The Meat of the Issue (Updated)

I don’t make New Years’ resolutions. I consider the Western calendar artificial, and the placement of the year’s end is arbitrary, not matching the natural rhythm of human existence. It’s just another day. Time itself is arbitrary, a fundamental element in what traps us in this Vale of Sorrow.

I questions the orthodoxy of everything, largely because of my cynicism about fallen mankind. Without being paranoid, I think it’s utterly sensible to fear the motives and plans of anyone with more political power or wealth than me. I highly recommend you do the same. Not cowering in fear, but a sane caution, an open-eyed skepticism regarding everything you encounter. Reality itself is quite dubious.

Don’t let that stop you from going about the business of living out whatever you find truthful. The most important thing you can do is learn to despise your own suffering and sorrows. You can’t trust your own body to truthfully communicate what is good and bad, because it is wedded to this prison plane of existence. When your consciousness on the higher plane demands something, be fully aware of the likely consequences and drive through them.

A critical element of that truth from a higher plane is recognizing logic and reason are not useless, simply limited. They belong in their own sphere, and are subject to the imperatives outside the sphere. We do what seems most reasonable to us until that higher moral imperative makes a call. Human flesh serves one purpose: Flesh is the vehicle in which we defy the falseness of this prison existence, even as flesh is bound by it. We adhere to the higher imperatives as much as our reasoning mind can discern how to implement. We will inevitably fail because that is the nature of flesh. It’s the paradox of knowing our commitment to truth cannot ever be fully realized, but we know truth is not bounded by our failures.

In seeking to embrace the truth of things regarding the flesh itself, I have to be careful not to swallow orthodoxy. No two of us can go about it the same, and each of us must find a balance between too cavalier about the care and feeding of the flesh, and too obsessed with it. For me, the crux of the issue is maintaining sufficient physical health to make maximum use of this fleshly tool until my sojourn is finished. Just as I am deeply cynical about the information authorities try to feed my mind, I’m deeply cynical about the food this worldly system wants to put in my body.

There are no absolutes in truth, not as we think of them in the West. The truth for me is I can no longer trust the vast majority of food sources. But in particular, I find the threat from commercially provided meat in the US is too high to risk eating much of it. If I can’t get it from trustworthy sources, I’ll do without, thank you.

So it’s not a New Years’ resolution, despite the timing. I’m going almost meatless because I believe the threat of toxins in my food environment is high enough to hinder my pursuit of truth. Nor is this some doctrinaire vegetarian or vegan thing. I believe God gave us canine teeth for a reason, and the Covenant of Noah specifically grants animal flesh as a divine provision for our welfare, but the circumstances make it unwise.

Update: Not sure why folks keep reading this ancient history, but it seems necessary for the sake of honesty to update. As of summer 2012, local grocers have begun offering grass-fed beef, bison products and even grass-fed hogs. Anything unstained by the CAFO environment is probably pretty good: no GMO corn, no antibiotics or hormones, room to roam and natural foods. While it’s still more expensive than the standard meat counter stuff, safe meat is now available and I’m eating it.