I live in Portland OR. For those who have never been to Portland, trust me when I tell you that it is overflowing with progressive, pseudo-intellectual youth. Among the many health conscious fads, that make the denizens of this city so unique, are two popular lifestyle choices: vegetarianism and veganism. Obviously these lifestyles are not solely restricted to the Pacific Northwest, but there are few other cities that cater to these herbivores in such a vast array of meat and animal-free ways.

    Let's begin by differentiating between the two. A vegetarian is someone who does not eat meat. There are exceptions, of course. Some vegetarians believe that fish are fair game. Sure they have a heartbeat and a desire to live like any other animal, but screw it, they're fish. While steering clear of animal flesh (or most of it) the vegetarian is known to still eat other animal products, namely dairy and eggs. Every so often (as it is in the case of my girlfriend) you get a pretty particular vegetarian who will go to some unusual extremes to avoid accidental exposure to animal flesh. This includes ensuring their food was not cooked on the same grill as meat, that there are no animal ingredients, like lard, in beans and other fried foods, and even avoiding things like carmine, a food coloring used in candy that's made of insect husks. (Yes it's true, I looked it up.)

    A vegan is like a vegetarian who was exposed to the ooze from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2: The Secret of the Ooze. (Or TMNT 2:TSOTO as it will be referred to herein) A vegan will not eat meat, nor any product that comes from an animal. No eggs and no milk, which means no dough, no cheese, and no flavor. I think honey is ok, but I mean come on, honey is like natures Twinkie. Seriously, it never goes bad.

    People turn to these lifestyles for a lot of reasons, usually health related. But a big reason to beat the need for meat, especially up here, is a strong belief against taking the life of an animal. Usually, closely tied to this belief is a disapproval for the conditions and circumstances in which livestock are raised and treated. Now after living with a vegetarian for a number of years and having many, many friends who are either a veggie or a vegan, I've heard nearly every argument that can be hurled at a meat eater. Yet I continue to eat meat. Not much, mind you, I never developed much of a taste for red meat or pork, but chicken and turkey are a staple of my diet. Even after all the countless discussions about weather or not it's the right choice to make, I never took the idea too seriously. Then I became more familiar with Buddhism.

    One of the fundamental principles of Buddhism is abstaining from taking life. Period. You just don't do it. So after taking a personal vow to take no life, (bug, pest, or otherwise) I eventually had to confront my ideas on eating meat. I almost immediately decided that my eating of meat did not constitute as taking a life. Which is fine, Buddhism really has no strict laws or moral codes. I can still be Buddhist and eat meat. But my inner conflict still continued. I don't want animals to suffer while being raised to be slaughtered and I certainly don't want them killed in excessively painful, prolonged ways, but there is another side to taking the path of a vegetarian that is not commonly discussed: is refraining from eating meat really enough?

    The test was really put to me when I learned why the Buddha condemned eating meat. In the eyes of the Buddha eating meat meant that you were valuing your life above that of animals, and taking their life to sustain yours showed attachment to the self, attachment being the source of suffering in Buddhist teaching. This is clear enough, but I look at this concept and try to see the intent behind it. As I see it, the Buddha was preaching against attachment when he said this. So the attachment is the real culprit while the meat eating is merely the source. But if this is true than isn't eating of any kind really just an attachment to your want of living? If we are not suppose to value one form of life over another then where does a plant fit in? These are the questions that filled my mind.

    On less existential ground, there are still a lot of questions that need to be answered before making the choice to be a vegetarian or vegan. Sure being a vegetarian is making a personal choice not to be responsible for the taking of animal life, but that certainly doesn't stop it from happening. It's like saying "I'm abstaining from rape, so rape's not my problem", the solution cannot be found by just avoiding the eating of meat. Now we are confronted with whether or not we are going to push our ideas on other people. Like it or not, the only way to truly stop something is to change it. This means changing an entire industry that's been around longer than our country. I know too well that if I decide to stop eating meat, the meat industry could care less. They'll survive. So instead of fighting them, I would do better to increase the awareness of others. But this requires aligning the values others might have with your own, which is no easy task. But to start this process, you would have to ask yourself, "what are my values"?

    Obviously you value the life of animals. Obviously you value animals rights. But do you value the life of all animals? Why just these animals that we use for food and not other animals? Almost every vegetarian I know wouldn't think twice about killing a fly, or an ant, or a spider. And there is of course the big question that all vegetarians face: "animals kill each other to eat, so why shouldn't we"? To which most vegetarians would respond: "because we're above nature, we have the ability to make a choice so we should". In a nutshell, "because we're smarter than them". And here is another gaping hole in the vegetarian train of thought. Most vegetarians seem to think we are above nature, outside of it. This is quite an elitist view for such compassionate thinkers. Humans are most definitely a part of nature. We are made up of the same compounds as things in nature, we have similar habits and lifestyles to things in nature, and we respond to the same threats as the rest of nature, particularly, the will to live. And finally we reach the source of vegetarian and vegan thought.

    Despite the fact that if we all stopped killing animals to eat them at the same time, the immense over breeding of these species would throw off the balance in nature and an army of pigs, cows, and chickens would likely storm the world for their next meal, there is an even more terrifying fear at the core of most modern vegetarians and vegans, in my opinion. The fear of the primal self. The fear that even with all our amazing accomplishments, all our stunning prowess, all our incredible strides in science and art, deep down we are really no different than a pig. No different than a cow, or a chicken. We fight for what's ours, we avoid our predators (illness), we screw to procreate, we wallow in cages of our own design, and that scares us. We want so badly to be above the rest of nature. We want to be better and different and not at all primitive and base. So we try to stop the killing of animals, because we don't want to see the murderer that's in us all. We want to be better than that. Above it.

    The funny thing to me is that most vegetarians, if given the choice of kill that animal and eat it or die, would undoubtedly choose a serving of bacon, or steak. I sit here and eat my deli meat and McDonald's hamburger, but you put the knife in my hand and ask me to kill that cow... I'd learn to love to eat dirt real quick. What's the best option? To eat meat or don't? I only wish I knew.

Labels: Buddhism, meat, pacific northwest, Portland OR, veganism, vegetarianism

Always rebel. The further you get from something, the wider the perspective. That way you can come back to it at your own pace. Be as familiar with it as you want to be. Choose how it will influence you, and if you don't like it, you already know how to get away. Those who don't rebel are consumed by everything. They live in the shadow of fear and are afraid of the things that aren't really there. I rebelled in my youth not as an act of defiance, but to gain a wider perspective. Then I came back to those who would oppose me, to a place where I was comfortable. If I hadn't, I would have traded one influence for another, and replaced my supposed superiors for others. Always rebel.

Labels: freedom, rantings

Here are the books I've read this month, I recommend them all:

1.) The Heart Sutra (Red Pine translation)
2.) The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are (Alan Watts)
3.) The Dhammapada (translation by Gil Fronsdal)
4.) The Diamond Sutra (Translation by A.F. Price and Wong Mou-lam)
5.) and almost done with Money, Sex, War, Karma: Notes for a Buddhist Revolution (David R. Loy)

hmmm... notice a theme? If you are interested at all in eastern philosophy, Buddhism, or alternative ways of thinking then these are a great place to start!

If you are new to the ideas of Buddhism, that last book is written with a Westerner upbringing in mind so it eases into things.

Labels: authors, books, Buddhism, philosophy

The subject of this article hinges upon the separation of the terms "brain" and "mind". The brain, while quite complex, is not the focus of this adventurous excursion, for even though it houses most of our perception it cannot be said that the "self" rests wholly in the brain. Thus, we are comparing the idea of a "self" to the term "mind". The "mind" is the part of you that makes you who you are; the inexplicable sense of "me" versus "everything else" that cannot be located by pointing to a diagram of a brain. This is the area in which your true self resides. Which brings us promptly to the point: where is the "you" in you?

Endowed with five senses, and the five ways we receive these senses, the typical being will define the limits of themselves as compared to his or her surroundings based on what we can see, smell, taste, touch, and hear. Using these senses, and what information the brain receives from these senses, helps us better understand our position in the universe. Thus, typically, a general statement can be made that because of our senses, we define who we are. But where in our senses is the "self"? The ancient Egyptians believed that the ears served the functions we now know the brain to serve. But we know that just because we hear, doesn't mean the "self" is in our ears. Nor because we see is our "self" in the eyes, nor mouth, and so on. So what does this say of our sensory organs and the brain, or "hub", which merely receives, perceives, and conceives the data fed to it by the senses? It is believed, by many, that all of these are completely void of a "self".

One accepted theory is that the data we receive from our senses and categorize with our brain isn't actually helping to define who we are, instead it actually works against us, creating a false illusion of a self amidst the torrent of things that are in the universe. It makes perfect sense, day in and day out we perform countless tasks that could be viewed as desperate attempts to confirm our "individual identity" to ourselves and to others. We talk endlessly wanting our "voice" to be heard. We crave the attention and company of others so we may feel safe in a system of "like" and "unalike", the categorizing of others as compared to you seems a vague attempt to confirm that we are unique to a certain point, but not unique enough to be the only one. Take the very act of "blogging" and such social networks as Myspace, Twitter, and Facebook. Here is the electronic means in which we can constantly remind others that we exist and we are important. (The conundrum of this very blog itself acting as one such confirmation can prove to be a real headache)

So if our "mind" or "self" is not in our brain and not in our senses, then where is it? A strange and elusive truth might be that because our body, with it's "ideas", "senses" and "feelings" is altogether void of a locatable "self" (just as the objects, people, spaces, and places around us do not house a "self"), then perhaps our self is something greater, or smaller, than our bodies and the world they inhabit. Perhaps the self that I call "me" is the same as the self you call "you" sense we, like our surroundings, are all made up of this same emptiness, or lack of self.

Calling it a mind, a self, a soul, or God, is concurrent with every civilization in history. It seems a universally accepted idea that there is something inside us that makes us different and that science cannot account for. The beautiful thing is that the universal emptiness of which I previously spoke is what makes us all different. For we only know who or what we are in relation to someone, or something else. So we name it, we believe it, we live it, and try really hard to forget that we are all the same, that we, like everything in creation, are all one.

Labels: origins, rantings, writings

A child once asked me if I was afraid to die, to which I responded, "Yes, I sometimes am." The truth is the awareness of my own mortality has been something of a cold obsession of mine since a very early age. These feelings are noted in my song Seven, in which I recall my initial realization that I, eventually, would die. I was seven years old.

Later in life the obsession became so desperate, I was completely debilitated by it at times. The ticking of a clock, or the sound of my own heartbeat was too much to bear and would drive me mad in the night. I would wake in a cold sweat, heart pounding through my chest, completely gripped with fear.

It took years of searching, and a lot of looking around inside myself to be able to conquer this fear, this mortal dread. It wasn't any one thing that helped, but eventually I began to see death in another light. Now if a child were to ask me my views on death I would know what to say...

To the east of me there is a large mountain, the largest I've seen in a great while. The mountain is monstrous and covered in snow. I can see this mountain from most anywhere I go, its size is so great. But for all the majesty this mountain holds, in all its awesomeness, the mountain can really only do two things: the mountain can exist, or not exist. One might say the mountain can have an avalanche, but that would be like defining our bodies by the shedding of our skin cells. No, the mountain, at its core, can only be or not be. But how do I know this mountain really exists at all? I have never been there, never touched it with my own hands. I simply accept that it is there because I can see it. I account for, in life, the things that I can see. But I can't always see the mountain, can I? At nighttime the mountain is gone, for all I know it ceases to exist, for I can only account for what I can see. Logic tells me that of course the mountain is still there, it is just too dark to see it. But this is rationalizing the subject because of the need, in our Western culture, to have reason and logic trump all. But I cannot really know, for sure, that the mountain is still there, so I have to believe it. I have to believe in the logic that is taught to me.

The mountain in this story, of course, represents a being. The being's life is spent in the span of daylight, but simply because the being does not appear to exist after the light has gone from it, does not mean the being ceases to exist at all. Whatever the being is at nighttime (or after death) is no less "there" than what we see in the daytime (life). A simple analogy, but one that helps my ever-rational mind to understand my existence better; helps me to no longer suffer at the unanswerable questions of what lies beyond.

Another great way to look at the analogy of life is in a raincloud. In a raincloud all the water is together, merged, in a different form. When the time has come, the water turns to rain and falls down its path in the form of individual droplets. The drops fall down to earth where they splash onto the ground, ceasing to be a drop, but merging again with other drops to become a puddle. There they wait until they are evaporated and again join the raincloud in the form they were before they became rain.

Here the raindrops are the beings. At first we are something else, we are all the same thing (the raincloud), then we are born (raindrops), we live our lives (the fall to earth), and we reach the end (splashing to the ground), our bodies decompose into the earth (become puddles), and then we rejoin the whole (evaporate).

These are but simple comparisons, which cannot be viewed as flawless from every facet, for life is not simple, but very complex indeed. I do feel, however, that comparisons like the ones I have made are necessary in a world where you can either "believe" or "know" but little else. The age old battle of religion versus science is a tiresome game which does little more than confuse those who do not cling to one or the other with all their might. We have a hard time, in this country, understanding our nature through the scope that our Western way of thinking presents. I invite all who read this to develop their own comparisons of life as can be found anywhere around us. For we are all made from the same material, we all function in the same way, only on different scales.

God came down to hang out with me the other night. Took the form of a girl too. Not exceptionally pretty, but lovely in her own rights. I was bummed cause I didn't get to audition for a part that really would have made my career. When God showed up I didn't know what to think. But she told me that she was going to hang with me and my friends all night and then decide if she should re-work the time line and give me the part. I was excited; who wouldn't be? Me and Justin knew it was God, (which makes sense, since Justin and I were quite the theologists when we were younger) but T.J. didn't know and we weren't about to tell.

We went out, had some laughs, God was a lot of fun. The night was nearing an end when T.J. argued with God that he had more money than her. On and on he went boasting about how rich he was, God goading him on all the while. Justin and I were curious to see where this was going and held our breaths in anticipation. Finally, T.J. had reached his limit and decided to use an ATM to prove to God how rich he was.

Over to the ATM our group went, T.J. with his bank card in hand. We huddled around the tiny monitor to see the results. In went T.J.'s card, up came his balance, and down came his ego, for his worth was less than two-hundred bucks. T.J. was sore and couldn't figure out where he had spent his money; he was really quite ashamed. It wasn't clear if T.J. had just been boasting or if God had pulled some nasty trick. But God followed through and started the process of checking her balance. Justin and I were eager to see where this was going and the excitement was almost unbearable.

But something else happened. God entered her PIN code (555 I believe was what it was, although I think my brain was mistaken and it was supposed to be 777 since that makes more sense) but instead of checking her balance she began to use the keypad to type a message.

At first the message looked like garbled gibberish, but suddenly I could read words, amidst the nonsense, that I knew only I could see. The message revealed God's decision: she was not going to give me the part. I was hurt, shocked, let down, and angry. Justin and T.J. appeared not to notice or care.

I was ready to leave, but was so angry, I couldn't help but give God a piece of my mind. I got right in her face and started to say something like "listen here woman..." when I noticed the fire in her eyes and remembered who I was talking too. Bashfully, I continued to tell her what bull-shit this all is and that no matter how hard I try, how much I give, or how much I suffer, I can never achieve the things I want in life because someone else is pulling the strings. I remember feeling so angry that she just stood there and smiled. What was she thinking? What was the point of the whole ordeal if she just wound up showing me that there is no free will, only fate? And if your fate wasn't what you wanted, well too bad.

She tried to explain that the part wouldn't have made me happy, that I wouldn't make much money, and it wouldn't really take me where I wanted to go. I told her I wished she'd let me decide that and walked away, leaving God in the club, or casino, or wherever we were.

Out in the parking lot we were all feeling sore. T.J. was still in a daze about his money and wandered off to his car, grumbling to himself all the while. Justin and I went to load something into his car, and I thought it was strange that he made no comment on the events of the night. Instead he was more concerned with whether or not he was getting fat.

And that was it. The rest was just a dream waiting to end.

Labels: ravings

So apparently I have a broken soul, according to Jared. The test is simple: if you like cold pizza anywhere as near as much as you like it warm... your soul is broken. Don't ask why, just accept it. I have.

Labels: rants, ravings