Our tongue, when unmindful, leads us to create such brutal systems of utter barbarity. That we would spawn and grow such intelligences merely for a few smacks of the lips! And then designed us to industrial scale, whole populations raised and slaughtered for something that is dropped in the toilet 16 hours after eating.

Jesus was definitely right when he admonished the purists who criticized his eating habits, when he said, “What goes into someone’s mouth does not defile them, but what comes out of their mouth, that is what defiles them.” (Matthew 15:11) But a few slices of offered pork in his own mouth, or the crunchiness of fried calamari harvested off the edge of a boat in Galilee, could never have imagined the vast industrialized scale of the suffering we defile living life with through our habits and our attachments. (And I must admit, though not a fish person, I sometimes enjoyed, maybe once per year, a meal that included fried squid on the menu. But once I viewed that award-winning film on Netflix, about the octopus, I ceased and have never eaten a bit of it since, already some years now, since way back in Greece.

The criminal audacity of such a project as this octopus-farm just stuns the innermost soul. That this is considered “an important business decision“, that we only see the money from it, the gold, and none of the torture we will systematically inflict on such deeply sensitive and intelligent co-evolvers! All for for that filthy lucre!

We just don’t get it, and I wonder if we ever will. Hyper-stimulated, through our eyes, ears, nose, tongue, body, and thinking-mind, we crave more and more stimulation, and this leads to industrial overproduction, and all of its attendant waste and immoral knock-on effects. Living at the pinnacle of this dark pyramid, if we continue to live unawares, we are just agents of suffering, and ethically culpable, more or less the same. Just like today’s Russians: not fully guilty, maybe due to government super-control and brain-washing — maybe, I‘m open to it — not technically guilty, but also very responsible and culpable. We will be like them, only with finer hues.

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