Day 3 of my “30 Day Vegan Challenge.”

2 more books on veganism arrived today and they seem very authoritative and compelling.  The library of books that I have been amassing on the subject is becoming quite impressive!  And yet I still think that my difficulty in experiencing a more dramatic transformation towards a demonstrative practice of actual veganism is probably due to a lack of a fully comprehensive, intellectual, and theoretical foundation upon which to base my actions.  I have been seriously studying vegetarianism/veganism for most of life, but I think that my research and gathering of data, recipes, testimonials, apologetics, etc., still needs further work and a more fully conceptualized framework.

I have been meeting informally with other enlightened souls on this same righteous path towards a healthier and more ethically responsible diet, and many of them are also facing a lot of the same challenges as I am.  However, there was one person attending our gatherings for awhile who was an actual *practicing* vegan for many years but we found that rather than inspiring the rest of us with greater zeal towards our professed commitments, we usually just felt guilty and a bit ashamed about our own lack of fortitude.  Not that she ever actually judged or criticized any of us for our apparent lack of progress, although I’m sure that I once noticed a condescending look from her when I arrived at one of our monthly vegan potlucks with my own inspired version of ‘pigs in a blanket,’ (beef sausage stuffed with with gorgonzola cheese and chicken livers, wrapped with bacon, and deep fried in goose fat--I mean, why even bother with a spelt and rice flour ‘blanket‘ at that point, that would seem a bit pretentious and hypocritical to me).

i will admit that having a more evolved conscience and elevated sense of the kinship of all being often seems like a heavy cross for me to bear.  I sometimes envy all those un-informed and spiritually adolescent souls who seem to wander through life without paying the least attention to the deeper metaphysical realities that undergird our material existence.  This would include, of course, all those Hindus and Buddhists that live their entire lives as vegetarians, respecting the vital life-force of all sentient beings.  Sure their eating “practices” are impeccably rigorous, but unfortunately their doctrinal foundations are technically quite unorthodox and suspicious and are subject to higher forms of criticism if not explicit condemnation.

In a way their ignorance and lack of critical and theoretical rigor seems like a kind of child-like bliss and they are almost as unburdened by any sort of interior conviction or self-awareness as the cows, pigs, and chickens, whose life force I have (at least on a abstract and theoretical level) come to revere and cherish and have taken a vow to embrace!

Day 3 has had it’s challenges, but I sense that I have made real progress, at least in exposing a lot of the fallacies of all those Others that have not yet embraced this higher calling.

Namaste and Obliged,