Eating Meat for Noble Purposes vs Eating Meat for Pleasures

[Stosh]

'What you mean by passions', answered Chuang Tzu, 'is not what I mean. By a man without passions I mean one who does not permit good and evil to disturb his internal economy, but rather falls in with whatever happens, as a matter of course, and does not add to the sum of his mortality.'

 

Our cats don't do it, but maybe some humans find nobility in not sacrificing themselves for nobility. Maybe part of their motivation to eat meat is to counteract the other side of this dichotomy which they feel is unnaturally seeking nobility and/or spiritual superiority.

 

But, it isn't always about nobility.

 

EDIT: And it's a good thing our cats would not do that. Their bodies don't produce the proper enzymes to survive on a vegetarian diet.

Yes in part , I do think the entire reason for self deprivation is to think one has some kind of moral superiority, whether the thing to eschew is meat or pork or 'fish without scales' or dancing or dice or drink or sex .... the arguments of many vegetarians point to that very thing!

 

The Op itself connects nobility with diet , I didnt invent that., and so-the thread was not "why is meat bad for my health?"

 

 

Some folks claim that it isnt healthy to eat meat , and thats why they dont.. but dietary habits of the last century have shown clearly that the dietary ill health revolves around carbohydrate and quantity.

 

Are really considering that I eat meat to defy folks who dont ?? C'mon thats a bit skewed.

 

My cat , I dont know if a mixture based on say, spirulina , might keep her fed. That isnt the point ,

the thing is -that she does what comes naturally to her , she isnt all confused about whether she is noble or not.

If Chi dragon is on the money about wu wei being central to Taoism , and that wu wei is acting natural , then doing unnatural things like depriving yourself of things you like , so as to be noble , makes no sense. ( the example of my cat is to demonstrate natural behavior expressed , not to say that humans have the metabolism of cats -- Im not debating the importance of naturalness , and I am indeed making the assumption that it is more normative to be accord with his view than its inverse)

 

The rightness or wrongness of killing 'sentient beings' is also based on a morality paradigm. ( if a chicken even really qualifies as sentient ) and its consistent with buddhism as far as Ive heard.

The health argument is not based on morality , and I dont take issue with it ,until the pragmatism is betrayed , in favor of pride and morality.

 

'What you mean by passions', answered Chuang Tzu, 'is not what I mean. By a man without passions I mean one who does not permit good and evil to disturb his internal economy, but rather falls in with whatever happens, as a matter of course, and does not add to the sum of his mortality.'

 

Joined toes and extra fingers are an addition to nature, though, functionally speaking, superfluous. Wens and tumours are an addition to the bodily form, though, as far as nature is concerned, superfluous. And similarly, to include charity and duty to one's neighbor among the functions of man's organism, is not true Tao.

For just as joined toes are but useless lumps of flesh, and extra fingers but useless excrescences, so are any artifical additions to our internal economy but harmful adjuncts to real charity and duty to one's neighbour, and are moreover prejudicial to the right use of intelligence."

Edited April 8, 2013 by Stosh

[RongzomFan]

Certain Vajrayana contexts actually require meat eating.

[runner11]

I eat meat, but if someone feels that being vegetarian is best I respect that. A lot of vegetarians that I talk to say they became vegetarian after watching some kind of video about factory farming. I think there's a backlash going on with some people. They witness or learn about the disgusting treatment of most farm animals in the US, and their reaction is to become vegetarian. I've worked on a small organic farm. We treated the chickens like pets. They ate non-gmo grains, vegetable scraps, and foraged all day for insects and flies. At the end of the day, they were still killed to provide nourishment for people. Some people are not OK with that, and I have a lot of respect for those people. But some people don't realize that you can buy meat in this country from farms that don't put the animals through hell. Sure its more expensive, but meat shouldn't be a large portion of one's diet anyway in my opinion.

[i am]

I eat meat. Back when I ate it thoughtlessly, I had low cholesterol, low blood pressure, and good energy.

 

Now I'm very conscious about it, and eat much less meat, and almost exclusively meat either I killed, or meat that I know how it was killed and feel ok about it.

 

And...low cholesterol, low blood pressure, maybe slightly more energy than I used to have. Genetics might be a better determining factor for many of us than diet, at least as far as the cholesterol and blood pressure.

 

I see many people who eat much worse than me, who don't suffer the negative reactions I do when I don't eat we'll.

 

Anyway...humans can choose a vegetarian diet, and survive. This, among other things, sets us apart from other animals. So...I don't pretend to know enough about the tao or spiritual matters to know the answer. Just because I might be healthier eating good quality meat than no meat, does that mean its RIGHT to eat another animal? Just because I'm healthier? I don't know.

 

I can't think of anything other than meat which could be argued as being healthy in the right amounts and quality, but has negative moral aspects surrounding it. I'm leaving out veggies and fruit because they all CAN be farmed without negative ethical consequences. Even though they often aren't. Clearly it's been a debate since we were conscious enough to debate such issues. Thousands of years, possibly.

 

Maybe, in the end, it really is personal. Things die in order for you to live. No way around it. So maybe its only the unconcious eater, and the willfully ignorant eater who is immoral. It's the eater who, knowing they could never kill an animal and feeling that the only way they can continue eating them is to distance themselves so much from what they're actually doing that they convince themselves "meat comes in plastic from the grocery store" who is hypocritical and immoral. It's only someone who just plain doesn't think about their food, or consciously lies to themselves about their food, who is immoral.

 

The rest of us are trying to find a way to understand what it means to follow nature, in an era of factory farms, assembly line meat, animals treated worse than inanimate electronics...

 

If I only ate meat I shot wild or raised and killed myself, I would feel much better. Or maybe being constantly that close to the killing would push me towards vegetarianism...probably a good idea to find out.

Edited April 8, 2013 by i am

[liminal_luke]

 

 

Things die in order for you to live. No way around it.

 

 

We might not like it, but it's true. Things die in order for us to live. It's part of what it means to be an incarnated being on this earth. So many of us, especially perhaps those attracted to "spirituality," aren't really comfortable with earthly existence at all. It would be easier just to go to heaven, and not have anything to do with the earth. The earth feels dirty and bad. We want to escape the earth, send our kundalini energy flying upward, never touch the ground. We want to believe we can escape the moral ambiguities of life in the physical plane.

 

For better or worse everyone writing on this forum is a human being living on the earth. We are part of the cycle of life on this planet, a cycle that involves killing and being killed. To me, the true moral issue is whether we can learn to embrace that reality or choose to live in denial. You can choose not to eat meat but make no mistake....this realm isn't all light and love in the heavenly spheres. We all kill (knowingly or unknowingly), we all die, we all belong to the earth.

[C T]

“As incisively pointed out in the documentary Food Inc.," an overwhelmingly large percentage of "new," healthy," and "organic" alternative food products are actually owned by the same parent companies that scared us into the organic aisle in the first place. "They got you comin' and goin'" has never been truer.”
― Anthony Bourdain, Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook

[baiqi]

"We should not eat the meat in order to enjoy it, because it is delicious. We should not eat it because we want to enjoy the great flavor and savor what we are eating. Instead we should eat the meat only in order to keep ourselves alive."

 

Very well put, and I'll just add that in our society we don't need it to survive anymore.

 

Honestly people eat meat only for bad reasons; because they enjoy it, or because they believe that they need it.

 

For the first ones: you can enjoy lots of other things, that are much less harmful. (Including food)

For the second ones: you don't need it, just like you don't need to smoke. Stop for a while, see the difference after a few months. Check it out on the net or (better) with other vegetarians, you'll learn a little about nutrition, see people who are meatless and in good health.

[baiqi]

We all kill (knowingly or unknowingly), we all die, we all belong to the earth.

 

Yes, but you can choose to do as less harm as you can.

[RongzomFan]

Dalai Lama eats meat

[Vanir Thunder Dojo Tan]

I am meat, but i eat vegetables. WHAT.

[Stosh]

Gather ye rosebuds whilst ye may

at least one translation of the ttc says

And similarly, to include charity and duty to one's neighbor among the functions of man's organism, is not true Tao

I still dont see the passage though that says that 'one should do the least harm they can'

harm is subjective perception - one mans loss is another mans gain
It is Artiface if it requires an injunction , isnt it?

[Xienkula1]

Doing harm is unavoidable in this matrix which means the matrix of Me Or You, runs exactly 180 degrees counter to our core spiritual values and that is the intolerable we all find ourselves within. We had no choice about being here and yet here we are in the chain of the matrix dependent on stealing energy from other life forms (plants and animals) so that we can survive instead of creating our own, caught between the extremes of pure + I win so those in the opposite - pollarity loose, so the - polarity follow the path of self-sacrifice, neither polar programming works and they are all symptomatic of the original split. This is the intolerable choiceless fact of this matrix, you must cannibalize your ancestors in order to live and to this operational code of the food chain we say No! No!, but we are still not out of the matrix and so we all must eat, but we can still say no to operational code and hack it!

[suninmyeyes]

... I totally agree with you. Factory farming is gross. If a person decided not to eat factory-farmed meat, well, I could totally get behind the ethics of that. But truly grass-fed cows? Wild salmon? Those are different beasts altogether.

...

 

It is good to get informed and buy sustainable seafood if that is what you like to eat , becouse we are losing spieces and ecosystem with it :

 

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7142053.stm

....

'Wild salmon on Canada's west coast are being driven to extinction by parasites from nearby fish farms, a study claims.

Wild pink salmon around the Broughton Archipelago are declining rapidly and will die out within 10 years if no action is taken, say researchers.

They say the data, published in Science, raises serious concerns about the global expansion of aquaculture. ...'

...

 

 

 

Marine life extincion -- serious dangers as well as rapid rise of different fishing restrictions all around the world :

 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/jun/20/marine-life-oceans-extinction-threat

Edited April 9, 2013 by suninmyeyes

[suninmyeyes]

Dalai Lama eats meat

So what .

My Granny did too .

[Stosh]

Doing harm is unavoidable in this matrix which means the matrix of Me Or You, runs exactly 180 degrees counter to our core spiritual values and that is the intolerable we all find ourselves within. We had no choice about being here and yet here we are in the chain of the matrix dependent on stealing energy from other life forms (plants and animals) so that we can survive instead of creating our own, caught between the extremes of pure + I win so those in the opposite - pollarity loose, so the - polarity follow the path of self-sacrifice, neither polar programming works and they are all symptomatic of the original split. This is the intolerable choiceless fact of this matrix, you must cannibalize your ancestors in order to live and to this operational code of the food chain we say No! No!, but we are still not out of the matrix and so we all must eat, but we can still say no to operational code and hack it!

If thats aimed at me at all ;I would say I agree alot with it , except the part about 'intolerability' , I find it quite tolerable for me to eat meats ( but I might not say so if I were the meats - but Im not,,,yet... the worms will get me at some point )

[Xienkula1]

It was aimed at us all, sure your body tolerates meat well, but if you go into your heart, the idea of killing something else making someone else loose life so you can win it, is in direct conflict with your core values and violates the soul's ethic. So we must do evil to live in this matrix, that's the operational code. That is what was intended and to iterate that we have the choice for those who wish to say No up! and No down. No to the split.

 

 

''What is the intrinsic worth of two small sovereign individuals 'a mouse and a frog' right here in the physical, in their precious differences, their absolute uniqueness? Priceless. Irreplaceable. Beyond rubies!'' -B

Edited April 10, 2013 by Xienkula1

[voidisyinyang]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lfY0Jpq_Ub0

 

Watch this "Out of the Wild" Venezuela survival show.

 

Also the earlier Alaska "Out of the Wild" show -- on youtube also.

 

It's pretty amazing to see how people view food differently when they are starving.

 

As for getting enough protein for the monks -- if a person does enter bigu meditation then they can make the necessary proteins they need and any other nutrients. Science has speculated maybe there's gamma rays involved causing transmutations -- haha.

 

Anyway yeah humans are eating the planet to death -- in Vietnam the wild animals are getting killed off for food just like "bush meat" in Africa. Sure some hunting is actually better for controlling animal populations just like having a "top predator" keeps the populations larger in the herds of ungulates, etc.

 

So humans evolved as meat eaters as the Bushmen culture shows us - but they are the original qigong masters and when they train they go without meat to do the "bigu" - they fast for a month.

 

But yeah Taoist Yoga: Alchemy and Immortality says for older males to increase jing energy to eat meat at first to build up the jing - but there has to be mind celibacy also - and so the meat energy is used to create chi energy and shen.

 

Also if animals are rotated properly then the manure goes back into the soil to increase the fertility of the grass -- and so this is way better then the huge manure lagoons from factory farms which give off the methane so much.

 

Also corn-fed animals are going to burp a lot more than grass-fed animals - the corn actually will kill cows if they are not slaughtered young enough.

 

I mean I'm not an expert on this stuff -- but I think being vegetarian when a person is younger is excellent as the sex energy is still strong and so a person can always draw on those reserves if necessary -- and so the diet goes together with the storing up of the internal energy also.

 

But yeah -- all the water and grain required for meat -- what is really required is tons of oil to grow the grain - and so as the EArth is depleted of the oil to turn into global warming - and so it can't last long.

 

But Western modern society is very testosterone dopamine driven and so people are expected to have strong jing energy to compete, etc. -- this is the opposite of say setting up monasteries that are vegetarian and the people use mind focus Emptiness philosophy to store up their energy.

 

Whether people choose to meditate to save energy -- zero population growth will happen.

 

Also humanure should really be composted and not flushed into drinkable water that then has to be sanitized -- it's a triple waste of energy!

 

Asia used to rely on humanure and so do the Berber in north Africa, among other places.

 

The U.S. still wastes some 40% of food - it gets thrown out of people's frigs or from stores and restaurants.

 

I was vegetarian for 15 years and then I dumpster dived for 10 years - just like a Theravedin monk - you just eat what you can scavenge. haha.

 

Now I grow a lot of my own food -- I had so many organic tomatoes over the summer it was fantastic.

 

I compost my own manure and I use wood ash and kitchen waste and leaves, etc.

 

We feed the deer but I will probably eat the deer soon as they're too many -- but they look in our windows begging for food - but it's just the bird seed that they eat.

 

Yeah so my sister visited saying she didn't think I was carrying my weight and so I just sat in full lotus for 10 days straight -- fasting the whole time - and I was never hungry! haha.

 

So also when they threatened to call the doctor I just went outside and I did physical labor to prove I was strong and healthy. At the end of the 10 days I took my nephew for a tour of the forest and then we climbed to the roof of the house together to check out my experiment roof garden.

 

So yeah - bigu powers do come in handy.

Edited April 10, 2013 by pythagoreanfulllotus