The World Peace Diet: Eating For Spiritual Health And Social Harmony

148 / the world peace diet
Fishing, hunting, and abusing pets and caught wild animals are some of
the ways children express this acculturated violence, which further legitimizes
the most pervasive practice of violence against animals—slaughtering
and eating them. The link between children’s violence against animals
and their later violence against humans, now well established, is
yet another reminder of the Pythagorean principle that our mistreatment
of animals inevitably boomerangs as cruelty to each other and the
untold suffering this causes.
Cultivating Compassion
The cycle of violence that starts on our dinner tables reverberates
through our families, our communities, and through all our relations,
rippling into the field of our shared awareness. If we had the clear vision
of an angel, we would see that it reverberates around the planet in incalculable
ways and into incalculable dimensions. What we are, and what
all beings and manifestations ultimately are, is consciousness.
Consciousness manifests vehicles, which are sacred embodiments for the
expression, growth, and development of consciousness. All of us are
parts of something far greater, and we all have a unique purpose and
contribution to make. The idea that consciousness is merely an epiphenomenon
of matter is an erroneous reversal. It is the myth of materialism
that the shallow, terrorized and terrorizing mentality of domination
has invented and propagates in order to maintain its blindness to the
painful but liberating understanding of the interconnectedness of all life
and the fundamentally spiritual nature of all beings. No being is merely
a material thing or object, and no being can thus ever be a commodity
or article of property. We are all infinitely mysterious manifestations of
consciousness, and spiritual maturity is an awakening from the crippling
limitations of materialism and separatism, accompanied by a sense
of love and compassion for all creatures.
This idea has been articulated by mystics, saints, and sages from all
traditions and cultures since time immemorial. Two contemporaries
2,500 years ago in India—Mahavira, founder of the Jain tradition, and
Gautama Buddha—preached the fundamental spiritual necessity of cultivating
an attitude of ahimsa, or non-harmfulness, in their followers’