Vegetarianism
Such a lame blog title I know. ”Great, another self-absorbed hippie with a blog”. Well, maybe. Anyhow, this is the story.
Anyone who knows me well knows that I am motivated by my dreams (ref: Marina, etc) — or at least I talk about being motivated by them more than most people I know. About a year ago, I had a dream about killing an animal.
The dream opened at a tense moment. I was across a table or countertop from a furry animal like a cat or a rabbit. I had a knife in one hand. My mission was to kill the animal — that’s all I was to do.
I tried a bunch of times to get it with the knife, mostly missing it completely, but I struck it a couple of times. One time I caught its front foot, which I sliced off. At this point, things started to get horrifying to me. It was clearly in pain and now struggling with the situation. I had very intense feelings of sadness for this creature, but I was still driven to kill it — now partly out of pity since at this point there was really no going back.
I made a final lunge at it with the knife and pierced its chest area. Clear liquid (not blood, hmm…) poured out. It was staring me dead in the eye. I could feel the life draining from it and it upset me very much.
At that moment, I woke up with my heart racing. I was sweating, breathing heavily, and really bothered inside.
That was really the turning point. We had been eating veg maybe one or two nights a week, but that dream marked when I got more serious about not eating meat.
There are lots of good reasons not to eat meat, not the least of which is avoiding causing pain and anguish in another animal. Environmental reasons, health reasons, kitchen-hygene reasons all point to going veg. On the other hand, lots of folks enjoy the taste of meat in their food — fair enough.
I definitely found it hard to give up eating certain things — not having sausage in lasagna or pizza was a biggie. The longer I stay away from meat though, the less I crave it. I’m actually kind of grossed out by chicken now — I’ve had it here and there and can really taste the chicken coop in it.
I’ll make an occasional exception though. If I’m at someone’s house and they don’t know I’m veg, I’ll usually not say anything because I’m not a veg-zealot and I’m not *so* grossed out as to make a scene. An infrequent trip to a Ramen house or Vietnamese Pho restaurant is also a time where I’ll de-cloak from vegetarianism.
Anyhow, that’s the story. Hopefully we’ll now get back to more interesting posts…
Mandana said,
January 1, 2009 @ 3:14 pm
Hi Zack, I am sorry to hear you had a bad dream. I myself rely on my dreams a lot and I believe that there is a message in every dream that we need to decode. Each person sees his messages in the form of codes or symbols that have a specific meaning for him and each person can interpret his own dream better than others. The messages are not as vivid as it seems to be. The stronger the dream the purer it is and the language is more complex. In my experience I need to dig deeper and meditate a lot on the content of the dream. What I usually do is try to find the characteristics of the elements in my dream and their relation to my personal life. and suddenly some how I get inspired and I get my answer.
In case of having a frightening dream, we are given a warning so that we can prevent this incident from taking place. In such cases, we can reduce the severity of the incident or even eliminate it. We have a concept in our culture called Nazr, meaning offerings or alms. Upon having an unpleasant dream we put aside an amount of money depending on how much money makes your heart calmer and give it away to a needy person. This can be considered as a way of reducing the bad effect of the incident.
Hope it helps.
thenobot said,
January 1, 2009 @ 3:26 pm
What a wonderful concept Mandana! I always appreciate yours and Mammad’s insights. We really should have you over soon — I’ll be in touch.
benagarr said,
February 5, 2009 @ 2:08 pm
Kudos Zack!
Originally, I stopped eating meat because my wife stopped and I didn’t feel like creating perpetual meal strife for no reason.
But, over time, I grew to realize that I really enjoy vegetables a hell of a lot more than I did before. Veggies, made right, a far more exciting to me than any meat ever was. Of course, I am kind of strange because I never did enjoy steak in the way that most midwesterners seem to.
misa said,
February 10, 2009 @ 4:10 pm
first off, nice accompanying photo!
but i had a similar experience in that i used to love some meats but now they mostly seem gross. and fake meat fills in the gaps best it adds texture and flavor but without the ew-factor. imagining a soybean is more appetizing than imagining the flank of a cow.