We all have our story of awakening. When I was about seven years old, I remember asking my mother, “The kind of food we eat—is that what everybody eats?” She answered, “Yes.” Then she added, “Well, there are vegetarians…” in a way that made me think they must live on another planet.
I have discovered that all of us raised in this culture have been ritually injected with an unrecognized mentality that renders our efforts for peace, freedom, justice, equality, and sustainability merely ironic. We want for ourselves what we refuse to give to others. Our massive and routine violence toward animals for food is our culture’s defining blind spot, and when we look deeply enough, we realize that this is the situation in a nutshell: We are all beings of light and awareness and love, bon into a culture of violence and exclusion.
We take on its darkness and fear, and the core ritual used by our culture to effect this is our daily meals, where we are forced to participate in routine killing by eating and buying the flesh and secretions of imprisoned, terrified animals.
Our path to freedom lies in freeing these animals. Veganism is the spiritual and practical key to happiness and peace. It is the stark and liberating solution to the omnivore’s dilemma, and to the unyielding conundrum bearing down on our culture as our relentless violence toward animals, people, and the Earth ripens before our eyes. As the lived expression of nonviolence, veganism is the path to heaven.
This beautiful Earth is a celebration of joy. As we understand and act in harmony with the universal teachings of compassion and nonviolence, we will discover that our Earth can be transformed into heaven. Each of us can be an angel in our heaven, here to love and serve the magnificent creation. Food is the key: our most essential, intimate, and significant connection with the larger order.
The food of heaven is available now, and together we can create a new dream every day on this Earth. I invite all of us to vividly imagine our culture’s vegan future in all its details, and to act to help create it. Sharing vegan recipes and spreading the word in our own unique ways, we are transforming our world. Imagining our culture as a vegan culture is imagining an utterly different culture, a beautiful world to which our future selves are ever beckoning us.
Bio: Dr. Will Tuttle, a best-selling author, pianist, and composer, has presented widely throughout America and Europe. Author of The World Peace Diet, he has also taught college courses in mythology, philosophy, humanities, comparative religion, and creativity. His Ph.D. dissertation in education from the University of California, Berkeley, focused on educating intuition in adults. A Dharma Master in the Zen tradition, he has done intensive training in Korea, and has practiced meditation and vegan living for 30 years.
www.worldpeacediet.org [email protected], 1083 Vine Street, Healdsburg, CA 95448. 800-697-6614 – voice mail; 508-367-2046 – direct