No one wants to see the Earth’s delicately-balanced natural
environment collapse under the weight of human-generated pollution and
runaway global warming. Nobody longs for the mass extinctions, very
possibly including that of Homo sapiens, which would surely follow such
an event. Nobody looks forward to sending their children to fight
and die in bloody wars over access to oil and other dwindling natural resources.
No one is okay watching 18 million people die yearly from starvation (the
current annual global average) while millions, elsewhere, suffer epidemic
obesity from consuming many times their fair share. No one is excited
about the likely near-future extermination of billions in the name of “sustainability”…
But we falter before the apparent impossibility of tackling such issues
head-on. The interwoven political, social, economic and ecological
complexities fueling such cata-strophic global events seem insurmountable
– especially when we are each just one person…
If all that woeful complexity rings like a GUT-inspired
siren-song to your ears, congratulate yourself on having already made substantial
progress along your path to awakening! In truth, ninety percent or
better of all the intertwined ills currently challenging Humanity, and
through us, all life on Earth, are deeply rooted in only two globally-pervasive
human activities – the use of fossil fuels and eating meat.
Chances are you’re well aware of the dangers of petrol-eum.
The Greenhouse Effect, the chief culprit behind global warming, is caused
by the buildup in the Earth's atmosphere of certain heat-trapping gases,
the most prevalent of which is carbon dioxide produced when fossil fuels
are burned (gasoline, home heating oil, natural gas, coal), and which accounts
for approximately 85% of total US greenhouse emissions. The
process of pulling oil out of the ground devastates the local environment.
The non-fuel products we make from the stuff, like plastics, ink, synthetic
rubber, paint, insecticide, fertilizer, dishwashing liquid, disposable
diapers, etc., are often themselves environmentally hazardous, practically
non-biodegradable, or both. Oil spills routinely ravage coastlines
and ocean ecosystems, often causing irrevers-ible environmental degradation.
Worst of all, as depend-ent on oil as we have become, both as a fuel source
and as a raw material used in the manufacture of just about everything,
in recent years the writing on the wall has become undeniably clear concerning
oil’s future – it’s a non-renewable resource, and someday very soon world
supplies are going to run out. Predictions of a fast approaching
“oil crash” have become a hot topic with book authors and Internet bloggers,
and even global mega-corporations like British Petroleum, whose trademarked
“BP” logo is now said to stand for “Beyond Petroleum,” have begun to very
publicly promote alter-native fuels research. In the face of soaring
energy prices, increased global temperatures and violent weather patterns,
melting polar ice caps expected to result in disastrous increases in sea
level, etc., it is no longer possible to deny the dangers of oil, for the
planet and for people everywhere.
You may be less aware of the equally-disastrous and far-reaching
impact of eating meat, both on the environment and on world hunger:
After Carbon Dioxide, the second most destructive greenhouse gas is methane, which is generated by the gastrointestinal processes of livestock, pri-marily cows, sheep and goats. Pig manure, when left to ferment in giant hog-farm waste-pools, also produces hefty amounts of methane as it "cooks" in the sun. Additional sources of methane include landfills, the use of petroleum-based fertilizers, natural gas production, and coal mining. While accounting for only 12% of US greenhouse gas emissions, methane’s impact on global warming is 21 times that of Carbon Dioxide.
Nearly 70 percent of all corn and wheat grown in industrialized countries (36 percent worldwide) is fed to farm animals, instead of to people, with the vast majority of the meat those animals produce targeted for consumption in a handful of the world's wealthiest nations. The United States, China, Brazil and the European Union, with less than one third of the world's population, consume 60% of the world's beef, over 70% of the world's poultry, and over 80% of the world's pork – commercially farmed animals which, by the time they reach the dinner table, have already, them-selves, consumed the lion's share of the world's cereal grains, an obvious recipe for starvation amongst the two thirds of planetary population not lucky enough to live in one of those four centers of affluence.
Roughly one fifth of the world's land area is used for commercial grazing, twice that dedicated to raising crops for human consumption.
It takes an average of 2,500 gallons of fresh water to produce a single pound of red meat – this while, globally, one in every five humans lacks access to clean water. 2.2 million people, mostly women and children, die every year from thirst, or from drinking contaminated water because no potable source is available.
The industrialized slaughter and butchering of 50 billion animals worldwide annually (a number which does not include fish), and the intensive processing and refrigerated storage required for meat products adds to their environmental impact an enormous post-farm investment of fossil fuel-generated electricity, which pumps more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, exacerbating the Greenhouse Effect.
Oil use and meat consumption, combined, account for such
a staggering percentage of Humankind's grossly-oversized "ecological footprint,"
which is a measure of how much land and water is needed to produce the
resources we consume and to dispose of the waste we produce, that it is
almost impossible to find even one truly pressing contemporary issue challenging
Humanity that cannot be traced directly to the doorstep of one or the other
of these industries, and very often to both.
Which, in the end, is good news, because acknowledging
the concrete causes – oil use and meat consumption – underlying most of
our global-scale diffi-culties, and holding accountable the real, flesh-and-blood
people whose daily choices perpetuate those causes –ourselves, each other,
world corporate and political leaders – empowers us to resolve a wide array
of interconnected problems with just a few, well-targeted actions.
This mini-exercise in accountability mapping makes abundantly clear that,
in order to stave off global environmental meltdown, feed the world, and
so significantly reduce the size of our "ecological footprint" that many
times our present number can peaceably share the Earth without straining
its human carrying capacity (the maximum population of a given species
that an area can support without reducing its ability to support that same
species in the future), we do not need to waste even one more minute worrying
over the mystifying political, social, economic or ecological dimensions
of the chal-lenges we face. All we have to do is stop using oil and
stop eating meat.
It really is that simple. So why aren’t we doing
it?
Oil is, of course, the toughie. Until some new
technology is developed to actually replace gas-powered vehicles, along
with the infrastructure of highways, gas stations, repair shops etc. that
supports them, we need our cars every day to get to work, to take our children
to school, to transport food and other commodities, etc. Moving beyond
oil will require us to wholly re-vision and reconfigure every aspect of
our lives, from the products we use (try finding even one item in the room
where you're sitting that does not have some kind of oil-based product
in its composition, painted on its surface, etc.) , to how we get around,
to how we grow our food (the vast majority of fertilizers and pesticides
are petroleum-based), heat our homes, and even entertain ourselves (CDs,
DVDs, TV's, computers – they're all plastic, which equals oil!).
The move from fossil fuels to renewable sources of energy is a change that
will, sooner or later, be forced on our species as world oil supplies peak
and rapidly dwindle to zero in coming decades. Any steps we can take
to help proactively pull the plug in advance of the inevitable crash, thereby
reducing the extent of the long-term environmental damage we'll have to
recover from, are well worth the effort. We can build solar homes,
purchase alternative-fueled vehicles, ride bicycles to work or school –
these are all good and useful things. But even with them, when the
“Peak Oil” turning point comes, for better or worse, whether our inevitable
global energy watershed washes over us as an exciting oppor-tunity or a
terrible human tragedy, breaking free of oil dependency is a passage our
species will traverse en masse, a great work we will all accomplish, or
fail to realize, together.
Eating meat, we do alone. No law requires us to
continue supporting the meat industry by purchasing and consuming its products.
No new infrastructure is required for us to transition to a vegetarian
diet. Meme-based cultural fears, especially in those aforementioned
wealthy, meat-gluttonous regions of the world, that a meat-free diet can’t
supply sufficient protein or other important nutrients has been proven
false by all manner of scientific research in recent years, not to mention
by the lives and generally exceptional health of generations of vegetarians
and vegans in those same wealthy countries, and for thousands of years
in India, China, Japan and other Asian nations where Hinduism and Buddhism
are widely practiced. While eating meat cannot be shown to offer
any health benefit whatsoever over a plant-based diet, just about every
health deficit you can think of has been directly or indirectly linked
to meat consumption, from breast and colorectal cancer to cardiovascular
disease to obesity, and on and on and on… Conservative estimates
by health care professionals suggest that, in the United States alone,
between $60 and $120 billion dollars a year in medical expenditures can
be directly attributed to the consumption of meat. The US meat industry,
in 1997, had gross receipts totaling roughly $100 billion, making the whole
industry a net loss for the American economy when the health effects are
factored in. Frances Moore Lappe’s 1971 best-seller Diet for a Small
Planet (13 million copies sold!) alerted the world more than three decades
ago to the devastating impact of meat consumption on the environment and
world hunger, and revealed an Earth-friendly, people-valuing path to transforming
global culture through vegetarianism which, had we followed it, would almost
certainly have allowed us to evade altogether, or at least to greatly minimize
the impact of, most of the self-wrought travails now threatening our species…
And yet, we keep eating meat. At the time of this
writing (2006), it would be statistically accurate to predict that, at
best, only about one in every ten people reading these words is a practicing
vegetarian (in the USA – Brits fare a bit better at about 2 in 10, and
globally, while hard statistics are few and far between, most sources suggest
that the worldwide vegetarian population probably averages a sad one to
two percent). Traditional, Third-World meat-eating cultures may not
be aware of or trust the scientific and medical information we have acquired
concerning the effects of meat consumption on health and longevity, and
nomadic lifestyles, the use of land for grazing which could not support
agricultural farming and other location-specific factors may posit a different
set of criteria people in less-affluent parts of the world must consider
when making their dietary choices. But if you live in the United
States, the European Union, China or Brazil, chances are that you are eating
meat one or more times every day, with full awareness (if you weren’t aware
of any of these things before reading this chapter, you are now) that doing
so is virulently unhealthy, massively destructive to the environment, and
an act of personal complicity in the deaths of 18 million people worldwide
every year from starvation, malnutrition and other hunger-related causes.
Are you okay with that? If you are not on board
with the verifiable negative impact of the global meat industry, on the
planet and on people, but you intend to go on eating meat anyway, how do
you explain that to yourself? If even one of the 18 million individuals
around the world slated to die this year for lack of sufficient healthy
food could look you in the eye and hold you personally accountable for
your actions, would you explain your choice differently? Would you
reconsider? Why?
While it is true that all Stage One and many Stage Two
sleepers, to once again quote Jesus, “…know not what they do…,” regarding
the larger impact of their actions on the world or, for that matter, on
themselves, it is equally true that no one can seriously expect to reach
Stage Three awakening and beyond without relinquishing, once and for all,
the easy ignorance is bliss comfort of soothing dream-world unaccountability.
Whether we are aware of it or not, whether we like it or not, every action
that we take, every choice that we make, has concrete, real-world consequences,
for ourselves and for others. We can embrace this fact and take willing
responsibility for consciously crafting our individual lives, and through
them, our common destiny, or we can eschew accountability for the direction
of our lives and our impact on the world, and simply drift about like leaves
on the wind, blowing this way and that in blind subservience to our memes.
We can commit to the realization of our highest personal potential, the
manifestation of our ideal life, and the creation of a bright future for
Humanity and the world, or we can dedicate our existence to nothing grander
than undisturbed slumber, the maintenance of the status quo, and the nourishment
of the parasitic memes we allow to feast on the very personal energy which,
if made available to us, would quickly catapult us to awakening.
All of the facts and statistics used in this chapter
are taken from legitimate, respected sources – no hyperbole or propaganda
– links to all of which and more are posted in the "Recommended Reading"
section of the The Simplest Path website at www.thesimplestpath.com.
Feel free to do your own research and draw your own conclusions.
But if, in the end, you agree that the facts here presented are valid,
and yet you choose to continue living your daily life as if they were not,
or as if you are somehow exempt from personal responsibility for the consequences
of your choices, or worse, taking the position that you'd like to change,
but They won't let you…, what larger meme are you serving in lieu of what
you know to be the truth? If your knowledge and your behavior are
out of sync, what payoff are you receiving in exchange for tolerating the
psychic dissonance? When what you inevitably purchase with your prize
is global warming, the annual deaths of millions, and the hastening of
Humankind's eventual breach of Earth's human carrying capacity and the
likely eventual extinction of our species, what payoff could be worth the
price?
_________________________________
KEY QUESTION EXERCISE #6
“By Their Goals You Shall Know Them”
Russian mystic, George Ivanovich Gurdjieff, who brought
the Fourth Way spiritual system to the West in the early 20th Century,
taught that good and evil exist only in relation to a goal – that it is
only when we know where we are going, when we have established clear personal
objectives and unflinchingly dedicated our lives to their achievement,
that we can honestly measure the value of our choices and behavior.
In our struggle to achieve Stage Three awakening, Gurdjieff’s aphorism
can be a handy tool for helping us break the hypnotic spell of all the
context-free, so-called "objective Goods and Evils” preached by large-scale
memeplexes like religions, political parties, economic systems, etc.
Guided by unambiguous goals, we need no longer passively petition invisible
forces for direction – Am I right? Am I wrong? Is this good?
Is this evil? Instead, we can take charge of our lives by actively
measuring the relative value of all our options in clear context – Do my
proposed actions lead me toward or away from my chosen destination?
Which of the options before me serve my goals, and which obstruct them?
It is only when we have established clear goals that
a question like “should I eat meat or be a vegetarian?” becomes meaningful.
Either path pursued in banal imitation of forces outside ourselves (including
this book) is memetic mimicry, and does nothing to free us from the hypnosis
of Stage One sleep. We dream blissfully of our Cosmic Entitlement
to Subdue Creation (I have heard Christians argue that the Bible orders
them to eat meat), or conversely, of our enlightened “vegan superiority”
to the lowly Homo carnivorans around us, who are just not smart enough
to surrender to our advanced understanding… But when we are clear
about what we want in life – personal awakening, less suffering and greater
happiness for ourselves and for the world, the transition of our species,
en-masse, to Stage Four Limitless Frontier consciousness – no imitation
is necessary. We need seek neither advice nor permission from any
outside force concerning our choices in life. We need only examine
our options with an open mind and ask, does this serve or obstruct my goal?
– then answer honestly, and behave accordingly.
So, step one of this Key Question Exercise is set spiritual
goals. Do you really want to awaken? Are you ready for enlightenment?
Can you commit to actually rolling up your sleeves and working hard toward
planetary awakening and the hands-on creation of a bright future for Humanity?
If your answer to these questions is “yes,” what are you willing to do,
give and/or sacrifice in order to achieve your goals? If your answer
to the first question is “no,” or to the second, “nothing,” why are you
still reading this book? Take time right now to journal at some length
in your notebook concerning these questions. Are you ready to set
and commit to defined spiritual goals? If yes, spell them out.
If no, what’s standing in your way? What do you need to do, understand,
complete, etc. before you will be ready to make unambiguous, irrevocable
commitments to personal and planetary evolution? Make a plan for
overcoming any barriers you identify – then carry it out!
Another way to benefit from Gurdjieff’s unique understanding
of the relationship between goals and choice is by turning his maxim around.
In the absence of consciously-chosen goals, close examination of how we
habitually define good and evil, and of the choices we make based on those
definitions, can bring to light the hidden memetic objectives which covertly
direct much of our behavior. If it is only when we consciously pursue
clear goals that we can know good from evil, then, reversed, whenever we
find ourselves weighing “goods and evils" in daily life, and making choices
based on those measurements, we can rest assured that, whether we are aware
of them or not, goals are being pursued. Just as observing
a boat turn against the current tells us that a rudder must be secreted
beneath the water's rippled surface, wherever questions of good and evil
arise, goals must be present, invisibly steering our lives, choice by choice,
toward some destination which, if it has not been consciously chosen by
us, must then be memetic. There is no third option. When we
observe that our knowledge and behavior are out of synch, as when we understand
the damage eating meat, burning oil, over-consuming, etc. inflicts on ourselves
and on the world, but we choose to pursue such activities anyway, questioning
the "goods" by which we justify such choices to ourselves and to others
can offer important clues toward recognizing and overcoming the memes and
memeplexes most successful-ly controlling our minds.
Step two of this Key Question Exercise is to closely
observe the contradictions in your thoughts, feelings and behavior that
committing to concrete spiritual goals will inevitably bring to light,
as displaced memes struggle to regain control over your thought processes
and lull you back to sleep. This is a permanent habit to establish
and practice every day of your life. Whenever you witness your actions
– or even the temptation to act – betraying your commitments, ask, “What
am I labeling ‘good’ when I make this choice/take this action? What
goal does that ‘good’ serve? When I abandon my own consciously-chosen
objective in service to that 'good,' what meme-directed purpose am I pursuing
in its place?
Awakening occurs when we break the power of memes to
control our thoughts and perceptions, and the choices we make based on
them. We cannot awaken without making new choices – conscious choices
based on an honest appraisal of the facts, untainted by our personal subjective
opinions, tastes, prejudices or beliefs (i.e., our memes), and carefully
measured, not according to any memetic scale of "objective Good and Evil,"
but rather in relation to each choice's likely impact on our ultimate ability
to achieve our consciously-set spiritual goals and life objectives.
The facts are plain regarding vegetarianism VS meat consumption.
If what you want from life is illness, environmental degradation, the starvation
deaths of millions annually, and the likely demise of billions in the name
of desperate “stabilization” strategies geared toward maintaining the gluttonous
lifestyles of the wealthy few, consume away. If, on the other hand,
you aspire to achieve personal awakening, to manifest your ideal life and
to contribute to the positive evolution of the human species and the creation
of a bright, enlightened future for all Humanity, then stop eating meat
now. These are paths that lead in opposite directions, and you cannot
simultaneously walk both. Your choice of futures begins with you
next meal.
In Key Question Community Groups, create enclaves of
vegetarian culture. Cook together, eat together, share meat-free
fellowship. Study vegetarian nutrition and cooking, and educate each
other. Support one another's efforts to set and actively pursue spiritual
goals, including, but not limited to, vegetarianism. Help each other
to identify the many memes such efforts are guaranteed to shake loose,
and to overcome, rather than succumb to, their hypnotic power.
NOTE: If I appear in this chapter to be advocating
the acceptance of a “vegetarian meme,” as opposed to the more general “opening
of the question,” recommended in the Key Question Technique instructions
that prefaced this section of the book, you have a point – but this is
a special case. Every human being must eat every day to continue
living. We do not have the option of truly stepping back from the
question to consider it at length. In view of the facts, or even
the "potential facts," if you're not convinced yet, and intend to pursue
your own research, isn’t it better to follow the sage advice of the Greek
Physician Hippocrates (or, in some sources, his Roman counterpart, Galen)
and “First, do no harm,” minimizing your impact on the environment and
other people by “trading memes” in the short run, and practicing vegetarianism
while you work to open and explore the larger question?