There’s an old quote attributed to Jonathan Swift that goes something like Man cannot be reasoned out of a thought that he was not reasoned into. I heard Ken Wilber say this on a Rebel Wisdom podcast last week and it’s been bouncing around my head ever since.
I realised today that this is why people ask if I miss eating meat. It was a flash of insight, an epiphany that made me stop eating animals. My dear old cat died one afternoon and I found him on the driveway. He looked like he was sleeping but he was gone. It was critical to me in that moment to know that he didn’t suffer and a light came on in my head; no animal should have to suffer.
I grew up eating meat but stopped eating ‘anything with a face’ in my early 20s but it didn’t last. It wasn’t changed; I was being a vegetarian. If Instagram had been around then I would have been #virtuesignalling all over the place. It would have been so embarrassing. But now I’ve grown, even though I would love everyone to go vegan overnight it’s never going to happen, even in my house. Actually that would be somewhat of a catastophe for human civilisation. No mistake, reducing our intake of animal products even by one meal a day (or week) makes a difference, for our health, for our planet and for the animals.
My point…I haven’t convinced you to go vego, have I? You weren’t exactly ‘reasoned’ into eating meat the way you were reasoned into buying the car you chose, or the university you went to. You grew up eating what your family ate. I feel that everyone has to have their epiphany and no-one can convince you until you are ready.
This is the crux of the evolution of consciousness that I bang on about all the time. Any shift in perspective must be triggered internally. I made a shift from Mythic to Rational many years ago when I was told that my first husband, who wasn’t a Christian, would be in hell for all eternity. I had to turn away from such a cruel and pointless world-view or I wasn’t sure I could continue living in such a world. It made no sense…My own shift then from Rational to Post-Modern happened somewhere in my journey as a parent. My Integral moments have been as a result of meditation. Hitting rock-bottom helped, too. To come to see that we are all one, we’re all connected and we are so much more than this human body we’re driving around at the moment. But we’re not here to just work towards enlightenment, there’s a reason we’re here in these bodies, at this point in history. We have to do the work, live in the world, relate to others, read, meditate, learn…unless we want to stay where we are that is… and it will all happen. It can’t be reasoned into us.
A family member recently felt a shift from Rational structure of consciousness to Post-Modern as he came to understand that same-sex couples marrying wasn’t going to end civilisation as we know it. We even had an intelligent convo about why being a vegetarian isn’t weird, nor am I extreme in my opinion that animal racing is immoral. It’s just the next… level.
I invite anyone interested in the Evolution of Conscious to check out the amazing videos over at Rebel Wisdom and read the article linked above. It’s time to #findtheothers
Feature image photo by Adrian Swancar on Unsplash
Mr. Rodgers worded it a little differently- he said he wouldn’t eat anything “with a mother.” 🙂
(I’m vegetarian, too.)
How did you come to it? Was it because of what Mr Rogers said?