06-21-2017, 09:10 AM
(06-21-2017, 06:15 AM)YinYang Wrote: I don't know why I don't see the eating of meat as wrong. The supermarket where I buy my meat, says they only sell ethically sourced meat.
Maybe I'm deluding myself... I did buy the book Eating Animals recently, maybe I'll change my view on it after I've read it...
At this point, all I can say is I simply don't know about this one. I have never known any vegetarians personally, braai is a strong part of our culture. We call barbeque "braai" (all our races), and we even have a National Braai Day once a year. When you meet new people, you say to them "come braai with us", not "come over for a drink", or "let's get together"... "let's braai".
Maybe it is just such a part of us, that we never questioned it. I don't know...
I live in one of the United States' barbecue capitals (Kansas City). It's a passion here, often a way of life. I loved it so much that I got really good at smoking and grilling meats. So delicious.
But I don't think I can eat meat anymore. Weirdly, for me, it has not been an intellectual concern at all. I have been academically aware of the massive suffering caused by factory farming and industrial food for decades, but that never gave me pause when it came to eating organic, ethically sourced meat from animals that hopefully weren't enduring horrific conditions.
Instead, as my spirituality is spiraling positive, it seems like eating meat serves as a drag on my progress. Most of the time the slowdown isn't traumatic, just more like being grounded back to an unpolarized state, but there have been a few times over the last six months where I tasted a piece of meat (usually something my wife had ordered) and something was horrifyingly off with it. The worst was a piece of steak that made me instantly nauseated, but a weird kind of nauseated that I've never felt before, like it came out of my mind more than my stomach. I was chewing this piece of meat, and could tell quite well that there was nothing wrong with it in the traditional sense. I couldn't taste or smell any decay, everything seemed perfectly normal about it, but the instant it hit my mouth, I could sense the wrongness of it, and somehow, as I swallowed it, I knew that this cow had died in fear and pain. It really was kind of horrifying.
I don't think eating meat is a spiritual dealbreaker or anything like that. Jesus shared fish he cooked with his disciples after he resurrected, after all, and the Buddha wasn't a vegetarian and didn't teach vegetarianism. Further, there is a danger, for changing one's diet for the wrong reasons can serve as a distraction to one's spiritual progress, if you start deciding that you're right and every one else needs to be corrected. One can begin to substitute that shallow, surface level change for the real soul level growth one needs to be undertaking, and turn vegetarianism into an idolatrous "Way," rather than a simple dietary choice. (I was thinking of some vegan acquaintances when I wrote this, just an FYI, this isn't aimed at Diana or anyone else here.)
Looking ahead a thousand years, to an Earth inhabited by a fourth density social memory complex...do we really foresee that this enlightened fourth density civilization, in which the vibrational state of the Earth has polarized sufficiently for fifth and sixth density entities to start visiting in the "flesh," will achieve sustenance through the destruction of second density creatures? According to most of the channeled sources I've encountered on this topic, most positively polarized species in the universe do not destroy second density (or other) entities to sustain themselves. They eat the freely offered fruits of second density entities who have incarnated to provide this service. They would never artificially end that service in order to eat the entity itself.
The Jain are really the only people on this planet who pursue that kind of diet. Their dietary traditions are a fascinating study with fifteen hundred years of results to analyze.