Thank you for all the work you have put into making the session available to us!
SAO said:
Another thought is that their mental state is not in tune with the needs of their bodies, and even though they feel repulsed by the idea of eating animals because they identify with them, their body, being human, may still need the nourishment of meat.
This is also a good possibility, osit. I think it's safe to say that the vast majority of people is not at all in tune with their bodies. How could they/we? After a lifetime of almost destroying it you can only lose complete perception of what's going on inside you, and from that point on, the intellect takes over what should belong to the body and you interpret your body's reaction within the frame of what you have been led to believe was healthy. It is amazing how one can try to fit a square piece of a puzzle into a round hole, and still believe it's the right piece. I sure know that well :)
Adding to the authoritarian personality type, another possibility is of a wounded individual, someone who finds in the way he/she eats, in the idea of being vegetarian and all that being vegetarian entails in his heads (spiritually evolved, defending animal rights, and so on...) a crutch. What he lacks inside from having been wounded is externally replaced by self identification with an ideal. The greater the lack, the more he/she will hold on to the ideal and defend it for dear life.
Another possibility could come, and following what was said in the session, from an overdeveloped sense of identification with animals. As I was thinking about it today, it came to mind that this could also be related to a need to des-identify (is that a word?) with one's own human species. A normal human being will develop a natural sense of empathy towards animals, even if faint in some cases. Also, when we see an animal killing another it doesn't disgust us because we know that it is in their nature. However, things change when observing a human killing another. This may partly be because we are humans, we also have a dark side and deep down, at some level, we also understand the killing. We understand sadism, vengeance, envy, and a myriad of other negative emotions because to one degree or another, we have also felt it at some point.
This deep understanding might be what repulses us, seeing in others what we know is also deep, deep down within us, even if in an infinitesimal scale (the sts/sto dynamic is still within). Animals won't produce the same reaction, we're not in their heads, bodies, hearts, we can fully detach from their actions because we don't have that same gut understanding (even if totally unconscious ) we have of our fellow humans' actions, which causes such repulse. It repulses us because we understand it,
although we fundamentally disagree with it. The result could then lead to over identification with the animal in an attempt to escape the cruel human reality, particularly if there is narcissistic wounding, as in more direct personal experience of that cruelty. This would tie well with what truth seeker said in another thread:
truth seeker said:
I think I understand more fully what's going on with some vegetarians. I think the ones doing it for moral reasons have no real concern for health. That's probably obvious but I just realized this. I suppose I confused the lack of animal protein with health due to my own programming. I wonder if some people have had some deep wounding and attempt to fix the past because they were hurt so badly - they don't want to be responsible for hurting anyone the way they've been hurt?
So their vegetarian stance is a projection of their own wounded self upon animals. The meat eating population a projection of the wounding parent and therefore seen as the enemy. Being vegetarian allows them to uphold the image of the good child who can do no wrong.
The vegetarian/vegan diet (or dairy or whatever) further cements this inability to think (or having thought loops) properly by not supplying proper nutrients that would enable them to think outside the box. The box in this case being their own narcissistic wounding via their inability/unwillingness to accept responsibility.
On the other hand, detaching from our fellow humans could imply a hidden belief in, or quest for, gaining one's own superiority over our fellows by trying to find in the animal kingdom what we most aspire to see in our idealized concept of a human being. However, this would happen without any attempt to BE or even understand what it is to be fully human ourselves.
This could explain the presence of greater manifestations of empathy towards animals instead of humans that we observe in some vegetarians (and even non vegetarians for that matter). Or maybe it's none of the above and I've just gone into "nonsense thoughts land", always a possibility.