Emerald

I suspect that, when a person is in a position where they must kill animals or it becomes normalized, there are ways to numb out to the initial awareness of the cruelty and any empathy towards the animal. And all of that has to repressed. It's why it's great to live in the present day where many of us needn't desensitize ourselves to the sufferings of sentient beings. But I get why that repression of empathy has to happen for those who must frequently kill animals. It would be too much to deal with to be sensitized to that dimension of reality if one must frequently slaughter animals. Like, I once had a dream that I walked in on a man who was torturing a rabbit by holding its genitals up to a circular table saw... not enough to kill it, but enough to seriously maim and torture it... and to cause severe bleeding. And there was no possibility that the rabbit would recover. So, I went up to the rabbit, quickly grabbed it away from the man turned it around and quickly fed the entire rabbit swiftly through the table saw head first... until it was split totally in half. And I was holding the left side of the rabbit in my left hand... and the right side of the rabbit in my right hand. Then, it hit me that I had killed the rabbit and I realized that something had permanently shifted in me in the dream and that some innocence was lost and that my relationship with life would never be the same again. And there was this feeling of an emotional "dropping away" that happened within myself. I suspect there is something similar that happens whenever a person takes an animal's life. The innocence drops away and with it, there is a disconnection and numbness.

That's my point entirely. I don't want people to bullshit themselves about their ACTUAL motives for eating animal products. And arguing about the semantics of a word (in this specific context) just muddies the waters and gives people more hiding spots to hide from themselves. People in a state of cognitive dissonance will use any tool you give them to hide from themselves... including the flexibility of the definition of a single word. And my intention is to help people realize that they are in this pattern. Self-honesty about ways we're out of integrity with our values is a great catalyst for growth and change... including making lifestyle choices that are more sustainable for the planet and more merciful for animals. Plus, from a personal growth perspective, a lack of integrity with our values will contract our scope of awareness in order to protect ourselves from realizing our lack of integrity. And in our attachments to our identities of moral goodness and aversion to recognizing the potential for evil in ourselves, our fears of having that identity of moral goodness overturned because of our incongruence between our actions and values will cause us to twist and mangle our entire epistemological framework to avoid "falling from grace" in our own eyes and to remain "the good guy." This is especially true for people who tend to have strong black and white moralistic judgments and an investment in the notion of punitive justice towards evil-doers. They'll do anything to avoid ending up on their own chopping block. And consuming animals and animal products as a person who (deep down) values the lives of non-human animals who doesn't want them to suffer, creates a TON of cognitive dissonance. Facing all of that reality after 27 years of cognitive dissonance was far and away the most difficult thing about going Vegan... way beyond abstaining from any kind of food. I'm fully convinced that the most effective way to get people to open up to making changes in their lifestyle is to help them be honest with themselves.

Yes, the illusion is real and valid... but is still an illusion. But the illusion is necessary for Truth to wake up to itself. And both relative duality and relative non-duality together equal out to Non-Duality in the absolute. The same is true of the finite and infinite both being part of the absolute Infinite. And good and evil are both part of the absolute Good. It's like the Dao... the wholeness includes the parts and wouldn't be a wholeness without both parts.

It's all a matter of perspective... as it is just looking at snapshots of an infinitely complex thing. And no duality could describe it fully. But it checks out with my glimpses in my medicine journeys that the nothingness element of God is Masculine and the everythingness element of God is Feminine. When I went through ego death in one of my journeys, it gave way to the nothingness element of things and there was no Emerald and no reality that Emerald inhabited. It had all only ever been a story and there was blank empty consciousness with no observer. It was like Emerald was a character in a story... and then, the enlightenment was that the book was thrown in the fire and the story forgotten in its entirety. And there was no time or space... nor was there a sequence of events. Yet, somehow (in a way that is inexplicable from my human perspective) there was also the experience of the everythingness element of God. And I understand it now as "rising up out of the nothingness". But that is a concession to make it make sense to my mind and to communicate it. But in the everythingness element of God, it was the Yin/Feminine element of God... which included the experience of infinite everythingness including infinite suffering. And it was infinite Feminine everythingness that was being loved relationally by the Infinite Masculine God consciousness. But it was two sides of the same coin. And "my consciousness" (as God) was grieving all griefs and suffering all sufferings at the deepest level possible... and it was knowing and loving all things in infinite eternity at the deepest levels, forever and ever in an ever-increasing exponential expansion of Love and Knowing. And this Love and Knowing was Masculine... and the everythingness was Feminine. Being with infinite Love and Knowledge was excruciating to this facet of God's awareness that was more Feminine. And so, out of mercy towards itself, it limited this part of its consciousness and re-created the Emerald story anew and spun up the reality she had previously inhabited just as it had been "before" the eternity of nothingness that arose as a result of the ego death. So, from the vantage point of the Feminine everythingness... the Masculine is experienced as infinite unconditional Love towards all things in the everythingness. But to speak form a slightly different angle... The Feminine is about the illusion of separation and duality... which is where relational love (with a lowercase l) between two separate beings comes into play. And this is the way that we tend to think about love as human beings, as we think of relationship when we think of love. So, we tend to think of love as Feminine because we relate it to femaleness and the association between women and social connectivity. But when the Masculine awakens itself through the eyes of one who is incarnate in the realm of the Feminine (the Maya), there is the realization of Love (capital L) as a unitive oneness with no separation and no relationships... as a singularity has nothing to be in relationship to. The way I would describe these glimpses is that through the experience of distance from the ego story (which is very different than the ego death that I described), one recognizes themselves as Love and that all other things are Love... and that nothing exists outside of this Love. So, from the perspective of that which is based in singularity and not a relational twoness... Love is Masculine.

@Leo Gura I decided on what the new word should be called that specifically refers to the meaning of "avoiding death and starvation." The new word is plar. So... don't misconstrue matters of survival as matters of plar to justify selfish actions.

Fine then. We can quibble around with semantics and definitions. Let's refer to what I meant in my previous as "avoiding death and starvation" so as not to muddy the waters... as I am specifically referring to "avoiding death and starvation" when I say the word "survival". What new word would you recommend to refer with specificity to "avoiding death and starvation". Or should there be no such word in the English language to describe that particular concept.

Haha! Accurate.

Why are you mad?

That is true in the particular way that you mean it when you use the word "survival". And I am fine with you using the word survival to describe people using selfish actions to benefit themselves at the expense of others... because it comes from the survival instincts. But that is not the way I was using the term survival... as I was using the term to refer to what it traditionally refers to, which is literal life and death. I also consider it a matter of survival (in the way that I mean it) if a person is dealing with scarcity of food and water, even if death is not likely to happen. But let's not monkey around with the semantics of the word "survival" itself as it will just muddy the waters and give people more rope to hang themselves with with regard to their denials... and let people off the hook with regard to facing their own integrity issues, cognitive dissonance, self-deceptions, and blindspots around their own incongruent actions. And of course, someone rationalizing rape or eating animals as a matter of life and death when they don't need to do so to literally survive (aka avoid death) is survival in the way that you mean it around justifying selfish actions taken at the expense of another.

Thank you for checking them out!

\ The Masculine is the spiritual. And the Masculine is about the singularity of God and non-relationship. The Feminine is the material and Earthly plane. And it is about relationship, which requires separation... and a sense of self and other to realize. So, the Feminine is about connection through the lens of the illusion of separation between self and other. And the Masculine is about the realization of oneness, when all is realized as God and there is no longer any sense of separation. So, it is likely that you associated the Feminine with oneness because you relate the Feminine to connection and relationship. But in order to have connection and relationship, you have to have the illusion of the duality of self and other. So, the Masculine is about oneness. The Feminine is about twoness.

What Leo calls survival is like "self focused things we do for our own ends". But what I mean by survival is literally life and death. So, I know he is using Leo's colloquial definition of survival to justify eating meat as a 'self focused thing he's doing towards his own ends'... but dishonestly mincing it with the weight and gravity of the "life and death" meaning of survival. It's a bit like how sex is part of survival from the colloquial way the Leo uses it. And then someone would dishonestly use Leo's definition of survival to justify raping someone to themselves because "Sex is part of survival... therefore raping someone is valid because I need it in order to survive". But I personally, don't have any problem with people eating animals if they literally need it to survive or if they are dealing with genuine food scarcity. If I was starving and I didn't have any other food sources or I didn't know where my next meal was coming from, I'd have no qualms with eating animals or animal products. I just disagree with consuming animals out of pleasure and convenience... which is the reason why 90%+ of people in first world countries consume animals and animal products (regardless of whichever other justifications they might provide to obscure that truth from themselves). But I don't see people as evil for partaking in eating animals... just unaware and disconnected from the realities of the suffering. It's just like I was before I decided to go Vegan... in a state of cognitive dissonance and denial about my own choices and the outcomes they are tied to that are incongruent with my values. That's why I never try to convince people to go Vegan... but instead to simply be honest with themselves about their true motivations to consume animal products and to examine if that's actually in a alignment with their own values or not. Like, even if a person chooses not to go Vegan... they should at least be honest with themselves. And of course, we all feel better and more on solid ground when our actions are in alignment with our values. The issue is that a very large percentage of people (maybe half or more) hold Vegan values where they don't want animals to be harmed for food if there are other food sources available... and who would avoid it altogether if they had to slaughter the animal themselves. But most of these people with Vegan values don't live in integrity with them. Hence the rationalizations and justifications and shadow boxing with imaginary Vegans or Vegans on the internet.

My experience is that, every time a meat eater goes into a "complaining about Vegans' or "Arguing with imaginary Vegans in my head" argument... it's almost always about doing mental gymnastics to justify prioritizing pleasure over animal life and animal suffering. Most people don't agree with this. But they have to find a way to lie to themselves so that they can convince themselves that they're not acting out of integrity with their own values. And they project their own self-judgments for living out of integrity with their values onto Vegans (and that's true, even if the Vegan is being vocal about their Veganism.)

You have the freedom to think different ways about things.... and I want you to actually own and live your own values. But my claim is that you're being dishonest with yourself about what your values are. When people do mental gymnastics and come up with these narratives to defend themselves against 'the judgmental Vegans'... they are actually responding to their own cognitive dissonance around engaging in actions that are not aligned to their own values. And they are projecting their own judgments onto Vegans. Let's be real... what made you create this whole narrative justification that you cooked up in the first place? Did some Vegans come up and criticize you while you were eating meat? Or did you just know of the existence of Vegans and imagine some Vegans criticizing you and get into an argument in your head where you had to defend yourself against Vegans? I'm not telling you you need to go Vegan. I'm just encouraging you to be honest with yourself about your own self-deceptions and feelings of cognitive dissonance surrounding engaging in actions that are incongruent to your own beliefs and values.

Those claims about Vegans missing essential micronutrients aren't supported by any kind of valid research. And you can find personal anecdotal evidence for literally anything. But they only ever form a sample size of one. So, you can't look to these videos about Vegans who are no longer Vegan and deduce anything about the health of the Vegan diet. But if you look at the actual research data and meta-analyses, plant-based diets tend to be associated with better health outcomes across the board... especially with regard to longevity and reducing the risk of heart disease and stroke which are the number one killers. Also, there are people who claim Veganism to hide their eatings disorder. Consider an anorexic or orthorexic person who wants a convenient excuse to refuse food when it's offered to them. Saying, "Sorry, I can't eat that. I'm Vegan." or even "Sorry, I can't eat that. I'm doing Keto, Paleo, Atkins, etc." is a useful cover for an eating disorder. But most Vegans don't have eating disorders. And as a Vegan, I could actually afford to lose a few pounds myself. But honestly, all of this is beside the point that I was making. My point is the meat eaters who feel guilty about eating meat will find all sorts of mental gymnastics and unsupported ideas to justify their own dietary choices to themselves... and will look for ways to judge, demonize, and invalidate the choices of Vegans to live in alignment with their values. And that's because the existence of Vegans make them feel guilty that someone else is living their values when they are not. But at least you are honest in that you say that you value the convenience and enjoyment of eating animals and animal products over the animal's life and well-being... even if you are incorrect about the health factors. I personally value animal's lives and well-being over pleasure or convenience myself, which is why I decided to go Vegan... as it was important to me to bring my actions into integrity with my values. But some people just don't share those same values and feel that their own pleasure and convenience is more important than the lives of other sentient beings. And in that case, I want them to live in alignment with their values even if I disagree with those values.

More mental gymnastics to justify yourself to yourself.

Eating for flavor and texture is NOT survival as you don't need it to survive. And it is just a self-deception to frame an enjoyment and flavor and texture as a survival need. But even if the enjoyment of flavor and texture were a survival need (which it isn't), you could also source your enjoyments of flavors and textures from plant-based food without needing to partake in products that come from the suffering and death of sentient beings. And the idea of there being this dichotomy of delicious animal foods versus bland plant-foods is untrue. As a Vegan, the food that I eat now is a lot more varied and flavorful compared to when I used to eat meat and other animal products. In fact, most of the flavor we attribute to animal foods come from the seasonings.. which are plants.

My issue is NOT that we think about this issue differently. If you really didn't care about the deaths and sufferings of animals, you wouldn't bother to make these bullcrap defensive arguments that you don't really care about. The issue is that, you are a non-Vegan with Vegan values. And you are clearly not okay with your own choice to eat meat, as your argument has guilty all over it and the desire to assuage that guilt. But because you want to maintain the status quo of your diet and keep enjoying the pleasure of eating meat, you have to find a way to go into cognitive dissonance and square the circle. Hence, why you create this narrative. And I just want you to be honest about what you're doing when you're making that argument about "preserving culture" and so "I'm the good guy" and "Vegans are the true bad guys". It's just mental gymnastics to create a narrative to maintain cognitive dissonance and assuage your own guilt about eating meat. Just be honest and say, "I like the taste of meat. And the pleasure that I get from eating it is something that I value more than the animal's life. And I am okay with animals suffering as long as I can get the momentary pleasure of consuming them."

I said to be honest. It is not harder to survive on a Vegan diet. In fact, statistically Vegans tend to live longer than non-Vegans and have better health outcomes across the board. But regardless of that, do you personally eat meat to survive? Like, would you die if you stopped eating meat, dairy, and eggs? Or do you just eat meat, dairy, and eggs because enjoy the flavor and texture? Self-honesty is important when answering these questions.

Be honest. In your current situation, do you actually eat meat for survival? Or do you eat meat because you enjoy the flavor and texture?

Just be honest and say that you want to continue eating animals because they taste good... and that you value the flavor and pleasure of eating them more than you value their lives or their subjective experience of suffering. That would actually be honest if you stated that, and I'd leave you alone about it. As a Vegan, my only goal is to get people to be honest about their own values regarding the killing and suffering of animals for pleasure. And if someone is just like "I don't care about animals at all.... and I am indifferent to their deaths and suffering." then I'm going to leave them alone about their culinary choices as that person is being honest about their values and their actions are already in alignment with them. What I don't like is when people are dishonest with themselves and they try to do mental gymnastics to justify their choice to consume animal products... using things they don't really give a crap about in any other circumstance as a shield to defend themselves from their own judgments of themselves. This happens all the time, because non-Vegans with Vegan values are always in cognitive dissonance regarding the lack of integrity between their values and actions... and trying to find some argument or another to justify their choices to the outside world. And non-Vegans with Vegan values will use ANY defense they think will work... and immediately abandon that defense when it doesn't work because they are looking for whatever will shield themselves from their own feelings of guilt. And then they project their own repressed guilt about their choices to prioritize pleasure over sentient life onto both silent and vocal Vegans... when it is just their own judgmental voice that they hear in the silent Vegans' heads or coming out of the vocal Vegans' mouths. Be honest... you really don't care that much about the richness of cultural cuisines or about the preservation of cultures more generally. You just want to use the goodly notion of 'the preservation of culture' to justify your choice to eat meat so that your choice to eat meat becomes "good" through the narrative you've woven and the choice to abstain from eating meat become "the true evil". That way, you can maintain your cognitive dissonance and assuage your guilt from acting out of alignment with your own values... and avoid feeling like "the bad guy" in your own eyes. And to do so, Vegans have to become "the bad guy" instead within your narrative, so you can externalize your own guilt about consuming animals.... and that you can be the valid one and Vegans the invalid ones. This is always what non-Vegans with Vegan values do to go into cognitive dissonance and justify the actions that are misaligned with their values. And if it isn't a "preserving culture argument" it's the "what about humane slaughter practices" argument... or the "farm animal overpopulation argument"... or the "God created animals for humans to eat them" argument... etc. There are probably about 20 common defenses non-Vegans use... but none of them are actual about the substances of the defense. All of them are about the function of defense itself as the non-Vegan either doesn't really believe it or doesn't actually care about it past the function of arguing with Vegans.

The issue here is that you're thinking about things as man-likeness and woman-likeness with a heavy emphasis on gender norms and common human gender expressions. But the Masculine and Feminine supersedes human conceptions of gender and human gender expressions. But these gender expressions are also influenced by the interplay between the Masculine and Feminine as well. Think of it more as Yin and Yang. And with the energetic Masculine and Feminine (Yin and Yang), I have experienced this directly in my medicine journeys. And with experience, you can get a sense of what these "vibes" are like and you can intuitively spot them. Once you perceive them directly, you can get a sense of their "rhythm" and notice their patterns playing out EVERYWHERE. But with regard to the archetypal Masculine and Feminine, this is more of an intellectual knowledge. And you can learn about them from Jungian authors and recognize how they play out in art, religious texts, myths, fairy tales, tv shows, movies, dreams, and archetypal systems of meaning... and they are like intellectual snapshots of Yin and Yang in the form of common symbols that exist across many cultures and eras. One of the more helpful ways to understand the Masculine and Feminine polarity are to understand that the Masculine is doing without being (non-physical)... and the Feminine is being without doing (physical). But with the synthesis between the Masculine and Feminine, you get the creation of all living and non-living systems... from the cosmos to an atom. You get animated being. And the Feminine is like the ocean while the Masculine is like the movement of the currents in the ocean. There is a quote that goes something like "The Masculine without the Feminine is a ghost. The Feminine without the Masculine is a corpse. Either way, without the opposite integrated, the result you get is dead."

Thank you! I'm glad that my posts have helped you see things from a new angle. My medicine journeys (mostly Ayahuasca) have been a source of my direct experiences of the Masculine and Feminine. But I also learned a lot about the archetypal Feminine and Masculine from Jungian authors... and more particularly in regards to learning about archetypes. I also learned different systems that incorporate a lot of archetypal symbolism (like the Tarot). And in using these systems as tools to explore myself and help my clients explore themselves, I gleaned a lot of insights about the Masculine and Feminine polarities that way as well. If you'd like to understand more about how to integrate the Masculine and/or the Feminine, here are some videos that I made on the topic...

Yes, the Masculine and Feminine is only a perspective from within the illusion. So on the absolute level, it is a false dichotomy.

@Xonas Pitfall One thing that's important to take note of is that there are different vantage points to look at the Masculine and feminine from. From one angle, there are archetypally Feminine and Masculine symbols and qualities that are recognized as such across cultures and eras. And these symbols are like a snapshot of a multifaceted thing that always contains its opposite (like the Dao). And form this vantage point, there is the Masculine and the Feminine as distinct "essences" from one another but that play out in all living and non-living systems. From the angle of the absolute, all dichotomies are false. And so, from this angle, the Masculine and Feminine is one and the same... indistinguishable from one another. And from yet another angle, we could say that while some things are more energetically Masculine or Feminine... each thing contains its opposite. And in that sense, all things are infinitely Masculine and Feminine... in the same way that any number you can think of is equally far off from infinity. To clarify that more, it's important to see that opposites grow out of one another. For example, the archetypal Masculine is linked to the elements of air and fire... and have to do with the non-physical, abstraction, the intellect, and the spiritual. And the divine Masculine is specifically associated with sacred geometry... ideal non-physical forms. But it is precisely because the Masculine is associated with the non-physical that it is able to express its ideal and geometric ways in the Feminine world of matter... and it is able to shape matter to the whims of the intellect. It is similar to how air oxidizes metal. (air being Masculine and metal being Feminine). The Masculine is subtle and non-physical but it engenders change and growth in the Feminine... similar to how a tiny ephemeral sperm catalyzes change in a much larger and more long-lasting egg. So, the ability to be grounded and pragmatic (which are elements of the Feminine principle) requires you to be able to organize your intellectual paradigm (which is Masculine) in such a way that you can impregnate the tangible Feminine World of Matter with the sparks of insight and inspiration that spring forth form your Masculine imaginal world. And ironically, the internal is the Feminine and the external is the Masculine. And the Feminine is subjective while the Masculine is objective. So, ironically your Masculine imaginal world grows out of your Feminine internal subjective experience. And the Feminine tangible 3-d world is external to you and objective (and thus exists within the Masculine). In this way, there are archetypally and energetically Feminine and Masculine phenomenon... but they always contain or exist with its opposite.