VEGETARIANISM
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Numerous recent medical studies show that a vegetarian diet can free you from the risk of heart disease and cancer. This is a unique form of vegetarianism that can free you from negative karma as well.
When it is breakfast time in New York, they are brunching in Rio, lunching in Madrid, taking afternoon tea in Cairo, supping in New Delhi, and making midnight raids midnight raids on Australian refrigerators.
Regardless of time or place, people everywhere enjoy the universal human ritual-eating- and they plan meals according to what they find tasty, nutritious, economical, or perhaps just easy to prepare, we are what we eat.
This concern is influencing many of today’s most thoughtful people to become vegetarians, as have great thinkers in the past, such as Leonardo da Vinci, Mahatma Gandhi, Henry Thoreau, Pythagoras, Voltaire, Socrates, Richard Wagner, Shelley, Lord Byron, Albert Schweitzer, Ben Franklin, Plutarch, and Henry Rousseau.
The brilliant physicist Albert Einstein pointed out the connection between our diet and the quality of our lives when he said, “ The vegetarian manner of living, by its purely physical effect on the human temperament, will most beneficially influence the lot of mankind.’’
You Are What You Eat
Psychological Effects
Because meat-eating involves the needless slaughter of innocent creatures, it produces powerful negative psychological reactions. We cannot isolate our spiritual well-being from our day-to-day activities.
If, out of weakness or indifference, we remain callous to the pain and fear inflicted on millions of living beings, our natural goodness, compassion, and peace of mind are extinguished, and undesirable traits of anger, violence, pride, and selfishness are fostered.
The famous playwright George Bernard Shaw lamented that when animals are killed for food “man suppresses in himself, unnecessarily, the highest spiritual capacity – that of sympathy and pity towards living creatures like himself- and by violating his own feelings, becomes cruel.”
The Logic of Vegetarianism
An examination of the structure of the human body leads to the conclusion that man is intended by nature to live on a vegetable diet. There is the closest affinity between the organs of the human body and those of the fruit-eating animals. The monkey, for instance, is so similar to man in shape and structure, and it is a fruit-eating animal. Its teeth and stomach are just like the teeth and stomach of a man; whole those of carnivorous animals, as for instance, the lion and tiger, are entirely different.