foods that are harmful to our physical health, we are


food ha o


also being compelled to eat


h c


t


attitudes and beliefs that injure


at and that in our psychological our psych


health. With every meal, we are being colonized psychologically in order to be malleable to the military-industrial-meat- medical-media complex. There are many dimensions to this, but to keep it brief, we’ll just look at a few. For example, the attitude of disconnectedness and desensitization that is imposed on us by being required as children to relentlessly eat animal foods. It’s well understood in systems theory that intelligence is the capacity for any system to make relevant connections and respond to feedback. Eating animal foods reduces this capacity and numbs our feelings both individually and collectively. We learn to stay shallow and avoid looking, listening, and feeling deeply. We avoid making the dreaded connection between what we are eating and what it took to get it on our plate. We are indoctrinated in daily meal rituals to repress our natural empathy and caring for others and this reduction of our cognitive and affective intelligence makes it comparatively easy for us to become gullible and uncritical consumers of narratives and products that reduce, harm, and enslave others and us. Our minds and bodies are also colonized by the poisonous attitude that beings are not beings but are rather mere commodities: material objects that we buy and sell by the pound. Upon refl ection, this is shockingly debasing to others and to ourselves, but we both propel and consume this highly exploitive attitude with every meal, sowing seeds of our own exploitation. Finally, we are compelled to eat dairy, eggs, and meat products that require rampant abuse of animal mothers, their forced insemination and stealing of their babies and the destruction of their sacred mother-child bonds. We become easily exploited psychologically by causing and eating this trauma, repressing our feminine capacity, and feeding this to our trusting children. We eat products


that are the embodiment of misery, fear, despair, insomnia, frustration, and chronic pain. The pharmaceutical industry’s most immense profi ts come from people buying drugs for precisely these conditions: despair, trauma, insomnia, depression, and chronic pain. FIFTH, AND FINALLY, OUR SPIRITUAL HEALTH. This may be the most severe exploitation of all. Every meal corrodes our basic connection with our true nature as eternal expressions of consciousness. By being required to repeatedly and ritually reduce other magnifi cent expressions of life to mere physical matter devoid of subjectivity and purpose, we sever our connection with the beauty, abundance, and enchantment of the living, interconnected web of life that is celebrating on this Earth. We have unwittingly become, in signifi cant ways,


Eating animal foods, we become unwitting cash cows for an


aggressive medical- pharmaceutical complex.


an abusive scourge on this Earth that destroys and consumes as our life-purpose, both individually and collectively. Our innate spiritual wisdom and our purpose have been paved over and repressed, and as we become sick and addicted, our exploitation increases dramatically. A false purpose and set of narratives has been forced on us by the herding culture into which we are born: that we are here to exploit the garden and consume it. Other animals and ecosystems pay a steep price for our inability to free ourselves from being exploited, as do our children and we ourselves, ultimately. The animal agriculture roots of our multi-dimensional exploitation have been invisible and unrecognized for too long. Now, we can fi nally see and fully understand the dynamics involved. Being compelled from infancy to eat animal foods has created us to be a severely wounded population with drastically reduced capacities intellectually, emotionally, morally, and spiritually to fulfi ll our potential and


28 Central Florida natural awakenings


create contexts that nurture justice, cooperation, creativity, freedom, joy, radiant health, and sustainability. Fortunately, this is beginning to change, and the momentum of our healing and awakening is increasing. We can see two raging infernos on this planet. One is burning and destroying ecosystems, animals, societies, sanity, health, and our children’s future. The other is benevolent and is illuminating and incinerating the obsolete delusions perpetuated by our unquestioned exploitation of animals, and is revealing a new path to a doorway that leads to a positive future. We will be free when we free others, and there is nothing physically holding us back from the evolution of respect, freedom, and harmony that is beckoning us. Whenever we eat animals foods of any kind—free-range, grass-fed, wild-caught, factory-farmed—it is all the same and cut from the same cloth: exploitation. Our exploitation ends when we awaken from the cultural program of exploiting other living beings and co-create a more aware plant-based way of eating and living, and understand the reasons behind this. Exploiting animals, we exploit and delude ourselves; freeing animals, we free ourselves.


Dr. Will Tuttle, visionary author of the acclaimed best-seller The World Peace Diet , published in 16 languages, is a recipient of the Courage of Conscience Award and the Empty Cages


Prize. He’s also the author of Your Inner Islands, on developing intuition, and is editor of Circles of Compassion, on the interconnection of social justice issues. A vegan since 1980, he is a frequent radio, television, and online presenter, and has created several wellness and advocacy training programs. Featured in Cowspiracy and other documentary fi lms, he is the co-founder of the Worldwide Prayer Circle for Animals. A former Zen monk with a Ph.D. from U. C., Berkeley, Dr. Tuttle is also a noted composer and pianist, and lectures and concertizes extensively throughout the world promoting peace and cultural healing. See www.worldpeacediet.com for more details.


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