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

Living the Revolution / 275
atively to the situation with love, understanding, and skillful means, and
to strive to live in ever more complete alignment with the values of compassion,
honesty, and integrity. The more we live in alignment with our
values, the stronger the truth-field we emanate will be, and the more our
words, gestures, and actions will carry weight with perpetrators. None
of us is completely innocent, because to some degree we all are, and
have been, in all three roles. As non-vegans, we are challenged by our
spiritual and ethical disconnection to slow down, stop, pay attention,
reconnect, embrace our disowned shadow, and begin the healing
process. As vegans, we are challenged by our inconsistencies and fear of
reprisal to pay attention and deepen our healing and awakening process
by making the effort to align our thoughts, words, and actions with our
understanding of interbeing and to ever more fully embody peace and
courageous love. Cultivating awareness is essential to realizing happiness,
peace, and freedom.
What about the victims, the animals? Who are these beings, so
defenseless and unable to retaliate, so punished by a heartless, mechanized
system developed for self-gratification and profit?
Our Connection with Animals
Though we are born into a culture that emphasizes our differences from
other animals, our actual experience tells us differently. We are only
comfortable eating animals when we exclude them from the categories
we use to define ourselves, but our differences from animals are far less
than our eating habits force us to believe they are. Those of us with
companion animals, for example, know without doubt that they have
distinct personalities and preferences, emotions and drives, and that
they feel and avoid psychological and physical pain. Besides the enormous
amount of anecdotal evidence that animals behave altruistically,
both toward members of their own species and also to animals outside
their species, there is clinical evidence as well, such as the typically cruel
experiments in which monkeys were given food if they administered
painful shocks to other monkeys. Researchers found that the monkeys
would rather go hungry than shock other monkeys, especially if they
had received shocks earlier themselves. The researchers were surprised