Did you ever wonder why a good God would build a world where the only way to survive is by taking life? How long would you stay alive if you refused to eat? You may love animals and grow plants inside your home and flowers in your garden, but every time you eat, you destroy the life of something. A something with a consciousness, that feels and desires to live, as we do.

The other day I grabbed an onion from a basket to chop up, and I saw it had sprouted a beautiful, tender, light-green shoot. It had a life inside it, a consciousness that wanted to take root, breathe air and thrive. Any tears in chopping that onion did not come from the fumes.

I’m not a sentimentalist. I’m a person questioning, increasingly aware of an insidious thread woven through biological life. We are born, we feed, and we die. Life is a process of consuming other living things in order to stay alive as long as possible until death in turn consumes us. We tell ourselves life is a whole lot more, but it’s reduced to that as long as we must feed to survive. If we can’t stay alive more than a few months without food, how can eating not be fundamental to how we define our existence?

Eating is a requirement for biological life as we know it. It’s the thread that holds together material existence. More than a thread, it’s a chain, binding us to the law that we must consume each other. Rebelling is punishable by death.

What kind of God or gods would create a world predicated on killing? We don’t like to ask that, and we find every excuse to avoid looking at this question. But every time a dear one dies, or you find a nibbled bird in the yard destroyed by an idle cat, or you read about an animal that has suffered mercilessly, or another molested child, or a nation ravaged by a quake that’s buried thousands of living people, your mind goes back to that nagging question. Who would make a world like this? Was it truly a God of love?

According to much evidence, it wasn’t. The world was created by something else. Or if it was created by the loving God our hearts insist exists, then creation has been tampered with by someone else so merciless that it barely resembles the original divine vision. The biological universe is controlled by the law that to live we must take life or die. That is sinister. Something there is that makes us have to eat, that makes us age and disintegrate. This is the “something wrong with the world,” the crack in the universe. Knowledge of it works “like a splinter in the mind, driving you mad,” quoting “The Matrix.” Yet awakening to the truth of our predicament is the first step toward radical change. Only radical change can possibly right the fundamental flaw woven into physical creation.

And how well-woven it is. Not only does violence wind through the lives of all Earth life like the fibers of a time-bomb attached to a victim. It reaches out into space, where supernovas implode, collapsing millions of stars along with all living beings on all their attendant planets. Death and devouring are so pervasive most people can’t conceive of a world without them, or if they can conceive it, they label the concept preposterous. Yet quantum physics shows that matter is nothing but atoms: emptiness vibrating. Emptiness does not die and neither does the energy it oscillates. So why must bodies die that are made of up of these things?

Robert Monroe, in his book “Far Journeys,” writes of contact he had with a light being in an out-of-body experience. (Monroe is arguably the world’s foremost researcher on OBEs; he started an institute with trainee/researchers to scientifically investigate the phenomenon.) Reportedly the light being told Monroe that when humans die, their energy is released and harvested by trans-dimensional beings, who use it to extend their own life spans. The claim is that the universe is a garden created by these beings as their food source.

According to Monroe’s story, animals are intentionally positioned on this planet to feed on plants and on each other, thereby releasing the life force of their victims so it can be harvested. In a predator-prey struggle, exceptional energy is produced in the combatants. The spilling of blood in a fight-to-the-death conflict releases this intense energy, which the light beings call “loosh.” Loosh is also harvested from the loneliness of animals and humans, as well as from the emotions engendered when a parent is forced to defend the life of its young. Another source of loosh is humans’ worship.

According to Monroe’s informant, our creators, the cosmic “energy farmers,” intentionally equipped animals with devices like fangs, claws and super-speed in order to prolong predator-prey combat and thereby produce more loosh. In other words, the greater the suffering, the more life force is spewed from our bodies, and the tastier the energy meal for our creators.

This story told to Monroe (which threw him into a two-week depression) corresponds to reports in some of the world’s oldest scriptures, the Vedas, Upanishads, and Puranas of India. There we read that “the universe is upheld by sacrifice” (Atharva Veda) and that“all who are living (in this world) are the sacrificers. There is none living who does not perform yagya (sacrifice). This body is (created) for sacrifice, and arises out of sacrifice and changes according to sacrifice.” (Garbha Upanishad)

Again:

“(Death as the Creator) resolved to devour all that he had created; for he eats all. . . He is the eater of the whole universe; this whole universe is his food.” (Mahabharata)

In the writings of Carlos Castaneda, who chronicles the life and teachings of a Yaquii sorcerer called Don Juan, we find another story of the Divine devouring humans, in this case human consciousness. Reports Castaneda:

“The Eagle is devouring the awareness of all the creatures that, alive on earth a moment before and now dead, have floated to the Eagle’s beak, like a ceaseless swarm of fireflies, to meet their owner, their reason for having had life. The Eagle disentangles these tiny flames, lays them flat, as a tanner stretches out a hide, and then consumes them; for awareness is the Eagle’s food. The Eagle, that power that governs the destinies of all living things, reflects equally and at once all those living things.” (“The Eagle’s Gift,” by Carlos Castaneda)

The idea that man must sacrifice (must kill something or be killed in order to appease the gods) is apparently intrinsic to all the world’s root religions. We find blood ritual, including human sacrifice, in the Druidic tradition, Tibetan Buddhism, among the Indians of the Americas, in Greece and Rome, Africa, China, Arabia, Germany, Phoenicia andEgypt. Even the Old Testament (Judges 11:31-40) has a little-advertised story of human sacrifice, with the Israelite judge Jephthah ritually slaughtering his own daughter to fulfill a vow he made to Jehovah.

While we may not think of Judaism as typically promoting human sacrifice, it more than promoted it if we count the genocide Jehovah demanded of the Hebrews. In one day alone, they murdered 12,000 Canaanites “and utterly destroyed everything in the city, both man and woman, young and old, and ox and sheep and donkey with the edge of the sword.”(Joshua: 6:21)

In Islam, the situation is similar. Allah, while paying lip service to the immorality of human sacrifice, orders his servants in the Koran to practice jihad against all unbelievers. “When the forbidden months are past, then fight and slay the Pagans wherever ye find them, and seize them, beleaguer them, and lie in wait for them in every stratagem of war.” (Koran: 9:5)

Peace-loving Moslems interpret such passages as “symbolic” in their desire to justify their faith, much as Christians try to justify Jehovah’s sociopathic behavior with excuses. In many ways, the god of Islam reasons and rants like the god of the Israelites. Could it be the same entity? It isn’t contradictory that he would support two separate peoples, then lead them to fight each other. Not if his agenda is to stimulate and harvest plenty of loosh.

Christianity, the religion of brotherly love, is implicated in blood sacrifice by being rooted in the Jewish tradition. The Bible declares Jesus is the son of God (Jehovah), and Jehovah announces at Jesus’ baptism, “This is My beloved Son in whom I am well-pleased.” (Matthew: 17:5) Where was Jesus when his father was slaughtering the Canaanites? Jesus himself becomes a blood sacrifice, a fact that Catholics reenact in the mass and that Protestants bathe themselves in to be “saved.” Christians are no strangers to sacrifice.

If suffering and death were part of creation that no one, including the gods, could help, there’d be some reason to be more forgiving. I might even buy the story that they need us to support them with our homage and we need them to keep the universe running. But when you add blood sacrifice into the equation, I abandon ship. It’s one thing if the gods can’t prevent earthly suffering and death – quite another if they seek it out and thrive from it – or worse yet, created it. And that’s what blood sacrifice, and the scriptures around it, indicate.

When the oldest scriptures of the world tell us we were created as food for the gods, I have to ask myself if I want to live in a universe where that might be true. The fact is, I don’t. I can no longer give my approval to that kind of reality. So if I won’t live with it, I have to come up with something better. I have to find something more fundamental than the physical universe to locate my identity in, and my power in. I sense, as many do these days, that there’s something beyond the universe as it has been presented to us, something outside this box, outside this system. That’s what I seek to know, connect with, and draw from.

Robert Morning Sky, a truth seeker of the Hopi and Apache traditions, tells a story he learned from his people about a race of beings who knew no limitations, who existed far outside this physical universe. One day one of them declared his intention to visit Earth and take on a body just for the adventure of it, for the experience. His friends cautioned him, as this universe had a reputation as amnesia-producing, a place of no return. But the entity laughed that off and promised to come back after one lifetime.

Centuries passed, and the entity never came home. One of his comrades decided to enter the physical world to go look for his friend. He promised not to get lost in matter and to return with the other individual. More centuries passed, and neither being returned. So another immortal entered physical mass, and he also never came back. In time many members of these unlimited beings incarnated in human form, and the story goes, none of them yet has gone home.

Maybe we are those people, starting to remember who we are. Maybe it’s time to break out of the hypnosis we’ve lived under for eons, the unquestioned assumptions that we must kill and eat, suffer and die, live in lack and sadness, and undergo all the human drama as it has been defined for us.

Is it insane to think that humans can beat the system? That we could make a choice to stop the activities that supply our up-line with fuel? That we could minimize – even stop– our own refueling from the life force of creatures lower than us on the food chain? Is it madness to think that our bodies, made of undying energy, could themselves not have to die, that we might learn to live on the power of infinite consciousness, which we can access within ourselves, being part of it?

While some may call that madness, I prefer it to the world I see around me. I certainly prefer it to death. I prefer it to loss of my dear ones, and to sickness and poverty. The greatest experiment mankind can engage in is mastery of the principles of freedom, creation, abundance, and immortality. We’re wearing body suits that in 70-some years of use are programmed to self-destruct. What could be more important than changing that programming?

In the Bhagavad Gita, Lord Krishna warns: “He who does not follow the wheel thus set revolving lives in vain.” The wheel is the cycle of birth and death, karma and retribution, human sacrifice and divine blessing. To rebel against this system is to fail in our life purpose as defined by those who say they are our creators and gods. But surely life was meant to be more than dinner for the next rung up on the food chain. If “living in vain” means breaking out of that, I’m all for that kind of failure.

Bronte Baxter

© Bronte Baxter 2008

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