The Work is in the Illumination

With a kind of prurient fascination, I was stunned by a quote of an unknown Japanese shaman:

"The lives of you modern people mirror the lives of the animals in your factory-raised meat farms--born inside, kept in the dark, fed artificial food, exploited for profit, and then finally, when a little light seeps into the cage, it is merely the door being opened by the great huntress that ends your life."

Ouch.

However, my next thought is that the shaman may be mistaken. Not the part about exploiting other humans, but that I don’t think this is strictly a modern phenomenon. My sense is that this assault on human ignorance actually should cut much deeper, into thousands of years of human cultural pathology, with the biting edge of truth.

OK, let’s suppose that at least some of our numbers are deviously maintaining our ignorance as the ultimate source of their feast. This would indicate that they are ignorant as well. Not in the same way, but in a little 'cage' just the same: trapped by their own ideas of justice and morality (recall the sickening mis-read of Darwin where ‘survival of the fittest’ is misunderstood as a moral justification for stepping on the other guy?) All this on their supposed grand road to happiness.

Orwell comes to mind, with the infamous phrase that "Some animals are more equal than others." It is breaking the cycle of ignorance which traps both the powerful and the disempowered together, that will end the suffering that both endure, whether they realize that they are suffering or not.

It is harder to take a misstep when the light is turned on. Illuminate the truth of things, and - at least in terms of human history - things are going to change.

The work ahead of us if we are going to turn this thing around, is truly in the illumination.