Mayim Bialik -American Actress

Mayim Bialik born  on December 12, 1975. She is an American actress and has a PhD in neuroscience. She played Blossom Russo on the television show Blossom  and Amy Fowler on The Big Bang Theory. She started her career as a child actress and has appeared in many television shows and movies and has done voice work for cartoons. She is also a celebrity spokesperson for the Holistic Moms Network and the author of the book Beyond the Sling: A Real-Life Guide to Raising Confident, Loving Children the Attachment Parenting Way, released in March, 2012.

Quotes by Mayim Bialik:

“I became vegetarian when I was 19 and as of the New Year 2010 I am totally vegan. Before, I was eating trace amounts of animal products and was very weary to call myself a vegan. I have a lot of true vegan friends and in their circles I was always hesitant to use that term. As you know, there’s a lot of politicization around veganism. However, it’s now my truth. I don’t even wear leather.”

“My husband and I just finished reading the Jonathan Safran Foer book Eating Animals  and that just pushed me over the top. I didn’t eat fish, chicken, meat or dairy for years, but if there was a birthday cake or something, I wouldn’t worry about it too much. But once I read the book, the full portrait of what was going on really moved me more than I even wanted to be moved. I mean it sent me to a whole other level.”

“I show my love for animals by not eating them or participating in any business that profits directly from their exploitation or – if that word irks you – their “use.” You may show your love for animals by eating them. You may love animals, but only “intelligent” ones. You may draw the line anywhere you gosh darn please, but for me, I couldn’t draw it anymore so I just gave up the line. I threw out the line.”

“I recently visited an animal rescue sanctuary… The animals living there have been saved from the most disgusting and vile situations; plunked from garbage heaps half-breathing, beaten and left for dead. At this sanctuary, they have been given a chance to live simply because someone thinks that they deserve to. There are horses wounded and discarded from rodeos, sheep and goats who were used as bait in dog fights, bulls with whip marks and the personalities to go along with them, calves left to die because they were deemed not plump enough for veal, 1000 pound pigs that want belly rubs and tiny speckled chickens and giant turkeys so outrageously patterned that both of my sons were literally shocked at what nature can do.

Well, frankly, I am shocked at what nature can do, too, and I am shocked at what humans can do. Cruelty, inhumanity, disdain, abuse, and denial of rights should not be inflicted on animals or humans, but both occur.

What really shocks me, though, is that there are also people who give their lives because they want to show that animals have feelings, animals are intelligent, and animals have rights and needs: to be loved, to be safe, and to be protected when humanity says ‘I don’t care.'”

Quotes are from her interview with Ecorazzi and from her ‘Why I Am Vegan’ article for ‘People for Green Justice.’

Interview with Jonathan Safran Foer

EVA Interview with Jonathan Safran Foer, the American bestseller-author

‘There will come a time in the not too distant future when we think about meat like we think about cigarettes’

Jonathan Safran Foer, the American bestseller-author of ‘Everything is Illuminated’ and ‘Extremely loud and incredibly close’, was  in Europe for a tour around his new book, ‘Eating Animals’. We were able to interview him in Antwerp. Foer is a short, quiet and relaxed guy, and oozes intelligence. He walks around in jeans and sneakers and there’s no way you would guess that you’re facing one of today’s young literary gods. Of course it is exactly because his fame as a fiction author that ‘Eating Animals’, a nonfiction work about a less accessible and rather unpleasant subject, became such a success.

EVA: You wrote this book to tell people about what’s going on with the meat they eat. Like many vegetarians, you believe that if people would know more about how their steak and chicken breast are produced, they would eat less of those. A strange thing, however: the meat industry in the US seems to think the exact opposite. A spokesperson recently said that when consumers see the people behind their product, they’ll feel a lot more confident in buying it. 

Jonathan Safran Foer: That’s just dishonest. First of all she’s saying ‘if you meet the farmers’. She’s not saying ‘if you have exposure to the practices’. That’s a very different thing. They don’t allow people to see what they do. If that was something they genuinely believed, they would give tours of their factory farms, or at the very least they wouldn’t make it a terrorist act to enter one.

I understand that you’ve asked farmers and producers if you could visit their places but they didn’t let you in?

Let’s say I sent about a 150 letters. I got maybe 10 responses. They talked about security regulations or said things like: ‘as a practice we don’t do it. I’m sorry.’ So yes, actually nobody invited me in.

You write early on in your book that eating animals is a place where people don’t really want to go. There seem to be many progressive, well intentioned people doing all the right things and making good choices, but they totally ignore the issue of eating animals. Why do you think that is?

Yes, I come across these people all the time. As for an explanation, well, it’s not a popular thing to care about. People tend to care about things that are popular to care about. Secondly, I think people are aware of the stakes. The more resistant somebody is to talk about it, the better an indication it is that they know that they have to change, or they have to recognize their own hypocrisy. Most of the time they don’t want to do either. So they try to ignore the issue and hope that it will go away.

Or they try to rationalize the issue away. Michiko Kakutani, one of the most respected literary critics, wrote a rather negative review of your book in the New York Times. She uses the same old argument, wondering how you ‘can expend so much energy and caring on the fate of pigs and chickens, when, say, malaria kills nearly a million people a year (most of them children)’.

That is literally the only bad review in the US of this book. It’s a shame that it was in the New York Times. If I had turned that article in high school, I would have gotten a bad grade. I’m sure one can find intelligent arguments to go after the book, but that wasn’t one.

Can you give an example of an intelligent argument against your story?

You could get into a conversation about poverty and talk about the way the food system is structured and how so many people don’t have access to alternative food, for instance. For many people in the US, junk food is the only thing they can afford. Not that it’s a good argument, or a defense, but there are stumbling points. It’s at least something to talk about.

You have said repeatedly that your book is not per se an argument for vegetarianism. You are mainly writing and talking about the way we treat animals for food, without giving any opinion about the actual fact of killing them.

Animal welfare is something that can be objectively discussed. I’m comfortable saying that what I’m saying is something we all need to agree on. However, when you start talking about killing animals or not, we get into less rational territory, where we end up investigating our own deep senses into what is right and what is wrong. I have my own feelings about it. They are reflected in the fact that I wouldn’t eat meat, not even from the best farm in the world, but I’m not comfortable discussing that as something objective.

One cannot say that killing is objectively wrong? 

Killing animals is not something to be a part of. But in the case of the very best farm, the right that you are talking about is the right of an animal to continue its existence, which in a way is a strange notion. During the course of my research, I went to farms where I had a hard time putting into words what was actually wrong and on what grounds I could say to someone else that was wrong. I don’t think that the question about the morality of killing animals is the important question to ask. It is divisive and not effective. We should rather be appealing to the things that everyone agrees on. Almost all people agree that we can kill animals for food. But if you ask them if it is right to have a system where animals can barely move around, or that breeds animals that can’t reproduced sexually, it turns out that a large majority of the people will disagree with what 99% of the meat industry does.

When we talk about killing people though, it’s pretty clear that that is wrong.

Not all living things are the same, or are to be treated the same. Would you ever swipe out a cockroach or a bee that’s in your face? If you can imagine yourself squatting a mosquito, you have drawn a line. Not always for good reason. A mosquito undoubtedly has a will to live. It doesn’t want to be killed, but if you kill it, you say it’s not like other things. I think a lot of people say that humans are qualitatively different. I don’t know if I would say that, but I could swat a mosquito. It’s a blurry, complicated issue.

We do seem to have a big taboo around killing though. People are not comfortable with killing. Does that mean anything?

Certainly the great majority of people in slaughterhouses don’t have a problem with killing. And we have to face the fact that the great majority of people don’t have a problem with animals being killed, even if they don’t want to be present when it’s happening, much like they don’t want to be present at a surgery. There’s very few people who’d want to watch a surgery on a human, but that doesn’t mean that it’s wrong. Blood, organs, anatomy… it all makes us very uncomfortable.

You write about Frank Reese, a farmer who seems to run the farm that comes closest to your ideal of a farm. The guy clearly cares a lot for his animals. Do you think that after treating his animals so well during their lives, he has no problem killing them?

He does! He cries when he talks about it!

Isn’t that strange?

Yes it is. Well… he’s a strange guy.  There’s not many farmers like him.

What is your vision for the future? Where do you think we are headed?

I think it’s quite possible that in ten years the majority of meals will be vegetarian. I don’t mean the majority of people, but the majority of meals. You would see that on restaurant menus the ratio of meat versus vegetarian dishes is reversed. There will come a time in the not too distant future when we think about meat like we think about cigarettes. People will feel a little bit ashamed eating meat, and will feel a bit grossed out perhaps. They won’t do it as openly and not as brazenly as today.

Do you think we could end up with a situation in which we have only farms like Frank Reese’s?

No, there’s no way they will ever produce meat for more than a few people, relatively speaking. The important thing is working on the reduction of meat consumption, like what has happened here with the vegetarian days. How did you guys do that, by the way?

You mention that food habits have deep cultural roots. Less meat means a cultural change. What do you think has to be done to create this cultural change without losing part of our cultural identity?

You lose something but you replace it. We always had turkey at Thanksgiving, and now we don’t. But the kind of conversations we have had explaining why we don’t have the turkey are a much more valuable and interesting cultural fact than the turkey ever was.

What do you think needs to happen to make the fastest progress possible?

I would say we need to move away from an absolutist conversation. The word vegetarian shouldn’t be an identity. After talks, people come to me and they say they’ve been vegetarian for four days, since reading my book. I’m almost inclined to say: have one meal with meat a week. You know these people who were vegetarian for fifteen years. You ask them what happened and they say ‘well, I was at the airport, and there was nothing to eat, so I eat chicken, and I’ve eaten meat since then.’ What’s that about? That’s when people put the entirety of their commitment on a vegetarian identity.

 Any celebrity reactions to your book?

Nathalie Portman read the book and became vegan. And Judd Apatow, director of movies like Knocked up and Funny people wrote me an email saying ‘fuck you – you ruined my life, I used to love meat and I now I won’t eat it anymore.’

What is the most interesting reaction you got from the meat industry? 

Well, their reaction is interesting only in the way that there hasn’t been any. They haven’t responded at all. Both because they have nothing to say – I got the facts right – and because they know that expanding the conversation is the worst thing they could do. Their business model depends on people not thinking about it.

You wrote this book because you noticed you had to explain to your son why you choose to eat what you eat. Your children are vegetarian. What do you say to people who tell you that you are forcing a diet on your kids?

Everybody is doing that. Everybody makes a choice, even if their choice is no choice.

Source: EVA (Ethical Vegetarian Alternative)        vegi.info
Author: Tobias Leenaert

See more interview with Jonathan:   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gyvWKdYJQN8&feature=related

FINDING THE LIGHT – The Kingdom Within

Excerpt from Master Ching Hai Lectures

There is a better life, a more perfect life inside. Once we are perfect inside, our outside life will be perfect too. We can use our wisdom and power inside to make our work more efficient, faster and more beneficial to the world. So actually, if we want to be in any important position or to be successful in any field, we must get the proper power to work for us, not our minds. There are two levels of power: the first level, the power level, is the mind. The other higher level is all grace, love and miracles. By miracles, I don’t mean changing the weather but we can do that too!

Scientists have proven that we only use 5% of our brain. Fancy if we could use 100%! The one who can use 100% of his brain, that is a Christ, a Buddha, a Lao-tzu or whomever you believe is the greatest brain power in the world. They are the ones who know the secret power in the world. They are the ones who know the secret access to the whole kingdom of our intelligence, what we call the Kingdom of God. Everything lays within ourselves. No one has been born without this Kingdom of God, just like the waves born from the ocean. Now, is there a way to gain control of this 100% of our intelligence? Yes, there are many ways, some take longer than others, some are more difficult than others. Some people do prayers, fasting, austerities. This we read in book of ancient wisdom, how people sacrificed everything to find God. But nowadays, if we follow this rigorous path, it is too hard, too time-consuming. We cannot just go in the jungle and leave society behind. In the ancient times, people had less desires and less comforts in life. Nowadays, we have more temptations due to comfort. They had less temptations and more free time to practice and find God.

How to find God? By reverting to the principles, that is, all loving, all forgiving, all compassion and all wisdom, by repenting our previous misdeeds committed through ignorance, and by resolving not to commit them again. With such a true repentance, the light of God will sprout forth again, and all our past sins will be forgiven. That is the true baptism; not by water, but by the Holy Spirit, by the light of wisdom and logic. That is why nowadays when we are baptized by water, we do not see any light from God, and we do not feel free of our sins, wisdom is not opened for us, and deep repentance is not evoked in our souls.

It is not as difficult to find God as it is to make money, I may tell you! When I was earning money, it was very difficult, working very hard 8 to 10 hours a day, and even that we squander away very fast. But if we are careful, we can make ends meet and save a little bit more for old age. But if we find the Kingdom of God, it lasts forever. Whatever intelligence, wisdom, happiness, joy we find, it will always be ours, never, ever will it be squandered way, never, ever can anyone steal it away from us.

Everyone has the inborn heaven because the heaven is within us. Everyone has it and can find it. This I may assure you, that you may find it also, and immediately. The moment you want it you will get is as quickly as that. But this nature has to be nourished every day, just like seeds need to be watered in order to grow. You can know your Buddha nature today, but you will become Buddha after some practice. Because we have been ignorant for so long, it takes a long, long time to wash out our habits, our lack of confidence in ourselves. We are used to people telling us what to do, that we are sinful, etc. After we get enlightened our head becomes clearer, we will experience how great we are, we will become more confident. We will know day after day with the practice of the Quan Yin Method that we are truly Christ, Christ-like or God-like, because God made man in His own image. He didn’t make man to become a slave, we and God are made of the same essence, the only difference is whether or not we find it. God make everyone equally, some people found it and became great like Christ, like Buddha, and others have not found it and groveled in darkness life after life.

For more information, please visit:  http://www.godsdirectcontact.org