Practice Meditation – In Gita Verse 11.13 At that time Arjuna could see in the universal form of the Lord the unlimited expansions of the universe situated in one place although divided into many, many thousands.
When Krishna revealed his mystic opulence Arjuna can see the whole universe is in Krishna. In my Bhagavad Gita Verse 11.10-11, Blog I wrote even now science has proved in a scientific way that the whole universe is an organic unity.
Pythagoras’s contribution to western philosophy is immense. For the first time he introduced vegetarianism to the West. The idea of vegetarianism is of immense value; it is based on great reverence for life. The modern mind can understand it far better now we know that all forms of life are interrelated, interdependent. Man is not an island: man exists in an infinite web of millions of forms of life and existence. We exist in a chain, we are not separate. And to destroy other animals is not only ugly, unaesthetic, inhuman, it is also unscientific. We are destroying our own foundation.
Pythagoras was not only a mathematician but an enlightened master with his own mystery school. Life exists as one organic unity. Man can exist only as part of this orchestra, just think of man without birds and without animals and without fish, that life will be very very boring; it will lose all complexity, variety, richness, color. The forests will be utterly empty, the cuckoo will not call, and the birds will not fly, and the water will look very sad without the fish. 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.
And it has something very scientific behind it. It was not an accident that all the religions that were born in India are basically vegetarian, and all the religions that were born outside India are non-vegetarian. But the highest peaks of religious consciousness were known in India and nowhere else. 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 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 the meditation goes. The grosser the food, then meditation becomes more and more difficult.
Pythagoras was the first to introduce vegetarianism to the West. It is of profound depth for man to learn how to live in friendship with creatures. That becomes the foundation. And only on that foundation can you base your prayer, your meditativeness. You can watch it in yourself: when you eat meat, meditation will be found to be more and more difficult. Buddha was born in a non-vegetarian family. He was a kshatriya, belonged to the warrior race, but the experience of meditation, slowly slowly transformed him into a vegetarian. It was his inner understanding: whenever he ate meat, meditation was more difficult; whenever he avoided meat, meditation was easier. It was just a simple observation.
Vegetarianism has nothing to do with religion: it is something basically scientific. It has nothing to do with morality, but it has much to do with aesthetics.
It is unbelievable that a man of sensitivity, awareness, understanding, love, can eat meat. And if he can eat meat then something is missing, he is still unconscious somewhere of what he is doing, unconscious of the implications of his acts. But Pythagoras was not heard, not believed, on the contrary, he was ridiculed, persecuted. And he had brought one of the greatest treasures from the East to the West. He had brought great experiment, if he had been heard, the West would have been a totally different world. The problem that has arisen today, that we have destroyed nature, would never have arisen. If Pythagoras had become the foundation for the western consciousness, there would not have been these great world wars. He would have changed the whole course of history. He tried hard, he did whatsoever he could, it is not his fault. But people are blind, people are deaf; they can’t hear a thing, they can’t understand a thing. And they are not ready to change their habits. People live in their habits, mechanically they live. And he had brought a message of becoming aware.
Great meditative energy would have been released in the West. It would have become impossible to produce Adolf Hitlers and Mussolinis and Stalins. It would have been a totally different world. But still the same old habit persists. We cannot change human consciousness unless we start by changing the human body. When you eat meat you are absorbing the animal in you, and the animal has to be transcended. Avoid it if you really want to go higher and higher, if you really want to go to the sunlit peaks of your consciousness, if you want to know God, then you will have to change in every possible way. You will have to look all around your life, you will have to observe each small habit in detail because sometimes a very small thing can change your whole life. Sometimes it may be a very simple thing, and it can change your life so totally that it looks almost unbelievable.
Try vegetarianism and you will be surprised: meditation becomes far easier. Love becomes more subtle, loses its grossness, becomes more sensitive but less sensuous, becomes more prayerful and less sexual. And your body also starts taking on a different vibe. You become more graceful, softer, more feminine, less aggressive, more receptive.
Vegetarianism is an alchemical change in you. It creates the space in which the baser metal can be transformed into gold.
When Buddha became enlightened he left non-vegetarian and became vegetarian – why? Meditation gives you the capacity to look inside of you. When you go inside you will find that even though everything looks separate in this objective world they all are part of me. Definitely no-one will like to kill themselves. Most of the animals also kill other animals only if they are hungry. They will not kill other animals if they are not hungry or they need to protect themselves from someone. If we want to see what Arjuna had seen then we need to practice meditation.
Tags: Practice Meditation
