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

230 / the world peace diet
of the animal cruelty in meals to emerge to be healed and released.
Instead, the very activities that would be most beneficial to people of
our herding culture are the activities that are the most studiously avoided.
We have become a culture that craves noise, distraction, busyness,
and entertainment at all costs. This allows our eaten violence to remain
buried, blocked, denied, and righteously projected.
Spiritual traditions universally recognize that we humans yearn to
enter states of awareness that are more luminous and serene, where our
usual anxious and compulsive thinking diminishes and recedes into the
background. This yearning has given rise to a wide range of meditation
practices that help people enter the present moment more deeply and
perhaps experience the transcendent reality that we might call God or
the Absolute. In this experience the walls that usually separate us from
others and the world begin to dissolve and we can see directly that we
are not essentially separate from others, that the same light that shines
in us shines in everyone. This unmediated intuitive knowing reinforces
and deepens our sense of compassion.
The connection between intuition and compassion has been universally
recognized in both Eastern and Western spiritual traditions, and it
extends not just to other humans but to animals as well. In the Buddhist
tradition, for example, intuitive wisdom is the sacred feminine and compassion
is the sacred masculine, and they give rise to each other and nurture
each other within all of us as our true nature and potential. It’s well
known, therefore, that monks and nuns are to refrain from eating animal
flesh, particularly during meditation retreats. This is basically true
in the Hindu, Jain, Sikh, Baha’i, and Taoist traditions also. The Catholic
monastic traditions that are the most contemplative, such as the
Cistercians and Trappists, tend to require monks to abstain from animal
flesh, especially during periods of extended prayer and purification.
An Example: Samadhi and Shojin
Meditation is not an exotic or specific activity. It’s a fundamental
human potential and simply refers to a mind that is present, open,
relaxed, and aware. It can be induced and developed by all kinds of
things, such as chanting, singing, sitting quietly and attending to our