Why did I go Vegan?

A tale from my heart to yours.

I want to welcome everyone, no matter who you are or what you believe in, to the spirit of this blog in a way that makes you feel comfortable, open, compassionate, and willing to receive.

And at the same time, maybe you will feel challenged, surprised or moved into a spirit of change through an energetic and spiritual transmission that you may not have expected! Here, I will take you through the full depth of my understanding of the matter from start to finish as it was revealed to me by grace.

When I got clean and sober from drugs, alcohol, drug dealing and a violence-based lifestyle of thought, speech and action in 2016 it was due only to the grace of God. I started reading Eastern-based spiritual and yogic texts, mainly originating from Buddhism and Hinduism in India. When I first heard about being a vegetarian and refraining from eating animals and fish due to the harm and violence inflicted upon them and the effect it has on our bodies and energy systems, it made perfect sense to me.

In yogic philosophy there is the principle of Ahimsa, meaning non-violence, and when we realize that we are all souls,  and that the Atman, the supreme soul of God is within all beings, it becomes pretty obvious that we don’t want to inflict harm on other beings unnecessarily. From one perspective, I could see the law of karma, what goes around comes around and as is truly said: “what we do to any life form we do only to ourselves.”

I saw the pictures in Prabhupada’s Bhagavad Gita of men with cow heads killing cows with human heads, a tough but true analogy showing us that when we partake in such slaughter we will almost certainly be the victims of the same in lifetimes to come.

In the Ancient Hindu scriptures meat eating was always put with other vices such as gambling, taking intoxicants, committing adultery and hunting. I started to realize that in a pure yuga or age it would be absurd to think of slaughtering animals for food, but that in this Kali yuga, the age of ignorance, it had become not only commonplace but done on an industrial level and in a way that kept most consumers completely removed and unaware of the process producing what they ate. In addition to this the yogic texts talked about how consumption of slaughtered and tortured animals has a huge effect on the energies that flow through the body-mind. For example the great Indian saint Ramana Maharishi said “the food you eat affects the mind and must be kept pure.”

So if you’re eating animals that were killed and often killed in a brutal way, you’re
absorbing all of that energy into you, which indeed has a negative effect on the system. It leads to a more “rajasic” or restless mind and negatively affects your chakra system and overall health. Setting out with this understanding, I became mostly vegetarian from that point forward.

However, I would still eat fish on occasion for some years, and I drank some milk and ate lots of cheese because I figured animals weren’t actually being killed for the dairy products. Sadhguru does speak about fish, saying that if you’re going to eat a living being, better to eat an order of life further from you, such as first plants, then fish and then animals. While I choose to refrain completely, I do highly recommend that one who eats animal products stick with only fish and/or eat such products less and less such as once a week instead of for 2-3 meals a day. As for myself, I was still feeding my dogs kibble with meat and plain chicken and sometimes taking a bite or two of the chicken as I handed it to them. And while I felt the vegetarian lifestyle was very important for me, I didn’t yet have as great of a passion as I do now for advocating for it and realizing the immense importance of it for the world!

The True Wake UP Call!

To put it plainly, I became fully vegan because of a few things.

1. I opened up so much deeper to my heart, my spiritual path and the embodied
   realization that we are all one only costumed in different bodies. I feel immense
   care for all creatures including insects and could not imagine intentionally
   inflicting harm on them when I know I can be perfectly healthy and happy, in fact healthier, happier and more connected with nature without having to do so.
   
   
2. I learned about how the animal and fish industry has become a massive business slaughtering almost 100 billion animals and trillions of fish per year sending these vibrations out all over the world and creating huge amounts of suffering on the animals, slaughterhouse workers, humans in general and our environment.
   
   
3. I learned the truth about the dairy industry.

People often argue that humans were meant to eat animals or that we have been doing so for thousands of years, or that we are natural carnivores etc. It is true that life on earth has the process of animals eating each other such as tigers, lions and hyenas hunting, bears catching fish, polar bears hunting seals, birds eating insects, rabbits being eaten for food and so on. However, the human predicament is much different. You aren’t hunting raw flesh and you don’t need it to survive. You’re walking into a giant grocery store choosing between plant-based options or the dead and frozen flesh of tortured pigs, cows and chickens. You’re not a tribesman in Africa that needs to kill an animal to survive, or a person in the freezing tundra hunting Mammoths before the last ice age. You’ve just been tricked by a multi-billion-dollar industry to be desensitised to what you’re eating and what it’s doing to you and the world. Some men have the excuse that it is manly to eat animals, but in truth the most manly, courageous, moral and spiritual act is to take care of all life!

Sometimes Christians think that heathens offered animal sacrifices in ancient times and were demonic fools for this, but that is what we are doing all of the time. We aren’t even honoring them either, just offering them in cruel ways for slaughter. We also have to realise that for those of us in the western world, Jesus Christ was definitely not killing, advocating for the killing of, or eating animals and nor were his close disciples. There is also much evidence that the earlier followers of Christ and the more esoteric and mystic sects of these times, such as the Essenes and those who are now referred to as the Gnostics – Those possessing Gnosis or spiritual wisdom were often vegetarian. The same could be said for Saint Francis who deeply loved all animals and is often depicted with them as Jesus is with the lambs. Saint Francis had that bond with all life because he was one with God, he saw it all as the same and therefore he didn’t eat animals. So it’s not that “Christianity” is ok with animal slaughter, it’s just that this understanding of harmony, respect and care for all life was taken out and mainly forgotten about. A saying I love is “If God wants humans to raise animals for torture and slaughter, what does the devil want?”

So now that we have sufficient evidence and products available that allow us to live happy and healthy lives without eating meat. Why do we still do it, and why are people so attached to this that they get so angry and threatened if you even bring it up?

I also had to give up the dairy when I realized it is being produced by horribly abused cows who are forcibly impregnated, stripped of their babies, forced to produce huge amounts of milk often standing in tiny stalls and pumped by machines, repeatedly impregnated, and then murdered when their  production declines. In India ghee – clarified butter has been used for thousands of years in food and ceremonies at the same time that cows were deeply honored and revered. But this was a different time and much less people lived on Earth then. People had small farms and cows naturally provided milk for their calves and had extra to spare. Now that is a natural symbiotic relationship with nature! But now it’s become much different. There is no way to feed fish, meat or dairy products on the mass scale we do to the world without industrializing it into a profit-based machine with the byproduct of immense suffering. Even in India, unknown to most of the people, when a male cow is born to a milk-producing mother it is often left out back to starve and die as there is no value in the owner paying for its sustenance.

I also used to eat eggs until I found something similar. Some vegans won’t eat eggs at all, but in my opinion, if you had an egg-laying hen who naturally laid eggs on a normal cycle and they weren’t fertilized there wouldn’t be anything wrong with eating them.

However in today’s industry here is what happens: Egg laying hens are not the same chickens used for meat production so they have to get born specifically for this purpose and any male that is born is considered useless and is grinded up or suffocated in a bag along with hundreds and thousands of others. So that is the byproduct of us eating eggs. I think this is hugely important because it shows us that in the past and in certain very rare circumstances these products such as dairy and eggs may be produced with little or no suffering but that is largely a thing of the past except in rare circumstances.

This brings me to my next point which is the treatment of these animals. You can do further research on your own and there are many good documentaries and movies that cover these subjects such as “Christspiracy” (Christspiracy is also a deeply spiritual movie) “Earthlings” “Dominions” and many more. What I will say is that the animals in these industries live extremely short and unnatural lives, they are kept in heavy confinement with little space to move, separated from their families, stuffed with hormones, killed on conveyor belts in brutal ways and often subject to intense suffering as slaughterhouses work in an extremely quick and high production way that leads to many animals not being properly killed and then having to be skinned alive etc by the next person in the process.

These are brutal jobs you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy and many people who have worked them express the horrors, trauma and brutal nature of this work. It is because of this it is often hidden behind closed doors, and the jobs given to illegals, migrants, or others who are very desperate for work. In America it is even coming out that when the southern border was open tons of missing children were trafficked into slaughterhouses.

Some people criticize vegan advocates saying “you think you’re better than us” or “Stop pushing your beliefs onto me”, but there are parts of the world where dogs and cats are eaten for food. If someone was advocating against that you would say “yes of course, cats and dogs should not be killed and eaten for food that is obvious.” Well the same is true of cows, pigs, chicken and fish. If you can’t look them in their eyes and do it yourself you shouldn’t be making someone else do it. And either way everyone involved is guilty for that karma, that sin, that suffering.

There is a story in the Jataka Tales of the Buddha, which are tales from his previous lives that carry great lessons. In one, there is a goat which a man is tasked by a Brahmin – a holy man – to bring for slaughter. When the man gets to the animal, it first laughs, and then it cries. He lets the brahmin know about the goat’s strange reaction, and when the goat gets to the brahmin, he is asked why he laughed and then wept. The goat says “I laughed because formerly I was a Brahmin like you and I killed a goat for slaughter. Because of this, I have had to be slaughtered 100 times and this is the final time. After you kill me, I will be free.” He goes on, “I wept because you may have to suffer that same fate.”

Believe me, I fully understand that is a hard story to digest and in today’s day and age when people want to think all is love and light, they don’t even want to look at the possible effects of their acts. But I would be amiss and do you a disservice not to point it out because it is that big of a deal for your soul’s journey. It’s also a huge deal for mankind. For me it’s plain to see we can never have a world free of hatred, anger and especially violence while we continue to slaughter literally trillions of fish and animals each year because those vibrations spread all over the earth and have a hugely negative influence on the world. Below are a couple of quotes about the matter!

“The sacred Vedas, enlightened saints, and even the Supreme Lord Krishna tell us that protecting and serving the Cow is the ultimate remedy for human misery and the only true way to attain lasting harmony on this earth.”