Clementine Sigh: 2015

Friday, May 8, 2015

Relief: Grabbing my own attention

I have waited my whole life to meet this book "The four agreements: A Toltec wisdom book". I have been waiting to meet someone who thinks the way that I do. Could it be that the author of this book, Don Miguel Ruiz is one of many. The notion that this book has been read my many and they may have connected to it's content the way I have would be phenomenal.

"I am the Smoky Mirror, because I am looking at myself in all of you, but we don't recognize each other because of the smoke in-between us. That smoke is the Dream, and the mirror is you, the dreamer." - the protagonist of humanity by Don Miguel Ruiz

"We are born with the capacity to learn how to dream, and the humans who live before us teach us how to dream the way society dreams. The outside dream has so many rules that when a new human is born, we hook the child's attention and introduce these rules into his or her mind. The outside dream uses Mom and Dad, the schools, and religion to teach us how to dream.

Attention is the ability we have to discriminate and to focus only on that which we want to perceive. We can perceive millions of thing simultaneously, but using our attention, we can hold whatever we want to perceive in the foreground of our mind. The adults around us hooked our attention and put information into our minds through repetition. That is the way we learned everything we know.

By using our attention we learned a whole reality, a whole dream. We learned how to behave in society: what to believe and what not to believe; what is acceptable and what is not acceptable; what is good and what is bad; what is beautiful and what is ugly; what is right and what is wrong. It was all there already -- all that knowledge, all those rules and concepts about how to behave in the world." (Ruiz, 1997)

Thursday, May 7, 2015

Respect for the honest man


Gennady Soloviev preparing trap

A couple of weeks ago I watched a documentary directed by Werner Herzog called "Happy people: A year in the taiga". The movie documents the lives of several men who live with their families in a little village along the Yenisei river in the Siberian taiga. The men spend most of their lives away from home trapping sable and mink; living in solitude, completely self-reliant, with their dog as their only companion. I was captivated by something one of the men, Gennady Soloviev, said when asked about hunting innocent animals for food when he could live in the village and raise his own. He said, "come to think of it, we are all killers or accomplices. Even the bleeding hearts intent to pity everything. Why? It's very simple. A man keeps a pig but he knows in advance what he keeps it for; to kill it and to eat it and to sell it's meat. Even he who is sorry for all of this buys the pork from him. The trapper is the same as that pig farmer, only he is more honest. I used to raise cattle and I could never bring myself to slaughter them. 'It comes to you to show it affection or to give it some treat; instead he gets a bullet in the head.' In the taiga the wild animal knows no good can come from me, from a man; he tries to escape. Here it's about who outsmarts whom."

Breeding and feeding for consumption and profits is a filthy practice that the ideology of animal liberation speaks to. Speciesism is a funny little word used to justify our nation's system of modern meat production. The ultimate in outsmarting the "lower animals...whose flesh we eat" (Ball et al., 2014). Our nation's factory farmer spew their mantra "but we're feeding the world"; it just doesn't play out when eighteen people die every minute in this world due to hunger. Today more than half the grain produced annually in the United States is being fed to livestock. Grains are not the natural diet of cattle, grass is. Grains are used to fatten them up quickly and get them to market. The resources spent on logistics from udder to slaughter lack reasonable efficacy and the costs t our biosphere are mounting.

The lifestyle of Gennady Soloviev and the lifestyle of the factory farm consumer have very little in common. One must be shrewd in his ability to outsmart the wild animal in order to eat while the other stands at the meat counter and chooses her cut. Of the two, I believe some animal liberationists could admire the respect the hunter has for his kill.