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

224 / the world peace diet
and administer the weapons never actually see the horror and agony the
weapons cause. As a culture we’ve learned well how to dissociate from
the violence we inflict on others because we all practice it when we eat
animal foods: somewhere, because of our decision, an abused and terrified
creature is attacked and stabbed to death. In war and in food production,
we use similar euphemisms, like “harvesting” animals, or “collateral
damage,” and we shield ourselves from the carnage of either the
slaughterhouses or the bombed villages and cities. Turning away from
our violence against animals, we naturally sanitize and gloss over our
war violence against other humans as well. We are shown by our mass
media complex the evil enemies who require us to do all the bombing
and killing, and we not only agree to it; we are unconsciously instigating
and demanding it through the denial and projection of the immense
shadow we create through our eating habits.
Every day, we cause over thirty million birds and mammals and
forty-five million fish to be fatally attacked so we can eat them, 4 and it’s
universally considered to be good food for good people. With these
meals, we feed our shadow, which grows strong and bold as it gorges
itself on our repressed grief, guilt, and revulsion. Strangely enough, the
larger and more powerful the shadow becomes, the harder it is to see,
though it is literally not just under our noses, but actually in our noses
and all our cells. It is well known in psychotherapy that it’s liberating but
difficult to see our own shadow archetypes and how they operate. We
instinctively resist it, which is why the undercover videos of animal abuse
on factory farms and slaughterhouses are mostly watched by vegans who
never eat animal foods. The shadow is by definition what we are actively
repressing, so it’s inevitable that we avoid experiences that might trigger
its coming into consciousness. Even Jungian scholars who spend their
time writing about the shadow fail to see the greatest shadow of all, the
shadow that springs from our abuse of animals, because they’re typically
eating and exploiting animals like everyone else. We become spiritually
and psychologically free only as we are able to see and integrate the
shadow aspects of ourselves, and this will only be possible when we stop
eating animal foods, relaxing and releasing the irresistible need to block
our awareness. In unchaining animals, we unchain ourselves.