Why Vegetarian or Vegetarianism?
What kind of food you eat should depend not on what you think about it, or on your values and ethics, but on what the body wants. Food is about the body. When it comes to food, don’t ask your doctors or your nutrition experts because these people keep changing their opinion every five years. Ask the body. Try different foods and see how your body feels after eating the food. If your body feels very agile, energetic, and nice, that means the body is happy. If the body feels lethargic and needs to be pumped up with caffeine or nicotine to stay awake, the body is not happy.
If you listen to your body, your body will clearly tell you with what kind of food it is happy. But right now, you are listening to your mind. Your mind keeps lying to you all the time. Today it tells you this is it. Tomorrow it makes you feel like a fool for what you believed yesterday. So don’t go by your mind. You just have to learn to listen to your body.
Every animal, every creature knows what to eat and what not to eat. The human species are supposed to be the most intelligent on the planet, but they don’t even know what to eat. Forget about how to be, human beings do not even know what to eat. So, it takes a certain mindfulness and attention to learn to listen to your body. Once you have that, you know what to eat and what not to eat.
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In terms of the quality of food that is entering you, definitely vegetarian food is far better for the system than nonvegetarian. We are not looking at it from a moral standpoint. We are just looking at what is suitable for the system. Whether you want to do your business properly or study properly or do any activity properly, it is extremely important that your body is at ease. So, the kind of food with which your body would be most at ease and would not struggle to get nourishment out of, that is the kind of food we should eat.
Just experiment and see, when you eat vegetarian food in its live form, what a difference it will make. The idea is to eat as much live food as possible. A live cell has everything to sustain life. If you consume a live cell, you will see the sense of health in your system will be very different from anything that you have known. When we cook the foods, it destroys the life in it. Eating foods after its process of destruction does not give the same amount of life energy to the system. But when you eat live foods, it brings a different level of aliveness in you. If one eats lots of sprouts, fruit, and whatever vegetables that can be eaten in a live condition, if you bring in at least thirty to forty percent live food—things that are alive—you will see, it will sustain the life within you also very well.
Above all, the food that you eat is life. It is other forms of life that we are eating—the other forms of lives are giving up their life to sustain our life. If we can eat with enormous gratitude for all the living things which give up their life to sustain our lives, then the food will behave in a very different way within you.
| Sadhguru is a yogi, mystic, and visionary, and a prominent spiritual leader. An author, poet, and internationally renowned speaker, Sadhguru is the founder of Isha Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to human wellbeing. (www.isha.sadhguru.org) |
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