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

Some Objections Answered / 201
forth. This objection is merely a restatement of the herding culture’s fundamental
supremacist orientation that legitimizes the domination of
animals. It is based in an attitude that animals don’t matter, that their
suffering at our hands is not an issue, and that they are somehow superfluous
or expendable. If we can get our minds and hearts somehow outside
the box constructed by our culturally defining core practice of
enslaving and killing animals for food, which traps our thinking and
feeling within the narrow confines of the dominator herding mentality,
we will begin to see, feel, and understand what animals actually are.
We will see that, like us, animals are expressions of infinite, universal
love-intelligence; that, like us, they yearn for satisfaction of their
drives and desires, and avoid pain and suffering; that, like us, they are
profoundly mysterious. If we’ve learned anything at all about animals,
it is that we can in no way make them fit into the categories of our limited
understanding. When we look at animals in nature it is possible to
see competition, struggle, and violence, as many scientists are trained to
do, and yet it is also possible to see cooperation and mutual aid, as
Kropotkin 1 and other scientists have discovered. Further, it is possible to
see celebration, joy, humor, love, caring, and the wondrous interplay
and expression of an absolutely infinite complexity of life forms. There
is deep truth in the old saying that we see things not as they are but as
we are.
We have not begun to scratch the surface of understanding animals.
How can we know what it is to swim as whales, at home in the ocean
depths and migrating thousands of miles, speaking in underwater songs
and breathing together in conscious harmony, or to fly in a flock of
sandpipers, whirling in an effortless synchronicity, fifty birds as one, or
to burrow as prairie dogs, creating complex underground communities
with virtually endless chambers, passageways, and interactions? 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.