This article from a few months ago caught my eye. I don’t know how reliable the inference is–“beware the single study”–but it got me thinking.
Meat, when it is meat, is dead. The animal or enemy has already been killed. For this reason, it would seem logical that we have something hard wired in us to recognize that, to react on a bioloogical, mechanical level. You have on the one sided the capability of arousal in combat, then the following relaxation upon victory. No doubt an addiction to this basic process has fueled and even caused many wars. Churchill said, echoing many others, that “nothing is as exhilirating as to be shot at without effect.” He himself had killed at least five men, and likely quite a few more, particularly once you factor in his stint in the trenches in WW1.
Anyway, me being me, that made me think of the Tibetan Chod tradition, and Tantrism more generally. As I understand the matter–and I am no expert, and one would expect much of this to be orally tranmitted–the intent is to combine morbid settings with unconditional love. You sit yourself in a graveyard, with bodies, and offer the spirits your own love and self. Tibetans use human bones for many of their instruments and in amulets and other things.
There is a conflict in all of us between the self that in many respects is like a dog seeing meat, and our potentially higher spiritual selves. I do not deny much of who we are is the result of our biological–which is to say evolutionary–heritage. This is the machine-like part of us. This is the part that responds to meat.
But in my view we are also capable of what I call non-statistical coherence, which is to say we are capable of choice, since our minds and brains are not the same thing. We can present to ourselves images that once evoked one pathway–meat satisfies a lust to kill–and consciously overlay that pathway with another, in which we ourselves become the meat, for spirits. This, at any rate, appears to be what is intended with this practice.
I have read other treatments of it elsewherer–as usual Wikipedia is both available and not very good–in which it was emphasized that unless you had the power to love deeply and without reservation all beings, then this practice could destroy you. You must have the inner light to avoid being taken by the darkness you consciously embrace.
This is a bit out there, but hell I have fun. Do with this what you will.