Quote:
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Originally Posted by Debrah
I just can't understand why others don't see
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I went back and re-read Lucky's reply to me. I missed this the first time I read it:
Your assertion that vegans are somehow farther down the trail of enlightenment then us meat eaters smacks of a rather amazing degree arrogance. He wrote this reply to me, yet there isn't a single instance in any of my posts where I either mentioned vegan, or asserted superior anything. All I did, was explain how logic can be used to avoid emotion arguments as we try to discuss these topics.
People don't see, because they are stuck seeing only what they have chosen to see. What they have pre-determined they wish to see. What they need to see. This applies to most people in any discussion, on any topic. I can talk about having a friendly dialogue where we look at things honestly and logically. It doesn't matter how warmly I word my invitation. If the individual is intent on maintaining their perspective that "People are trying to make me feel bad," then all they're going see is me attacking them.
You may have thought I was losing it, writing all those long posts about "not-hunted animal = alive animal."
I was in fact addressing this same question -- Why don't people see? -- in my own way. I was trying to explain how this isn't necessarily about peoples' inability to "feel." We all have feelings. Rather, it's about peoples' inability to let go of their already-determined way of seeing and being in the world. If we can let go of our typical, everyday way of seeing the world, in order to have just a simple and friendly dialogue, it can go a long way towards at least starting to understand others' perspectives. But most can't do even that much, they're too locked into their beliefs.
Beliefs are peoples' personal identification, a kind of armor they put on. People hold tight to their beliefs as a protection and confirmation that their world is in order. Because to question one's beliefs, even in a friendly conversation, is to throw one's belief-world into chaos. It's too risky a process for most.
A common theme in all spiritual paths is the constant need to examine and evolve one's moral understanding and behavior. It's said that for every step on the knowledge path, the spiritual student must take three steps on the moral self-development path. And that process starts with the understanding that, as the highest form of spiritual life on this planet, we are here to help advance the lower animal, vegetable, mineral and elemental worlds. Our highest soul-spirit task is to act as caregivers essentially for the lower-world beings who cannot protect themselves, and who are at the mercy of our own lower-self actions and behaviours.
Sir Walter Scott was a Mason I think, and he wrote about this need for the human being to evolve one's empathy, one's moral responsibility and duty to these lower nature forms:
This is the day when the fairy kind,
Sit weeping alone for their hopeless lot.
And the wood-maiden sighs, to the sighing wind,
And the mer-maiden weeps in her crystal grot.
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For the children of clay [humanity] was salvation bought,
But not for the forms of sea and air.
~
And ever the mortal is most forlorn,
Who meeteth our race on the Friday morn.
Debrah, who in their soul is most forlorn, and weeps for nature? I do. I am crying as I type this. And not because I'm a wuss! But because my soul was opened to this understanding and reality. And I can't help but weep now. And other people cannot understand any of this, let alone weep, until their souls have been opened. Because it's also true that people don't see, because they can't see. They have yet to see.
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