Episode 5: Giving Thanks
In a few days, depending on when you’re listening to this, many of us will continue a long-held tradition and gather with family and/or friends for a magnificent feast. This is an important, though often stressful, tradition as it can be one of the few reasons to actually take the time in our busy lives and get together, in person, and to be in one another’s company. This is an opportunity to gather and give thanks, as the name of the holiday implies, for all the many things which have transpired for us to be here now. This gratitude though is usually accompanied with, if not wholly overcome by, feelings of indulgence by days end. All this comfort food stuffed so tight inside of us, its hardly comfortable at all. Just Stuffed.
We could all eat less. We all know this. Every day we know this. Eat less of what though? It is estimated that this Thanksgiving, 46 million innocent lives will be lost simply as we uphold the tradition to eat turkey on this day ( 46 million is roughly equal to the entire human population of California, Oregon, and Washington state combined). Just like that, we could spare the innocent lives of millions of creatures by simply being mindful of what we eat.
In Taming the Tiger Within Thich Nhat Hanh tells us that “before we can make deep changes in our lives, we have to look into our diet, our way of consuming, we have to live in such a way that we stop consuming the things that poison us and intoxicate us. Then we will have the strength to allow the best in us to arise, and we will no longer be victims of anger or frustration.” I believe that the best in us is boundless love, compassion and understanding, indeed the greatest ways to embrace anger and frustration.
Why is it that he suggests we first look into our diet before making deep change? Is it that we have become mindless about what we put into our bodies? Are we what we eat?
Perhaps its that the rate at which we consume more and more creature’s flesh and fluids has exploded to an unsustainable level. Where these uses of animals were once helpful and perhaps necessary in order for our survival and evolution, this is no longer the case. Indeed the consumption of the animal likely lead our brains, to sufficiently develop the knowledge and compassion to eventually spare them. As we consumed more animal, we became closer to the animal and then compassionate towards the animal. It is now time to give the animals a break. It is time to thank them for all their sacrifice and hard work. It is time to show them the respect they deserve, to give them the lives they deserve. It is time to free the enslaved. We no longer need them in the ways of the past. We can enjoy them and just let them be - as they are - in nature. It’s time to stop the senseless breeding and slaughter. This detached practice was rare; raising animals -for any reason- with no love, no connection, no freedom to enjoy just a fraction of life in the wild. In fact, it is now the case that we have exploited these animals to a level that it is actually causing us, the entire planet, great harm. Our survival now depends on greatly minimizing, if not giving up this resource completely, as it is a major contributor to the diminishment of our physical and environmental health.
We once relied on animals to do a lot of our hard labor, our farm work, they carried our cargo and took us places, over time those tasks were eventually, and mostly, taken over by machines as our knowledge in technology began to grow. We found more efficient, and more humane ways to do many jobs and animals and humans rejoiced. Animals provided the labor in place of humans in most cases, and they played an important role in helping us grow and thrive and we should be thankful for them, to them, especially on this day. This day could not exist without them.
For thousands of years animals have also provided us with clothing and shelter and we have now found a more ethical and humane and bloodless way to clothe ourselves. Though we still use animal parts more than we we need to, I feel this is trending downward, as we begin to see mindfulness take root and clothing manufacturers begin to steer away from using animal products. Once again, we should be grateful historically for what the animals provided to us in keeping us warm in the coldest of times and protecting our skin from the elements. They provided countless generations with warmth and safety, We should be grateful. We now know how to clothe ourselves in more ethical ways, and its easy if we’re mindful.
Aside from providing us with labor, transportation, clothing, and shelter, animals have provided us with food. Again, we would be nothing without them. From before each of us was born, we were already reliant on the animal. We have come from the animal. For we ARE animals after all, who possess both the animal urges to survive at all cost, AND a spontaneously active consciousness which help us see our actions clearly and make better choices. I say spontaneous because we are so often lost in our thoughts that we are not seeing clearly, that is from the perspective of consciousness, but from an ancient animal urge to ensure safety, avoid poverty of any kind and reproduce. If we look closely, we see that our mind and body are constantly responding to perceived threats, sometimes actual - a physical threat of a car hitting us while crossing the street, and sometimes imagined - comment made by passerby while crossing that same street. Quite often, our imagined threats cause us actual lasting harm as we dwell on them and allow our thoughts and judgements to keep us from living the life we want to live. We judge ourselves and assume our judgements are correct and shared by those around us. Seeing from the point of consciousness is a view free of concepts, it is emptiness. Judgements do not exist here because there is no need for such a thing. This clear seeing, which often makes us feel bad when we’ve done something harmful, is what we believe separates us from the animals we have relied on and befriended throughout the ages.
The Homo Erectus learned to stand, the Homo Sapien learned to conquer, create, and destroy everything. The next evolution is Homo Conscious in which we know that we CAN do many mighty and powerful things, but CAN doesn’t mean that we should. With mindfulness we can see more clearly how we are in the world, how we fit into the world, how we are part of the world and how we are absolutely nothing without it. Just as we have relied on animals for thousands of years for mental and physical evolution, as well as protection and sustenance throughout those years, we now owe it to the animals, to the earth, and to ourselves to leave the animals alone. We have the ability, the knowledge and the conscious awareness to know that there are better, more peaceful, less destructive options than the over use and exploitation of animals. They are our roommates. We are all guests together on this planet. We can come together to develop new solutions to help people eat and live closer to the earth, and to eliminate the desire for animal products and unnecessary waste. Plant based meat and other animal free product substitutes are great options to get people started on the path of eating more ethically. These days our options for animal free substitutes seem endless.
Ninety-nine percent of these 46 million Thanksgiving Day turkeys will be factory farmed. This means that they will likely not have any opportunity to live life as a free being. Incapable even of reproducing and moving as nature would have intended, so far have they been been bred from their closest relative found in the wild. They are injected with antibiotics and growth hormones and fattened up with the remains of their own kind. They are then slaughtered with speed and inhumanity then processed in filth and waste. All of this energy is then going into our bodies. If we are what we eat, this may be why we continue to see so much violence in the world today. Selfishness everywhere we look.
This is why Thich Naht Hanh urges us to look into our diet. We are consuming such great quantities of violence, torture, and pollution everyday, that if we were mindful and changed our habits just a little bit, the results would be incredible. As we begin to make the choice to put the animal’s welfare above our own arbitrary preferences, we’ll begin to find a greater level of happiness and compassion in ourselves. We begin to see all animals, as our own animals, as our pets which we’ve grown so fond of over the years. There is no difference between your pets life and my pets life. Just as there is no difference between your pet’s life and the cow’s life who has become your burger for the moment, just as your life is no different than mine. Homo sapiens know that we CAN take the life of anything and eat all its parts and grind its bones into powder and make glue, but as homo conscious we see that we CAN do these things, but we ask SHOULD we? And the answer is clear, we shouldn’t. Why? Because why cause harm when there is no need? If you have access to a supermarket or grocery store, there is no reason why you can’t reduce or eliminate entirely your usage and consumption of animal products. Not only will you be saving a life every time you choose not to eat an animal, you will be removing yourself from a system of environmental destruction. You will water your seed of compassion with every choice.
People in communities where these factory farms are located endure serious health issues as a result of the local water air and land pollution. Reducing or eliminating our consumption of animals will reduce the number of these factory farms. In the U.S. we now eat more meat than we ever have. We are also suffering from a number of diseases which are directly correlated to one’s meat consumption. Subsidies hide the current true cost of meat, which makes it over abundant. Stores and restaurants and even households regularly throw out bad meat. It takes 1,847 gallons of water to make 1 pound of beef compared to 39 gallons of water it takes to produce 1 pound of vegetables. This is an important distinction to make. Many have said to me that there is not enough farmland to feed all of earth’s people and creatures vegetables. There is today plenty of food to go around, to satisfy every individuals basic needs everywhere, yet much of it goes unused. If we only had the collective will to make it happen.
Around 60 percent of the earth’s farmable land is being used to grow food for livestock, not to mention the land upon which the cattle graze. At one point our meat consumption was probably sustainable for the planet, but not at this staggering level. If we could go back to a modest, more respectful way of consuming, we may not be having this conversation now. The only sure way to know that an animal has been treated ethically, and with love and respect is to find it in nature.
Animals being raised for food are eating too much food, drinking too much water, and polluting the air and water too much. Livestock account for 14.5% of the global greenhouse gasses each year. Methane, which is emitted by livestock, is the worst type of pollution. It is much more dense than the CO2 our cars and buildings emit and stays in the atmosphere for much longer. So how is it that a quarter pound burger cost us only a few dollars when we consider the environmental impact? How much would we pay for the 461 gallons of water that was used up in the burger? What if that water was packaged in plastic bottles on the shelves, what would it cost us then? Again, if we look closely we see that so often, when we get hungry, we eat an animal, even when thirsty we tend to have some animal product in many of our drinks as well, but even those of us with access to clean water in our homes, buy the stuff in a neat plastic bottle for convenience, not thinking about where all the bottles might end up, or about how much energy it takes to create and/or destroy/recycle each bottle. The trail of trash we’re leaving behind us seems to ever increase right in line with our demand for convenience. We don’t need to throw something away each time we’re hungry or thirsty. Each choice we make has an impact. Just one mindful choice at a time and we’ll begin to see great progress. As we change, the world will change. We are one. We can make a conscious effort to simply be mindful of our actions.
As humans, we cannot escape the responsibility of a certain level of waste and emissions in order to maintain our continued survival. All life will consume and excrete, we just have the added advantage of being able to ask ourselves what extra should we consume and what extra should we emit.
We’re currently emitting more carbon pollution than ever while simultaneously removing that which naturally filters these emissions. Forrests are burning on land destroying life, habitat, and ecological balance. Meanwhile thousands of miles of seabed are being scraped up everyday. The homes and ecological environment in which these sea creatures depend on to survive is being destroyed over and over again. Millions of carbon gobbling sea dwelling lifeforms are being violently removed from the ocean at an irreplaceable rate and the contents are packed onto jets and distributed all across the world so that we can have sushi or oysters or lobster in places like middle America. Simply because we are hungry and we get a spontaneous craving.
Our hunger and cravings keep us from being mindful about what we are eating. We trade the life of a living being, for a temporary, usually unnecessary and never guaranteed feeling of satisfaction. This is why we are urged to look at our diet before we can make deep change. If we change the way we eat, we will change the planet. When we change, the planet changes. When the planet changes, we change. We are all part of this earth energy, this one giant life-force. There is no escaping it. It is our home, our true nature. This is why we seek to be in nature and feel a certain way while we’re there, that is if we’re there by choice. Otherwise our view will not be too mindful.
We can see in nature that it is our nature. Thich Naht Hanh speaks of our interconnectedness with all things, animals, plants, earth, and nature as “interbeing” a word which better describes how we are in this world. We can only BE together. None of us, plant, animal, human, can survive on our own. Millions of conditions throughout time have lined up perfectly for us to be here right now. And many have to continue to ensure our survival. We got a good glimpse of this witnessing firsthand product shortages in grocery stores during the early days of the pandemic, and even still today in the lingering supply chain issues. We learned that we are completely reliant on one another for even the simplest seeming item. If something goes off course just a little bit, we will fight one another for toilet paper. We simply need one another to exist, we are all connected.
At one point we relied on animals to provide us with nearly everything we needed for our survival, now the animals need us to provide them with protection from us. Often when the topic of animal welfare comes up, people will accuse the one who is standing up for the helpless and voiceless of self-righteousness, or accuse them of being preachy and not listen to the actual message. This message is for animals, this message is to inspire you to think about how you use animals and whether that usage is necessary. Especially this week, before this big holiday, use animal substitutes anywhere possible. It is not difficult.
Often I have resisted the urge to stand up for the animal to avoid being divided from a group or person. Oddly, praise or thanks are rarely the reaction I receive from others when they discover my commitment to the well being of animals. Largely because of their laughable scorn, I have hid my commitment to animals away. This is not the best way to protect helpless creatures. At the very least, one should state that one feels that they do not have the right, the authority, or the need to take or consume the life of another living creature. These words will matter and will carry with them the spirit of love, and compassion and can have the power to transform the world, even one person at a time.
As I said in the beginning of this episode, there is something very simple we can do for ourselves, for our fellow humans and for every other living being, in fact, this one thing we can do will benefit of the entire world and that one thing is to stop eating animals. The simple thing to do is to open up your circle of compassion and include all living beings inside of that glorious ring. Realize that all of them are worthy of equal respect and that you have no right or need to take that beings life, directly or indirectly. We can never escape the harm we cause in the world, everything is interconnected. Look closely, you will see.
We are all on the path to what some say is the next phase of our human evolution and that is the shift from Homo Sapien to Homo Conscious. This is one reason why we are undergoing such collective mental turmoil at this time, we are midway through this fairly rapid evolutionary change. Part of us is still moved and motivated by our animal instincts, that is trying to protect our selves, or our sense of selves, as we see in the imaginary threats, and part of us can see through these primal urges. Our primal urges and our conscious thought are often in conflict. We do the one before we see that there are other options. Sometimes the seeing comes before we act, sometimes later. We can train our minds to see before we act through regular meditation practice. This is how we develop the next evolutionary stage within us. We will find more often that the seeing comes before we automatically react to whatever situation arises and pushes us to act mindlessly. We can stop, breathe deeply then act appropriately. The animal reacts automatically. The bird flies off at the sound of a broken branch underfoot, just as we might fly off the handle over a misunderstood comment. This is the thinking animal in us. The conscious being which we are all becoming will hear the words and let them pass just as the sound of the breaking branch. Sounds both - containing information, which may or may not be useful, but nothing truly personal.
Just as these words have been spoken, how are they landing on your ears?
I realize that in speaking in this way, in broaching this topic, a fire has possibly been kindled within you. Hopefully the fire is the warmth of your love, compassion, and commitment to all living beings. The buddha himself urged us to live compassionately in this way. Jesus said that what you do to the least of these, you do to him and in turn to yourself. We can develop more love and closeness with animals, and even one another, simply by not consuming them anymore. The benefits of making this choice reach farther than we will ever know. In fact we will begin to develop love and compassion for people we once thought unreachable or unloveable, insects even slide easily into our expanded circle of compassion. What do we have to lose by expanding our capacity to love?
It is all love, yet I know some will be fired up against me. If you fall into this boat, ask yourself why it is that you are angry at someone for standing up for and asking that we all think twice about how we treat animals. Why are you upset that someone is asking that we be kind to all living things? Why does it cause you to burn inside when someone makes a commitment who’s impact will no doubt improve your quality of life by default? Shine the light of mindful awareness on that anger and expose its roots. Being upset at a messenger who shares a message of love and compassion, will reveal a lot within you. There will be a lot to learn if you allow the light of mindful awareness to shine just as bright on that anger, as the sun shines on all without discrimination.
This Thanksgiving, let’s finally give the animals the thanks and the respect that they deserve, and for all that they have provided us with throughout the ages. We could not have made it this far without them. And let’s celebrate this grateful realization by allowing them to be freed from our grasp. Let us free them from bondage. Let them slide, crawl, or fly right off of the menu this Thursday. In fact, it’s easiest if you just remove them from your mental menu all together. There are many potential edible things which you have already removed from your mental menu. Just place animal stuff right there next to eggplant or human flesh, or any other thing you choose not to eat for less good reason than to save its life. With your friends and/or families this year, make a commitment to show animals the respect, love and gratitude that we owe them. Celebrate that you are all making this commitment together and indulge in love and compassion this year rather than making a stuffed animal out of yourself.