Rebel’s view of things

(Last blog, as I’m off line, till 28th Dec)

The changers, the rebels, are fighting against a HUGE popular trend. They need fuel to be solo fliers who are trying to be conscious of what they do. Good food yes, but other fuels too. We might start by dropping bad habits and replacing them with better ones, and maybe, after that, get used to flying on auto pilot, make flying a breeze … in order to better relax into rebelling.
This deliberate act of being “more aware” might sound a bit scary at first, as if we’re losing our life-long carefree spontaneity. But somehow we have to find a way to boycott that of which we don’t approve. We need to drop our support for the 1%’ers. By questioning the 1%’er system, by increasing consciousness rather than reducing it, we can start to break free.
But it’s a mixed bag of opportunities and fears. If fear stops us from becoming vegan, that’s very unfortunate. Admittedly living a vegan lifestyle might be, initially, an uncomfortable experience. At first we need to prove to ourselves that we’re really breaking out of ‘the pit’. We have to be sure we’re not intimidated by anything, like missing our “favourite" foods or missing being just like others. By giving up the enjoyments that others “enjoy” we can, to some extent, emerge from the pit. As we leave and slough off our old skin, we’re really shuffling off the hardened element in ourselves. Thus putting behind us our ‘service’ to the world of the 1%’ers.
However (going vegan) doesn’t guarantee complete protection but by rebelling against the conspiracy of silence surrounding animal abuse in our society, we start moving towards vegan consciousness, towards being ‘the rebel’. And immediately, from that point on, we’ll be able to see the connections forming between various modes of thinking … thence to see ALL the big issues in a somewhat different way.

Hammering in the nails

The big worry today isn’t about being in the pit, it’s whether we’re conscious of it. Like sex starved teenagers who’re losing their virginity, we adults lose our acuity. By forfeiting fine minds (bursting with full consciousness) we settle for any old ‘pleasure experience’ we can lay our hands on. Instead of opening doors of consciousness we close them. Maybe not voluntarily but nonetheless we justify our closing them with that cheap cut: “Everybody does it so why shouldn’t I”?
By our being so easily seduced by safety in numbers we’re able to get over our guilt simply by going with the crowd. Even if we suspect we’re swimming against the tide of the coming age, we’re still in step with the march of the day.
If we’re not so easily seduced we may have jumped ahead already and be changing fast. If we also work it all out for ourselves, logically, then we’re also moving towards veganism and our own disassociation with the crowd mentality. Understandably any such ‘unauthorised change’ is a threat to the 1%’ers, who’re aware the world is approaching a more expansive age. Do you think they ever get horrified when they realise the coming age may be “vegan”, may eschew gratuitous violence and overall be a more aware, more intelligent age. Not good for arms shares and not good for animal industry profits.
Today, this “expansive awareness” still seems a million miles away. We’re still poisoning ourselves with the corpses of animals, still at war and still carrying the weight of huge bodies, huge egos, double standards and hubris. Vegan food doesn’t eradicate this entirely, but it helps to dissolve the ‘lump’ of it. It breaks open the belief that we eat meat for strength or that we can kill fear by being semi-conscious all day. By being vegan we can at least be alert. We can even wake the rebel in us. Trouble is constantly being silenced.
The rebel stands up to the 1%’ers by asking tricky questions in public. If we let that rebel in us stay sleep we’ll be allowing these frightening (and truly frightened) people to carry on controlling our world. If we aren’t sapping their strength by boycotting their commodities (mainly animal food and clothing) then we’re only boosting their spirits. When we open our purse or wallet to them, we also open our hearts to them (rather as we do in worship). We do it in the name of non-awareness - by pretending we aren’t aware. We tip them the wink and turn a blind eye to our own involvement. We let our dollars ‘hammer in the nails’.

Second class pleasure

Ordinary people, almost all people, are controlled by, shall we say, the remaining 1%. We’re (most of us) controlled by the carrot and stick method, only that for humans the ‘carrot’ bit is mainly in the form of animal products. Our love of them keeps us controlled. It’s a neat system.
Everything that comes from the animal industries is meant to be pleasurable but usually it’s ‘second class pleasure’ – cheap thrills, ice creams, chocolate, nursery teas, that old favourite, ‘meat’ and all the little luxuries we equate with enjoyment. We’re given almost anything to keep us ‘sweet’. It’s a sort of ‘seconds world’ of cheap and cheerful commodities, to keep us working and consuming. It’s like that now in Australia but it was like that half a century ago, for me growing up in England.
When I was a child I had a friend who lived a dull life in our exceptionally dull town, forty kilometres down the river from London, an hour’s train trip away. He used to go up to the ‘bright lights’ on a Friday night for the purpose of ‘having a laugh’. London for the poor is an exceptionally dull place, no laughs there. But just getting away from an even duller town for the night was some sort of enjoyment, some sort of relief from life “in the pit”. (Our fathers worked ‘down the pit’, in cement and paper factories situated in ugly depressions cut out of the chalk cliffs along the River Thames). We did have our indulgencies which made life bearable but they were strictly second rate, often to do with ‘treats’ made from animal stuff. It took our minds off the awful trapped feeling of living in this inescapable ‘pit’. The deal was that if we came to terms with life there, we could have plenty of indulgent ‘treats’. Obviously to many people living today, in this sort of cheap-thrill world, they’re tempted by the very same tawdry pleasures.
In order to socially engineer the lives of people, it makes sense to hold people in ‘the pit’, keeping them happy with a few miserable ‘indulgencies’. As ordinary people (I’ll call them “99%’ers”), we don’t have to deliberately indulge in evil activity to get what we want, it’s done for us. Neither do we have to be aware of acting compliantly when we’re trying to find relief, because we do so many things in a state of semi-consciousness (we gigglingly call it ‘indulging’). I suppose I’m rather obviously pointing to one of the most popular activities, that of eating animals. It’s an example of acting semi-consciously – that is, eating indulgently but keeping what we’re doing away from our full consciousness. It’s evident at meal times, that if we didn’t reduce awareness of it (when eating animals) we’d be in trouble – with ourselves. If we couldn’t “detach” from the guilt of what we were doing, it would cripple us. In order to conduct our day to day lives we, reluctantly, have to do some things semi-consciously. The dull town I came from was almost entirely, and probably still is, full of people who act semi-consciously. And yet these same good hearted people, trapped as they may be, are still capable of true feeling. They know the feeling of guilt and temptation and they learn how to enjoy the simpler pleasures of life. This is in sharp contrast to the rich (I’ll call them “1%’ers”) who control others’ lives but who keep themselves immune to any sense of their own wrong doing. For a start, the 1%’ers don’t ‘do’ guilt whereas the 99%’ers do!!

Enjoying money

Friday 18th December

It’s hard to enjoy hearing about the daily unreported massacre of animals. It’s very hard to take any comfort from our own responsibility for it. By pretending we’re NOT engaging in the act of hurting (hurting ourselves, hurting animals, hurting the planet, etc) we enter double-think and delusion. Our logical self tries to escape the inner eye by NOT seeing what’s going on. It’s laughable to think we can kid ourselves when we’ve already thought it through in our mind. As consumers we are party to a 1%’er’s reckless and juvenile projects for making money. We know they have to do it because they’re insecure and they have to find “safety” wherever they can. Because they consider “money” = “security” they are practically immune to the gentle heart approach to life. They expose and ridicule this very approach by calling it “bleeding” hearts of people who will get sloshy about something as insignificant as an animal. Reality is not a vegan life but a moneyed one.
Which brings us to money itself. Whether we are elite 1%’ers or amongst the 99% left over, we’d all jump at the chance to have plenty of money - to cushion our fear. It isn’t just the wicked who believe this. All over the world humans fear poverty and being forced to “live without”. So we try to get hold of as much of it (for security) as we can get – ‘high’ living - food, sex, intoxicants, anything to relieve the fear of insecurity and the tedium of living as a poor person. With money we can spend indulgently, to make life safe and in the everlasting search for enjoyment. Get rich, get smashed, get “out-of-it”, get fed, get bedded - enjoy.

“To do”

The wicked 1%’ers do know what they’re doing; however they ‘do’ without moral constraint. They know the consequences but do it all the same. They act wickedly because their fear of standing alone is so great whereas 99%’ers fear the guilt. They fear doing things wrong. Maybe it’s a superstitious fear of being clobbered by karma or by God, but it comes down to a dread of feeling guilty. For 99%’ers self-punishment of guilt is worse than being homeless.
1%’ers are cold, hard bastards so there’s no problem being ‘wicked’. For them failure to make big money is the important sin. They say “if it works, go for it, whatever it takes”. They don’t have dilemmas about morality and certainly not with regard to using animals as a resource. There’s no indecision concerning the way money is made. For 99%’ers it’s not that simple. It is a “moral” struggle. We often use food products to relieve the monotony and stresses of life. We can’t afford to look too closely at our “comfort” foods, not too consciously anyway, and that very blurring compromises our chances for achieving personal growth. If the contents of our foods doesn’t wreck our bodies then the avoidance of the ugly origins of our foods will play havoc with our sense of reality, concerning our part in the massacre of the animals.

“Wicked”

I’d be very surprised if even 1% of humans are truly “wicked”. To be wicked one would have to be so chronically frightened of life as to sell one’s soul. Those who take advantage of others and amass money and power in order to avoid vulnerability, could be said to be “soulless”. To ensure this level of “safety”, moral constraint must be abandoned and this opens the way to acting wickedly.
For the remaining 99% of us it’s different. We may be scared but not chronically frightened. We put limitations on what we are willing to do to ease our fears. We wouldn’t sell our soul just to feel safer. Would we? All of us probably have a few really deep fears – fear of failure, fear of poverty, fear of abandonment, fear of death etc., but 99%’ers don’t have the monster gene. We might flirt with the devil sometimes, but we aren’t held to any contract, we aren’t trapped. But we may be less than fully conscious of what we do, maybe purposefully underachieving or deliberately not knowing something that is easily knowable to ease our consciences without actually “selling our souls”.
With everything that’s known about animal husbandry today, you’d have to be pretty unaware and insensitive to carry on eating the poor creatures and not feel something. So we act blind sometimes, as if we don’t know. Apparently that’s what JC said when they were hammering in the nails … “They don’t know what they’re doing”.

The wicked

The way the entrepreneurs have made money out of animals is both diabolical and clever. The things they’ve done to animals make their work truly diabolical but the way they’ve manipulated their fellow human beings is just down right clever. Not too many people will admit their connection with all this, but it’s obvious who is spending on it and who is being rewarded from it. The ‘rewarded ones’ control the whole environment through the subjugation of humans, by way of the subjugation of animals. By addicting humans to eating animals and coming to depend on their secretions they have built a guaranteed market with guaranteed permission to provide for that market in whatever way they sought fit. The animal industries have garnered their support from generations of customers comprising almost every human that has ever lived on this planet. They’ve provided what’s been needed at the survival level and catered for every taste right up to the luxury level. Their influence is everywhere - in many of our clothing industries, in most food industries and absolutely all shoe companies. The animal industries control us by controlling our main spending habits. They seem to offer a service, by providing what seems like a reliable, safe, economic and fashionable source of supply (and when they offer a new line in food or clothing we all jump for it). They give us what we want.
This albeit small percentage of the population have an insatiable appetite for money. And that mightn’t be such a wicked thing if it were not for the fact that they have no scruples about telling untruths. We ordinary people, comprising the 99% bulk of the population, won’t believe they can be such rogues or that they are made up of rather a lot of people, who’ll stop at nothing to shore up their own bank accounts.
As if bank accounts could allay the deep fears life contains, as if selling your soul for money was even a vaguely good idea.