Equality always pays.
Life gives constantly, consistently and continuously. Take a plant, if you grow a fruit bearing plant and you don’t water it, don’t feed it and don’t tend to the soil, that plant will not give up. That plant will put everything into staying alive, growing and bearing fruit. If such a plant does manage to still bear fruit, you can eat it and nourish yourself, regardless of how you treated that plant.
The environment in which we live is constantly filtering out our toxins, cleaning our water and air, and providing us with food, shelter and raw materials with which we create every single thing we need for our comfort, enjoyment, entertainment and security.
Animals provide the same giving. They will produce in the form of their labour and their products in the form of milks, eggs, flesh, skin, bone etc... And they will continue to produce these things which we use, regardless of how we treat them, for as long as they are able.
This is the unconditional giving of life, and of innocence of Life: they do not have a mind to judge us or the ‘free will’ to choose not to provide. They do what they do because they are alive.
Inequality exists only within the mind of man, and is expressed in his actions, in our actions, wherein we take advantage of this unconditional giving from our world and even demand more, as if we were somehow entitled to take what we want without considering the experience of that which is providing, or `the consequences of our `taking. We demand more and more until we suck the life out of that which provides, and we move on to the next one, or the next space, to do the same. Over and over until we ruin everything and there’s nothing left for our children.
All we would have to do to gracefully receive all these unconditional gifts provided to us by Life in all its different shapes and forms is to realize our equality with all of Life, and with all that is here. This involves treating everything with the respect, care and dignity we ourselves would want to be treated with. If we are unable to even treat ourselves and our own bodies with respect, care and dignity, then we will be unable to treat our world with equality, because we are unequal to ourselves. This is why, within the process of bringing about equality, we must first start with equality within, because only then can we realize our equality with All Life.
If we were to actually live as ‘equals’ with all that is here, we would nurture the land and it would provide the most wonderful produce forever, baring of course the occasional isoloated environmental factors that would prevent such a thing. On a global scale, if we as humanity took care to respectfully cultivate the land and animals all around the world, the earth would provide ceaselessly and endlessly for us. It is already willing to do so, except we take too much, we abuse the animals and we deprive the land of the essentials it needs, we destroy the land and deprive half the people in the world of any kind of Life other than to struggle for survival, while a small minority live the kind of life we could all be living if we truly lived as equals. If we truly cared for each other, honoured life as ourselves and ourselves as Life.
The animals and insects already provide for us unconditionally, all we have to do is acknowledge that. Acknowledge that we depend upon them for our very survival and be humbly grateful for what they do, by treating them with respect, by giving them something in return, like dignity, care, comfort, enjoyment.
This is what I mean when I say it’s time to realize our equality with all that’s here, treating others, even other life-forms, as we would want to be treated.. This can only be done by mature, responsible people who have the strength to be humble enough to be grateful. Most humans are not that advanced, think only of themselves and their personal experience in the world as the world cares for them as if they were spoiled children who never grew up to realized that :at some point, it’s time to take responsibility, for oneself and one’s actions.
That time is now, because it has to be. We can’t remain in denial about what we’ve created in the world. As all of us have been living out our lives in ignorance, millions and now biliions are going without. We are completely insulated from what’s going on in the world, in terms of suffering and destruction. It can’t continue.
We have to get through this by forgiving everything that has led up this point, everything that has allowed us to get this far out of control, so that we can stop immediately and start to change. Start to respect what we have and where we live so that we can ALL graciously experience the abundance and the unconditional giving the earth is already providing.
