HOME PAGE

Read This Month's New Articles!

Articles Archive

Do you want to be informed when we update our magazine or leave a message? Click here!

Looking for a specific author or subject in our magazine? Try our search page

Who are we?

Our Purpose

Vegetarianism: A Diet for the Spirit

by Annalisa & Giampiero Cara

To give up meat is not only a matter of health. It is above all a matter of love. Love for the animals and for the Earth, of course, but also for ourselves. For how can we expand our consciousness and understand the oneness of everything that exists if we remain indifferent to the killing of so many of our "little brothers"?

The greatest sages and enlightened beings in history have always recommended not to eat meat to people on the path of inner evolution. Let's see why.

A primary foundation of all great religions is compassion toward every living being. That's why killing is considered a major sin. In Christianity, the fifth commandment "Thou shalt not kill" has been interpreted as "Don't kill other human beings." In reality, its literal translation from ancient Hebrew would be "don't commit any kind of killing." That's why vegetarianism was originally a fundamental principle in Christianity, as well as in other great religions like Buddhism, Hinduism, Islamism and Judaism.

Today, most ministers of almost all these religions - with the notable exception of Buddhism (in part) and Hinduism - tolerate, and even encourage the killing of animals to eat their meat. But we should ponder on what the Buddha said in Dhammapada: "In the future, some fools will say that I gave permission to eat meat, and that I ate meat myself. But I have never permitted anyone to eat meat, and I never will, in any form, in any way and in any place. It is unconditionally prohibited to everybody."

The Buddha explained his unconditional prohibition with the fact that eating meat "stifles the seed of great compassion." And since God is perfect love and compassion, you must cultivate compassion in order to find him inside yourself.

"Why make other beings suffer when we try to avoid suffering ourselves?" the Buddha said. "If you can't control your mind in order to abhor the mere thought of killing, you won't be able to free yourself from the ties that bond you to life in this world. How can he, who seeks and hopes to learn how to free others, eat the meat of sentient beings?"

Also the Vedas say thousands of times that man shouldn't eat meat, because "one is worthy of salvation when he doesn't kill any living being." And doesn't eat it either. In fact, the Vedas say that it is necessary to abstain oneself from eating any kind of meat, because meat always implies killing, and it generates karmic bonds. "Whoever kills animals cannot find any pleasure in the message of Absolute Truth," conclude the Vedas.

According to the sacred scriptures of Hinduism, man should recognize the same vital principle in every living being. The Veda describe incarnations of God in various non-human forms, like the fish, the horse, the turtle and the wild boar.

Vegetarianism and the World Religions

In his inspiring book Food for the Spirit - Vegetarianism and the World Religions, professor Steven Rosen says that Vedic philosophy recognizes animals' capacity to reach a high spiritual state. This is a religious tradition that promotes not only vegetarianism, but also the spiritual equality of all living beings. Therefore, practicing vegetarianism means being aware that all living beings are equal in spiritual terms.

Also the Koran exalts Allah's compassion - in fact, the deity is also called al-Raham, or "infinitely merciful" - toward every living being He created, without exceptions. And the prophet Muhammad, who was himself a vegetarian and loved animals, wrote: "Whoever is good toward God's creatures is good toward himself."

As for Judaism, the diet prescribed for man in the Genesis is clearly the vegetarian one. God tells His people that their food will be every plant and every fruit that produces seeds. He also commands them not to eat meat and the life that runs through it, blood. In fact, the people of Israel were vegetarian for ten generations, from Adam to Noah.

After the Flood, which destroyed all vegetation, God gave His people temporary permission to eat meat. Then, to restore the vegetarian diet, when the Israelites left Egypt, God sent them manna, a vegetable that could feed them during the Exodus. But since the Israelites kept on asking insistently for meat, God gave them meat, accompanying it with a fatal pestilence that killed all who ate it.

In the New Testament, the teachings of Jesus Christ have been censored so much in the numerous translations and revisions of the Gospels that references to his compassion and his complete love for all living creatures have almost completely disappeared. In reality, Jesus didn't eat any kind of meat, in harmony with the teachings he received from the confraternity of the Essenes, of which he was a member.

In a John's Gospel handed down from the Essenes and from the Christian Churches in the East but denied by the Church of Rome, Jesus Christ is a prophet who teaches to refrain from any form of violence toward animals and explicitly forbids his disciples to eat meat. "Eat anything you find on God's table," he said. "Fruits from the trees, grains and vegetables from the fields, milk from the animals and honey from the bees. Any other food is the work of Satan and leads to sins, illnesses and death."

In fact, the first Christians were strictly vegetarian, as were the Fathers of the Church. Yet when Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire, during the Council of Nicaea the original Christian documents were radically altered to make them acceptable to the emperor Constantine, who didn't want to give up meat.

So, in order to convert him, the "correctors" nominated by ecclesiastic authorities eliminated any reference to not eating meat from the Gospels. For no less than nineteen times, they translated the original Greek term for "food" with the word "meat" and they chose the "loaves and fishes" version of Jesus' miracle over the one, contemporary to him, called "The multiplication of bread and fruit" (it must be said, anyway, that not even the fishes of the second version were real fishes, but a particular kind of "seaweed pancakes" very common among Jewish people at the time.) Therefore, even Constantine persecuted Christians, but only those who absolutely refused to eat meat.

Nevertheless, most Christian saints have been vegetarian, like the most famous of them all, Saint Francis from Assisi, who loved all living creatures and ate exclusively bread, cheese and vegetables.

Vegetarians in History

Many other great men in history have chosen the vegetarian way. In the VI century b.C., for example, the great Greek philosopher and initiate Pythagoras preached the strictest vegetarianism among his followers. They abhorred killing in any form and abstained from eating "animate beings," in order to reach a state of purity and asceticism. In that state, considered the highest degree of initiation, they thought humans could free themselves from the prison of the body and regain their original divine condition.

Pythagoras also thought that, as long as humans continued to kill animals, they would keep on killing each other.

In Plato's Republic, another great philosopher from Greece, Socrates, says that the ideal diet for men in the city of the future will be based on bread, olives, cheese, onions, legumes, figs, berries, acorns and a little wine. Eating meat, he says, is the main cause of illnesses, but also of wars, because cattle-breeding requires much more space than agriculture. Therefore, a city may be forced to invade neighboring countries.

In the II century, the Greek historian Plutarch wrote that people who wanted to eat meat should be able to kill the animals themselves without arms and eat them alive, like lions and other fierce animals use to do.

Leonardo da Vinci, the Italian Renaissance vegetarian genius, complained that human bodies were increasingly becoming "the tombs of the animals." And he also prophesied that "one day the killing of an animal will be considered no less sinful than the killing of a man."

In the 17th century, Jean Jacques Rousseau, the famous French philosopher of the so-called Age of Enlightenment observed that meat-eating animals were more violent and cruel than the herbivorous ones. Therefore, he contended that the vegetarian diet could make men less aggressive and thus more peaceful.

In the following century, the American politician and scientist Benjamin Franklin defined eating meat an unjustified crime. He had become a vegetarian when he was sixteen years old, also because he noticed that he managed to learn more easily and was intellectually more brilliant when he didn't eat any meat.

In the 18th century, the great Russian writer Lev Tolstoy, who used to be a hunter, became a vegetarian and passionately began to advocate non-violence. He wrote that "eating meat is immoral, because it implies an immoral action like killing. When a man kills a living being, he wipes out his highest spiritual faculties, which are love and compassion toward other creatures."

In the 20th century, many other great men and women were vegetarian, like the musician, physician and philanthropist Albert Schweitzer, who won the Nobel price for peace in 1952. Or like another Nobel prize, Mahatma Gandhi, who said that "meat is not the right food for our species."

Even the greatest scientist of the 20th century, Albert Einstein, maintained that "the vegetarian diet would have extremely beneficial effects on humanity."

The Esoteric reasons for Vegetarianism

According to various esoteric teachings, vegetarianism is the ideal diet for those who want to reach the highest levels of spiritual development. For example, the American theosophist C.W. Leadbeater has written an essay on Vegetarianism and Occultism, in which he says that the vegetarian diet is the only one that allows the necessary purification of the body to anyone who wants to reach perfection in order to help the evolution of humanity.

According to Leadbeater, saying that diet is unimportant from an occult standpoint is a heresy. In fact, all the ancient and modern occult schools maintain that absolute purity is indispensable to physical and spiritual progress.

Referring to the four spiritual bodies of man theosophy talks about, Leadbeater states that all these bodies communicate with each other, although on different planes. Therefore, since meat is the grosser form of nourishment, whoever eats it will have his highest bodies made of a denser, impure matter. Moreover, while blunting sensitivity, meat diet also hinders the development of ESP. The real clairvoyants, Leadbeater says, must be all vegetarian.

According to other esoteric teachers, eating meat is detrimental if you want to practise meditation, because the negative energies absorbed when you eat the meat of brutally killed animals prevent you from attuning your energies with the energy of the universe. In fact, all the great yogis are vegetarians.

Even Osho, probably the most "westernized" of all Indian gurus, didn't allow the consumption of meat in his communities. He said that a man who isn't searching for the divine can eat anything he wants, but a man who begins to meditate in order to "fly" to higher levels of consciousness must get rid of all unnecessary weight. And non-vegetarian food, Osho concludes, is an unnecessary weight.

Hare Krishna followers, who have greatly contributed to the spreading of vegetarianism in the West, think that our "alimentary violence," together with all the other forms of violence in our society, creates a tidal wave of negative karma. That, in turn, increases human aggressiveness and therefore the number of crimes perpetrated in the world.

Someone could ask if the karmic problem concerns also the "killing" of vegetables like carrots, potatoes, onions, etc. "There can also be karmic reactions in this case," a Hare Krishna spokesperson explains. "But there is much less pain involved than in killing animals, because the plants' nervous system is much less developed."

Another reason why the Hindu tradition prescribes vegetarianism is the belief in the possibility that a human being reincarnates in animal form. When killing an animal, then, it's possible to commit violence against a human soul.

Anyway, the crime isn't much less severe if it is perpetrated against an animal soul, since the most spiritual people have always believed that animals have souls like humans.

Pythagoras, for example, who believed in the transmigration of souls, maintained that the animals' souls are eternal like those of men, since both originate from the "Anima Mundi" (World's Soul), the force that permeates all the molecules in the universe, the prime mover of all matter, which acts as intermediary between God and the cosmos. Animals, then, are all emanations of divine energy, like humans.

That's why it is important to make more conscious choices in any field, if we really want a New Age of Love and Unity, of compassion and understanding. Even one person's choices can make a difference for all living beings. And since violence begets violence, according to the law of karma, if we choose not to do harm to the weakest creatures, that can only have wonderful effects on all humanity.

Therefore, in this new era of light, we can choose to go beyond our fears of loosing our good health or of causing an ecological disaster, and become vegetarian for the most important reason: for love.

Copyright © 1999 Annalisa & Giampiero Cara