|
Excerpt Chapter 1: VISITATION UNDER THE ARBOR It was a perfect Seattle night in the summer of 1995. There was a full moon, and that was the pretext for inviting friends over for dinner. ... We carried our plates out onto the back deck and sat under the grape arbor. We looked up at the moon, a few clouds slowly passing in front of it. ... A woman arrived. I said, "Are you hungry." She nodded vigorously. I gave her a bowl of my soup. Jane slurped as we talked. I assumed she was a friend of a friend. She looked a lot like the woman on the cover of this book .... Well, we talked and we talked, and we talked just the two of us. We talked about the many positive signs: The Cold War over and the growing likelihood that we might not blow ourselves up after all. ... Women beginning to recover their rights. ... We also talked also about all the things that were getting worse: Climate change. ... Species dying off before we can even name them. Weapons of mass destruction becoming more computerized, more accurate, and more deadly. ... An economic system that enriches the few, works the middle class overtime, and leaves the rest impoverished. ... "Who is this strangely outspoken and self-confident woman?" I wondered. ... "And I think you should teach people that animals are conscious beings which should be treated with a certain dignity. We cannot be vicious to animals who mean us absolutely no harm without damaging our own moral structure." Being a strict vegan, I liked the sound of that. "Have you heard?" she asked. "There is an Eleventh Commandment." "You mean, like after the Ten Commandments there is an Eleventh Commandment?" "Do unto other species as you would have them do unto your own species." ... "I have speculated that maybe the whole environment of other species is risking up against humanity out of self-defence to destroy us." ... "But other species will survive, and evolution will go on without us." "And after 25 million years the raccoon may evolve into the next space-traveling species." ... "So how will it turn out?" I asked again. "Things are going our way in the world," she assured me. "We will win in the end." She looked like she meant it. ... The party wound down. ... That night I dreamed about her. In my dream she took on mythic proportions. She sat with her legs crossed, motionless, meditating, wearing her karate robe and black belt. She was even wiser, even more profoundly disappointed with what has become of her world, but even more defiantly confident that she would win in the end. In my dream I was meditating deeply about the ... messiahs of the past. I often dream theological dreams. ... ... It was an epiphany. Jane was a prophetess like Deborah, a savior like Esther, or a messiah like Joan of Arc. I slowly awoke. The entire thing had been a dream, the dinner with friends, her visit, and the dream within the dream. ... It was almost sunrise. The window was wide open. The full moon was low in the west and was shining into my room. The night was full of gentle animal and insect noises. I heard rustling in the back yard. I snuck out of bed and peeked over the window ledge. There was a raccoon with her pup checking out the garden. I returned to bed and sat with a comforter around myself. I crossed my legs and meditated on how beautiful it is, how beautiful it should be, how beautiful it can be. I felt transformed, like a person who has passed through a near-death experience. I resolved then and there: I will focus on what's really important. Of course, everyone dies, but before I do I will say what I have to say. I turned on the light and started writing this book. ... THE GODDESS, SYMBOL
OF PEACE, HEALTH In Europe before 4300 B.C. people thought of god as a woman. Cities had no walls. Where there is no war, there is no need for walls. ... Most of the rulers were queens. ... Women owned the land because women had developed agriculture. ... When man and woman married, they joined the mother's household. There were similar patterns in the Middle East, China, and India. (There are a lot of footnotes in my book, but I'm omitting them in this Internet Sample for reasons of space.) In Old Europe there were towns of up to 10,000 people. There were paved streets, small two-story temples, five-room homes .... There were beautiful frescos on the walls, vases, sculpture, and jewelry. The Old Europeans had a written language which we have not yet deciphered. Homes were all roughly the same size, indicating there was a fundamental equality of wealth and income. All this was swept away after 4300 B.C. by patriarchal Aryan invaders from the Caucasus, whose ideology was conquest and herding. They had mastered horseback riding, and they had perfected powerful, lightweight, composite bows and deadly composite, flint swords. They were invincible, and the goddess culture was quickly overwhelmed. ... ... By the time we get to the era of written history, we find prophets Pythagoras, Socrates and Plato, Daniel, the Essenes, John the Baptist, Simon Peter, James the brother of Jesus, and Jesus himself who taught some or all of the themes of the matristic civilization: peace, nonviolence, opposition to slavery, respect for women, herbal healing, and a vegetarian diet. I will demonstrate that these prophets and their followers were vegetarians. I will show that Jesus himself was a vegetarian and that the Judeo-Christian church for 300 years until it was wiped out by the "Great Church" was vegetarian because they believed this was necessary to bring the messianic era of peace. ... The goddess beckons us to come to our senses, and so I have chosen her as the unifying symbol of my book. THE GODDESS, SYMBOLIC OF THE MYTHICAL EDEN ... Eden is said to be a vegetarian time when humans in small numbers lived in a peaceful, garden setting, where plant food was so abundant that our forbearers did not have to plant, harvest, or hunt. Was there ever such a place? Some 10,000 to 12,000 years ago, the human population of the entire world was under 10 million. People ate mostly fruit, seeds, nuts (as high in protein as meat and much richer in essential oils), roots, grains that grew wild, and edible greens. ... The Jains of India say that their ancestors have been vegetarians from time immemorial. THE GODDESS, SYMBOLIC OF THE ETHICS OF DIET Most people see no connection between what they eat and the mistreatment of the animals that we convert into food. Before humans took up animal husbandry, right after the end of the last Ice Age, there were no domesticated farm animals. Now there are 15 billion of them, most of them living most of their lives in hellish factory farms. ... It is a matter of ethical concern that animals are killed for food, and its a matter of concern how they are killed. But these first two concerns are minor compared to the much greater concern over how cruelly they are treated during their short lives. ... It is an even greater ethical issue that entire species are being killed off in the growing of grain to feed these animals. THE GODDESS, SYMBOLIC OF THE WOMEN WE MEN COOK FOR "The way to a man's heart is through his stomach," someone has said. It's also a way to a woman's heart. Men, if you want to make friends with a woman, ask her to cook with you. ... THE GODDESS, SYMBOLIC OF MEN TAKING CHARGE OF THEIR HEALTH AND THEIR DIET On average, we men have shorter life spans than women. ... We men can be sure of getting the healthy foods we need only if we get involved in the kitchen. And what should we cook for ourselves? Low-fat, plant-based food that will protect our hearts and arteries. ... You men are going to enjoy learning how to cook in a way that will add years to your life, make you a stronger and leaner person, make you a better lover, bring you great culinary enjoyment, and make you a better friend to the environment. Getting hungry? Skip to the recipe section right now and give it a try. THE GODDESS, SYMBOL
OF ENVIRONMENTAL SANITY: ... When the last Ice Age was ending around 10,000 years ago, there were probably only around 10 million humans in the entire world. By the time of Jesus, there were 200 million of us. And today there are 6.0 billion of us. Add to our effect on the environment the effect of 15 billion domesticated animals worldwide, most of them in sealed factory buildings and feedlots. These animals defecate and urinate vast quantities of waste, which flow untreated into streams and then into rivers and coastal estuaries. ... With most of these animals confined in sealed buildings and crowded feedlots, they are the breeding ground of frightening new diseases that are becoming resistant to modern antibiotics. The only solution now left us is a radical one: We must change our eating habits and move to a plant-based diet. ... Farmers in poor countries grow grain and feed it to animals in feed lots, while people starve just outside the fence. The meat is exported to make mortgage payments on their country's massive international debt. ... MY THESIS IS THIS: It will not be possible to have a truly healthy and long-lived population; not possible to bring about peace between nations, not possible to reign in population explosion; not possible to achieve an environmental balance or end hunger without moving to a vegan or near-vegan diet. WE ARE WHAT WE EAT ... Well, what else would we be but what we eat? ... Dr. Udo Erasmus gives us a choice: Our bodies can be built of nutrient-rich foods or junk foods. If our bodies are built of nutrient-rich foods, he says, they will constitute a medium in which certain viruses and cancer-causing microbes will either not exist or will remain latent. (Udo Erasmus, Fats that Heal, Fats that Kill, p. 364.) ... Some of us eat as if our digestive systems were some incinerator that completely burned the food, like fuel in an engine. It does not happen that way. ... FOOD IS A SEMI-AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL MATTER ... I have written much of this book in the first person singular because what I have to say about food is in large part based on my experience. ... How I decided that my diet was important to the physical and moral environment of the world may be relevant to your decision about what to eat. ... PLANT-BASED FOOD: IT TASTES GREAT AND MAKES YOU FEEL GREAT ... I remember how
sluggish I used to feel after eating roast beef. It made me want to … go
… to … sleep. Z-Z-Z-Z. I would lie on the sofa feeling sluggish from
the quart of thick oil I had injected into my arteries. At the same time
my heart would race because of the adrenaline that had been in that
terror-stricken cow and was now in me. ... Deal Home Page Goddess Home Page Next Excerpt Copyright © 2007 James Robert Deal. All rights reserved. |