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

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stock/capital and, at the end of the day, eat the flesh and/or secretions
of their confined and killed animals as a ritual celebration. What drives
this entire heartless enterprise, generation after generation, so that we
are powerless not just to challenge it but even to recognize and discuss
it intelligently? The cruelty we routinely inflict on animals haunts our
boys and the cycle continues, ravaging the earth, the generations, and
the landscape of our feelings.
The Birth of Post-Rational Consciousness
We have looked from many perspectives at our ongoing practice of eating
animals and have seen how it creates an internal mental climate of
distractedness and disconnectedness that reduces our inherent intelligence
and ability to make meaningful connections while numbing and
paralyzing us emotionally. The resulting cycle of violence keeps us confined
to patterns of competition and acquisition that drive the same
commodifying and destructive elitist economic system that began
emerging ten thousand years ago with the herding culture. Even though
many people and traditions have urged us to practice compassion and
develop direct intuitive knowing, we have remained mired in
omnivorism, self-preoccupation, and disconnected analytical thinking.
This has allowed us to develop technologically but has blocked our
emotional and spiritual progress with painful results for us, for our children,
and for our children’s children.
Pre-rational processes may be called instinctual, and many of us
enjoy believing we’ve progressed beyond instinct—and thus beyond animals—in
our development and use of the complex symbolic languages
that give us the ability to think conceptually. Matthew Scully points out
in his book, Dominion, that some scientists and theorists, such as
Stephen Budiansky, John Kennedy, and Peter Carruthers, claim that our
human language gives us the ability to think, and that without language
and thus thinking, we would not be conscious. 11 We have to wonder
how they would construe this statement by Albert Einstein:
The interaction of images is the source of thought. The words of the
language as they are written or spoken do not seem to play any role