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

270 / the world peace diet
ships with each other and the created order. From every perspective we
can possibly take, we discover that our culturally imposed eating habits
are numbing, blinding, and confining us. Enslaving and eating animals
is relentlessly polluting our mental and bodily environments, hardening
our hearts and blocking feelings and awareness, instigating fear, violence,
and repression in our relationships, laying waste our precious
planet, gruesomely torturing and killing billions of terrorized beings,
deadening us spiritually, and profoundly disempowering us by impeding
our innate intelligence and our ability to make essential connections.
To come to terms with our multifaceted human dilemma is to come
to terms with the mentality of oppression that our meals demand.
Looking away, as we chronically do, our existence and our projects
become ironic, self-deceptive, destructive, and suicidal. Seeing our eating
habits for what they are, though, and answering the call of our spirit
to understand the consequences of our actions, we become open to
compassion, intelligence, freedom, and to living the truth of our interconnectedness
with all life. There is an enormously positive revolution
implicit in this, a spiritual transformation that can potentially launch
our culture into a quantum evolutionary leap, from emphasizing consumption,
domination, and self-preoccupation to nurturing creativity,
liberation, inclusion, and cooperation. Are we ready for such a spiritual
revolution? If we refuse, the strife, stress, and destruction will almost
certainly intensify due to our ascending numbers and exploitive technology.
When is a caterpillar ready to transform? The most obvious sign is
the passing of its voracious appetite because an inner urge turns its
attention to new directions.
The spiritual and cultural revolution that calls us must begin with
our food. Food is our primary connection with the earth and her mysteries,
and with our culture. It is the foundation of economy and is the
central inner spiritual metaphor of our lives. There is no way to overstate
the magnitude of the collective spiritual transformation that will
occur when we shift from food of violent oppression to food of gentleness
and compassion. The key to veganism is that it is lived. No one can
be a vegetarian in theory only! Unlike many religious teachings that are
primarily theoretical and internal, veganism is solidly practical. The