CHAPTER 4 SATYA Telling the Truth
If people knew the truth about how badly animals are treated in today’s factory farms, if people knew how completely confined and immobilized these creatures are for their entire lives, if people knew how severe and unrelenting is the cruelty these animals are forced to endure, there would be change. If people knew, but too many of us choose to look the other way, to keep the veil in place, to remain unconscious and caught in the cultural trance. That way, we are more comfortable. That way is convenient. That way, we don’t have to risk too much. This is how we keep ourselves asleep.
—JOHN ROBBINS
Satya means “truthfulness.” What happens when one becomes established in truth?
satya-pratiṣṭhāyāṁ kriyā-phalāśrayatvam PYS II.36
When one does not defile one’s speech with lies, the words one says are listened to and acted upon in a positive and immediate manner. The speaker will be able to say what they mean. What one says comes true.
- satya: truth
- pratishthayam: being established or grounded in
- kriya: purifying action
- phala: fruit, fruition, to come to pass
- ashrayatvam: dependency
TREACHERY AND DECEIT WERE THE methods used initially, thousands of years ago, to “domesticate” animals: Kill the parents, steal the baby, raise the orphan as if it were your own child. Thus, the baby bonds to you and grows up thinking it is part of your family. In this way, animals become dependent on you and trust you. You can easily exploit them—shear them, milk them, use them to make more babies. Then, when you have exhausted their usefulness to you, you kill them and—the final humiliation—eat them. This master/slave relationship began by deceiving baby animals and continues to this day.
When the natural bond that occurs between child and parent is dissolved, the child is not able to develop in a healthy way, and physical and psychological breakdowns are inevitable. The child remains dysfunctional, with a distorted perception of itself and others. This vulnerability makes it more easily manipulated by its oppressors. It is easier to manipulate others when you take away their personhood and see them as objects.
Life on a farm has never been a happy, healthy family experience for the animals. Even before the onset of factory farms, a farm was a place to raise and harvest animals. In agriculture, seeds are planted with the intention of reaping crops. Farm animals are treated like vegetables—as if they had the feelings of vegetables. Farms are breeding facilities, where rape and manipulation are common daily procedures. Farm animals are not allowed to develop normal relationships with others of their kind. The cow, pig, or ewe, for instance, will never actually have the chance to have a relationship with the male whose seed will father her children. She never even gets to have a relationship with the children she will give birth to. In most cases, she isn’t even allowed to see or to touch her babies. She is kept chained to a stall looking straight ahead or, in the case of pigs, strapped down on her side on a concrete floor, immobilized as she gives birth and for the short time that she nurses her piglets.
The consumer is not told the truth about where food comes from. Instead, we are told lies. The meat and dairy industries spend millions of dollars on advertising to deceive us. Because these industries form the foundation of our economic system, government agencies also don’t want the public to know. There are laws now protecting the animal-user industries from citizen scrutiny, and it is becoming harder and harder for animal rights groups to gain access to factory farms or slaughterhouses to film or take photographs. The few pictures and pieces of film footage that do exist and are available for public view are very threatening to the animal-user industries. Why? Because in our culture, seeing is believing, and these films and pictures show the truth, a truth that once seen is impossible to deny. We have a worldwide culture of denial when it comes to our treatment of animals. No one wants to talk about it. In fact, it is considered taboo to speak of it, as it may spoil one’s appetite.
When advertising is employed to sell meat, milk, and eggs, pictures of happy animals enjoying family life on the farm are used: calves grazing beside their mothers in lush green fields or cute, fluffy baby chicks surrounding a doting mother hen in a country barnyard. The truth is that in factory farms, and in farms in general, mothers are never allowed to be with their babies. Images like this are false advertising. Although in our hearts we know the truth about how food animals are being used, we lie to ourselves. We perpetuate this untruth when we lie to our children and fail to encourage them to investigate the truth.
The more we lie to others, the more others will lie to us. Eventually, it becomes quite normal to communicate through lying, never really saying what we mean or doing what we say.
Advertising and various media use lies to keep us convinced that we must continue to enslave animals, to use and exploit them, and to eat their meat. This is a form of lying, a violation of the power of speech that destroys any chance of creating an atmosphere of satya, or truthfulness. This fragmentation of body, mind, and speech prevents the development of dharana, the ability of the mind to concentrate, and ultimately blocks the ability to meditate and merge with blissful transcendental reality. The ability to concentrate is a difficult enough practice for most people, regardless of whether they are vegans. Meat eaters who try to meditate have to deal with that obstacle, not to mention the paranoia and fear they experience as a result of terrorizing others.
Some meat eaters say they are peaceful people and would never hurt anyone—they didn’t kill the animal; they’re just eating what is convenient. This type of thinking is an example of how disempowered and disconnected most of the carnivorous members of our culture feel. They have been convinced that what they do doesn’t really matter in the larger scheme of things. After all, it is only my lunch—just a piece of ham between two slices of bread; what harm could that do?
The fact is that when we buy the meat of an animal, we are the ones who have signed his or her death sentence. When a hit man is paid to murder someone, should we view the person who hired him as innocent and put the blame solely on the hired gun? If we are buying and eating meat and dairy products, then the slaughterhouse workers, meat packers, and factory farm workers are all working for us. If everyone in the world woke up tomorrow and refused to buy meat and dairy products, they would no longer be lucrative industries, which is the only reason that they exist.
Part of the process of transitioning into living more honestly is to hold yourself accountable for the things you do. When we stop blaming others for our actions, we take a giant step toward freeing ourselves from low self-esteem, which arises through continuously relinquishing our decision-making power to others.
I am very close with a family I have known for years. I have seen the children grow up. The parents have always respected my veganism, and when I arrive for a visit, the whole family adopts a vegan diet for at least the time I am with them. Normally, they aren’t vegans and eat meat. One summer when I was visiting, one of the children, who was then a teenager, asked me why I am a vegan. I replied that I wanted to contribute to peace on this planet and not more violence. “So do I,” he exclaimed. “You know me; I’m a very peaceful person, but I do eat meat. What does eating meat have to do with peace?”
“Eating animals is a violent act,” I replied.
“Only if you kill the animal,” he argued, “and I don’t kill animals. I would never kill an animal or go hunting or hurt anyone. I just eat them, and someone else kills them.”
“But you are the one paying for someone else to kill them. Doesn’t that make you responsible?” I asked him.
“No,” he replied, “because I don’t buy the groceries. My parents do, not me.”
This is not an isolated incident. Such feelings are commonplace in our hierarchical, structured societies. Accountability for one’s actions is less important than doing what we are told or obediently going along with the crowd and never questioning. We are told over and over again that the actions of individuals are not important to the whole scheme.
The Perils of Obedience
PSYCHOLOGIST STANLEY MILGRAM CONDUCTED A famous experiment in obedience at Yale University in the 1960s. It was a study of how obedience, as a deeply ingrained behavior in our culture, can override ethics. The experiment measured the willingness of study participants to obey an authority figure, who instructed them to perform acts that conflicted with their personal conscience.
In his experiment, two people come to a psychology laboratory to take part in a study. One of them is designated a “teacher,” the other a “learner.” The experimenter explains that the study is concerned with the effects of punishment on learning. The learner is conducted into a room and strapped into a chair with what appears to be an electrode attached to his wrist. He is told that he will be read lists of simple word pairs by the teacher and that he will then be tested on his ability to remember the second word of a pair when he hears the first one again. Whenever he makes an error, the teacher will administer electric shocks of increasing intensity by pulling on a lever.
The teacher is a genuinely naive subject. The learner is actually an actor who receives no shock at all but pretends to. The learner sitting in the chair is in full view of the teacher. When the learner begins to miss words, the teacher pulls the lever to administer a shock.
When the actor/learner convulsed and appeared to be really suffering, and even screaming, the teacher would inevitably turn to the experimenter and ask to stop the experiment. The experimenter would always respond by insisting that the teacher continue with the experiment. The actor/learner would express pain more dramatically, and the teacher would again turn to the experimenter to ask whether the experiment should be halted. The experimenter would insist firmly that the teacher must complete the experiment.
Most of the subjects who participated in the experiment continued to shock the learner even while protesting to the experimenter that they felt what they were doing was unethical. They obeyed the experimenter in spite of their own feelings.
The experiments began in July 1961, three months after the start of the trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann. Milgram said that he devised his experiment to question whether it was possible that Eichmann and his accomplices were just following orders.
“The question arises as to whether there is any connection between what we have studied in the laboratory and the forms of obedience we so deplored in the Nazi epoch,” he wrote in the preface to his book, Obedience to Authority. “The essence of obedience consists in the fact that a person comes to view himself as the instrument for carrying out another person’s wishes, and he therefore no longer regards himself as responsible for his actions.”41
“Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process,” Milgram wrote in a magazine article. “Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.”42
“Even Eichmann was sickened when he toured the concentration camps, but he had only to sit at a desk and shuffle papers,” he observed in Obedience to Authority. “At the same time, the man in the camp who actually dropped the Zyklon B into the gas chambers was able to justify his behavior on the ground that he was only following orders from above. Thus there is a fragmentation of the total human act. No one man decides to carry out the evil act and is confronted with its consequences. The person who assumes full responsibility for the act has evaporated. Perhaps this is the most common characteristic of socially organized evil in modern society.”43 In Milgram’s experiment, 65 percent of the people tested did administer the highest voltage of electric shocks.
Interestingly, in a similar experiment conducted during the early sixties with rhesus monkeys (also known as macaques) instead of human subjects, the majority of the monkeys refrained from operating a device for securing food if it caused another monkey to suffer an electric shock.44 One description of the experiment reads, “In a laboratory setting, macaques were fed if they were willing to pull a chain and electrically shock an unrelated macaque whose agony was in plain view through a one-way mirror. Otherwise, they starved. After learning the ropes, the monkeys frequently refused to pull the chain; in one experiment, only 13 percent would do so—87 percent preferred to go hungry. One macaque went without food for nearly two weeks rather than hurt its fellow. Macaques who had themselves been shocked in previous experiments were even less willing to pull the chain. The relative social status or gender of the macaques had little bearing on their reluctance to hurt others.… By conventional human standards, these macaques—who have never gone to Sunday school, never heard of the Ten Commandments, never squirmed through a single junior high school civics lesson—seem exemplary in their moral grounding and their courageous resistance to evil.”45
In their behavior toward animals, all men are Nazis; for the animals, it is an eternal Treblinka.
—ISAAC BASHEVIS SINGER
Through the practices of yoga, we begin to connect to a place of conscience, which provides us with information about the possible outcome of our actions. To act from conscience is to act from independence—from being dependent inward. That place, which some call the heart, is our connection to the greater world, or the greater heart. When we act out of conscience, our actions are never merely self-serving; they serve the whole. As the Milgram experiment shows, our cultural conditioning can be so strong that it disconnects us from our heart, leading to a feeling of disempowerment. We can become programmed to act in a way that is fragmented and not true to ourselves. To do something because everybody else does it is not a good enough reason. To do it because we believe God told us to do it is not a good enough reason either. To live by violence and then to deny that you do is to live a lie. Living a lie causes a deep fissure in the human psyche. Yoga seeks to heal that fissure.
One of the ways you can tell if you are making progress in yoga, especially hatha yoga, is by observing your own voice. Through regular practice, you will find you are able to adjust the volume and pitch of your voice so you can be heard and understood, but most importantly, you will be able to say what you mean and mean what you say. When this happens, it is an indication that the disease of disconnection is beginning to be healed. You will be increasingly able to articulate with integrity from a place of deep universal connectedness rather than isolation.
It is thought of as quite normal these days for people to say one thing while thinking something else, and then do a contradictory third thing. One underlying cause of this symptom is that we have conditioned ourselves to disconnect from the reality of how we view and treat animals.
Most of us say we want peace, equality, and freedom for all, but our actions say something entirely different as we bite into a hamburger or order an ice cream cone, wear a fur coat to an antiwar demonstration, or serve hot dogs to our children. Once you become more aware, there’s simply no way to not notice these everyday hypocrisies, these gaps in awareness justified by group behavior and the culture of “dis-ease.”
By contemplating these issues with sincerity, you will realize that they are just an outgrowth of our ancient animal slave-based culture, which surrounds all of us at every turn. This disconnection between one’s feelings or heartfelt beliefs and what one says and does stems from a patriarchal herding culture as old as Babylon. It may be interesting to note that Sumer, considered the cradle of Western civilization, is where both the herding of animals and the development of written language originated. The Sumerian cuneiform tablets are among the oldest written literature existing. This vast literature, mostly in poetic form, tells of man’s conquest of animals and of nature and his move toward urban societies built on a hierarchical system of government, religion, and economics stemming from animal slavery.
For thousands of years, we have conditioned ourselves to do things we know in our hearts are morally wrong; yet we do them because we have been told to do so by the authority figures in our lives. We have been told that life is hard, and that in some situations we simply must buck up and do them anyway, even though they are unpleasant—like killing animals. We live a double standard: We don’t want to tell our children where their food is coming from and don’t want to do the killing, but we don’t question the lie at the core of our abusive treatment of animals. The truth is that we don’t have to hurt them, kill them, or eat them to be happy, healthy, and wise, but in order to become aware of that, we must decondition ourselves and explore ways to live and act from a place of the heart. As Stanley Milgram suggests, “It may be that we are puppets—controlled by the strings of society. But at least we are puppets with perception, with awareness. And perhaps our awareness is the first step to our liberation.”
In The Animals Film, the filmmaker asked random people on the street the question “Do you like animals?” One woman gave the very revealing answer “Animals? I love animals!” Then he asked, “Do you eat animals?” The woman responded incredulously, “Eat animals? Yes. Doesn’t everybody?” The filmmaker then asked, “But you said you loved animals. Is there a contradiction there?” To which the woman replied, “Well, I’d like to live by my principles, but I don’t, ’cause we gotta eat, don’t we?”
The industries that exploit animals create self-serving euphemisms to conceal the truth of their actions. A survey of your local supermarket will turn up such terms as “humanely slaughtered” and “raised according to animal welfare standards” on packages of meat and cartons of eggs. If you look up humane in a dictionary, you will find a definition like “characterized by compassion, sympathy, kindness, mercy, or consideration for other human beings or animals.” If you look up welfare, you might find “concerned for another’s health, happiness, and well-being.”
These industries have become experts at what Tom Regan refers to as “Humpty-Dumpty talk” in his book Empty Cages.46 In Lewis Carroll’s classic Through the Looking Glass, when Alice comes across the egg, Humpty-Dumpty, they have a conversation in which Alice becomes frustrated with Humpty’s way of defining things. He uses words to mean something totally different from what they actually mean. When Alice confronts him with this, he says, “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”
We, in turn, use Humpty-Dumpty talk to lie to our children about what we are really feeding them, and they grow up learning that no one has to be honest about anything. They are given the message that denial, not honesty, is valued and should be cultivated. We override our children’s natural sense of compassion by showing them pictures on packages of meat of cute animals dressed up and happy, or cartoons of pigs eating ribs, cows offering ice cream sundaes, or smiling burgers bouncing up and down in a burger garden saying, “Eat me, please!”
If we don’t want to be taken in by the lies people tell us, we can begin to examine our own speech and ask ourselves if we are really saying what we mean. If we say we want peace on Earth, are we willing to do what is necessary to create it? Are we willing to speak truthfully at every turn and be honest with others and ourselves? This is difficult work, but once begun, it becomes easier with practice. It is, like yoga itself, a lifelong effort.
If we want others to speak well of us, are we willing to stop gossiping, judging, and blaming others? True or not, we humans tend to assume we are superior to other animals because we have the ability to speak. Yet scientists have observed that other animals can and do speak, but in languages that we cannot understand. All of nature communicates. Why is it that we cannot hear what she is saying? We want so much for others to hear us. Half the effort in speaking truthfully lies in listening well. Are we listening to the anguished cries of the animals in factory farms or the shrieks of the slaughtered?
If we grew up eating meat and dairy products, then our own bodies have been formed from animals whose voices we had a hand in silencing when they were locked away to cry on their own in lonely warehouses and had their throats cut at the time of slaughter. How might this have an impact on our own ability to speak truthfully—and to be heard?
I have observed in my years of teaching yoga that many students are quite shy when it comes to speaking in public, let alone singing or chanting mantras. Shyness could be seen as a form of vanity because it exists when we are thinking of ourselves and our feelings and not the feelings of the people in front of us. It lacks empathy and comes from a deep self-consciousness and self-absorption, which stems from feeling separate.
Why do so many of us feel so shy? Musician and activist Michael Franti says that the biggest fear people have is the fear of having to speak in public and that fear is second only to the fear of having to sing in public. But why? Some people blame early childhood experiences; perhaps teachers, parents, or siblings silenced them with harsh judgmental words like “Shut up! You can’t carry a tune,” or “You’re no Pavarotti or Elvis Presley!” These types of experiences are by no means rare in our culture but might be viewed as symptoms rather than causes.
If we look more deeply at some of our more indigenous human relatives who have not distanced themselves so far from nature and live more closely with wild animals, we find societies in which singing and dancing are considered normal everyday activities for every member of the tribe. Within so-called uncivilized tribal societies, singing and dancing is not a performance art or “dis-play” but is engaged in as actual play—a form of communication with life, rather than as a commodity to be taken to the market place. Have we traded our natural musical abilities, which would allow us to express ourselves freely or even wildly in song and dance, for a more domesticated version of ourselves?
Most of us unconsciously accept that our “civilized” way of life is better than the wild, savage version. After all, we have been told this over and over again over countless lifetimes. We, in turn, pass on these unexamined assumptions to our children, unaware that we may be lying to them and to ourselves. We don’t question the results of a 10,000-year war on animals, nature, and all that is wild. Yet our domesticated civilized life has been bought at great cost not only to nature and the animals but also to ourselves. As we have domesticated animals and robbed them of their wildness, we have become domesticated ourselves and lost our natural ability to be expressive and spontaneous. We have become nervous, neurotic, self-conscious, and—at the same time—vain and arrogant.
I once visited an animal sanctuary in South Carolina, which rescues exotic animals from abusive situations in circuses, sideshows, theme parks, and the like and provides them with a fairly safe haven. I say “fairly” because they are still captive, but at least they are spared the degradation of travel and performance. When I first arrived, the owner was very excited to give me a tour and introduce me to some of the lions, tigers, elephants, baboons, chimpanzees, zebras, bears, wolves, and mountain lions (to name but a few). He took me to the “nursery” to show me the babies and said, “My commitment is to, number one, help these animals get over their fear of humans and, number two, help them get over their fear of each other.”
The nursery was a fenced-in yard with a large barn attached. Every morning, he brought all the babies together to play and returned them to their parents in the afternoon. I was immediately greeted by two five-month-old tigers, who ran to me, tumbling over themselves in the process. The tigers shared their play space with a baby mountain lion, a baby bear named Ursula, and Bambina, a gentle, big-eyed, two-month-old fawn. They all seemed to be quite chummy with one another, but that wasn’t the most extraordinary thing that struck me as I sat on the ground surrounded by these furry children. It was the cacophony of voices: They all seemed to be speaking at once. From my perspective, it appeared that they were either in a continuous dialogue with one another, mumbling to themselves, or just talking and singing for the sake of it.
I was literally dumbstruck, as I had ignorantly assumed that all animals were basically mute and only let out a howl, bark, or meow on occasion, like the pet dogs and cats I had known (except for the Siamese cats I have had the privilege of living with, who normally do engage in lengthy conversation and commentary on life).
From this experience, I gained an insight about how our domestication of animals and its repression of all their natural tendencies might have led to a repression of their voices, causing them to become mute. The common practice used in all situations where there is slavery is to separate the babies from their parents while they are very young. The babies are not allowed to develop communication and speaking skills, as they would have if they had been allowed to be tutored by their parents. Wild animals, in contrast, talk a lot and without inhibition. Could there be a connection between how we have treated animals and our own inability to speak or sing freely?
In his book Dominion, Matthew Scully recounts, “I think of a fellow I know, in many respects devout and conscientious, who recently tried to shock me with a story about a laboratory (in Indiana, as I recall) where, to silence the yapping of some sixty dogs, the researchers cut out the vocal cords of each one. The dogs still try to bark, my colleague told me, as if relating some hilarious punchline, only it looks like someone has pressed the mute button, and now the scientists can go about their work in peace and quiet. Where does this spirit come from, that can laugh at such a thing?”47
As yoga practitioners, we come to a time in our lives when we begin to question whether what we have been told is true, including the assumptions we hold about ourselves and the world around us. The fact that you have begun a yoga practice is evidence that you have the courage to embark on a deep self-reflective quest. Through such self-reflection, you will encounter blockages to your creativity and self-expression. It is during those crucial moments, while engaged in asana or meditation practice, that it is important not to harbor negative thoughts. Do not blame others or feel guilty, inadequate, or overwhelmed. Instead, allow the past karmic residue to arise, and let it go with each passing breath. Through steady practice (abhyasa), you will experience for yourself what is true, and all the lies you have been told, even those you have told, will fade away in the light of the greater truth of your true potential.
As we embrace the practice of satya, our speech becomes purified, and we are able to fearlessly say what we mean and mean what we say. Others cease lying to us and begin to perceive us as people with integrity; they listen to us and take our words seriously. What we say comes true. As Mahatma Gandhi suggested, we “become the change we wish to see in the world.”
41 Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority (New York: HarperCollins, 1974), xviii.
42 Stanley Milgram, “The Perils of Obedience,” Harper’s, December 1973, https://harpers.org/archive/1973/12/the-perils-of-obedience.
43 Stanley Milgram. Obedience to Authority, reprint ed. (New York: Harper Perennial, 2009), ii.
44 Jules Masserman, Stanley Wechkin, and William Terris, “Altruistic Behavior in Rhesus Monkeys,” American Journal of Psychiatry 121(6) (1964): 584–585, https://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi/abs/10.1176/ajp.121.6.584.
45 Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan. Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (New York: Ballantine, 1992), 117.
46 Tom Regan. Empty Cages: Facing the Challenge of Animal Rights (Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004), 78.
47 Matthew Scully. Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy (New York: St. Martin’s, 2002), 18.