Vegetarianism: its role in mental and spiritual development
It is common to cite the benefits that a vegetarian diet brings to a person’s physical well-being, but relatively little attention has been paid to the role of the vegetarian diet in the realm of mental and spiritual development. I would like to share my perspective on this topic.
1) The accumulation of toxins not only affects the intestines, arteries, kidneys, liver and other organs, but will also affect the nervous system, which is directly related to the functions of the brain. Therefore, toxicity is bound to hamper the individual’s ability to react adequately to all kinds of external and internal stimuli. Toxicity must also hinder efforts to focus and contemplate.
2) Many people believe that the only exhaustion a person can experience is physical exhaustion of the body. However, generally, when a person becomes depressed or confused, when resting or sleeping, they return to feeling mentally rejuvenated and clear. Due to physical struggle, our bodies develop, and due to mental struggle, our minds develop. When that struggle becomes excessive in quantity or duration, then the mind begins to desire to enter the non-conscious condition during which it rests and obtains energy by merging into the unconscious mind. Poor physical health depletes the body, destroys the effectiveness of our rest periods, and thus creates an environment in which it is difficult for the mind to rest, in which case the development of the mind is stunted.
3) In general, yogis explain to their students that the physical and mental exercises of yoga and meditation are closely related to glandular hormonal secretions, that is, with the increase, decrease or balance of the activities of the glands . Therefore, they encourage students to be vegetarian so that they can better control their acorns and therefore better control their minds. Through thousands of years of experimentation, yogis discovered that different foods affect glands differently and classified them accordingly. (A categorized list follows later.)
4) The yogis themselves teach that lighter food is easier to digest and therefore generally better for meditation or any other brain work.
5) One’s ability to concentrate or meditate is highly dependent on the mental strength derived from following one’s own consciousness. The evils of eating meat include the destruction of the environment, damage to one’s own body, the immorality of unnecessarily killing innocent sentient animals, and helping to maintain a global economic imbalance due to the excessive consumption of expensive foods by wealthy nations: meat, fish and eggs.
The conclusion of the yogis on the effect of food on the mind and body is contained in the following well-known list:
SENSE FOODS (good for body and mind): fruits, most vegetables, grains, beans, dairy products, nuts, apple cider vinegar, honey, sugar (in small amounts)
MUTATIVE FOODS (taken in small amounts, not harmful or helpful): coffee, tea, caffeinated beverages (such as cola), brown chocolate, seaweed, brewer’s yeast, hot spices
STATIC FOODS (bad for the body, mind, or both): meat, fish, eggs, onion, garlic, mushrooms, mustard greens, alcohol, tobacco, narcotics, and many drugs
Yogis explain that static foods that are harmful to the mind cause disturbances in the three lower psychospiritual energy centers, called “chakras.” The main chakras are generally classified into seven and are related to the physical glands. The hormonal secretion of each of the glands affects various human emotions and instincts that are beneficial or detrimental to balance and mental development. The relationship is as follows (the list of emotions is only partial to avoid complications):
When static foods heat up the lower three chakras, the balance and concentration of the mind is directly disturbed. As a result, both mental and spiritual progress are severely hampered.
Yogis teach that monks and nuns should eat only sensitive foods. People in the family should also prefer sensitive foods, but they can consume small amounts of mutant foods if they wish. Static foods should be strictly avoided by everyone, except when they are mandatorily required for medicinal purposes or under conditions that would otherwise result in starvation.
Considering that onion and garlic are generally praised as body cleansers, one may wonder why they are classified as static. These two foods are effective as cleansers because they are mildly poisonous to the body. When the body tries to reject them quickly, normally other negative elements can be expelled simultaneously. This is not a good method because it causes a lot of internal heat to build up in the lower gland area. It is much better, rather it is positively useful, to use lemon water or apple cider vinegar in small amounts mixed with water to cleanse the body. These two sensitive cleaners increase alkalinity and help overactive glands cool down.
Until now very little has been done in physical laboratories to examine these yogic teachings. On the other hand, as mentioned above, for thousands of years the relationship of food with mental and spiritual development has been the subject of experimentation by countless people working with their own bodies and minds. It is hoped that this objective examination will take place in the near future. It will be a great service to humanity to clarify these fundamental principles. In the meantime, however, any individual can try it for himself and see results in a matter of a few weeks.
As such information cannot be objectively justified, we can refer to the large number of famous people who personally analyzed the relationship of food with the body and mind and decided to be vegetarian. The list of famous people who have made their preference for vegetarianism known is long. The fact that such highly developed personalities were vegetarian is in itself a statement of the intimate relationship between a subtle diet and a subtle mind. To end this article, I quote some of these famous people.
Benjamin Franklin, one of America’s greatest leaders in physical science, ethics, social movement, and many other fields, became a vegetarian when he was 16 years old. Franklin understood from his diet “greater progress, greater clarity of mind, and quicker apprehension.” He called eating meat “unprovoked murder.”
French philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau said that since carnivorous animals are by nature much more violent than herbivores, the vegetarian diet generally produces more compassionate people. He even suggested that butchers should not be allowed to testify in court or serve on juries.
Because the great Greek mathematician Pythagoras was a vegetarian, the vegetarian diet is sometimes called the Pythagorean system. He said: “The earth provides a generous supply of riches, of innocent food, and offers them banquets that do not involve bloodshed or slaughter; only the heartbeats satisfy their hunger with meat.” Pythagoras was known to even pay fishermen to return their catch to the ocean.
The essence of a strong mind is to follow one’s consciousness, or in other words, to be consistent with one’s beliefs. The poet Shelley pointed out that a carnivore cannot have a strong mind because it is not consistent with his deepest feelings. He said: “Let the defender of animal food force himself to perform a decisive experiment on its fitness and, as recommended by Plutarch, tear a live lamb with his teeth and, sinking his head into its vital organs, quench his thirst with the smoking blood. … … then, and only then, would it be consistent. “
One of the world’s greatest physicists, Albert Einstein, said: “The vegetarian way of life, by its purely physical effect on the human temperament, would most beneficially influence humanity.”
The great Renaissance painter, inventor, sculptor and poet Leonardo da Vinci wrote about carnivores: “He who does not value life does not deserve it.” He said that the bodies of carnivores are nothing more than “burial places,” graveyards for the animals they eat.
Even Adam Smith, the promoter of free market capitalism, was a vegetarian. He said: “Grains and other vegetables, with the help of milk, cheese and butter, or oil, where you cannot get butter, provide the most abundant, healthiest, most nutritious and most invigorating diet.”
The Russian author Leo Tolstoy said that killing animals is “simply immoral”, and that in doing so “man unnecessarily suppresses in himself the highest spiritual capacity, that of sympathy and compassion towards lilkle living beings, and by violating his own. ” feelings turn cruel. “
Most Christians believe that eating meat is appropriate because they think Jesus ate meat. Here we are faced with a translation trick to mislead people, which has caused widespread misunderstanding for these 2000 years. Nowhere in the original Greek manuscripts of the Bible is there any reference to Jesus eating meat or encouraging others to eat meat. The words that have been translated as “meat” are Greek words like “trophe, brome and phago”, which simply mean “food” or “to eat”. The Greek word for “flesh or flesh” is “kreas”, which is never used in relation to Christ. Understanding this point, many of the early Christian saints were vegetarians, including Saint Jerome, Saint John Chrysostom, and Saint Benedict. Also, many early Christian parents like Clement of Alexandria did not eat meat.
Today, many Buddhists, including even monks and nuns, follow non-vegetarian diets. This is the height of irony when you consider that one of the main impulses behind the first spread of Buddhism was a reaction to the widely accepted practice of killing animals. In general, Buddha stopped this evil by preaching the doctrine of non-violence.
Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw, who became a vegetarian at a young age, although many doctors warned him that the diet would eventually kill him. When he was an old man, they asked him why he did not return and he showed them the good that he had done for them. He replied, “I would, but they all passed away years ago.” Someone once asked him how he looked so young. “Not me,” Shaw replied. “I look my age. It’s the other people who seem older than them. What can you expect from people who eat corpses?” On the relationship between eating meat and violence, Shaw wrote:
We pray on Sundays that we have light
To guide our steps on the path that we travel;
We’re sick of war, we don’t want to fight
And yet we gorge ourselves on the dead.
HG Wells wrote about vegetarianism becoming the only way of life in his vision of a future world in “A Modern Utopia”. He wrote: “I still remember when I was a child the joys of the closing of the last slaughterhouse.”
Although the realization of Wells’s vision still seems distant, somehow any carnivore can bring about the end of the slaughterhouse today. Because today every house where meat is eaten is like a mini-slaughterhouse. All humanity’s loving creatures, be they animals, plants, or humans, pray for a change to occur in carnivorous humans. They pray that carnivores, whose digestive systems twist with the extreme unnaturalness of their barbarian habit, adopt the lifestyle based on fruits, vegetables and other natural elements. And every time even a human barbarian chooses to civilize and shut down his own personal slaughterhouse, the world rejoices.