Ever since my mother got back from her retreat this summer, actually even a month before she went to her retreat she stopped eating meat. She did it for spiritual reasons at first but after the retreat she continued on for ethical reasons.
My mom was first a vegetarian for five years in her mid-twenties as she briefly dated an author who wrote about vegetarianism. One of the first sentences in a book he gave her said, "Why take a life when the earth provides such an abundance of fruits, vegetables and grains." That one sentence alone made sense to her and resonated deeply in something that she felt she always believed even when she was a child. She knew she was being a hypocrite by eating meat. With the mind connection it was an easy thing to do, however she had a tiny kitchen and did not really like to cook back then so her health suffered a little and her doctor felt strongly that she should go back to eating meat if she wasn't going to be a proper vegetarian. So she like most just turned a blind eye to eating meat again.
Now that she is older and a little bit wiser she is a vegetarian again. Eventually with more research she will also be a vegan as ignorance of how dairy and eggs are handled in the United States reflect eating some bad karma. Especially if eggs and dairy aren't free range or come from an organic farm, you almost might as well be eating meat. Mom has also realized that vegetarian diets are not like they were fifteen years ago. Vegetarian menus are much more tasty and filling. She says she honestly has not missed eating meat for one second. She also around the time she decided to continue with a vegetarian diet happen to meet a few vegetarian chefs and nutritionists so the universe was definitely encouraging her direction of diet.
Lastly, how could you eat meat when you have the love of your pets, Q-Ball and Powder Puff.
-It would seem my mother is in good company. Um, make that excellent company!! It seems some of the most brilliant individuals who ever walked this earth were also vegetarians. I have collected some of their quotes and I just wanted to share them with you.
-Truly man is the king of beasts, for his brutality exceeds theirs. We live by the death of others: we are burial places! I have from an early age abjured the use of meat, and the time will come when men such as I will look on the murder of animals as they now look on the murder of men. ~Leonardo da Vinci
-I have no doubt that it is a part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals, as surely as the savage tribes have left off eating each other.... ~Henry David Thoreau, Walden, 1854
-You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson
-While we ourselves are the living graves of murdered beasts, how can we expect any ideal conditions on this earth? ~George Bernard Shaw
-"Thou shalt not kill" does not apply to murder of one's own kind only, but to all living beings; and this Commandment was inscribed in the human breast long before it was proclaimed from Sinai. ~Leo Tolstoy
-Can you really ask what reason Pythagoras had for abstaining from flesh? For my part I rather wonder both by what accident and in what state of soul or mind the first man did so, touched his mouth to gore and brought his lips to the flesh of a dead creature, he who set forth tables of dead, stale bodies and ventured to call food and nourishment the parts that had a little before bellowed and cried, moved and lived. How could his eyes endure the slaughter when throats were slit and hides flayed and limbs torn from limb? How could his nose endure the stench? How was it that the pollution did not turn away his taste, which made contact with the sores of others and sucked juices and serums from mortal wounds? ~Plutarch
-It is only by softening and disguising dead flesh by culinary preparation that it is rendered susceptible of mastication or digestion, and that the sight of its bloody juices and raw horror does not excite intolerable loathing and disgust. ~Percy Bysshe Shelley, Queen Mab Notes
-To my mind, the life of a lamb is no less precious than that of a human being. I should be unwilling to take the life of a lamb for the sake of the human body. ~Mahatma Gandhi
-Nothing will benefit human health and increase chances for survival of life on Earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet. ~Albert Einstein
-Think of the fierce energy concentrated in an acorn! You bury it in the ground, and it explodes into an oak! Bury a sheep, and nothing happens but decay. ~George Bernard Shaw
-If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be a vegetarian. ~Paul McCartney
-A man of my spiritual intensity does not eat corpses. ~George Bernard Shaw
-My tummy is not a graveyard. – Swami Sri Purna
Something to think about...
Chow for now!
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