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Osho Quotes on vegetarian Food
- Life in its infinite forms exists as one
organic unity. We are part of it: the part should feel reverence for
the whole. That is the idea of vegetarianism. It simply means: don’t
destroy life. It simply means: life is God — avoid destroying it,
otherwise you will be destroying the very ecology.
- Jainism is the first religion that has
made vegetarianism a fundamental necessity for transforming
consciousness. And they are right. Killing just to eat makes your
consciousness heavy, insensitive; and you need a very sensitive
consciousness — very light, very loving, very compassionate. It is
difficult for a non-vegetarian to be compassionate; and without
being compassionate and loving you will be hindering your own
progress.
- Vegetarian food is not complete, and
particularly for intelligence certain vitamins are missing. Those
vitamins can be found in meat. Certainly I cannot support
non-vegetarian food. Even though it gives you better intelligence,
it destroys your very soul; it makes you cruel, violent, inhuman. So
I suggested to them, "I have found something which should be
immediately accepted if any intelligence is left in you, and that is
eating eggs which are not fertilized, non-fertilized eggs. They are
not living, there is no life. If you leave them they will simply rot
and disappear. There is no life in them because the male sperm has
not entered into the mother's egg; the mother has grown the egg
without the male sperm. It is not alive, so there is no harm in
eating it. It is vegetarian."
- All the religions of the world have
insisted on fasting. The reason is that when you are fasting your
capacity to judge between the real and the unreal is lost after
three weeks. Your mind needs the continuous nourishment of certain
proteins; just a three week fast, and those proteins are finished.
The mind keeps a certain emergency reserve and that emergency
reserve is finished in three weeks -- and that is if you are a
non-vegetarian. If you are a vegetarian, then within a week all your
proteins are gone, because vegetarian food is not sufficient food as
far as the mind is concerned.
It is no coincidence that not a single vegetarian has received the
Nobel prize! It is strange; it should be otherwise. Vegetarians
think that since they are eating the purest food, they must have the
purest minds, but even the three persons from India who have
received the Nobel prize -- all were non-vegetarians.
Being a vegetarian and fasting and isolation are all strategies to
bring your mind to a position where you cannot distinguish whether
what you are seeing is real or unreal.
- Ma Tzu insisted on vegetarian food. In his
monastery non-vegetarian food was absolutely prohibited. It takes me
back to Gautam Buddha.
Gautam Buddha was a vegetarian, strictly vegetarian. And all his
followers were vegetarians. That was a revolution in a way, because
man had lived as a non-vegetarian for millions of years. And
according to Buddha, he would remain a barbarian unless he became
vegetarian. Killing life is destroying your own possibility of
growth. You have to respect life; a reverence for life will help
your growth of consciousness. And he was absolutely right.
- Vegetarianism functioned as a
purification. When you eat animals you are more under the law of
necessity. You are heavy, you gravitate more towards the earth. When
you are a vegetarian you are light and you are more under the law of
grace, under the law of power, and you start gravitating towards the
sky.
Your food is not just food: it is you. What you eat, you become. If
you eat something which is fundamentally based on murder, on
violence, you cannot rise above the law of necessity. You will
remain more or less an animal. The human is born when you start
moving above the animals, when you start doing something to yourself
which no animal can do.
Vegetarianism is a conscious effort, a deliberate effort, to get out
of the heaviness that keeps you tethered to the earth so that you
can fly -- so that the flight from the alone to the alone becomes
possible.
The lighter the food, the deeper goes the meditation. The grosser
the food. then meditation becomes more and more difficult. I am not
saying that meditation is impossible for a non-vegetarian -- it is
not impossible, but it is unnecessarily difficult.
- Remember, I am not against non-vegetarian
foods for any other reasons. If a man is not meditating, if a man is
not trying to grow inwards, if a man is not in search of God, then
it is perfectly okay -- he can eat whatsoever he wants to eat. The
higher you are trying to reach, the more and more you will have to
drop any unnecessary luggage. Only then you can fly. This is
unnecessary luggage.
- I have not told everybody to drop
non-vegetarian food, but I have told Pradeepa in a very shocking way
to drop it. Her consciousness is growing; now this has become a
hindrance. People who are not soaring high -- they can carry as much
of a burden as they like; but those who are starting to soar high --
they have to drop all unnecessary luggage. The more pure your energy
becomes, the more you will have to be careful about it, because
something precious can be lost. And it is very difficult to create
that precious energy, it is very easy to lose it. Those who don't
have anything to lose -- they need not worry, they can go on doing
all kinds of stupid things. Their whole being is in tune with those
stupidities.
This has to be remembered by you all: that as you will be growing I
will be making more and more demands on you.
- The change of food is bound to change the
qualities of your physical body. Food is not just energy, it is also
a qualitative thing. Food is not just a fuel, it contributes more
than fuel -- it gives you either transparency, or non-transparency.
The insight into this phenomenon can mutate, and you can have
altogether a different type of body. And it is not so difficult to
change this body, because the body is a flux, every moment changing
itself; it is a process, it is not a static thing. The moment you
came here, you had another body; now the body has changed. It is
changing constantly, every moment; it is riverlike, moving and
changing -- it is not a static thing.
If you change direction, the body takes a jump; only the direction
has to be changed. One should become aware, that whatsoever one is
eating must be such that it doesn't make one's body heavy. This
heaviness is not concerned with weight: sometimes you feel that you
are weightless, as if you can fly. So the food that can give you the
feeling of weightlessness is the right food. The food that gives you
the feeling of being burdened is not the right food. All
non-vegetarian foods make you more rooted in the earth; you cannot
fly. Vegetarian foods give you wings; you have an inner feeling that
you can just levitate, you can just go out of gravitation.
Food is right if it is non-gravitational. If you can feel
non-physical in it, it is good. Really, the body is felt only when
it is heavy; when you have the feeling of heaviness inside, only
then you feel the body. When the body is not heavy with wrong foods,
you are bodiless. That's why when the body is diseased, when the
body is ill, you feel it; when it is healthy, you don't feel it. You
feel your head only when there is a headache; when there is no
headache, there is no head.
- I say Patanjali is scientific. If
you want to change the body posture, Patanjali will say change your
food habits, because every food habit creates subtle body postures.
If you are a meat eater you cannot sit Buddha-like. If you are
non-vegetarian your posture will be different, if you are vegetarian
your posture will be different -- because the body is built by your
food. It is not an accident. Whatsoever you are putting in the body,
the body will reflect it.
So vegetarianism for Patanjali is not a moralist cult, it is a
scientific method. When you eat meat you are not only taking food,
you are allowing a certain animal from which the meat has come to
enter in you. The meat was part of a particular body; the meat was
part of a particular instinct pattern. The meat was the animal just
few hours before, and that meat carries all the impressions of the
animal, all the habits of the animal. When you are eating meat your
many attitudes will be affected by it.
And if you are sensitive you can become aware that whenever you eat
certain things, certain changes immediately come. You can take
alcohol and then you are not the same. Immediately a new personality
has come in. Alcohol cannot create a personality, but it changes
your body pattern. The body chemistry is changed With the change of
the body chemistry, the mind has to change its pattern and when the
mind changes pattern a new personality has come in.
- A violent diet does not only mean that a
man eats non-vegetarian food. It is also a violent diet when a man
eats with anger. Both of these things are violent. While eating in
anger, in suffering, in worry, man is also eating violently. He does
not realize at all that just as he is violent when eating the flesh
of something else, so when his own flesh burns up inside due to
anger and worry, violence is present there too. Then the food which
he is eating cannot be non-violent.
The other part of right food is that you should eat in a very
peaceful, a very joyful state. If you are not in such a state, then
it is better to wait until you are and not to eat for a while. When
the mind is absolutely ready, only then should one take his meals.
For how long will the mind not be ready? If you are aware enough to
wait then at the most it can remain hungry for only one day -- but
we have never bothered to listen to it. We have made eating food a
completely mechanical process. One has to put food into the body and
then leave the dining table. It is no longer a psychological process
-- that is dangerous.
On the body level, the right food should be healthy, non-stimulating
and non-violent; on the psychological level the mind should be in a
blissful state, graceful and joyous; and on the level of the soul
there should be a feeling of gratefulness, of thankfulness. These
three things make food the right food.
Related Articles on
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- Is Vegetarian Food essential for Spiritual Growth
Osho on Cow Slaughter
and Hindu Theory of evolution
Ramana Maharshi on
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Annie Besant on
brutality involved in eating Non - Vegetarian food
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- All Vegetarian religions believe in Reincarnation & Remembering Past
Lives
Vegetarianism Quotes of Famous People
Vegetarianism Quotes of Spiritual Teachers
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