In this episode, the final panel begins, starting with Dr. Gabriel Cousens (vegan), founder of the Tree of Life Rejuvenation Center, reflections on the media’s role shifting to a “culture of life” perspective and promoting compassionate solutions.
MC: Jane Velez-Mitchell: This is our third and final panel, and we’re talking about perhaps the most important aspect of this entire movement, and that is media – transformational media. We have heard the message; how do we get it out effectively to the rest of the world to avert this global catastrophe that we are in the midst of?
So, we are excited to have three amazing gentlemen with us: Dr. Gabriel Cousens, founder of the Tree of Life Rejuvenation Center. People have gone there to turn their lives around and to turn around their health with a raw vegan diet. John Raatz, legendary film producer and founder of Visioneering Group and Global Alliance for Transformational Entertainment. Thank you so much for being here. And Scott Badenoch, who is CEO of Creative Citizen – a leading environmental and social networking website. So, these are three individuals who are really changing the world.
And, I’m used to doing television where basically people talk for 20 seconds and then they’re cut off. And what’s really interesting about this is that I think sometimes you have to talk to somebody for 5 hours before they get it! Because we’ve been telling them in 20-second sound bites for years now, and they haven’t heard it. So, I think there’s a real method to the system here that people are undertaking. And in many different ways we’ve said the same message over and over and over again. You don’t have to be a genius to realize that meat production is destroying the world, destroying our own health, and it’s just horribly cruel. Why is it that intelligent people cannot get this message? And that’s what we want to talk to these gentlemen about. Dr. Cousens, let’s talk about what we’re trying to do here and how constructive television plays a role in that.
Dr. Cousens: I’d like, first, maybe, if we could just stand for a moment and do an Om, just to kind of quiet the mind. (Yeah, let’s do it.) (Om~)
For the sake of the merging of the Heavens and Earth, the Holy One of blessing and the Sacred Feminine, and unifying our fragmented lives, souls and world, we as all humanity are consciously entering into this moment in the oneness of the Heavens and Earth and the completion of the world.
So, that prayer was about the merging of the Heavens and the Earth. And it’s key to understanding what’s going on. First, let’s consider that not only is Supreme Master Ching Hai Divinely inspired, but we all are. I really thank everybody for coming here and being Divinely inspired. (Thank you.) Yes.
And that takes us into media. The media needs to be Divinely inspired. Let’s put it that way. And we can say that, really, Supreme Master TV is Divinely inspired. (Yeah.) And we need to understand that all the media that’s happening now, from our point of view, should be, can be and is Divinely inspired. So think about it that way, and we get a bigger picture – that we aren’t just doing it, but we are here not by accident.
In 1975, I had a vision from deep in meditation. It said, “You should learn to eat and live in a way that supports the spiritual energy.” The word was “kundalini,” actually. And from that time, 10 books have been written. Notable ones are “Conscious Eating,” “Rainbow Green Live-Food Cuisine” and “Spiritual Nutrition.” We have now outlined, including all the difficulties people face, how to be a complete, successful vegan and live-fooder. That’s it. We don’t have to worry, the questions are there. These books are carried in naturopathic schools around the world. They’re out there for the public; no one can say, “I don’t know how.” It was like “This is what you need to do. You’re a holistic physician; you need to do that.”
And the reason you’re doing that actually is: How do we become super conductors of the Divine? And the diet that came through was a vegan, live-food diet. It’s the best way, without a doubt, of how to become a super conductor of the Divine. From that place of awareness comes the deep compassion and love for all of creation, for the living planet. We’re no longer seeing ourselves as stewards of the living planet, which is also very good, but we are one with the living planet. There’s a whole different set of discussions when we have that, a whole different set of understanding. Now, from the position of a holistic physician, a Columbia-trained medical doctor, we’re going to talk a little bit and try to understand this in a deeper way.
And what we need to understand is global warming, diabetes are symptoms of a way of thinking in the world, we call “predatory way,” in which humans, animals, plants, and the living planet are considered as an economic unit to be exploited. I call it, the “culture of death.” Now, we’ve got to have a solution to that, and that’s to move into the consciousness of the “culture of life” and this is really what Supreme Master TV is about, and really what all our lives are about in a deeper way. There are two ways of looking at it: one level, we can say, out of our need for survival and our fear of danger and global warming, we’re going to come up with, “How do we decrease the carbon footprint?”
OK, that’s very good, but we haven’t gone to the deeper, deeper level, which is a holistic approach, which says, “Wait a second! We have to look at our whole lives and turn that around.” And the “culture of life” is about bringing compassion, bringing love, feeling that wholeness, knowing that the animal world is, in essence, “Mitakuye oyasin,” which means “all relationships” – we’re all related.
And if you look deeply in the scriptures, the animals had their souls breathed into them first, as it says in the Torah, what we know as the Old Testament. The souls of the animals came first. And we look at Buddhism, and Buddha in the Surangama Sutra said, very simply, “In the future times, there will be ghosts, who will tell you that it’s OK to eat meat and be liberated.” He said, “This is not possible. One cannot eat the living flesh of sentient beings and be liberated.” And keep that in mind.
So, this is what we’re saying. So, in the Christian tradition, besides the Jewish tradition that comes out of the Torah, Jesus and all the disciples, as well documented in my book “Conscious Eating,” were all vegetarians. Just so we know that the foundation of Christianity, the foundation of Judaism was that vegetarian diet. Genesis 1:29 makes it very clear. “I’ve given you the seed of every herb-bearing seed on the planet and the tree of a fruit-bearing tree to be yours for food.” What does that mean? It’s a vegan diet. It’s a live-food diet and it was given to us 6,000 years ago. We’re just a little slow on the uptake. But it’s there, right in front of our face. So it is the dietary blueprint for healing the planet and healing ourselves.
Now, we talked about diabetes, and I’ll just make a point that the rate of diabetes for meat-eaters is four times higher. And at The Tree of Life (Foundation), we are reversing diabetes. It’s called “unhealable.” It is, if you keep eating meat and sugar, it certainly is. But we’re reversing it on an average of 21 days – Type 2 Diabetes. And we got lots of documentation, and we’re getting more and more. So what we’re saying is, “Change your consciousness. Change your lifestyle.”
And so that’s the question we’ve been dealing with all along here. And the bottom line of that of course, is a minimum – the vegan diet. Simply, a meat-centered diet is a hoarding of resources that is not only causing economic, ecological disaster in the planet, but literally, is responsible for 40 to 60 million people dying of starvation on the diet, 15 million children a year dying. Even the World Health Organization said 29,500 children are dying each day of starvation.
The deeper piece is we all have the shadow of the “culture of death” within us. We all have the shadow. We’ve got to admit that and be at peace with that. And the work is how do we move into the “culture of life” consciousness? Because it’s not fighting against something, we are moving into a consciousness of the “culture of life,” of compassion, of love, of our oneness with the planet. And that now is what the media can do. And that’s exactly what we’ve done. We’ve been inspired by Supreme Master TV, and we hope many other media networks are. We have created a virtual “Culture of Life” community.
And we are talking about alive people, alive relationships, alive parenting, alive planet, alive food, and literally alive building materials and ecology. We actually have been pioneering veganic organic farming. Veganic organic – what that means is we do no blood meal, no bone meal, and we have an apprenticeship in that. And we’re about ready to start a master’s program in ecological and live building.
The thing that we have seen that’s most powerful, once people get the idea that “Vegan is a good idea, but I’m afraid to do it,” is we do the seven-day juice fast. And we have seen tremendous transformation. In Israel, which actually has the second(-highest number) of vegetarians in the world outside of India, we do fasts with 80 people. We know that when people get that they can live without meat, they can then more comfortably make the transition to veganism.
We invite you to join the whole transition into the “culture of life” way of being, so that we can live with love and consciousness and compassion with all of animal life, all of plant life, and all of the living planet, and understand at the deepest level, we are not stewards – we are one with the living planet.
And may everyone here be blessed that all our actions are based on that shift in consciousness. The most important thing for the media is to help people create a new morphogenetic field that supports the shift in consciousness to a vegan, culture-of-life consciousness. Thank you very much.
Photo Caption: “Loving the Sun, Humbly Trying to Imitate Its Happy Shape to Brighten the Tiny Corner of the World!”
