Why be vegetarian?
Meditationtime Forum Post
Date: Posted 7 years before Aug 11, 2018
MiBeloved 7 years ago
Someone asked about vegetarian diet, the reason for it, as to whether it is religion or what.
It is an effort to protect the self from taking birth in lower species.
The psychology adapts according to habits, of which diet happens to be a primal one.
Any of the spirits can take a body in any other species of life, because all the spirits are adaptable.
Thus to protect oneself from accidentally or impulsively being attracted to an animal species after leaving the present body, one has to cultivate habits which give one the required resistance to avoid animal wombs
The only thing that protects a person from animal birth is non-animal habits. This is because in the interim state after leaving the body, one senses things on the basis of instinct. One does not usually have any objective say in what will happen regarding where one will take birth. So if one has an instinct for eating and living like an animal that there is a likelihood that one might come out in the next life as a kitten or puppy and just like in this life, one cannot consciously recall what happened as an embryo and as a newborn baby, one will be in the same ignorance again.
Another sure way to get an animal body is to keep animals as pets. This is very good for the animal since it gives the animal something to aim for which is higher than its present body status, but for the human being who keeps the animal it is a danger, because upon passing if the affection continues, then the human might enter an animal parent body and develop an embryo there.
In one of the books from India, there is a narration about a great yogi named Bharata, who was living in isolation doing his spiritual practices with intentions to go to higher dimensions after death. But once when a tiger roared near his place, a pregnant deer got scared, and leaped across a stream. During the action, the doe's body delivered a fawn. Since the doe ran for its life, it lost the fawn and Bharata took a mind to raising the animal.
In his next life the result of this was that he took the next body as a fawn. Even in that form, he had inclinations to yoga but could not practice and so he used to be around the huts of yogis, trying to chew the pages of their palm leaves books.
So that is another method of taking animal birth after a human birth. There are many other ways of doing this, according to the psychological instincts one develops and according to the route of one's emotions.
Right now all over the world, there has been a great increase in animals living inside human premises. Humans always had pets but living inside the human premises has increased. This tells us that the animals are desperate for human birth. Perhaps because human beings over the past 300 years at least have wiped out the animals and threaten their very survival. So the animals are scared and want to move over into the human species. But the problem with this is that there might also be a reversal, where humans are taking animal bodies because of their affiliation with animal pets. And of course if that happens then the animals will be more demanding and more influential in causing humans to treat animal-pet bodies as human bodies or as having the same value as human bodies. And we are seeing this in the developed world.
Many people have opted out on children and have cared for pets instead. And it may be that providence will reward them by causing them to take the next body as an animal. It would be a fair exchange, I am sure you all agree.
People may get the idea that I am a vegetarian because of religious stipulation, but actually I do not give a fig about religion. I am concerned only about where I will go when this body is confiscated by nature. And I sure am not going to voluntarily do anything that will cause nature to guide me into an animal womb. I will do everything in my power to discourage nature from achieving that.
Buddha admitted to having many animal bodies in the past, as well as other bodies, and he saw this in his deep meditations. His view is that it was all mental suffering. He did not think that it was cool. I am simply not interested in it. I don’t even care to be a human being what to speak of being an animal in the next life, but as a last resort, if there is no alternative, I would prefer a human birth.
I could have easily raised animals instead of human babies. In fact I had dairy goats and two donkeys when we lived in Minnesota. Sir Paul can vouch for this. The dairy goats were for milk, and the intention with the donkeys were to use them as draught animals.
I never kept an animal as a pet, except that humans are also animals, and I kept four children. I am looking away even from those four children because I want to be in the divine world. So there is no question of my adopting any animals. If anything, I will advice students about how to effectively and efficiently take care of their social obligation in caring for infants.
Diet is only a part of the method for avoiding animal birth, but it is an important step in that direction. People who have astral projected know fully well that they are going to survive in a psychological form after this body dies. But they must also understand that the psychology is highly adaptive and it can assume animal habits in a jiffy.
I have no objection to anyone eating flesh. My father used to tell us stories about snakes, turtles and many other creatures as part of his diet when he was in the Amazonian forest diving for gold as a young man. I personally think that eating flesh is great because by doing that one gets to explore all the various types of taste which are available and one gets to polish one’s predatory instincts by cooking the flesh instead of eating it raw as the big cats and even some aborigines do. Cooking flesh before eating it is an upgrade from the animal world and is a hallmark of having entered the human species.
But for me personally, I am not interested in exploring all those avenues of experience. I ate flesh as a child, because of the parental situation but it is not my thing. I am not into it. I don’t want to be stuck down here in the animal world which includes the human scene.
If you get something out of it, then go ahead and do it. Aleister Crowley who was regarded as the Devil by Christians, left us with one important line which is:
Do what Thou Wilt Shall Be the Whole Law!
What he was trying to say is that if you can get away with it, then do it. At least until you can understand how it will hurt you.
Nature is the Teacher and she shows us the good way and the bad way, the way which will hurt us and the way which will really free us. So if she gives us some allowance and we take it and then find out that it is hurting us, we will eventually stop. Eventually here is an interesting word!!
There is much about diet throughout my books but this verse below from the Brahma Yoga Bhagavad Gita, is a sample of the information:
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Thus, O son of Kuntī, entering the wombs of the wicked people, the blockheads, after not associating with Me in birth after birth, traverse the lowest route of transmigration. (16.20)
Siddha Swami’s Commentary:
Since the living entitles are hitched to a set of psychological equipments, they are to an extent limited to what such equipments allow them to perceive. Thus if one gets into a lower species of life, one will develop lowly priorities, which to one's senses, may appear as a high order of preferences. If for instance one enters the species of the big cats, like the lions and tigers, one's intellect will be inclined to analyzing methods of catching herbivores like deer and cattle. Using the intellect in that way, one will feel superior to other life forms which are not obsessed with such methods of killing other species for food. Thus even though the same intellect may be used for earning one's way to liberation and divine association, one will have no idea of such usage.
A living entity who has a leonine form in one life time, will take with him his intellect, mind space, emotional and sensual energies, along with his memory when he transmigrates to any other life form. Even if he attains the form of a human being, he will still do so with the same intellect he used in the lower species. One must know that there is no change in the psychological equipments even though there might be a change in the gross body. The subtle body adapts to any new gross form one takes but that subtle form is not changed for a new one. It is therefore important to take up the task of reforming the subtle form, since it is the same form one will use through the duration of the creation.
One remains in a lower form or goes to an even lower species, through the method of becoming addicted to the senses of the subtle body. For then, whatever is shown to one by such senses, becomes one's basis for the next transmigration. Unless one can curb the subtle body so that its quest for lower gratifications is eliminated, one will have to enter lower life forms.
