Sunday Weekly Global Meditation - October 6th, 2019
Dear friends,
This Sunday's meditation will be focusing on sending healing to animals including our pets and wildlife. We may want to reflect on our relationship with animals, including livestock.
Why are we causing so much damage to nature and the animals living there? For example why are whales still being hunted by countries such as Norway and Japan? Why are there so many homeless dogs and cats? Why do we still consume so much meat in our daily lives, which in order has created the horrific meat industry with all the inhumane processes? Why do we have love for our pets, but we cannot extend that same care and love to all living beings and to animals that are being (ab)used?
It is well-known that animals have feelings, they can feel pain, fear and empathy too.
There must be some kind of a major cognitive dissonance at play and also willful ignorance in the human society and not just the western one which is thought to be a "civilized one". These may seem hard and unpleasant things to contemplate and meditate on, but without doing that we will never truly heal ourselves and this planet. We have to look at what in our behaviour as a species is ethically wrong and which would be the ethical and compassionate way to live on planet Earth.
It would seem obvious that the golden rule is one good rule to be followed. That everyone fairly, equally and with compassion. Including yourself and animals.
”Empathic disconnection (or alienation) is a modern, emotional disease that is spreading rapidly, and its implications are very serious indeed. Empathy is the key to societal harmony. It is the building block of kindness, of compassion towards all our fellow beings – human and animal. It is the fundamental building block of nonviolence and peace, in fact.
The links between animal cruelty or indifference to animal pain and suffering and cruelty towards other humans, and indifference to their plight, are well-documented. Those who kill and maim start by first killing and maiming animals. A hardness of heart and an active indifference is cultivated most frequently through animal victims.
Animal cruelty incidences are shockingly on the up. More than 150 billion animals are killed every year for their flesh alone and this is only set to increase as human population figures spiral ever further out of control. Contrary to popular assumptions, animal vivisection has also been increasing year on year. In excess of 100 million animals die in often agonizing laboratory experiments annually.The scale of animal suffering is at a terrible, all-time high.
Our society is also rapidly changing with conflicting social mores and ethics challenging what little protection animals currently have under existing legislation. Exemptions for so-called ‘religious’ slaughter is a particularly pressing case, as healthy young calves, for example, can take an agonizing 20 minutes to die using kosher and halal methods - during which they are also fully conscious.Measures are now desperately needed to cultivate more compassion.
But the majority of children are born loving animals. In fact it is this natural love and desire to help and protect them, this identification of commonality (and beautiful difference) which helps them to form positive relationships with their fellow human beings too.
But whilst children are encouraged to feel empathy for animals and kinship with them for the first few years of their life (the Benjamin Bunny/Peppa Pig ‘phase’), their natural empathy is deliberately socially conditioned out of them once they reach eight or nine, and certainly by early pubescence. Those who still display their natural concern, who still feel a strong bond are derided as sentimental, childish, unrealistic and ‘over-soft.’ Society does all it can to harden them up, and to ridicule them - in preparation for their blind collusion in lucrative animal exploitation, and in preparation for other forms of societal violence and competition.
Compassion and empathy are being routinely, culturally destroyed.
Animals are sentient, conscious and sapient, just as we are. There is so much more that unites us, than that separates us. But the facts and figures are tragically too vast, too abstract, too distant and overwhelming to engage the vast majority.
We desperately need to connect again: individual to individual, eye to eye, heart to heart. We need to find ways to reverse negative social conditioning, and develop a more creative (rather than destructive), compassionate and kind society – for all beings.”
Source: All-Creatures.org
Much blessings,
Sunday, Otcober 6th
@20:00 AEST
@18:00 BST
Read more about our Sunday Weekly Global Meditation here.
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