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

234 / the world peace diet
Is Shamanism an Answer?
Human welfare, animal welfare, and environmental welfare are completely
and inextricably interconnected. Our dilemmas can be resolved
to the degree we evolve into a living understanding of this, awakening a
sense of universal compassion as articulated by Pythagoras, Jesus,
Buddha, Plotinus, Gandhi, Schweitzer, and countless others. The
shamanic traditions, while containing many valuable teachings and in
some ways revealing a more multidimensional view of the world and of
human potentials than that of conventional Western science and religion,
are nevertheless products of hunting and herding cultures. While
they typically seem to view animals with less disdain than in our culture,
they also seem to treat animals as food and ritual objects. They often
rely on plants to induce the altered states of consciousness that are central
to the shaman’s ability to walk between worlds, perform extraordinary
feats, and heal.
It seems enormously ironic, but it appears that cultures that eat animals
and use them for clothing, entertainment, and ritual sacrifice,
whether they are industrialized herding cultures or the more indigenous
shamanic cultures, use plant foods as drugs to escape ordinary reality.
Obvious examples of this are the use of heroin and other opium products,
psilocybin and other mushrooms, ayahuasca, peyote, marijuana,
tobacco, cocaine, and alcoholic products from the fermentation of fruits
and grains. There are many others as well. Users of these plant-based
substances have forgotten that the mind is the source of its experiences.
Visions and altered states of consciousness that are induced by relying on
plants can also be attained directly.
Our mistreatment of animals is a spiritual problem. It reflects a misunderstanding
that reduces beings to things. The shamanic traditions,
though born in cultures less overtly exploitive than ours has become,
still view animals as objects to be used and killed for food, apparel, healing
ceremonies, and other uses. They may perhaps be able to teach us
about respecting animals more than we currently do, and about not taking
more from the earth than we need, but, at the risk of overgeneralizing
a vast subject, shamanic traditions seem to tend toward parochialism,
in being devoted primarily to the welfare of a particular tribe or