Light switches and dark rooms

Thursday 13th January
The status quo is like a lump of concrete - at present it is set strong. It’s stronger than anyone’s good intentions to change it. We have to deal with this and not fight the reluctance-to-change head-on. For us, this particular reality includes some disappointment in our attempts to raise awareness. That shouldn’t piss us off. It will always be hard to persuade the omnivores to switch across, especially those vegetarians who are rightly proud of the progress they’ve already made, getting away from eating meat. The sequence of events depends on initial attitudes being in place - if an attitude is locked it shuts out any progress.
However far along the line we’ve come there’s often an attitude sitting there blocking our way and dragging us to a halt. Our own attitude blocks (complaisant pride at our own ‘so-far’ progress holds us back. It could be a springboard for further change, by evaluating and re-evaluating where we are.
We might feel in charge of a great lumbering machine, wanting to be moving forward but unabl;e to because we can’t see where it’s going, what it’s aiming towards. That’s why I think vegan reasoning is so useful because it shows us exactly where the ideal is, up ahead, not how to get there but why we should be moving in that direction. It’s our reason to move, without hesitation, with direction.
Humans seem to have always been in dark rooms, looking for a light-source. Collectively we are groping about, searching at random and getting pathetically small glimpses, sometimes. There’s an appearance of chaos, of the unordered and of the not-very-promising. It seems as if most humans have been high-jacked by beliefs that prevent us from discovering what should be obvious (where the light switch might be found in the dark room). ‘Groping’ is not a good look, it takes energy and concentration to little effect, and it makes those around us feel nervous.
Once we locate the light switch all is clear. Once we go over to another attitude (in this case a respect for the animals we’ve been eating for so many years) we’ll have a more confident grasp on a more appealling reality.
On one level we already know that there’s a parallel reality to the one we know about most of the time. In that ‘reality’ we can see things in almost the very opposite way to the way we were brought up to see them. It is less obedient to authority, more confident of self and therefore far freer ... but also far more disciplined. To discover the order behind the chaos, to stop being so subservient to convention, to stop being random in our decisions we need to see how sequence rules everything. The following of sequences brings us from here to there, from one reality through to the newer (but less tested) reality. A vegan diet, for example, is certainly less tested than a conventional diet, and yet it’s obviously a more intelligent way to go (simply because it’s safe, clean and energy-producing, etc.) The same would apply to compassionate attitude which seems so much cleverer than conventional thinking.
In a parallel reality, on a subconscious level perhaps, we do a lot of planning. Dreaming perhaps. But in this quiet-moving reality we follow sequences that appear logical. We foresee events. And when they arrive we’re already familiar enough with these events to deal with the problems as they come up. For our own personal satisfaction that’s useful enough, but it also benefits ‘the greater good’.
Always in front of us is the common aim: to eventually rescue the animals as well as rescuing our own drowning souls. In other words the sooner we can relax about the hugeness of the challenge (and the near impossibility of these major changes becoming fashionable), the sooner we’ll be able to entertain another reality, consciously. That will almost certainly satisfy our needs, to be on the move, to be working for our cause (whether that be to get people to go vegan or to get people to go non-violent).