied, with far less judgment of me, the meat-eater, “I was born into relative privilege. I am privileged enough to know what kind of impact eating meat has on the world.” And while at the time I would certainly have considered myself an environmentalist, and concerned for human rights (we were in Africa working for a legal team that was prosecuting the genocide in Rwanda), I had never, ever thought of meat as a threat to people or the environment.
During our week together in Zanzibar, Grant and I held an ongoing conversation about the meat industry. And when I later delved into my own research on the subject, it began to make perfect sense: Pasture for cattle has become the number one source of deforestation in the Amazon rainforest, constituting two-thirds of annual clearing. The Amazon is also cleared to make way for the production of low-grade soy meant to feed chickens, pigs, and cattle worldwide. I learned that one third of the world’s grain harvest is used to feed livestock, and to this day I continue to find the news shocking – the National Institute for Space Research released an estimate in January 2008 of 4,300 square miles of deforestation in the Amazon, all of which is area for livestock and crops. The number of indigenous people and native species that have been exterminated or displaced under this scenario is difficult to imagine.
A 2006 report, issued by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) reports that one third of the earth’s entire land surface is in use for livestock production. The UN report also states that methane emissions produced by cattle farming make up 18 percent of greenhouse gasses that contribute to global warming. All of this because of the world’s dependence on meat.
If this all sounds familiar, it should: environmentalists have been quick to point out that the problem of meat is much like that of oil. New York Times bestselling author Kathy Freston was quick to size up the UN’s new findings and point out that a plant-based diet is a far more effective strategy to combat global warming than purchasing a hybrid car (and far less expensive).
To anyone who would argue that the problem of meat requires policy change and cooperation of world leaders, I would agree. But the most valuable way to enforce change is on the grassroots level: right now, remove yourself from the equation by eliminating meat from your diet.
This is how it started for me. I decided that I would leave meat out of my diet for six months, and see how I felt.
Years later, I am vividly aware of how my decision set me on a path toward a spiritual truth that rings in my ears every moment of every day. But in those first six months it was a transformation of my physical body that surprised me the most. I noticed the absence of the post-meal stomach aches and sleepiness that I had become used to. I started to get compliments on my skin and the brightness of my eyes. When I was hungry I found that I craved the tender flesh of fruits and vegetables the way I used to crave animal protein. I found bliss in the creativity it required to shop for food – I couldn’t believe that I had never cooked curly kale or squash blossom, that I had never barbequed platanos or baked eggplants or cooked bulgar wheat. The first few times I was invited to dinner parties and the host said, “Okay, you don’t eat meat or eggs…what do you eat?” I was pleased to reply, “Everything else.”
I also began to experience an unexplainable change in my imaginative power. When I thought about the plants that I’d eaten, I was able to visualize my digestive process, perceiving my insides as bursting with bright plant colors and cartoon-like organic shapes – I could sense a pulpy fruit’s string-like fibers gently scrubbing the walls of my intestines, I could feel the purple of a beet’s flesh, the golden skins of corn kernels, peach fuzz bristles like tiny feathers – all floating in my bloodstream like pollen on spring air.
And while my actual digestion continued to improve, I had the sensation that nothing was being wasted, that everything I ate truly fed me.
Eating became more about contemplation than anything else. Now, when I eat fruits, vegetables, grains, and nuts, I like to reflect on their origins, like a stop-frame movie: as exquisitely delicate seeds inches beneath soil, the way they interact with bacteria and insects and fungus, the pollen and pits and sweet, rotted corpses they leave behind. I find joy in contemplating a plant’s journey from seed to harvest because it reminds me of my own lifecycle.
I once had a dream in which I was at a picnic with friends, painstakingly tearing apart a barbequed chicken thigh with my teeth, tugging at the marinated skin, chewing so hard and with such disgusted fervor that I woke myself up.
In the act of chewing a bite of steak or chop or wing, we’re forced to resist the contemplation of that bite’s source – who wants to contemplate the life and death of the animal that supplied it? To do so requires that we placate ourselves with the lie that it came to us without slaughter. Our most common eating practices represent a false ritual, one of pretending, hoping perhaps, that the nourishment is provided free of the violence that is inherent in slaughter.
It is no surprise that slaughterhouses are notoriously secretive, and have been the focus of dozens of investigations by animal-rights groups, not so much because animal activists are bent on advocating vegetarianism for everyone, but because today’s methods of slaughtering animals for meat is unnecessarily cruel, and poorly regulated by the United States Department of Agriculture.
“It would be difficult to conceive of a more wasteful, toxic, inhumane, disease-promoting, and destructive food production system than our farmed animal industry,” says Will Tuttle, author of “The World Peace Diet, Eating for Spiritual Health and Social Harmony”. Methods of slaughter of cows, pigs, chickens and other animals has changed significantly in the past century, as the demand for meat has grown alongside growth in human population and the meat lobby’s influence over the media and the legal system.
Animals must be killed with speed, often at the cost of precision. The Wikipedia article “Slaughterhouse,” states that, “Cattle are rendered unconscious by applying an electric shock of 300 volts and 2 amps to the back of the head, effectively stunning the animal. or by use of a captive bolt pistol to the front of the cow's head (a pneumatic or cartridge-fired captive bolt). Swine can be rendered unconscious by CO2/inert gas stunning.” And while rendering mammals unconscious before slaughter is mandated by Federal law, a recent report by USDA inspector Steve Cockerham reports that the laws intended to keep slaughter “humane” fall short. He reports that he often saw plant workers cut off the feet, ears, and udders of cattle that were conscious on the production line after stun guns failed to work properly. “They were still blinking and moving. It’s a sickening thing to see,” says Cockerham. Birds raised for meat are primed for factory conditions with beak removal and wing-clipping, and pigs’ tails and genitals are clipped, without anesthetic. This, in addition to living an entire life without setting foot on grass or tasting it, living day and night in pens and cages where their movement is restricted to mere inches in each direction, making trampling, cannibalism, and disease rampant. Within the confines of industrial meat plants, natural social and behavioral patterns are repressed, and animals spend their lives in confusion, fear, and constant psychological retreat.
The condition of slaughterhouses in the US and worldwide is a bastardization of every family’s prayers before mealtime. These conditions are a realistic threat to the human race’s physical and spiritual health. Only when a larger segment of the world’s population, particularly those in developed, wealthy countries, become aware of the process that is required to bring meat to their plates, will become clear why peace often feels so out of reach.
It seems that the most important element of understanding why vegetarianism is for many a primarily spiritual pursuit, is the concept that human beings represent just one evolutionary path, a path which has seen us to our current destiny of global domination. Every other species on the planet is moving forward on a parallel evolutionary path, each plant and animal is designed to better operate in the same world, this shared planet we call Earth. Jesuit priest, philosopher, and paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin said, “We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.”
Animals bred for meat are the greatest casualty of an overly-materialistic, spirit-repressive worldview. Industrially farmed animals have been relegated to the world of commodities, their production and sale is a part of an elaborate profit-scheme, and as a result they are easily considered not-a-part-of-nature. But although animals raised for food live their lives in captivity, they are still units of evolution. Their collective consciousness is still an integral part of the evolutionary process. And all animals, in order to end up “safe” for standard consumption, must pass through a slaughterhouse.
Like any spiritual pursuit, my vegetarianism has evolved. I think less and less about my diet, and feel it more.
I find incomparable comraderie both in other vegetarians and in other animals. I feel closer to my pets – a new and indescribable energy resonates between us. While observing fish in an aquarium, Franz Kafka once said, “I can now look at you in peace; I don’t eat you anymore.”
My dreamlife has changed, too. As a kid I was tortured by what can only be described as “needle in the haystack” nightmares: I was locked in a hedged maze, searching for a friend, or stumbling down a dirt arroyo near my house in search of a single grain of sand, but if I stepped on it, it would no longer contain the answer that I was looking for. Whatever the scenario, I was always retreating, always hunted.
It’s not to say that I my nightmares were due to my meat-inclusive diet. During this time my parents were divorcing, I was growing up and into a world where the most accessible path was littered with the toxins of rabid materialism and bizarre, plastic interpretations of womanhood. I was a teenage girl experiencing myself through the eyes of everyone else.
But as far back as I can remember, dreaming has been my most trusted personal barometer, and my change in diet did, quite precisely, coincide with an evolution in my sleeping-self.
I now seem to see much less of my own physical body in dreaming, and I’ve found that the most memorable of my dreams have been amongst animals, in distant, untouched natural landscapes. Touching animals is a major theme: swimming underwater with a giant blue whale, hand in fin; conversing with two yellow-breasted warblers high in a treetop, and speaking their sung language fluently; spooning in bed with a brown bear who was my boyfriend.
If evolution is a path that requires the gradual increase of vibrational harmony, I have seen my ability to harmonize explode in a rainbow of color, and, without a doubt, I sense that this is due to the way I interact with food.
This harmonic growth is ongoing, and fostered by a more recent delve into understanding the impact of meat-production on the collective consciousness of the animals that are raised for food. Until I was exposed to the brutal truth of meat production, I had not fully considered the impact of the world’s farmed animal’s collective pain on the energetic wellness of all species. I had yet to see the power of non-violence that a plant-based diet affords.
It’s no surprise that non-vegetarians carry with them a plethora of defenses when confronted with this sort of information. For most of refuse to see that the destruction of the environment is today’s most basic form of psychological control. In the face of environmental problems we often ask, “How did we let it get this far? Why don’t our leaders do something about it?” But in fact, destruction of the environment caused by industry and sanctioned by government is not “allowed” and therefore damaging, it is a deliberate and highly effective form of control. It has been systematically written into our legal and cultural paradigms, much like foreign oil dependence and a corrupt monetary system. The simultaneous weakening of our bodies and minds is meticulously carried out via the food supply.
A vegetarian lifestyle is not, contrary to popular belief, riddled with a constant sense of self-restriction. My diet is hardly agonizing. I don’t smell bacon frying and think, “If only I could eat that…” and I certainly don’t enjoy holiday celebrations any less. Make no mistake, vegetarianism is about liberation. It is part of a discreet but powerful evolutionary path, a joyous expression of compassion and self-love. It is a method of communication with the universe that exceeds spoken language.
My friend Grant, who inspired me to become vegetarian, died tragically shortly after our trip to Zanzibar. In the months following, I dreamt of him as he was when he was alive: waking early to jog and practice yoga on the beach, standing before the dawn, neck and limbs outstretched toward five sacrosanct directions. His living presence was seething with wellness and compassion, and much to my gratitude, he’s left a bit of both for me to chew on.
