The Vegetarian Diet

This entry is part 11 of 40 in the series 2012A

Thanks for your comments on my meat-eating article.  If I had more than 600 words a lot of your concerns would have been covered.  I think I’ll expand the article for the web page and then submit the shorter version.

DK emphasizes a vegetarian diet for aspirants and such a diet is essential for times when new energies are coming into play for the seeker as he goes through the first and second initiations.  After that he must follow his soul as to when he must assume the practice.

Overall it is the destiny of humanity to move toward a vegetarian diet although I believe there will be some eating of meat for some time to come.

You will note that many of the initiates of the past ate meat – among them are Winston Churchill, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, H. P. Blavatsky, the Apostle Paul, the twelve apostles and Jesus according to the Bible.  You will remember that Jesus fed 5000 people by multiplying fish.

Alice A. Bailey, who I would guess ate meat, expressed a common sense approach as follows:

I am convinced that there comes a phase in the life of all disciples when they must be vegetarians.  In the same way, there must come a life in which a man or woman should be a celibate.  This they must be in order to demonstrate that they have learned control of the physical nature.  Once they have learned that control and once they can no longer be swayed by the appetites of the flesh, they can be married or not married, they can eat meat or not eat meat as seems best to them and as their karma may indicate or their circumstances dictate.  Once that has been proven, the situation is altered.  The physical disciplines are a phase of training and when the lesson is learnt they are no longer needed.

The argument for vegetarianism, based on the cruelty of animal eating, may not be as sound as it appears to the emotional and sentimental types.  I worried about this a great deal, because I love animals.  I would like here to make two suggestions which I have found helpful.  There is a law of sacrifice governing all the evolutionary process.  The vegetable kingdom draws its sustenance out of the mineral kingdom, for its roots are in the mineral kingdom.  The animal kingdom, on a very large scale, draws its sustenance out of the vegetable kingdom and it lives by the life of that kingdom.  Some of the higher animals are carnivorous and, under the law of evolution, prey upon each other, but they are not incited thereto by man’s thought, as some fanatics claim.  Sequentially, then, the human kingdom might well be regarded as drawing its sustenance out of the animal kingdom and, because man is the macrocosm for all the three lower kingdoms, he might be supposed, normally, to draw his life from all the three, and he does.  In the ancient scriptures of the East, it is pointed out that the human kingdom is “the food of the gods” and in that statement the great “chain of sacrifice” is complete.  My second point has reference to the law of cause and effect, or of Karma, as the Theosophists call it.  In the early days of primitive man, men were the victims of the animal kingdom and they were quite defenseless.  The wild animals of the past preyed upon human beings.  In all kingdoms the Law of Retribution works.  It is possible that it is this law which is one of the factors inclining humanity towards meat eating.  I worked this out in my own consciousness in due course of time but not rapidly.

Unfinished Autobiography, Page 153-154

Here are some good quotes from DK on the subject:

But unless the goal of a vegetarian diet is this field of service (reading the akashic records), the arguments for its following and for that form of diet are usually futile and of no real moment.  From the standpoint of the eternal verities, what a man eats or wears are seen in a connotation very different to that of the one-pointed fanatic.  Let me again reiterate  that this whole problem of the taking of life (whether in the vegetable or the animal kingdom) is a far bigger one than we know, and should be approached from an angle different (not only in degree but in kind) to that of the taking of life in the human family.  The three aspects of divinity meet in man, and with the destiny of a divine son of God no one must interfere.  Where the two aspects of divinity are concerned, as in the subhuman kingdoms, the attitude can be otherwise, and the emerging truth is different to that which the little minds believe.

Esoteric Psychology, Vol 1, Pages 241-242

No set diet could be entirely correct for a group of people on differing rays, of different temperaments and equipment and at various ages.  Individuals are every one of them unlike on some points; they require to find out what it is that they, as individuals, need, in what manner their bodily requirements can best be met, and what type of substances can enable them best to serve.  Each person must find this out for himself.  There is no group diet.  No enforced elimination of meat is required or strict vegetarian diet compulsory.

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