Its murder.

[feibelal]

Nothing dies, just gets transformed.

The intent behind your action, is what determines what kind of inner change, if any, will happen to yourself.

I've been sort of meditating on this lately - seems like a relevant notion for me. The idea that it's always all about me - in the sense that it is my intentions that matter. If I murder someone (Ok, it's an extreme example), if I do it with pleasure, or with great regret, it's not the act, but what i make of it, and what my intention was, that resonates. So if I eat meat, if I am grateful, that sort of does it for me. Then I look to what sort of eating agrees with me - how much meat, or raw vegan food, or whatever. And I guess be appreciative for whatever foodstuff I end up choosing.

Now what's more towards the morass for me - is what if I know darn well that free-range and humane is much less cruel, if I am going to eat meat? But let's say for convenience and cost I do cruelty-full beef. My dilemma, and my wrestling, isn't objective though. If I can thank the cow or the chicken, then I'm good. If I can't thank it adequately, then that's good to work on. But I think any karma I accrue comes from my callousness in not being appreciative and not from the actual choice to eat cruelty-full for a meal or meals.

I don't really get that, at the emotional level, but I do resonate to the truth of it. I believe, intellectually, that my gratitude and appreciation for the the sacrifice of itself and the pain it experienced could theoretically and humanly be adequate to balance the convenience of my choice. I'm not sure I can appreciate the pain and the self-sacrifice, but that's about the development of my heart. Pain and suffering always exist, and the dance of material 3D is infused with loss of material bodies and pain. How big can my heart become? If I am not eating an occasional meal of cruelty-full beef, I will be using gasoline, or clothing, or food, that was processed by slave or serf or marginalized labor without healthcare, or will be tithing to the literati in myriad daily purchases, will be silent when I could be clear and illuminating and therefore help wake someone else up who exists in the numbness of slumber several or even a hundred times a day because pain and cruelty are implicated in nearly all of my practical choices. All our institutions, governments, and organizations are at the very least asleep and are often hell-bent on extracting our life force from us for their own goals exactly like in the movie The Matrix. By living in these systems, I am always participating in cruelty. That is how they grind us down. If I get too busy trying to avoid material cruelty, or if I get too busy worrying about it, then they win too - I'm playing by their rules, which are about keeping me away from the power of my intention, of my inner attitudes. Ralph Ellison, in Invisible Man, has a line that goes something like "Keep that n***** boy running." That's the plan here, on one level. If you can be raw vegan with joy and without judgement of cruelty full meat eaters, then hurrah for your choices. But it's the personal choice, and the lack of judgement that matters. Better, I say to by a meat eater with joy, and to make room in your heart for alll[/i] the daily cruelties involved in life on earth these days. These myriad and sometimes seamless cruelties come from shopping, having an automobile, using the phone, using the web, being here on Bring 4th since all modern industrial and high tech existence is intimately interwoven into our lives and most of it is profoundly cruel, is in league with cruel, debasing and exploitative government and other power agendas.

So the bottom line is that I can not escape being profoundly, massively intimately implicated in cruelty on a global scale. Eating cruelty free meat, or just vegetables is good if I can do it with joy. But the moment it becomes attached to judgement, then those passionate dietary selections transmute to a mere decoy to the real work of enlarging my heart to encompass the thousands of daily acts where I am participating by my dollars and also by my acquiesence to the yeast and spongelike existence of ubiquitous, grinding cruelty of our global, technological industrial society to all three densities of life on earth .