The Vegetarian Myth

[Stranger]

I highly, HIGHLY, recommend reading "The Vegetarian Myth" right away for everyone. It is loaded with super important nutritional information...

I just finished chapter 4 and I have to take a break. It's a page turner for sure, but I am exhausted. Even as a vegan I never adopted a "must not kill animals" stand, but there was so much more that I did pick up. Reading this book is a major clean-out.

Oh, yes. After reading it I realized in what a dream world I lived as a vegetarian and how much lies and cultural distortions I had absorbed during my life. Cleansing indeed!

 

[anya]

Thank you Laura and Psyche for your input. I clearly need to get a copy of "The Vegetarian Myth".
The "Cholesterol Myth" by Sherry Rodgers talked about three conditions that many older adults in America develop and these three conditions combined shortened their life spans. These three conditions are heart disease, thyroid disease and diabetes. I lent my copy of the Cholesterol Myth to a friend. When I get it back I will post some of the more relevant passages.
Sugar and refined carbohydrates are deadly. I am not sure what my blood sugar levels are but they are tested regularly because of my previous surgery and my hypothyroidism. I am certain that lowering my intake of carbohydrates will help to maintain my good health.
In the years prior to my heart surgery I ate a low fat, high carbohydrate diet. After my surgery I eliminated soft drinks and surgery treats but I still ate a lot of carbs. I also ate low fat meals. Now I eat more meat and fats and find it to be much more satisfying. I love bacon and sausage.

 

[Laura]

I highly, HIGHLY, recommend reading "The Vegetarian Myth" right away for everyone. It is loaded with super important nutritional information...

I just finished chapter 4 and I have to take a break. It's a page turner for sure, but I am exhausted. Even as a vegan I never adopted a "must not kill animals" stand, but there was so much more that I did pick up. Reading this book is a major clean-out.

It's definitely apocalyptic, isn't it? I had to take a break too but I'll be finishing it today.

It's not just vegetarians and other environmental activists that don't have a clue - I don't think that many of us ever think about the planet and it's flora and fauna the way Keith has described it: as a living organism that we have killed. It does remind me of some things that physicist Richard Firestone wrote in the book "The Cycle of Cosmic Catastrophes" about the "Sixth Extinction" that I quoted in this article here:
http://www.sott.net/articles/show/227222-The-Golden-Age-Psychopathy-and-the-Sixth-Extinction

In their book, The Sixth Extinction, Richard Leakey and Roger Lewin (Doubleday, 1995), describe the present as a time in which we are moving toward the extinction of at least 50% of all life on Earth, possibly including humanity. They suggest that most of the extinction is occurring due to human overpopulation and overexploitation of the planetary resources. But there is more to this than what can be blamed on humanity as the research on cometary impacts clearly reveals. Our current extinction is, apparently, just part of a very large cycle. Richard Firestone et al. write in The Cycle of Cosmic Catastrophes:

"When people use the term extinction, they mean that many living species vanished. This is just part of the equation, however. Another side is that some species survived. In all past major extinctions, with ecosystems out of balance, many of the surviving species experienced explosive growth. This is what happened 13,000 years ago, when an unusual mix of conditions created favorable conditions for the human species.

First, there were new genes. Spurred by genetic mutations that produced a burst of creativity and technological resourcefulness, humans became even more efficient predators. The Event killed off many competing predators, and skilled hunters decimated many surviving ones, ensuring that more people survived. The same resourcefulness made humans better at finding food in every way, and consequently human populations expanded rapidly.

Second, a benign climate, due partly to the green house effect of the impacts, fostered larger human populations. The warmer climate, coupled with humans' newfound resourcefulness, fostered the invention of agriculture, freeing humans from a nomadic lifestyle. The development of better housing, clothing, and weapons all allowed human populations to increase.


Third, increasing populations led more people to live together in villages and towns, where the division of labor allowed a larger pool of skilled talent to develop. This fueled an almost constant technological boom in many fields, producing, among other things, pottery making, metalworking, and writing.

All that may seem positive, except that the burgeoning population, initially fostered by the extinction Event, contained the seeds of many of our current troubles. When overpopulation occurs in any species - whether it is rabbits, locusts, lemmings, or people - a host of problems comes along with it, including epidemics, starvation, extreme aggression, ecosystem destruction, and scarce resources, every one of which is a major pressing problem in our society today.

An extinction sequence comprises the following stages:

1) A major catastrophe leads to the disappearance of some species.
2) These disappearances lead to the overpopulation of some surviving species.
3) Overpopulation leads to devastating depopulation.

This equation has held true for every past extinction event. In the current sequence, we have passed through the first two stages as a species but not the last stage, depopulation..." (Richard Firestone, Allen West, Simon Warwick-Smith, The Cycle of Cosmic Catastrophes, Bear & Co., 2006.)

 

[forge]

3) Overpopulation leads to devastating depopulation.

Clearly shows that people in power acting in regard Human Population Control weren't that far from reality in their goals to reduce Earth population to a manageable levels. Only their solution is STS: kill by fire, radioactivity, engineered viruses and bacteria, kill by war, kill by force. Their solution is force and cannot achieve harmony with nature, i wouldn't take their word on it. Human birth control, then weather control and finally nature control they might have had in mind.

The STO way could be - going along with Keiths approach - to realize, we humans became way too many and need to control our numbers, need to die in big numbers: people with procreative ability must become conscious, realize viability of only healthy genes, plus the need to take care of Earth and making further evolution possible, to refrain from procreation almost entirely. In one generation conscious human population levels could drastically decrease, we bury the dead, or more accurately: feed our dead to the trees and nature [bones, phosphate, usable nutrients] and undertake a sort of sweepstake or consciously chosen young couples with perfect healthy genes and minimal psychopath-gene exposure in the bloodline to procreate.

We as a community could then rear the very few children and take care of them, not so much directly , as their parents do that, but indirectly, with external consideration and a intent on making the childrens future better, work on making their environment more supportive for advanced bio-spiritual development on a mixed 3rdD/4thD STO Earth.

What would be the answer of 5th Density Reincarnation Office to this plan? Where would they re-reroute the many souls wishing to incarnate? To other worlds? Or just wait until population levels rise again? What did the many souls waiting in line do during cataclysms? Just that, they waited?

 

[mcb]

I highly, HIGHLY, recommend reading "The Vegetarian Myth" right away for everyone. It is loaded with super important nutritional information...
It's definitely apocalyptic, isn't it? I had to take a break too but I'll be finishing it today...

The last chapter was very different. I was tempted to dismiss parts of it at times but it is, after all, the author's opportunity to look for resolution coming from what she knows. In doing so she brought back to mind some of my oldest, deepest questions.

It's time for me to go to work for the day (i.e. my "day job," the one that pays for all that organic meat), but I will ask a question or two. What would be gained if we could somehow go back to "living with nature?" Is that even the issue? Nature evolves. That evolution seems to have, with our human assistance, taken a rather ugly turn these last 12,000 years but should we put our energy into "undoing" that or should we instead be learning all we can from it? Did we ourselves not evolve in spite of all the bad food we ate and all other the species we killed? Nature is not static and, as far as we see, no organic life form lives forever, including this earth. It's all going to burn up anyway.

What chapter 5 is missing most, of course, is a hyperdimensional perspective. Looking at what has happened from a 3D perspective makes little sense. There was a passage that helped clarify things for me, though:

Because agricultural societies, and only agricultural societies, develop civilizations, centralized hierarchies of control. This process is universal. It happened everywhere agriculture took root, and the reason is surplus. Toby Hemenway explains:

The damage done by agriculture is social and political as well. A surplus, rare and ephemeral for foragers, is a principal goal of agriculture. A surplus must be stored, which requires technology and materials to build storage, people to guard it, and a hierarchical organization to centralize the storage and decide how it will be distributed. It also offers a target for local power struggles and theft by neighboring groups, increasing the scale of wars. With agriculture, power thus begins its concentration into fewer and fewer hands. He who controls the surplus controls the group. Personal freedom erodes naturally under agriculture.

Or, as Richard Manning puts it, “Agriculture was not so much about food as it was about the accumulation of wealth. It benefited some humans, and those people have been in charge ever since.”

Add to that a knowledge of portals and hyperdimensional influences and it makes a lot of sense, I think. But not all of the results were negative. One thing that is bothering me is that there are aspects of our present way of life that I like. It's hard right now for me to separate one thing from another because I am still learning about the consequences of doing different things. But I am not willing to declare it all bad and call for returning to the old ways. What I have learned seems to suggest other ways of evolving.

But I am not going to go out and try to make that happen, not directly. It's clear that this game is up. We're in deep, deep trouble. In my teens, when I was connected with a religious cult, I heard many warnings about how things were about to come crashing down. What the prophets of doom of that era (the 60's) seemed to have overlooked was the potential to turn oil into food, temporarily. But we're back there again, and to me it feels eerily similar to those days. It's time to busy ourselves (i.e. "Work") doing what we need to do.

 

[Renaissance]

I haven't got The Vegetarian Myth yet but I've been listening to her talks on youtube. One of the things that strikes me about the information she presents is how she relates the the destructive nature of agriculture on all scales: from a global perspective to individual farms to what it does to your body. She smashes the 'vegetarian myth' to smithereens. Definitely looking forward to reading it.

 

[Hesper]

I haven't got The Vegetarian Myth yet but I've been listening to her talks on youtube. One of the things that strikes me about the information she presents is how she relates the the destructive nature of agriculture on all scales: from a global perspective to individual farms to what it does to your body. She smashes the 'vegetarian myth' to smithereens. Definitely looking forward to reading it.

Same here. With this information it is also interesting to think about the adoption of cosmetics with agriculture. Gotta look good somehow, if we're destroying our bodies with poison. I'm still working on the Odyssey and Polyvagal Theory, though, so I don't know when I'll make it to the Vegetarian Myth. So much good reading, it's hard to stay focused on one book!

 

[Gaby]

I found in "The Vegetarian Myth" a great quote of sentimentality as an example of "abuse of sex". Gurdjieff said that when the sex center works with energy that is not its own, its impressions become much coarser and it ceases to play the role in the organism which it could play. He also said that a misuse of energy from the sexual center by the emotional center creates sentimentality. Well, in "The Vegetarian Myth" the author quotes the following after explaining how entire ecosystems are destroyed thanks to agriculture.

"For the sentimentalist it is not the object but the subject of the emotion which is important. Real love focuses on another individual: It is gladdened by his [sic] pleasure and grieved by his pain. The unreal love of the sentimentalist reaches no further than the self and gives precedence to pleasures and pains of its own, or else invents for itself a gratifying image of the pleasures and pains of its object." -Roger Scruton, Animal Rights and Wrongs

The rest of the quote is also very insightful:

The unreal love of the sentimentalist focuses on the self, and treats the pleasures and pains of its object only as an excuse for playing a role. The sentimentalist may seem to grieve at the other's sorrow, but he does not really grieve. For secretly he welcomes the sorrow that prompts his tears. It is another excuse for the noble gesture, another occasion to contemplate the image of a great-hearted self.

Sentimentality and fantasy go hand in hand. For the object of sentimental emotion is, like a fantasy object, deprived of objective reality, made pliant to a subjective need, and roughly discarded when the going gets tough. He is, from the beginning, only an excuse for an emotion whose focus lies elsewhere, in the great drama of which the sentimentalist is the sole enduring hero. Hence the object of sentimental love is given no security, and will find himself quickly replaced in his lover's affections when the script requires it. -Roger Scruton

 

[Mr.Anderson]

Thanks for this Psyche, somehow I feel like this will help me be more disciplined about my diet. Although seemingly unrelated, I am struggling with carbs/sugar. I am about at 150 grams.

 

[Rose]

Thanks for the quote Psyche

This whole thread has been very helpful to understand what was going on in my mind when I was a vegetarian. Very insightful, thank you!

 

[Mr. Premise]

The results of the low carb, high saturated fat diet has been amazing to me. I was in a drugstore this week and put my arm in the blood pressure machine. I had a bunch of bacon for breakfast, and even smoked a cigarette before going into the store. It turned out my blood pressure is lower than it has been in 25 years. I am very excited about that as that was one of my big worries. So after ten years as a vegan where I did everything you were supposed to do to lower blood pressure with no results, I find this amazing.

 

[Laura]

The results of the low carb, high saturated fat diet has been amazing to me. I was in a drugstore this week and put my arm in the blood pressure machine. I had a bunch of bacon for breakfast, and even smoked a cigarette before going into the store. It turned out my blood pressure is lower than it has been in 25 years. I am very excited about that as that was one of my big worries. So after ten years as a vegan where I did everything you were supposed to do to lower blood pressure with no results, I find this amazing.

Such results seem to be common among those who really stick to the diet. Why scientists can design reasonable studies about this is beyond me. (Well, not really, I know they have vested interests in people being sick so they can sell them drugs. But you know what I mean. It really is pretty simple to test it and lots of us are doing it and having amazing results.

We are all actually eating less and feeling more satisfied; have lost cravings and not just for food, but for all kinds of things. Makes one wonder if unnamed feelings of dissatisfaction and feeling ill at ease, unloved, unhappy in general and so forth might simply be the body's hunger for nourishing food affecting the mind in all sorts of ways.

I'm really glad your BP is down!!!

 

[SolarMother]

The results of the low carb, high saturated fat diet has been amazing to me. I was in a drugstore this week and put my arm in the blood pressure machine. I had a bunch of bacon for breakfast, and even smoked a cigarette before going into the store. It turned out my blood pressure is lower than it has been in 25 years. I am very excited about that as that was one of my big worries. So after ten years as a vegan where I did everything you were supposed to do to lower blood pressure with no results, I find this amazing.

Congrats! What a testimony to this diet, Mr Premise.

Laura

We are all actually eating less and feeling more satisfied; have lost cravings and not just for food, but for all kinds of things. Makes one wonder if unnamed feelings of dissatisfaction and feeling ill at ease, unloved, unhappy in general and so forth might simply be the body's hunger for nourishing food affecting the mind in all sorts of ways.

Wow! Very inspiring I must say.

 

[Mrs. Peel]

The results of the low carb, high saturated fat diet has been amazing to me. I was in a drugstore this week and put my arm in the blood pressure machine. I had a bunch of bacon for breakfast, and even smoked a cigarette before going into the store. It turned out my blood pressure is lower than it has been in 25 years. I am very excited about that as that was one of my big worries. So after ten years as a vegan where I did everything you were supposed to do to lower blood pressure with no results, I find this amazing.

My blood pressure has always been low, but I had it taken at a Health Fair at work Friday morning and it wa 96/60 !! Am I still alive??

 

[Mr.Anderson]

Laura

We are all actually eating less and feeling more satisfied; have lost cravings and not just for food, but for all kinds of things. Makes one wonder if unnamed feelings of dissatisfaction and feeling ill at ease, unloved, unhappy in general and so forth might simply be the body's hunger for nourishing food affecting the mind in all sorts of ways.

I hope this happens for me soon. I think I am headed in that direction but it seems to be taking me longer than most.