I often talk about being a joyful vegan, because it reflects the truth of my experience. In my opinion, to advocate for animals and veganism is to advocate for nonviolence and peace. And, not surprisingly, peace is the byproduct of a vegan lifestyle. It is what you give, create and get back. It is an unexpected gift.

There’s a very deep peace of mind that comes from disconnecting yourself with the inherent violence of turning beautiful, living, feeling beings into butchered bodies. To say "no" to that—to remove yourself from the horror, from the slaughter that many of us turn away from releases you from that burden of guilt that so many of us experience — that low, constant, underlying hum that causes us to make every excuse in the book to justify our actions, in order to release us from our complicity. To be released from that is nothing short of liberating - and joy-inducing.

Several years ago, I came across an essay that reflected this very perception. It’s written by Robert Bass, Ph.D., a philosophy professor who has given me his permission to reprint his essay. Everything below is his words, but I celebrate them as if they were my own. There are so many misconceptions about what it means to "be vegan," and I think this essay so eloquently debunks some myths.

"If you look at a photographic negative, the colors are reversed, nothing seems quite as it should, and the image may be unrecognizable. Once you see the picture developed, you recognize the face of your best friend.

That’s a bit like a common impression of vegans. We don’t eat dead animals. Or their products. Pork and beef, seafood and fowl are out. So are milk and cheese, eggs and caviar. And it doesn’t stop with what we don’t eat. We try to avoid leather and wool and fur. We don’t use them to cover our bodies or our furniture or our floors. It sounds like a long list of negatives, of don’ts: Thou shalt not this; thou shalt not that. Why would anybody want that?

You get a better picture by reversing the colors, developing the negative. The incomprehensible prohibitions turn out to be the boundaries of something positive, visible in its true colors and proper proportions. Instead of a list of don’ts, we see an abundance of healthy, delicious foods, with plenty of options for home and clothes and personal care. We do not grudgingly practice a creed of self-denial. We select from an embarassment of riches.

But that is still just a flat, two-dimensional picture instead of the solid, three-dimensional reality. At the heart of being vegan is a kind of compassionate awareness. We share this planet not only with billions of fellow human beings, but also with uncounted billions upon billions of other creatures, with lives, wants, enjoyment and suffering as real as our own. Humans have had and used the power to crowd them out, push them aside, sometimes driving them to extinction, and often, making them into tools for our use, servitors of our desires, food for our tables, clothes for our backs.

As vegans, we look, we pay attention, we see the unnecessary suffering imposed on our fellow creatures. We respond in compassion, refusing to pretend that might makes right, refusing to turn away and ignore what we know. The vegan message is ultimately very simple:

Look. Pay attention. See the unnecessary death and suffering. We don’t have to contribute or help to keep it going. We can stop being a part of this. And so, that’s what we try to do."

It reminds me of B.R. Myers’ fantastic review ("Hard to Swallow") of Michael Pollan’s book, The Omnivore’s Dillemma, in which he asks the question, "If it is so natural to kill and eat animals, and so sentimental to think otherwise, why is the vegetarian the only one who can stomach the details?" I would rather have my eyes wide open than return to the sleep of my meat-eating days."