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

The Dilemma of Work / 181
temporary anthropologists, before the hunting of large animals, herding,
and the domination of animals and women. Returning to the garden
of abundance, innocence, and natural blessedness has always been
seen as the goal of religious yearning in the West, yet to actually accomplish
this we must unseat the basic mythos of domination and exclusion
that our culture propagates. In its heart of hearts, our culture longs to
transcend itself, as we ourselves do, and to return, spiral-like, to a time
of connectedness, mercy, and creative joy. The seeds of this yearning are
planted in our culture’s heart and in our spiritual essence.
The fall from grace, innocence, freedom, and mercy began when we
ate of the fruit of the illusion of dualistic separatism and stopped showing
mercy to those at our mercy. The fall came when we began commodifying
animals. We can resurrect our work from defiling slavery to joyous
participation. The path simply requires that we give the same
opportunities to the animals who are at our mercy: release them from
slavery and grant them freedom to once again fully participate in the
unfolding of their unique purpose and consciousness. What we would
wish for ourselves we must first give to others: this is, it seems, an everlasting
spiritual principle.
To resurrect work from the depths of the trivialization, dissatisfaction,
and exploitation into which it has fallen, we’ll need a cultural shift
far more radical than any currently proposed by the left or the right.
We’ll need a positive transformation of our relationship to those at our
mercy, which means shifting from animal foods to plant foods, and
from a mythos of death and domination to a mythos of life and cocreative
participation. Anything less is mere irony and hypocrisy.
As individuals, as a culture, and as a human family, we pay a
remarkably steep price for work that is demeaning or destructive to others
or ourselves. When we work primarily for money, we transgress
against our spiritual purpose, and sell our life energy and time, which is
unfathomably precious. Spiritual traditions and teachings have all
emphasized that each one of us has a unique purpose and mission in this
life to unfold and fulfill, and that this is our work. Our work has to do
with purifying and awakening our consciousness, contributing creatively
to our community, and being the voice and hands that confer bless-