Let me preface what I am about to say with this: I am a vegetarian.
And let me continue by saying this: that doesn't make me better or more spiritual than meat eaters.
How can that be? As we all know (or ought to by now--it has been published repeatedly by physicists), everything is energy. Our world is made of atoms, electrons, and neutrons, and nothing else. These are merely different vibrations of pure energy. So how can it be better to eat one type of vibrating energy than to eat another type of vibrating energy? Our world is a constant re-cycling of energies into different forms. Grass grows. A cow eats it. A man named Edwin eats the cow. Edwin lives a full life, dies, and is buried in his local cemetery. His body deteriorates, and becomes part of the soil. Out of the soil grows grass. So what is the grass? Is it really a vegetable? Or is it Edwin in another form? If a cow eats it, is he eating Edwin in the form of grass, or is he eating grass? Is the cow then a vegetarian or not? The line between vegetable and animal begins to get blurry. For the grass to come to exist, it was first a cow, then a man, then soil, and eventually grass. On the energetic level, nothing is separate or isolated in its existence. We are all intertwined in this cosmic energetic soup.
To believe otherwise is materialistic. On a more materialistic level, it might seem more evolved not to eat meat. It is better for the environment. It is better for your health. It is better for the animals who must give up their lives to feed you.
But even that is debatable. As my Cherokee husband often tells me (he is also a vegetarian), many Native American tribes had deeply spiritual experiences as they hunted and ate what they killed. They not only honored their experience as hunters, but they honored the being they were hunting. It was a merging of spirit, they believed, to take an animal's body to feed the tribe. The animal's spirit merged with their own in a deep union of hunter and hunted. To them, the spirit never died, only the animal's flesh. To them, the animal was liberated from the limited life afforded on this plane, and set free into the limitless spirit world. Isn't this spiritual?
To me, it is more spiritual than raw vegans who have bumper stickers condemning most of the western world not only for eating meat, but for cooking food: "Cooked food is poison." In this little bumper sticker is another message: "I'm better than you." Is that spiritual?
Of course, Native Americans who hunted in a traditional way in a wilder world were of a different time, and those animals were not factory farmed. They lived a free life in pristine natural environments.
But what about the lion? Is the lion "bad" for eating meat? What about your cat or dog? They seem to follow their intuitions guiltlessly. As do the spiritual teachers Eckhart Tolle and the Dalai Lama, neither of whom are vegetarians.
And it is that freedom from guilt that is a most important piece in spirituality. Obviously, it is the strongest shackle in religion. And guilt is what differentiates the two.
Is a vegetarian "better" for eating vegetables? How do we know that vegetables aren't just as sentient -- if not more -- than deer or sheep? Did you know that when a tree is sick, it is able to send a message to trees in nearby forests, who then are able to protect themselves from that very sickness? (http://www.gi.alaska.edu/ScienceForum/ASF7/762.html). In this way of communicating, they are more intelligent than humans. Can we be certain that the plant world doesn't feel as strongly as any other being?
It is the "better-ness" and the "guilt" that strike the cord of not-the-way-to-go-ness to me. Neither of those qualities evoke spirituality. In fact, the opposite is true. "Better-ness" and "guilt" are deeply materialistic, sticky, and pain-provoking.
For many people who have wanted to become vegetarians for a long time, but were unable to give up their guilty pleasure of meat eating, it was their guilt binding them to their behavior. If you can let go of the guilt, you might have a better time making an objective decision about what to eat. But as long as vegetarians enforce that guilt with their better-ness, there is a remarkably un-spiritual superficiality preventing change.
Follow Olivia Rosewood on Twitter: www.twitter.com/OliviaRosewood
