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

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ness. 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 Shadow
In Jungian terms, our culture’s enormous, intractable, overriding shadow
is the cruelty and violence toward animals it requires, practices, eats,
and meticulously hides and denies. As mentioned in Chapter 1, according
to Jungian theory, the shadow archetype represents those aspects of
ourselves that we refuse to acknowledge, the part of ourselves that we
have disowned. To itself, the shadow is what the self is not, and in this
case it is our own cruelty and violence that we deny and repress. We tell
ourselves that we are good, just, upright, kind and gentle people. We
just happen to enjoy eating animals, which is okay because they were
put here for us to use and we need the protein. Yet the extreme cruelty
and violence underlying our meals is undeniable, and so our collective
shadow looms larger and more menacing the more we deny its existence,
sabotaging our efforts to grow spiritually and to collectively
evolve a more awakened culture.
As Jungian psychotherapy emphasizes, the shadow will be heard!
This is why we eventually do to ourselves what we do to animals. The
shadow is a vital and undeniable force that cannot, in the end, be
repressed. The tremendous psychological forces required to confine,
mutilate, and kill millions of animals every day, and to keep the whole
bloody slaughter repressed and invisible, work in two ways. One way is
to numb, desensitize, and armor us, which decreases our intelligence
and ability to make connections. The other is to force us to act out
exactly what we are repressing. This is done through projection. We create
an acceptable target to loathe for being violent, cruel, and tyrannical—the
very qualities that we refuse to acknowledge in ourselves—and
then we attack it. With this understanding of the immense violence
toward animals that we keep hidden and the implacable shadow this
creates, the existence of 50,000 nuclear warheads 1 becomes comprehensible.
Our “never-ending” war against terrorism becomes not just comprehensible
but inevitable, as does our appalling destruction of ecosys-