Elk Steak Enlightenment
According to the teachings of Buddhism I’ve studied, you “steak” your life on this when fully enlightened.
To better understand my role as hunter and carnivore, I’ve been investigating Buddhism and its Seven Factors of Awakening.
During this journey of self-discovery I recalled a small gathering at which a young woman turned down the host’s offer of honey for her tea. But a polite “no thank you” wasn’t enough. She seized the opening for showcasing her moral superiority by pontificating on the inhumane theft of an innocent bee colony’s food stores, a larceny with which she would have no part. The rest of us honey-licking tea drinkers, by implication, were guilty.
How could you be so insensitive and cruel as to steal honey from an innocent bee?
You have to give that lady credit for demonstrating more originality than the typical vegan railing against meat eating, but she is not unique. Many soul-searching vegans have learned to decry animal slavery which gives us not only unjustly procured honey, but also milk, eggs, and even wool. Imagine. Stealing the very clothing off a sheep’s back! Well played, virtue signaler!
Robbing chickens of their babies? How low can you go?!
Despite such vegan advancements in self-awakening, few practitioners have risen to recognize, let alone appreciate, one of the highest levels of Veganist Enlightenment: the heinous misappropriation of vegetation.
Few vegan purists have mindfully meditated to the elevated level of self-awareness that identifies purloining plants as the original sin against Nature. Consuming cabbages is literally stealing food from bunnies. Isolating broccoli and blueberries behind electric fencing leaves baby black bears bereft. Deer die when we convert soybeans to tofu for our own consumption.
Sure, go ahead and eat that cabbage, stealing it from the hungry mouths of whitetail fawns.
When anyone meditates fully and long, he/she arrives at the frightening and full understanding of the Universe and humankind’s corruption of it. The plants -- those holy, perfect, and sacred green engines that convert sunlight to energy -- are the life-giving fuel for elephants, giraffes, deer, bunnies, rats… A vegan who eats carrots, spinach, dandelions, asparagus, grapes, apples – any and all vegetation -- is stealing the very essence of life from other vegans! Innocent, four-legged vegans! The holiest beings of all. They were here first. And, as if trespassing upon their ancestral lands for millennia isn’t bad enough, we’ve been stealing their food!
Arguably the cruelest vegans of all, dog and man teaming up to murder helpless, innocent cabbages before bunnies, deer, elk, and moose can utilize these essential nutrients for their own survival.
The rather obvious ramifications of this discovery are self-limiting in the extreme. Truly dedicated vegans at this level of Awakening rather quickly decompose to a spiritual plane from which they can no longer proselytize. Their teachings lie beyond our reach.
But that need not spell the end of the self-aggrandizing vegan religion. There is hope. Uplifting news.
A few, a select few, of highly awakened vegans have raced beyond their self-imposed diets of nothing to achieve the Supreme Level of Awakening – Equanimity. Buddhists describe this as “accepting reality as it is without craving or aversion.”
Crave that pretty red bowl full of fresh garden peas and deprive some sacred, four-legged animal of its vital nourishment.
Without craving or aversion! I don’t want to brag, but I, formerly a sinning carnivore, have risen to this “7th Level of Awakening.” While I do on occasion crave grilled elk tenderloin or orange-glazed duck, I have accepted the reality of my body’s need to consume and convert a wide variety of living things, plant and animal, without aversion.
Please do not take this as evidence of my own self-aggrandizement. Unlike the honey-rejecting women cited above, I do not flaunt my moral superiority by lecturing others who, insufficiently mindful of their reality and inattentive to their obligations to investigate the nature of reality, retain their primitive vegan aversions to reality.
The path of Awakening is narrow and the climb to Enlightenment is steep. The journey requires the ultimate commitment to sacrifice, but the Equanimity of moose steak and asparagus for dinner is priceless.
Having the equanimity to make and eat moose jerky represents the ultimate level of spiritual enlightenment. Acceptance of Nature/reality without aversion.
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