The Spiritual Origin of Mankind
Human beings did not always eat meat!
Armin Risi’s contribution to the book Utopia Today — Reality Tomorrow: A Vegetarian World (EVU 2006; euroveg.eu).
A vegetarian world will come about as the result of a world-wide change of consciousness. This broadened view of ourselves and our responsibilities here on earth will also open up a new understanding of our origin as humans. As the future is the product of the past, a new understanding of our past will change our future.
Today’s generally accepted teaching says that the first life forms on earth were primitive bacteria and monocellular organisms that had evolved out of inorganic matter. These first organisms are said to be the original ancestors of all plants and animals, with the human being as a very late offspring in the line of ape-like mammals. Using his larger brain the “primitive human being” supposedly started to hunt animals and to fight each other. “Humans have always been violent, there have always been wars, and eating animals has always been part of the natural life of the human being.” This is one of the most common pro-meat arguments.
The world-view outlined above is called materialism: the world-view that considers life to be a product of matter. “In the beginning there was matter, and there is nothing else but matter.” A living being is reduced to its physical, material aspect: the body. When the body dies, the life of that particular living being (plant, animal, human being) as a «temporary epiphenomenon» of matter is finished, too.
Materialism in all its forms entails a materialistic understanding of life: Everything is matter, matter is energy, and energy follows abstract, impersonal laws that are mechanistic (or quantum-mechanistic, respectively). Consequently, the materialistic definition of reality says: Everything is energy, and “energy” is without consciousness, without love and without mercy.
This so-called consequent view of reality is the highest form of realism, or truth, according to materialism.
Imagine the ethics that corresponds to this world-view! In short, it says that “good” and “bad” are defined according to the necessities of realism. What helps to further this (materialistic) realism—which means: to further the interests of those representing this “realism”—is good. Everything else is bad and has to be removed or overcome. It is like in chess: those who know to apply and exploit the laws better are the legitimate winners. (Interestingly enough, these «realists» consider life nothing but a game.)
Is this really the ultimate truth? We can judge according to the fruits this world-view bears: destruction of the ecological balance, world-wide pollution, exploitation of animals and plants, cutting down of the rain forest, violence, profiteering, etc. There is no real love and no real respect of life; otherwise these things would not happen.
The change of consciousness that will lead to a vegetarian world will correct the fallacious errors of materialism, too. People at large will then understand that energy is not just abstract and material. Energy is the expression of consciousness, and the direction consciousness takes is the consequence of our free will. (Matter and its laws have no consciousness and no free will.) Thus, consciousness will again be recognized as the overriding factor of life.
Accordingly, it will become a common truth again that we as humans are beings of consciousness and not beings that evolved out of matter. Neither are the animal beings that evolved out of matter. In the vegetarian world, even children will laugh about the blindness of today’s materialistic “biology” which says that amphibians have evolved into reptiles, reptiles into birds and into mammals and human beings.
Just imagine the funny creatures this scenario proposes: creatures that are 90 % reptile and 10 % mammal, then 80 % reptile and 20 % mammal, etc. There is not the slightest proof that this impossible “evolution” ever happened.
Along with the change of consciousness that will bring peace and harmony (including vegetarianism) to the world, we as humans will gain new insights into our own past: We are beings with a spiritual origin, just as all other living beings. And, matter itself has a spiritual origin, too. Consciousness is not a product of matter (the brain), it is vice versa. In other words, the early humans were not primitive, ape-like beings. Humans did not “always eat meat”. Rather, all lasting problems started when humans began to eat meat, especially when some peoples started to breed animals in order to kill and eat them—and to sacrifice them …
The “paradise” of the past is the “utopia” of tomorrow, which will become reality on the basis of mankind’s real, spiritual evolution.