The karma before the storm

I’m sick and tired of hearing things from uptight short-sighted narrow-minded hypocrites

All I want is the truth, just gimmie some truth

John Lennon

The sins of the treacherous changed people into a misshapen animal, so that they appeared like, and yet unlike, human beings

Pythagoras[1]

Meatamorphosis documents the metamorphosis I underwent when embracing overnight a vegan lifestyle after 50 flesh-chomping years dedicated to the ravenous blood cult of meat eating. My instant karma switch to veganism kicked off 10 years of conscientious research that led me to appreciating diet as a fundamental determinant not only of personal health and wellbeing, but also as a fundamental determinant in the broader ambit of our collective endeavours. The wholesome experience of re-booting my diet has granted me an appreciation of the unwavering logic behind the observation that we are what we eat. That simple, solid causal fact, fires a deadly arrow of understanding straight through the very heart of the self-destructive mess we currently find ourselves floundering in.

Throughout the pages of this book I cite repeated historical warnings against exploiting and eating animals that are embedded deep in the ancestral jurisprudence of all cultures. Where communities have followed instruction to abstain from harming and eating animals, humans have blossomed, physically, mentally and spiritually, unifying harmoniously and artistically with the natural world to create a veritable garden of Eden, a peace on Earth that has reigned for a minimum 70 000 years of our history as homo sapiens sapiens. Nowhere has this symbiotic flourishing of humanity and nature been more evident than in the abiding, elegant Hindu and Buddhist ahimsic[1] cultures of Asia. As the great Rabindranath Tagore points out, ‘all the oldest and longest civilizations have been Eastern’[2].

In contrast, where people have fallen into the violence of meat-eating, moral decay, the splintering of society into perpetual conflict and the malicious exploitation of animal (including humans), mineral and vegetable, has ensued[3]. That is, the malicious exploitation of everything has ensued. Societies riven with addiction to the meat of slaughtered animal may surge in power via invasion, plunder and enslavement, but invariably collapse into turpitude. These societies tear themselves apart through the normalization of violence and suffering. The horrible history of our subjugation of animals highlights a frightening, inescapable revelation: that how we interact with animals, shapes how we interact with each other. Our treatment of animals is the bellwether for our moral integrity. If our morality disintegrates for animals, as sure as night follows day, it disintegrates for humans. Indira Gandhi warned that whatever happens to animals, will happen to people. We ignore this chrysalis truth at our peril. You may want to check out the tragic ghost life of farmed animals to gain a glimpse into the doomsday scenario we are all being marshalled toward by the man[4]-made, dog-eat-dog horror show of corporatization and privatization. A rat-race, meat-market, stock market[5] madness of profit at any cost is now embedded as a moral and hence behavioural norm into our global political and social governance systems. The contemporary rise of totalitarian puppet states commanded by the bullying big shit stick of big business cabals, increasingly is herding us toward the same commodification[6], the same confinement, the same enslavement, the same electronic tagging regimes, the same generic low grade stock feed, the same withdrawal of legal and moral protection, the same acceptance of cruelty, the same denial of sentience meted out to our poor suffering animal cousins. The tyrannies imposed upon animals are imposed upon us.

The corrupting influence of the meat and allied industries over human society is not a new observation. Flesh eating and cruelty to animals has been identified repeatedly throughout history as the incubator of violence and as a critical, measurable indicator of moral decline. Repeated warnings against meat-eating constitute a foundational cornerstone of the human condition resounding through every age and culture, first captured in written form as a record of the measureless oral tradition of the pre-biblical, pre-Homeric, Sanskrit text of the Mahabharata, ‘the great song of the universe’, which states explicitly that:

the eating of animal flesh is the source from which all human folly arises[7].

Every single one of us shares a common, existential interest in opposing the animal exploitation industries, particularly those of us who currently endorse, through daily patronage, these grisly industries. As Socrates pointed out, it is worse to do wrong than to be wronged. Complicity in unpardonable terror and suffering is bringing you down my friend.

For the coy investors lurking with criminal intent behind the largely camouflaged carnage of our global death diet, throat cutting has proven an obscenely lucrative cash cow over an extended period of time. Fortunes, dynasties, nations, empires have been launched on the rivers of blood flowing from the cutting blocks of the butcher business. And like its fish counterpart, the meat industry rots from the head down. The individuals occupying board and executive positions in the meat trade are — and have been from the trade’s inception as a money spinner for the Roman Empire’s military blood cult of Mars[8] — made up of morally neutered, intergenerational vampires making rich on the eternal suffering and servitude of human and animal alike.

The contemporary slaughter empire these egregious corporate vampires perch atop, is a macabre theatre of cruelty performing 24 hours a day 7 days a week 365 days of every year and playing at a venue near you…in suburban kitchens across the length and breadth of the planet, in almost every shop and eatery from Timbuktu to Na Nar Goon, in clothing and cosmetic establishments, in furniture shops, in eateries and factories and laboratories and universities and haberdasheries and sporting and entertainment facilities, in pubs and in clubs and every which place with enough space to swing and skin and cook a dead cat in. The gory detritus of this ceaseless effusion of blood ends up in all manner of commodity. No doubt this fecking computer my fingers are punching out these words on contains products garnered from the untimely death of some poor persecuted beast. You can’t escape it. It is everywhere. The dye of cruelty runs deep in the plumage of our vulture culture. It casts a black shadow over the air and the rivers and the sea and the cities and the pulverised countryside…it chokes our minds and blinds our conscience. The blood stain of animal abuse soils almost every aspect of our contemporary reality. Like rust, animal cruelty never sleeps.

To any meat eater, who through no fault of your own find yourself caught up — as I have been caught up for most of my life — in hard core addiction to the ridiculously ubiquitous products of the trillion-dollar animal slaughter industries, I want to assure you that my aim here is not to denigrate and finger wave, but to inform and embolden. Yes, there is horror and there is condemnation as we dissect the brutal corruption of the slaughter industries…the time for pulling punches has long passed. But above all else, this book extends to the reader a message of empowerment. My principal purpose in penning Meatamorphosis is to offer assistance to meat and dairy eaters in firstly recognizing and then loosening the sleeper-hold grip of a mass culinary cult of cruelty that is squeezing all the goodness and the joy of life out of us. Meatamorphosis also offers value to those commendable plant-powered people who may not be fully aware of the astonishing historical and philosophical depth of the vegan, ahimsic way of living, and its interconnectedness across all cultures. By writing on the spiritual and historical vigour of vegan practice, I am hoping to contribute in some small way to kicking against the pricks in the noble struggle for pax romana: for lasting peace on Earth. In this, I hold to the perhaps naïve belief that the pen is mightier than the sausage.

The global butcher business currently looms like a leviathan of doom over planet Earth. Technological innovation has ‘facilitated killing on a scale that defies imagination’[9]. We live in an age where the bloody tempest unleashed by this contemptible business is peaking. The meat transnationals, along with their various partners in crime — particularly the animal torturing military/pharmaceutical/medical/petrochemical cartels[10] — have to a large extent wrested control of the global social, economic and political steering wheel. These colossal corporations now operate above the rule of law. They own the law. The legal and particularly the political system, is their bitch. We shouldn’t be too surprised to find ourselves currently careering erratically along at a lunatic pace on the blood-puddled, needle-spiked highway to hell. Where did you imagine cut-throats, drug-pushers and arms dealers habituated in pathological greed would be taking you? Paradise? The highway to health? That’s a bit like sourcing a convicted paedophile to babysit your kids and then being surprised it didn’t go well. We need to wake up and yes, by all means smell the roses — that’s important — but turn your nose the other direction and have a big hard whiff as well of the depraved mountain of rotting corpses fashioned daily by the global meat industries and then pumped down our mouths to wind corrosively through our guts. That Everest heap of death is humanity’s highest shame. It is the reeking, decomposing elephant carcass in the room. It is the putrid stench of a mass psychotic degeneracy.

The world stands at a critical crossroad. Billions of previously plant-based Buddhists and Hindus[11] are being strong-armed into adopting a meatcentric western diet by the daunting global muscle of the likes of JBS, Royal Danish, Cargill and Tyson Meats[12]. Buddha and Krishna are on the decline and Colonel Sanders and Ronald McDonald are the new blood-soaked gods of the east side. China is now the biggest meat producer on the planet. Over half the world’s swine herd live out their miserable, shortened lives in China[13]. China is also the world’s biggest producer and exporter of fur and leather[14]. What an insult to the visionary traditions of compassion initiated by Buddha, Lao Tzu and Confucius. To see thousands upon thousands of years of meditation on universal compassion and ahimsic peace go up in barbeque flames as part of a demonic alliance between the western butchering industries and the ruling elite of the Chinese communist[15] party, can’t help but make me feel ashamed to be Asian. As the meat industries continue to stampede through the golden continent of Asia, cynically undermining via deviant propaganda the ahimsic vegan core of Hinduism and Buddhism[16], they trample in their wake the last vestiges of a world peace diet that once constituted the staple food for the majority of people on the planet. A spiritual desecration of Asia has taken place in our lifetime, principally achieved through violence of the meat industries. Asia has been comprehensively colonized by western throat cutters, operating on a standard Roman model of corrupt thuggery they have been employing for more than 2 thousand years of war and bloodshed[17]. There is now nowhere left to desecrate and plunder. We are at the end of the road. If Asia continues its spiral into the hell of meat eating, humanity falls into unavoidable ruination.

The dire historical and contemporary impacts of the meat industry are biblical in dimension: dispossessing and fragmenting countless communities throughout history; exploiting and destroying ecosystems across the world; waging a relentless global war of extinction[18] and enslavement against all manner of earthlings; polluting and exhausting the once seemingly limitless riches of the oceans through the dragnet devastation of global overfishing[19] and the toxic run-off from animal agriculture; wantonly abusing fresh water supplies by being the single largest user and abuser of fresh water on the planet[20]; clearing the last remaining pockets of the once expansive verdant forest lungs of the Earth and obliterating soil nutrition through massive pesticide saturated mono-farming designed to cheap feed livestock; driving the insectageddon this poisonous mono-farming produces; generating epidemic levels of disease and depression for billions of people caught tight in a cunningly spun web of consumer convenience; constituting the single biggest cause of death among humans[21]; sucking up trillions of public monies in corruption and malfeasance[22]; instilling as a norm violence and cruelty into people’s daily routines; smashing with a hammer people’s moral compass and incriminating all who partake of their ‘products’ in horrendous iniquities. What a damning litany of indictment.

For all humankind’s apparent progressions, for all our technological inventiveness and ingenuity, for all our self-proclaimed intelligence, we live and breathe precariously and nervously in the fear-riddled, paranoid age of the anthropocentric Anthropocene, bearing tragic witness to the breakdown of the intersecting biostructures that generate and perpetuate life on earth. Life itself is on the wane and the number one culprit that stands above all others in this hellacious diminishment is the business of animal slaughter and its myriad ghastly commercial offcuts. At the core of our ecological crisis is the blood-soaked meat trade. At the core of our ecological and moral crisis is your blood-soaked dinner. The heart of darkness driving our gratuitous vandalism of the planet beats loudest from the slaughter industry, an industry most of us blithely contribute to by munching on a hot dog or buying our kids an ice cream and some gelatine lollies. Do you know what part of the animal yields the most concentrated levels of gelatine, and thus is the most sought after by confectionary manufacturers? Hooves. Yeah, hooves. Our children are chewing on the severed hooves of tortured animals. No need to dress them up at Halloween in Dracula costumes. Just tell them the tricky truth on the origin of the treats they gorge on. Imagine coming across a crowd of kids in the street, all on their fours, picking and biting and gnawing into the hooves of a horse corpse. That is the reality we have accepted as normal. We are all being sucked surreptitiously deeper and deeper in to the powerful gravitational pull of a black hole of oblivion.

Countering any sober exposé of the diabolical impacts of meat eating on ourselves and on our planet, is the flagrant deceptions spread by the interminable tentacles of the meat and associated industries, tentacles that wrap around the girth of the earth, that wind their slimy way deep into every facet of our lives. Like moths to a flame, our little brains flutter about the chimera light of meat marketing chicanery, imagining here is the lunar beam by which we were designed to navigate our earthly path. We collide against a blinding blight of lies and in our bafflement manically repeat, utterly oblivious to our cataclysmic error in judgement.

One false light of deceit forcefully beamed out ad infinitum by the meat industry is the notion that it is in our nature to eat meat. Pause for thought and consider the possibility this could be wrong. Oliver Cromwell once pleaded to his countrymen who were defending the status quo of a corrupted monarchy, that ‘I beseech you in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be wrong’. Consider for a moment, if for no more than a mildly amusing exercise in mental plasticity…consider the possibility that the eating of meat is an opportunistic, manufactured departure from an original plant-based diet we are almost exclusively designed to consume. Instead of veganism being presented as a shift away from what is natural, consider the possibility it is flesh-eating where we depart from our instincts. Consider that a human conditioned into eating meat is akin to a gazelle or an elephant or a kangaroo or a cow being force-fed a diet of meat. The meat industry has proven it possible to keep cows half alive on feed pellets manufactured from the leftover slop of their fallen comrades, just as they have also proven it is possible to keep humans half alive on similar slop. Does anyone argue the cow loses its herbivore status because of the way their diet has been wilfully manipulated? No. Well, same diff to the poor ole manipulated human. I hate to break it to you Tiger, but you are not a tiger. Nor are you that roaring lion whose image you have hung up on your wall as an apparent representation of your prevailing spirit. You are an overweight, clawless, clueless ape. Anatomically, physiologically, chemically, electro-magnetically, behaviourally…any which way you want to poke the person, we present as neither carnivore nor omnivore. Our natural state — as illustrated by the global matrilineal[23], animist history that dominates the timelines of our past — is as a convivial, co-operative, communal herbivore. The human family has allowed itself to be manipulated and malformed from compassionate pacifists spiritually respectful of the interrelatedness and sacredness of all life, into squabbling, blood-lusting, self-destructive imbeciles. Our cultures have been white-anted by the butcher business. We have permitted ourselves to be moulded completely out of shape by the mendacity of money-mad meat mongers. We have allowed reality to be substituted with some grotesque counterfeit. We are lost in a violent hell on earth, a hell of our own making. This is the price we pay for worshipping at the voodoo altar of the blood-stained cutting block. It is the same karmic algorithm that riddles us with cancer and prematurely explodes our poisoned hearts. The cruelty and violence we mete out to animals, returns to us with interest.

The research I conducted and which this book is a summary, has led me to identify the meat industry, particularly in its current expression but also in its putative forms throughout history, as the enduring antagonist of all that is decent in humanity. The animal abuse trade, by exercising a cavalier conceit for life, reveals itself as the bitter enemy of humankind. As Upton Sinclair observed when famously critiquing the hellish slaughterhouses of early 20th century Chicago, the meat industry has ‘hoisted the black flag and declared war on civilisation’[24]. That was over a hundred years ago. Charles Patterson noted at the turn of the millennium that:

one slaughterhouse today… kills more animals in a single day than all the

slaughterhouses in Sinclair’s day killed in a year[25]

Patterson pointed out this exponential explosion of death before the recent meat and dairy[26] invasion of Asia. This is a world war the good guys are well and truly losing. It is a war of life and love against death and despair. It is a war being waged by cruelty upon compassion, and cruelty as it stands now, is kicking ass. This is a war that rages not only over the land and sea, but also over the personal terrain of your body and mind, and particularly, this war rages over the inner spiritual terrain of your soul. Whether you are conscious of it or not, every time you open your mouth and your wallet, you choose a side, you step in one direction or the other along the road that travels between good and evil[27], between compassion and cruelty. In the to and fro of daily life, your actions mark your allegiance and generate your karmic trajectory.

Meatamorphosis offers up a tried and tested way for us to pacify our souls and in turn, pacify our warring world. It documents an easily attainable method by which we can free ourselves from the disorder of the ego and calm the restless, pacing, caged-monkey mind of modern humanity. This is achieved by simply shifting our dietary and hygiene practices back to what we were designed to consume and practice in the first place. By doing this we move our ethical and spiritual configuration away from daily acts that are flagrantly perverse, retrograde and inhumane. We revert back to being humane creatures. We return to being human. We return to our true nature of compassionate awareness, to a state of bodhichitta.

To achieve this return to humanity we are going to need to acknowledge, then to unburden ourselves of, the startling weight of cultural baggage we have acquired from the past and which we haul about on our backs like overloaded, long-suffering peasant asses. Our shoulders may be broad, and we may have become so accustomed to carrying these onerous sacks of shit about that we know no different. But once we are shown — as I was lucky enough to have been shown — how to offload all the useless cultural ballast we’ve been led to believe we need to stay afloat, the resultant feeling of liberation, of moksha, is indescribable. This book is my attempt at describing that indescribability. Meatamorphosis endeavours to illustrate how, through no fault of our own, inherited absurdities imposed upon us for generations by malignant pecuniary interests have distorted and contorted our divine spirits into a cruel and violent antithesis of our amiable, fun-loving natures. This book attempts to illustrate how by seeking guidance and clarity from history, we can learn to quell our aggressive tendencies that have been deliberately incited by those with an exploitative mandate to undermine our personal and collective well-being and to create deprivation, hostility and division among the living beings of our miraculous planet.

Though somewhat hackneyed but true nonetheless, once a certain initial momentum was established, Meatamorphosis seemed largely to forge its own path, as if the project were invested with a will of its own. My role in penning these words has largely involved opening my mind’s eye to an inscrutable wheel of wisdom vibrating all around and within me, a wisdom resonating back through time to the visionary proclamations of Tolstoy, to the sparkling, hope-filled eyes of Shelley, to the cool enigmatic intellect of Schopenhauer and the mighty Gallic minds of Voltaire and De Montaigne…a wondrous wisdom shining as a light of uncanny logic and shooting straight as truth back to the Renaissance rays sparkling off Da Vinci and Ficini, back to the nous of Plotinus and the providence of Cicero to the grace of Jesus and the resolute dignity of Socrates, back to the Golden Age as espoused by Empedocles where human and animal lived together in abiding friendship, to the mesmeric reincarnate metem-physics of Pythagoras ‘whose thoughts drew near the gods’[28], to Buddha and beyond to the chain of holy yogis linking us to the everlasting echo of the Om that prophesizes consciousness into being and infuses our sacred souls with divine, ahimsic reverence for all life.

[1] Ahimsa is the sacred Hindu ethical practice of harm reduction, the behavioural method by which we maintain the ‘great law of peace’. See the One love, one heart chapter for a more detailed exploration of ahimsa as a universal ethical construct.

[2] In Hill, B p180

[3] Exceptions to this general rule are some cold-climate tribal animist cultures who bind the hunting of animals within a meticulous code of ethics, which includes the overt seeking, through ritual communion with the spirit world, of moral appeasement for the act of killing. This appeasement is sought from a universe humming with karmic intent. The meticulous tribal ethics of avoiding unnecessary harm to animals puts modern society to shame in comparison. These tribal cultures minimize the hunting of animals down to absolute necessity, given that animist belief in (or knowledge of) the transmigration of the human soul into animals, and vice versa, is universal. Individual animals are invested with personhood, respected and protected under tribal law. Indeed, they are revered as sacred ancestors. Despite our skewed perceptions of so-labelled ‘hunter-gatherers’, animist cultures naturally recoil from killing. See the Yabba dabba do time chapter for a more detailed discussion of yogi-gatherer societies and the prominence of animal rights and vegan practice in tribal communities.

[4] The miserable world of eternal friction conjured forth principally from the egoistic will to Greed, is principally a patriarchal structure. The gender specific term ‘man’ is deliberately cited. A return to the social and political order defined and sustained by a matriarchal structure — a structure that has been in place for most of our history — is, I argue in this book, one of the correcting shifts required for us to arrest our current mad dash toward destruction. That is, a move from Man, back to Human is required.

[5] Recently I watched a CNBC financial report beamed from a studio set up in the New York stock exchange building. On the central monitor behind the presenters, there were no trading figures displayed. Instead there was a big yellow M for murder symbol, with the ‘I’m lovin it’ logo underneath. There are cogent reminders everywhere of the central role the meat and affiliated industries play in the finance sector, and in that sector’s insane rush to ‘love’ the planet to death

[6] The harvesting of human plasma is now big business, particularly in America and China

[7] Calasso p 312. Regarded widely as the greatest epic ever written, the Mahabarata is ten times the length of the Iliad and The Odyssey combined.

[8] I discuss the cult of Mars in detail in the Lost in a Roman wilderness of pain chapter

[9] Wadiwel, p1

[10] See http://www.worldpeacediet.com/category/2022-essays/

[11] Meat consumption has tripled in the last twenty years in India. See the 2022 documentary The Land of Ahimsa

[12] Cargill and Tyson represent the ugly underbelly of imperial America; not so much the star-spangled banner as the blood-splattered hammer

[13] See https://www.statista.com/statistics/263964/number-of-pigs-in-selected-countries/ Accessed 30/10/21. Qin Yinglin and family are the largest pig slaughterers on earth. The Yinglin family have amassed a 33.5 billion dollar empire out of butchering pigs and are listed in the Forbes top 50 world’s richest list

[14] Newkirk and Stone, p160

[15] Totalitarian capitalism is I suggest a more accurate description of the current Chinese governance structure

[16] Contrived misinterpretations of Hindu and Buddhist teachings suggesting that meat eating is condoned under these belief systems, are being propagated by media and other organisations with intimate money ties to the rabid global meat industry.

[17] See the Lost in a Roman wilderness of pain chapter

[18] The 2022 documentary Eating ourselves to Extinction, narrated by Kate Winslet and available free on You Tube, highlights 43 minutes in, that 60% of wild animal populations have been wiped out and that over 26 000 species are in danger of extinction

[19] The population numbers of larger predator marine species such as sharks and rays have plummeted by 90% in the last 50 years. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jikGuwKf_Yc (Distant Waters Oct 15, 2021) Hill, S (2021) points out that the global fishing fleet has doubled in the last 50 years (p225) Also see Seaspiracy

[20] See Hill, S p8. Also, Eating Ourselves to Extinction points out that the animal agriculture industry uses 70 million gallons of water per year (1hr 7mins). That is a third of all our water use.

[21] See Greger and Campbell and Campbell

[22] Ed Winters estimates the meat industry costs us globally somewhere in the vicinity of 12 trillion dollars a year. And it’s the muggins tax payer who is picking up the bill for this wrecking-ball sabotage of our economies. See Winters 2022, final chapter

[23] See Carrington, in Jacoby, p55 and Gimbutas, 1999

[24] Sinclair, p534

[25] Patterson, p64

[26] It is often quoted that most Asian communities are lactose intolerant. I suggest the evidence points to all humans being lactose intolerant. See Dairy is Scary on You Tube as a summary starting point

[27] When I discuss evil in this book, I employ Buddha’s definition of evil as that which produces suffering.

[28] Ovid, p336