Preface

VEGETARIANISM AND SPIRITUALITY
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I

 am not vegetarian as a result of any belief or craze or  fashion. For me it is conscious choice that emerged out of my deep understanding of consciousness and meditation. For me vegetarianism is the by-product of meditation. As meditation deepens one naturally tends to be vegetarian.

For Patanjali vegetarianism is not a moralist cult. Instead it is a scientific method. When you eat meat you are not only taking food, you are allowing a certain animal from which the meat has come to enter in you. The meat was part of a particular body. The meat was part of a particular instinct pattern.

The meat was the animal just few hours before, and that meat carries all the impressions and all the habits of the animal. When you are eating meat your many attitudes will be affected by it. And if you are sensitive you can become aware that whenever you eat certain things, certain changes immediately come.

You can take alcohol and then you are not the same. Immediately a new personality has come in. Alcohol cannot create a personality, but it changes your body pattern. The body chemistry is changed. With the change of the body chemistry, the mind has to change its pattern and when the mind changes pattern a new personality has come in.

The change of food is bound to change the qualities of your physical body. Food is not just energy it is also a qualitative thing. Food is not just a fuel, it contributes more than fuel. Food gives you either transparency, or non-transparency. The insight into this phenomenon can transform, and you can have altogether a different type of body. And it is not so difficult to change this body, because the body is a flux, every moment it goes on changing itself. Human body is a process and not a static thing. The moment you came here, you had another body. Now the body has changed. It is changing constantly, every moment. It is river-like, moving and changing ant not a static thing.

Quite often you wonder what kind of food is right. Indeed food is right and suitable if it is non-gravitational. If you can feel non-physical in it, it is good. Really, the body is felt only when it is heavy. When you have the feeling of heaviness inside, only then you feel the body. When the body is not heavy with wrong foods, you are bodiless. That is why when the body is diseased, when the body is ill, you feel it. However when it is healthy, you do not feel it. You feel your head only when there is a headache. And when there is no headache, there is no head.

    

Remember the quality of food influences the mind. The mind feeds on the food consumed. Your food is not just food instead it is you. What you eat, you become. That is why Hindus say ‘Food is consciousness.’ Food determines you thinking and behavior pattern. If you eat something which is fundamentally based on murder, on violence, you cannot rise above the law of necessity. You will remain more or less an animal. The human is born when you start moving above the animals, when you start doing something to yourself that no animal can do.

Vegetarianism is a conscious and deliberate effort, to get out of the heaviness that keeps you tethered to the earth so that you can fly. Only then the flight from the alone to the alone becomes possible.

The lighter the food, the deeper goes the meditation. The grosser the food meditation becomes more and more difficult.

Vegetarianism is not religion. It is a way of life that blossoms in you with the fruition of meditation. Neither George Bernard Shaw knows anything about meditation, nor does his Fabian Society. They are just eccentric people who want to do something different from everybody else so they look better, ok higher, and holier. Vegetarianism is their philosophy.

Vegetarianism is not my philosophy. Instead vegetarianism is simply a by-product. I do not insist upon it. I insist upon meditation. Be more alert, silent, joyful, ecstatic, and find your innermost center. Many things will follow of their own accord. And when they come of their own accord, there is no repression, fight, hardship, or torture of any kind. Instead there is joy and bliss.

But if you live vegetarianism as a religion or a philosophy, you will be continually hankering for meat, continually thinking, dreaming of meat, and your vegetarianism will be just a decoration for your ego.

With me, meditation is the only essential religion. However this is what you will find around you. Someone enters yoga or any such thing the first thing he imposes on is that he has to leave meat-eating. This is repression. And then one day the craving is intensified and he begins meat-eating under many pretexts.

When it is the byproduct of meditation then everything that follows it is virtue, because it comes of its own accord. You do not have to drag it. You do not have to discipline yourself for it. I have nothing to do with vegetarianism, but I know that if you meditate you are going to grow new perceptivity, new sensitivity, and you cannot kill animals.

Have you observed one fact? The vegetarian societies have the most delicious kinds of foods. The Buddhists, the Jains, and Hare Krishna restaurants have the best dishes in the world, for the simple reason that through their meditations they had to drop meat-eating. They became more inquiring into delicious food so they did not miss meat, on which they had been brought up from their childhood. It had become almost their second nature.

There are millions of people who have never thought of vegetarianism. From the very childhood they have been killing living animals. It is not different from cannibalism. And since Charles Darwin it is absolutely a scientific fact that man has come, evolved, from the animals so you are killing your own forefathers and eating them joyously. Do not do such a nasty thing!

Indeed both the earth is capable man is capable of creating enough vegetarian food vegetables, fruits, new fruits which have never existed before. Just crossbreeding is needed, and we can have the best kind of food available for everybody.

Your sensitivity, perceptivity, and aesthetic understanding are immediately understood by the animals. They know these people are not going to hurt them. They are safe. Nobody is going to hunt them.

In Osho garden there have been three hundred peacocks. The moment they see his car, they all start moving in front of it. They know that they cannot be hurt, that nobody is going to run over them. They will not move. And then someone has to push them. They are enjoying!

It was also reported that there were a few really crazy ones. The moment they see Osho’s car they come running from far away, just to stand in front of the car. He will move slowly, and they will move slowly backwards, but they will not move away from the road. They understand something, their hearts have felt something, that ‘these people are not enemies; these people are part of us, friends.’

Remember the entire animal kingdom is part of us, even the trees. Now the scientists have come to an established conclusion that trees are living beings. Not only that, they have a very fine sensitivity, far more sensitive than you have. They have placed cardiograph around trees, plugged wires into the trees.

It shows the heartbeat of the tree, and if somebody is coming to chop the tree, immediately the graph on the cardiogram goes crazy. The tree is feeling really afraid and trembling.

This is what exactly happens to animals before they are killed for human consumption. There is so much fear in them. They go on seeking compassion from the butchers for life. And, when you consume such meat products, subtly those vibes become your vibes.

Gurdjieff jokingly has proposed a theory – because Muslims, Christians, Jews, all believe God created animals for man to eat. The problems like these have always been posed to before masters.

It was once enquired of Gurdjieff, that if everything is food for somebody else – one animal eats another animal, that animal is eaten by another animal, and so on and so forth – finally there is man. For whom is he food? Or is he an exception?

Gurdjieff was a remarkable man. He said, ‘Man is also food. He is eaten by the moon.’

His disciples could not think what he was talking about, but he had many proofs in his favor. More people go mad on the full-moon night, than on any other night. More people commit suicide on the full-moon night than on any other night. More people commit murder on the full-moon night than on any other night. More people have become enlightened on the full-moon night than on any other night.

There seems to be some reason behind it. On the full-moon night, man’s psychology and his body, are all affected by the moon. The people who commit suicide perhaps the moon has better ways of finding its food than you have.

The moon need not come to you with a gun or with an arrow, but in a subtle way its rays come as death to many people, through suicide, and murder. Those who somehow escape become mad. And enlightenment is the ultimate death, because the body will be dissolved and the soul will never be reincarnated into any other body. The moon has eaten the enlightened man completely, not leaving even a trace behind.

Allow your meditation to deepen. Go deep in your search for that which is hidden deep within you.

Accept the body. Love your body. Respect it. And be grateful to it. Body is the most complex mechanism in existence. It is simply marvelous. When your body is the temple then treat it as temple not as garbage bin. You carry the selected food items to be offered to the God in the temple. However both temple and God are outside. This you remember always. But you have forgotten the inner temple and inner God. And you continue to treat this miracle of God – body and the god within as insignificant.

This realization comes only through meditation. Meditation gives you the awareness that God dwells within you in the temple of God not in the outer temple.

You forgot the temple created by God and its miracle nature and you go on cherishing the outer temple and outer Gods. No outer temple or outer God that you cherish can convert ice-cream into blood. Certainly the temple that God gave you as your body has the capability to convert ice-cream into blood instantaneously. Meditation makes you aware of this body as the gift of God and the God enshrined within as being.

Love!

Taoshobuddha