Dr. Will Tuttle describes compassion as the hidden potential within us all to create social harmony, spiritual growth, fulfilling relationships and healing of all kinds. Let’s have a compassion-filled day by participating in Meatless Monday!

Can you remember times in your life when you’ve been blessed by someone’s compassion? I remember times when I was under the weather or stressed out and received the compassion of a loving touch; when I’ve been on stage in front of a large crowd and received the compassion of an encouraging smile. And, I think we all know we would never survive our early months and years without the loving compassion of our parents.

What is compassion? Compassion is an inherent potential within us all. It is not simply a sense of caring and kindness toward the being before us. It isn’t merely a warm-hearted feeling of empathy for the suffering of others…it is the determined and practical resolve to do whatever is possible to relieve their suffering; the sustained urge to eliminate suffering.

For this reason, compassion is often referred to as the highest form of love. It flows out of the truth of our interconnectedness with others. Not confined merely to the realm of feeling, compassion rouses us to action, in much the same way we are instinctively roused to action to defend our own lives, well-being, and interests. Compassion is a blessed miracle, and though it’s virtually inexplicable by our culture’s materialistic orientation, it is a vital and unrecognized key to social harmony, spiritual growth, fulfilling relationships, living a meaningful life, and healing of all kinds.

The natural development of compassion in children is unfortunately short-circuited by forcing them to participate in meat-based meals. The subtext of these meals is one of systematically excluding certain animals from the sphere of our compassion and moral concern. In our daily food rituals, beings are systematically reduced to things, and these rituals instill in all of us the mentality of exclusion and reductionism that is the antithesis of compassion. I believe this is the hidden root of disease, the underlying disaster churning at the core of our culture that causes so much of the physical, social, psychological, and environmental illness that we see proliferating around us.

Compassion brings healing. Whenever we wake up from this acculturated consensus trance that sees beings merely as things to be used, we become more alive, more aware, and more filled with what the ancients called Sophia: the wisdom of knowing the interconnectedness that underlies the apparent outward separateness. This is a wisdom that is actually lived, not merely intellectualized. There is a pithy and illuminating proverb: “To know, and not to do, is not to know.”

As Sophia awakens in us, bringing wisdom, compassion, and healing; and we are relentlessly confronted with our acculturated food habits—eating more living, plant-based foods and less of the inherently cruel animal-based foods—we experience healing, both physically and on the deeper causal levels of our being. Our bodies function better and begin to cleanse and purify, our mind is clearer, our emotions are more positive, our relationships become more harmonious, our buying patterns are more ecologically responsible. We begin to care more deeply about the Earth, others, and ourselves, and we evolve to spiritual awareness that there is much more to life than our cultural programming has revealed. In short, we become a threat to the established order!

We might find people saying to us, “Hey, you can eat how you like, but don’t tell me what to eat!” We realize how ironic this is. The only reason anyone in our culture eats animal-based foods is because they’ve been told to do so since birth by every institution in our culture: family, media, religion, government, education, and business. It’s never a freely-arrived-at choice: we’ve all been, and continue to be, inundated with messages that eating animal-derived foods is a natural, normal, and essential characteristic of human behavior.

I don’t remember my parents telling me that I could freely choose whether to eat the first little blobs of meat they presented to me…or explaining that they were the flesh of pigs and turkeys who had been confined their entire lives and killed in terror and pain. I don’t remember my schoolteachers helping me to understand that fish are highly intelligent, social creatures with the same pain receptors we have. I don’t remember my minister pontificating about the suffering of dairy cows, whose babies are serially stolen from them so we can steal their milk, or the TV informing me of the nightmarish conditions endured by chickens at egg-production facilities. I was never given a choice and was forced into complicity, completely oblivious to the repercussions of my actions. Without knowing the truth, how could I ever practice compassion?

The exquisite beauty and potential of our brief adventure on this Earth are that we can grow, evolve, and awaken to greater capacities of love and wisdom. We can become a force for spreading freedom, peace, and healing. With any inner healing, there will be outer healing, and with healing comes change. With any meaningful change, there will be risk. We may find ourselves alone, losing cherished relationships because we no longer eat the same way and no longer respond unquestioningly to pervasive social conditioning.

We find, though, that we are connected to a deeper source of joy and inner peace. As we bring our lives into alignment with the truth we have discovered, and the compassion that has grown in our heart, we realize that the rewards are worth infinitely more than what we risked. At a deep level, our self-esteem returns, and we realize how participating in the violence pervading our culture’s meals had reduced our awareness and sense of self-worth. Newfound joyfulness blossoms in our heart and we intuit it all directly—truth, compassion, healing—these three are inseparable sisters. Cultivating one cultivates the others. We are all connected, and the more deeply we heal ourselves, the more we bless others. Cultivating compassion is an essential and often unrecognized key to authentic healing. It’s never too late to begin practicing it! The more we bless others, the more we are blessed.

This Meatless Monday, Will Tuttle, Ph.D. discusses his thoughts on a question many vegans (or Meatless Monday warriors!) receive all the time: “What would happen if everyone stopped eating animals?” After reading today’s blog, you’ll have more knowledge to ponder as your develop your own perspective…

Those of us eating a plant-based diet often find our food choices causing more questions and consternation during the Holidays than during the rest of the year. One of the perennial concerns I’ve found people have is that if everyone went vegan, what would happen to all the animals—chickens, turkeys, pigs, cows, and fish? If we stopped eating them, wouldn’t they just take over the Earth, threatening our survival?

For years this question irked me because it seemed patently ridiculous, and worse, would be used to justify the cruelty of eating animal foods. Now, though, whenever I hear this question, I am delighted to respond to it because it’s an opportunity to deliver a brief meditation on how our world can be healed.

Imagining the world gradually going vegan is imagining the most positive possible future for our species, for the Earth, and for all living beings. First of all, as we reduce the number of animals we are eating, that will send a message to agribusiness to forcefully inseminate fewer female pigs, turkeys, cows, and other animals, so fewer animals will be hyper-confined, and there will be less mutilation, killing, violence, terror, and suffering. It also means there will be lower demand for corn, soy, and other feed grains, and thus less deforestation, monocropping, and pollution. As this continues, there will be more food to feed starving people, and also monocropped land can be returned to being critically-needed habitat for wildlife, whose populations are being decimated by the habitat loss caused by grazing livestock and growing feed grains. As the vegan trend continues, streams will come back and run cleaner, more birds, fish, and other animals will be able to thrive, there will be far less toxic pesticides and fertilizers needed, and the oceans will begin to heal. As recent studies have shown, livestock production is the main driving force behind global warming, and this also will decrease. In addition, by eating less animal-based foods, people will be healthier physically as they eliminate the toxic fat, cholesterol, and animal protein that drive obesity, osteoporosis, diabetes, arthritis, cancer, kidney disease, heart disease, and drug use. People will become healthier emotionally and spiritually, also, as they cause and eat less misery, and our culture, as its level of violence decreases, will become healthier also.

As forest, rainforest, and prairie communities come back to life, along with riparian and ocean communities, the devastating mass extinction of species that is going on right now will slow down. To raise and slaughter hundreds of millions animals daily for food on this planet, we are forcing many hundreds of species of animals and plants into extinction every week. Because of our appetites for a few species of birds, mammals, and fish, we are destroying the Earth’s genetic diversity, and it seems absurd to be unconcerned about these tens of thousands of species, but to care only about the few that we’re eating. In any event, the animals we imprison today for food lived freely in nature for millions of years and could do so again. The animals that we most intensely factory-farm, such as turkeys, ducks, geese, chickens, and fish, are all doing just fine in the wild (aside from being hunted and having their habitat destroyed). They would continue to do so, and this is also true for pigs, sheep, and goats, which even today have substantial wild populations. There is no reason to think that the animals we are eating and using wouldn’t be able to return to their natural lives living freely in nature—they already are!

Cows are the only possible question—their progenitors, the aurochs, were forced into extinction in the 1600s, but it is very conceivable that cows could be reintroduced into central Asia and Africa where they lived for millions of years, and with time would return to the ecological niche they inhabited before cruel human enslavement tore them from their ancestral homelands.

So, it’s a refreshing question to ponder—uplifting and heartening—to think of “what will happen to cows, chickens, and pigs if we all stop eating meat, dairy products, and eggs?” I hope we all can discuss this question a few times during the holidays, and by doing so, pull back the curtain to reveal the positive future we can create together. There is no action more powerful that anyone can take to subvert the dominant paradigm of exploitation and inequality than to shift to a plant-based diet for ethical reasons. By going vegan, and spreading the vegan message creatively, we take the most effective action to create a world where peace, abundance, sustainability, freedom, and universal joy are not just possible but natural.

Yesterday marked the beginning of World Vegan Month. Today, Dr. Will Tuttle is here to talk about how our food choices connect us to the rest of the world and our spirituality. Participating in Meatless Monday is the perfect opportunity to create positive change for your health and the health of our planet!

“From one grain, ten thousand.” This ancient understanding of the universal principle of generosity and abundance is at the heart of macrobiotics, veganism, ahimsa, and the spiritual teachings of the world’s religions. It points to the truth that we live in an essentially benevolent and cooperative universe, and that life is a miraculous creative exuberance flowering all around us. We have been invited to participate in this life through the giving of ourselves.

From one grain spring hundreds, thousands, and millions of grains, each of which has the same potential. How do we respond to this existential exuberance of life bursting with more life? Our response depends on our food! From the early days, there have been two types of agriculture: plant and animal. Plant agriculture is essentially more feminine work, cooperating with the cycles of nature, nurturing the spontaneous growth of herb-, fruit-, nut-, and seed-bearing plants, and saving the precious seeds so they could be planted again the following season. For thousands of years, sacred rituals celebrated the miraculous abundance of the Earth, the powers of rain, sun, and green growth, the fecundity of Nature’s ever-giving and replenishing womb, and the joy of receiving a bounty of fragrant, delicious, and life-giving vegetables, fruits, and grains.

From the beginning, roughly eight to ten thousand years ago, animal agriculture was essentially men’s work and it required violence and the cruel domination of animals who always resisted as best they could to the thefts, confinements, and killings that were forced on them for their flesh, fur, and secretions. It began with wild sheep and goats and spread to cows, pigs, chickens, and other animals, and it always brought out the worst in the people who practiced it.

Universally, we feel a sense of wonder and joy upon entering a lovingly tended organic garden. It exudes beauty, magic, delight, and blessedness, and we instinctively feel grateful, humble (from humus, earth), and blessed in the presence of the gifts we receive so freely from forces that accomplish what we can never do: bring forth new life from seeds, roots, and stems.

Universally, we are repulsed by the violence and sheer horror and ugliness that are always required to kill animals for food, and at a deep cultural level, we feel ashamed of our relentless violence against animals for our meals. We cannot create life, but we can most certainly cause death, and we do so on a massive scale. It spreads to our plant agriculture. Though we could humbly cooperate with life by creating widespread networks of small-scale organic gardens, we tend instead to dominate nature violently, the way we dominate animals for food, and create the kind of pesticide-ridden, mono-cropped industrialized agriculture that is actually a manifestation of the same mentality required by thousands of years of animal agriculture.

As children, we are injected with all the stories that rationalize our violence, the no-soul, protein, taste-good, and superior-species stories that armor our feelings. As we get older, we are forced to participate in preparing the foods, cutting flesh from bone, hooking unsuspecting fish, stabbing “meat” and hardening our hearts to the cries of terrified calves and starving children, whose grain we feed instead to livestock.

We are cast out of the garden into the rat race of competition and consumerism, ashamed of ourselves. It is this low self-esteem that drives the profits of corporations enriching themselves on our insatiable craving for gadgets, drugs, and entertainment to help us forget what we know in our hearts. The choice is set before us at every meal between the garden of life or the altar of death and as we choose life and eat grains and vegetables rather than flesh, milk, and eggs, we find our joy rising, our health increasing, our spirit deepening, our mind quickening, our feelings softening, and our creativity flourishing.

We are all connected. At the core of virtually all spiritual teachings are two interdependent directives: to love a higher power (i.e., to connect authentically with the transpersonal dimension) and to love our neighbor (i.e., to treat other expressions of life with kindness and respect). In the Buddhist tradition, as but one example, these are considered to be mutually supporting, so the more authentic our meditation experience, the more we become spontaneously compassionate, and the more we practice compassion, the deeper our meditation practice will be able to bring us.

We are here to bless the world. We are each one grain who can bless ten thousand, and that is not just our potential but our joy. As we find our song and give it voice and wings, we contribute to the healing of our world and join with others in the celebration of love and beauty on this Earth. The inner teaching is generosity, humility, and gratitude: that as we give and nurture, we receive and are blessed. Mindfulness of our food choices is the key to creating not just the outer gardens of beauty, sustainability, and nourishment, but to nurturing the inner garden of our hearts. Choosing plant-based meals is the foundation of spiritual awakening, authentic generosity, humility, and ensuring the future of life on Earth—the ten thousands depending on us today. We are ALL connected.

Continued from Part I: The History of Animal Rights…

With the Renaissance and subsequent Enlightenment in the 16th to 18th centuries, the influence of the church waned as reason and modern science began to ascend, but unfortunately, this was not good news for animals, and signaled the beginning of a much more ferocious exploitation of them for scientific experimentation, as well as for entertainment, clothing, products, and, of course, food. While there had been some modicum of respect for and protection of animals as God’s creatures under the old order, under the new materialism, they were reduced to mere resources and commodities in the clutches of a surging industrialism and population expansion of omnivorous humans that continues unabated to this day, and is threatening all animals, and indeed all of nature and even humanity itself, with destruction and perhaps complete annihilation.

The cross-currents of intercultural dialog have always served to help people question the official story of their culture, and in the 19th and 20th centuries, we saw this happen in the striking rebirth of vegetarianism and animal protection, inspired to a great degree by the rediscovery of Eastern thought in Europe and North America. With the translation of ancient Buddhist and Jain sutras, as well as the Upanishads, Vedas, Tao Te Ching, and other Indian and Chinese texts, as well as the discovery of vast populations thriving on essentially plant-based diets, more people in the West began to question the routine violence toward animals that characterized their culture. The word vegetarian was coined in 1850 to replace the old word Pythagorean, and experimenting with and promoting vegetarianism became popular with many influential writers such as Shelley, Byron, Shaw, Schiller, Schopenhauer, Emerson, Alcott, Besant, Blavatsky, Tolstoy, and Gandhi, among others. There was also a Christian strand as well, with several church leaders such as William Cowherd in England and his protégé in America, William Metcalfe, advocating compassion for animals, with some, like Ellen White of the Seventh Day Adventists and Charles and Myrtle Fillmore of Unity School of Christianity advocating a the main tenets of veganism forty years before the word was invented. They were aided in this by the pioneering work of early vegetarian proponents like Graham, Post, and Kellogg who raised consciousness about the health benefits of plant-based eating, as well as the animal cruelty involved, and also by the efforts of the first animal protection societies such as the RSPCA, ASPCA, and the Humane Society.

In 1944 Donald Watson in England strengthened the foundation for the modern animal rights movement by coining the word vegan and founding the Vegan Society in London, directly challenging the official story and the underlying core of our culture. He defined veganism as “a philosophy and way of life which seeks to exclude, as far as possible and practical, all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing, or any other purpose.” Thus the vegan movement was born as a continuing manifestation of the ancient and universal wisdom teaching of ahimsa, and is at the heart of today’s animal rights movement.

In the decades since, there have been many books and studies written, many organizations and periodicals founded, many documentaries filmed and websites created as part of humanity’s effort to reduce our violence toward animals. Veganism and animal rights issues are becoming increasingly mainstream as a result of all these efforts, and the momentum continues to build in spite of enormous resistance by all the institutions in our culture, and in spite of the difficulties in responding to pervasive cultural hostility and the complexity of the issues involved. For example, it is increasingly clear today that our violence toward animals is a primary driving force behind environmental devastation, physical and psychological illness, war, hunger, inequity, and social violence, besides being ethically wrong. Groups and individuals align themselves with and promote the animal rights agenda for varying combinations of these factors, depending on their predilections, and so there are a number of competing perspectives.

We live at a time of immense and growing crisis that gives us unprecedented opportunities. The old complacency is being stripped away by the multidimensional crisis facing our culture. More and more people are realizing that the only viable future for humanity is a vegan future. Rather than negotiating with the suppliers of animal cruelty, we can see from the wisdom of those who have gone before us that the real power we have is in reducing the demand for animal foods and products by raising consciousness and educating and encouraging people to reduce and eliminate animal-sourced foods and products. Thankfully, we see this happening today with the proliferation of both secular national, international, regional, and grass-roots groups and efforts to spread vegan ideals and practices, and also, increasingly, religious and spiritual groups and efforts that are similarly doing this.

This is the way forward. The idea of ahimsa and the idea of veganism are so powerful because they resonate with the core of our true nature as beings of love, awareness, creativity, sensitivity, and compassion. Donald Watson and the other sages that have gone before us have planted a seed deep into the core of the obsolete story that has mired and encrusted our culture and that threatens to destroy all life on this planet. As we each water that seed and plant our own seeds, a new garden of compassion will grow that will inevitably break the bonds of violence that enslave all of us. People will realize that as we have enslaved animals, we have enslaved ourselves.

Good Meatless Morning! Today, Dr. Will Tuttle is here to give us an in-depth look at the origins of animal rights. Part II is coming up tomorrow!

At its core, the animal rights movement is about questioning the official story of our culture at the deepest level. This is why animal rights is so threatening to the existing power structure. Essentially, the animal rights movement is about vegan living as minimizing our cruelty to animals, and when we trace it all back, we find that our movement has ancient roots in questioning the official story of this culture.

According to anthropologists, around 8 to 10 thousand years ago, in what is today Iraq, people for the first time began the practice of herding — owning and confining animals for food – first it was wild sheep and goats, and around 2,000 years later, cows, and eventually other animals. This was, I believe, the last major revolution that our culture experienced, and it changed our culture, and us who are born into this culture, in a fundamental way. For the first time, beings were reduced to mere property commodities, rather than being mysterious, autonomous, and respected cohabitants of the Earth with us. This changed the essential orientation of the culture, and a wealthy elite emerged that owned livestock as their wealth, the first large-scale wars evolved, and indeed, the first word for war that we know of is the old Sanskrit word “gavyaa,” which means “the desire for more cattle.” Capitalism (from the Latin “capita,” meaning “head” as in head of cattle and sheep) emerged with warfare as profitable for the wealthy livestock-owning elite, along with the ownership of humans as slaves—often people vanquished in war—and the systematic reduction in the status of women, who by the arrival of the historic period, roughly three thousand years ago, were bought and sold as chattel property. The reduction of wild animals to the status of pests because they could threaten the herders’ capital, and the development of science as a method of dominating animals and nature followed, as did the arising of a new and different role model for boys of the macho male herder, tough, disconnected, and capable of extreme violence and cruelty toward both animals and rival herders. This bellicose culture spread gradually and relentlessly throughout the eastern Mediterranean, eventually to Europe, and to the Americas and is still spreading, and we are born into this culture, which has the same basic attitudes, behaviors and practices to this day.

Shortly after the beginning of the historic period, roughly 2,500 years ago, we have the first cases of prominent and respected people urging compassion to animals and what we would call today veganism. In India, two contemporaries, Mahavir, a significant teacher in the Jain tradition, and Shakyamuni Buddha, the historical Buddha, both preached and practiced a meatless diet, and required their students to observe strict codes of conduct that prohibited them from owning animals, harming animals, and eating animals. Both traditions, the Jain tradition in particular, claim that they go back much further than 2,500 years; that the practice of nonviolence that they enjoin is an unbroken teaching extending back centuries earlier into pre-history.

These are the first animal rights activists that we are certain of today, and the basis of their activism was the teaching and understanding of ahimsa. Ahimsa is the doctrine and consciousness of non-violence: that violence toward other sentient beings is not only unethical, and brings suffering to them, but that it also inevitably brings suffering and bondage to the perpetrator and society as well. It is very interesting that both of these traditions are essentially spiritual traditions, and they focus not so much on animal welfare, but on what we would call today animal rights and animal liberation. Ahimsa is the essence of veganism, which is the commitment to minimize cruelty and exploitation by not interfering with animals at all, or as little as possible, and allowing them sovereignty in their lives in nature.

It’s important to understand that owning animals as property to be killed and eaten is the hidden and defining core of our culture, and that all of us were, and are, routinely indoctrinated into the mentality of domination, exclusion, reductionism, elitism, and disconnectedness required by the food practices of this culture. The spiritual sages of India, with their propagation of ahimsa, rejected and boycotted the core of cruelty of our herding culture 2,500 years ago, and were the earliest vegans we know of, consciously attempting to minimize their violence to animals, and to spreading this to others. This powerful time in our cultural evolution, called the Axial Age by Karl Jaspers, saw similar ethical giants emerging simultaneously or shortly thereafter: Pythagoras, Heraclitus, and Socrates in the Mediterranean, Zoroaster in Persia, Lao-tzu & Chuang-tzu in China, Isaiah and the later prophets in the Levant. All emphasized compassion for animals, the rejection of animal sacrifices, and the fact that violence toward animals boomerangs as violence toward humans. As we sow, we will reap. These ideas spread through spiritual teachers and philosophers over the centuries, and by the beginning of the Christian era, for example, Buddhist monks had established centers as far away as England in the West, China in the East, and Africa in the South, and brought ahimsa and veganism with them. I am using the word veganism here explicitly because unlike the word vegetarian, the word vegan stipulates that the underlying motivation is to minimize violence to sentient beings.

With all the cross-pollination of ideas in the ancient world, it is not surprising that many of the ancient historians record that Jesus and his disciples were well-known abstainers from animal flesh, and it is documented that the early Christian fathers were vegetarians and most likely vegans. A few centuries later, when Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire under Constantine, the practice of compassion to animals by Christians was viciously suppressed, with Constantine’s soldiers reputedly torturing to death anyone who refused to eat meat. This attitude continued in the centuries that followed after the fall of Rome, with vegetarian Christians in Europe in the medieval period, such as the Cathars and the Bogomils, being suppressed and eventually exterminated by the church. There were other strands and individuals promoting nonviolence toward animals in the ancient world going into the medieval as well, in the neo-Platonist, hermetic, Sufi, Judaic, and Christian traditions.

With the Renaissance and subsequent Enlightenment in the 16th to 18th centuries, the influence of the church waned as reason and modern science began to ascend, but unfortunately, this was not good news for animals, and signaled the beginning of a much more ferocious exploitation of them for scientific experimentation, as well as for entertainment, clothing, products, and, of course, food. While there had been some modicum of respect for and protection of animals as God’s creatures under the old order, under the new materialism, they were reduced to mere resources and commodities in the clutches of a surging industrialism and population expansion of omnivorous humans that continues unabated to this day, and is threatening all animals, and indeed all of nature and even humanity itself, with destruction and perhaps complete annihilation.

Come back tomorrow for Part II: The History of Animal Rights…