VEGETARIANISM
Every being is created for specific food intake. Plants mainly receive their food from the soil through their roots. Animals eat plants or other animals. The type and way of receiving food is divided into four stages within the evolutionary cycle through which every being goes from its beginning to the end (ontogenesis). These stages correspond with the evolutionary stages – described in the chapter dealing with evolution of a being – and with regularities of the “Creative Four”.
The first evolutionary phase is characterised by a passive manifestation of life and evolution. This is the life of plants. Plants’ food consists mainly of inorganic matter. They change it into organic with the help of chlorophyll and solar radiation. Evolutionarily higher plants receive organic as well as inorganic matter – dead bodies of other plants. But they do not get food by murder. It is only near the end of the first stage and the beginning of the second when carnivorous plants start catching and digesting insects.
The second evolutionary stage, which is characterised by animated manifestation yet passive evolution, is in the domain of animals. Here, the eating of other animals occurs. Especially at the beginning of the second stage, beasts of prey – the lowest among animals – murder weaker animals and live on their meat. They provide the balance of lives and their acts are rightful and natural for this evolutionary stage. Their bodies are adapted for hunting, their intestines for digesting meat, their teeth are typical for beasts of prey. They are the animals of the lowest level. Spiritually higher animals in the second evolutionary stage are the herbivores. They live on vegetal food, to which their digestive system and typically herbivorous teeth are adapted. Some species live mainly on leaves and grass, others on fruits. Man belongs to the second group.
Since life is already manifested actively in the second evolutionary stage, this activity spreads, the possibility of decision-making strengthens. Thanks to the strengthening of decision-making, mistakes in life stance occur. Certain herbivores begin adding meat to their natural vegetal food. In the beginning it is a little slug or insect which falls as a sacrifice to them, then perhaps dead bodies of other animals and sometimes it is a hunted and murdered individual. Science calls these perverse creatures “omnivores”.
This unnatural habit of meat eating has also afflicted man, who begins the third stage in which active evolution joins the active manifestation of life. We have already said that the ability of active evolution as a new ontogenetic quality accedes slowly. With evolu tionarily lower humans, spiritual passivity and the law of reflection still prevail. With higher ones, effort towards awareness of the evolutionary progress and deliberate change already manifests itself. While lower humans consider eating bodies of other murdered animals normal, more developed man begins pondering and revising his approach.
Human thinking is influenced by two princi ples. They are reason and intuition. The two should be, as with everything, balanced. In the beginning they used to be. They were weaker in terms of evolution, but they were to strengthen in balance within the line of human incarnations. However, within phylogenetic evolution (evolution of human species) man has made a basic mistake. Perhaps as a result of ignorance or through mistaken religious cults he tasted meat. In the beginning it must have been only small portions, he would not have been able to manage bigger ones. After all, his physique, digestive system, teeth etc. were herbivorous. His body must have slowly become used to it and, as we can see at present, it has not got used to it much up to the present time. He started perhaps only occasionally and through reasons of cult, he ate a piece of muscle of a bigger animal (a mammoth perhaps). He believed he would obtain greater muscular strength. Another day he ate a piece of brain and believed he would become cleverer and so on. Mankind gradually included more and more meat into its food and so especially its thinking became out of balance.
This was described as early as in the Old Testament in its image of “the expulsion from the paradise”. There God said to man: You will eat from this source, you may not eat from that one, otherwise you’ll have to leave the paradise. The sources are symbolised by trees. And this symbolic prophecy really came true.
Man began eating from the “unnatural source” – meat. He ate substances other than those his body had been built for. His brain was unnaturally influenced by it. His reasoning was strengthened to the exclusion of the intuition. Thinking was set off balance. Man was rationally covering larger and larger areas in the course of time. He gradually discovered several material laws. He started combining them and creating techno logies, learning more about matter and losing knowledge about himself. He invented things that would destroy him slowly and yet he took pleasure in it. He increased his material demands so he tasked his mind with more and more work. To make it easier, he invented machines which make unnatural noise, unnatural vibrations, polluting and poisoning the air, producing combustion fumes poisoning water, soil, plants, the whole environment and so on. We can observe this even today. His bad thinking lead him as far as to using poisons deliberately and willingly despite knowing they were really poisons. He was aware of their effects and yet he continued using them. These include for example nerve poisons (alcohol, nicotine and drugs). To preserve meat longer, he began to smoke meat and thus to consume the saltpetre and tar soaked up by meat. This is the strongest carcinogenic matter. I am not going to list all the dangers – there are countless numbers of them today. Neither am I going to describe today’s lifestyle, which is so senseless as anybody can easily see. I just ponder over beginning of all that evil – the consumption of the dead bodies of other animals.
Here, the biblical image of the “expulsion from the paradise” is fulfilled. This is the punishment that the man suffered when he moved away from his natural evolutionary journey. Actually, he prepared the punishment himself. Let’s imagine a man crossing a swamp on a narrow wooden path. He can only walk where the path leads. When he strays, he sinks into mud and it takes a lot of effort to get back to the path.
The evolutionary path of beings is set and each step to the side must be rectified. If it is not, the evolutionary species becomes extinct. This means that the evolutionary journey ends, it meets its doom and the zoological species becomes extinct. Many species have met such a fate on our planet. The man strayed. He began eating from another source. He has been strengthening his brain producing more intellect than intuition and starting on his way to perdition. If he continues like this, he shall destroy himself.
Let us look around ourselves. Let us look at people’s lifestyles and their mistakes. We will find out that man is up to his neck in the mud of destruction. Will the human family proceed or will it perish and a new zoological species – a dolphin, for example – start his evolutionary journey towards the finish?
What we have just said is taken from the material point of view, there also another point of view – spiritual evolution.
A being moves from its centripetal – specific standpoint towards the centrifugal one. We arose from oneness. From it – units separated, these units com prehended themselves, worked on themselves, felt separated from the whole – their thinking was centripetal. In the current evolutionary stage, a being starts standing on the centrifugal position to understand itself more and more as a part of the whole and as everything else. Thinking becomes centrifugal. The standpoint that “I” am everybody else and that “I” am everything, is slowly approaching. We arose from the Podstata, and we return to the Podstata.
Then we must understand that if we harm the whole, we harm the Creative Work and thus we harm ourselves. All the animals, insects, plants – all living creatures are the same beings as us. They all have the same desire for life, they all sense pain or the anxiety of death, the terror of slavery, lack of freedom and injustice in the same way as we do. And if we harm them in our ignorance, we harm the fatality in the Creative Work and thus in ourselves. We will not only reincarnate for learning purposes into those creatures afflicted by men, we not only slow our evolution down, but we are also a disruptive part in the Creative Work.
Those who have reached the point where they consider themselves as a part of the whole in their evolution would certainly never eat a part of their own body. We certainly wouldn’t bite off our own thumb just to have a meal.
There are those who, having become aware of these facts, thought about it and said, “Well, yes, it is undoubtedly so. We had not thought about this problem and got carried along by the stream of habits.” At this very moment, these people change. They set off on a new track. They start a different, more perfect way of thinking.
But there are also people who have many excuses, who negotiate truth or even justify the evil. We are all different and on a different evolutionary level. Let us not be angry with them. They are simply not able to understand more and to start a new voluntary way yet.