2. WHAT HAPPENS WHEN ONE EATS MEAT?

   I shall tell you then a story. I knew a young Swedish woman who was doing sadhana. Normally she was a vegetarian, by habit as well as by inclination. One day she was invited to a dinner. She was given fowl to eat. She did not like to make a fuss and quietly ate her fowl. Now at night she found herself, in dream of course, in a basket and her head in between. two bits of sticks and being shaken, shaken to and fro. She felt very unhappy, very miserable. And then she saw herself head down and legs up in the air and being shaken, shaken continually. She was thoroughly miserable. All on a sudden she felt she was being skinned, peeled and how painful it all was ! And then someone came with a knife and cut of her head. She woke up at that. She told

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me the story and said she never had such a frightful nightmare in her life. She had thought nothing of this kind before going to bed; it must have been simply the consciousness of the poor chicken. that entered into her and she experienced in dream all the agorues of this creature when it was being carried to the market, its feathers pulled out and in the end the head severed. That is what happens. In other words, along with the meal that you take, you absorb also, in a large or small measure, the consciousness of the animal whose. flesh you swallow. Of course it is nothing serious, but ir is not always pleasant. Pet obviously it does not help you to be more on the side of man than on that of the animal. Primitive men, we know, were much nearer the animal level. and used to take raw meat: that gave them evidently more strength and energy than cooked meat. They used to kill an animal, tear it to pieces and bite into the mesh. That is. how they were robust and forceful. Also it was for this reason perhaps that there was in their intestines an organ called appendix in a much bigger size than it is now: for it had to digest raw meat. As men however started cooking their food and found it more tasty that way, the organ too gradually diminished in size and feed into atrophy; now it does not serve any purpose, it is an encumbrance and often a source of illness. This means that it is time to change the diet and take to something less bestial. It depends, however, on the state of the consciousness of each person. An ordinary man, who leads an ordinary life, has ordinary aspirations, things of nothing else than earning his 1ivehhood, keeping good health and rearing a family, need not pick and choose, except on purely hygienic grounds. He may with benefit eat meat or anything else that he considers helpful and useful.

    But if you wish to move from the ordinary life to a higher

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life, the problem acquires an interest. And again, for a higher life if you wish to move up still farther and prepare yourself for transformation, then the problem becomes very important. For there are certain foods that help the body to become more refined and others that keep it down to the level of animalism. But it is only then that the question acquires an importance, not before. Before you come to that point, you have a lot of other things to do. It is certainly better to purify your mind, purify your vital before you think of purifying your body. For even if you take all possible . precautions and live physically with every care to eat only the things that help to refine the body, but the mind and the vital remain full of desire and inconscience and obscurity and all the rest, your care will serve no purpose. Your body will become perhaps weak, disharmonious with your inner life and drop off one day.

    You must begin from within. I have said a hundred times, you must begin from above. You must purify first the higher region and then purify the lower. I do not mean by this that you should give yourself up to all the licences that degrade the body. I do not mean that at all. I am not advising you not to control your desires. What I mean is this: do not try to be an angel in the body before you are already something of the kind in your mind and in your vital. For that will bring about a dislocation, a lack of balance. And I have always said that to maintain the balance, ah the parts must progress together. In trying to bring light into one part you must not leave another part in darkness. You must not leave any obscure corner anywhere.

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