The shift to Vegan

We are living through a cultural shift, a shift that many are experiencing as an awakening to a new morality. Meanwhile, others are simultaneously experiencing it as an awareness of a new social pressure.

Veganism is alive in the West and spreading in the age of social media, which has distributed a seed of doubt — the doubt that society should dictate morality. People are questioning their conditioning to find the cracks in the ethics of their culture. This is causing a re-evaluation of the principles by which they want to live their lives. This re-evaluation is happening en masse, with people not simply settling to repeat the behaviours of their parents, but newly identify for themselves a set of values they can live by. The form these values take are for the individual to decide, but what is most exciting is that we are living through this time of questioning at all, and where it may ultimately lead.

Put simply, Veganism has highlighted the reality that a dog and a pig are equally sentient, drawing attention to the idea that it is only our cultural conditioning that has sorted them into the categories of ‘pet’ and ‘food’ respectively. If our culture was reversed, then pigs would be pets and dogs would be food, and we would blindly follow this inverted favouritism, for the simple reason that it is what we were born into.

Culture gives answers to questions a child is too young to even ask, and by the time the child has grown up these ‘answers’ that their culture has provided have disguised the fact that there was ever a question. Now we are seeing a new surge of people looking to unify their morality, and free it from double standards.

As a Vegan and a Psychologist, I have clients coming to see me because they are newly Vegan and going through what I can only describe as ‘culture shock’. They have woken up to their own culture, and are seeing a slaughter. Not only this, but they are also having to watch the world go on just as it did before — with friends, colleagues, parents and partners all continuing to be complacent and compliant with the status quo. This is difficult, very difficult. However, it is also the time when a person’s whole belief system can be looked at in new light, with veganism acting the catalyst for rapid self-growth, as one change ignites more changes and an embracing of the process of change allowing for accelerated actualisation of the self.

Ultimately, people don’t recognize themselves as killing or harming and aren’t connecting the detached act of eating meat, milk and eggs with the cruelty of the process that has produced them. This isn’t to say that guilt is not felt. A build up of unseen residual guilt may be being ignored, and channeled into other outlets. Guilt transference can cause volatile behaviour, depression, anxiety, fatigue and restlessness. Veganism offers for many a release from the stress of this guilt, as it can align a person’s morals with their actions, creating peace of mind. From this position the mind is less clouded, it has been made more streamlined as it is no longer acting in conflict with itself at every meal.

A streamlined mind is an amazing thing. The mind is like a maze, to understand your own psychology you must walk the maze, but many of its paths are locked by guilt; to unblock the paths and walk freely about your own mind the existence of guilt must be accepted. The best way for this to happen is by applying changes to your behaviour in order to stop incurring guilt. Once guilt has stopped being built up it can finally be looked at, releasing us through the rationalisation that we aren’t who we were. We have broken the cycle of behaviour and are, in this respect, a new person, who no longer needs to protect or repeat the actions of their past self.

This is a process of rebirth, and life should be a succession of rebirths, or else we are remaining static.

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