When I first went vegan 9 years ago now, none of my close friends or family were vegan. I experienced a lot of social pressure. I had to constantly defend my choice of nonviolence. It felt absurd, that deciding to stop supporting an oppressive industry was seen as a “difficult”, “extreme” or “judgemental” way of being. If anything, one would hope that such a commitment to peace would be celebrated. But not once did this personal discomfort have the slightest effect on my choice. When I made the connection in my heart, that no animal has to be tortured or killed for me to live, I knew I would be vegan for the rest of my life.
It wasn’t until years later that I came across the term ‘carnism’, and many things began to make sense to me. This violent belief system is so deeply programmed into people’s psyches through such a systematic cultural and societal brainwashing that it causes similar collective unconscious behaviour as a religious cult. People who question the veracity and validity of carnism tend to get energetically and verbally stoned.
This is due to cognitive dissonance - most people truly believe that they love animals while still directly participating in the exploitation, killing and eating of certain animals. This was me back in the day as well of course. I believed that my core values in life were love and peace, while I was eating the corpses and secretions of tortured and murdered sentient beings who were conceived by rape and lived their whole existence in captivity. You see, it is exactly the spell of carnism which justifies it all and makes us totally blind to the fundamental hypocrisy most of us have lived in.
It is this same fundamental disconnection that has allowed for racism, slavery and genocide to exist. It is the corruptive belief, that the life of certain beings is less valuable than our own. The people who accepted these beliefs were not monsters, they were ordinary people like you and I. They followed the law, the customs, the political leaders, and they believed the lie. We cannot continue in this way. We must go back into the heart consciousness, and sincerely seek within; are we living in resonance with love? Are my choices creating needless suffering in this world? What can I do to change?
For this inner search to create Peace, we must remember that there cannot be any shaming or blame games. We can simply come together in sincere self-reflection and take responsibility for the way we live.
Of course it is not alright to needlessly take the life of another sentient being - it is not ours to take. All spiritual Law is based on the concept of property, you can only govern that which is rightfully yours. Their body, their life. Our body, our life. We are morally coded beings who absolutely thrive in service and in harmony with all life. In our True essence, we are not ruled by base desires for flesh, but by the nobility of our hearts.