Is not eating Meat crucial for Enlightenment?

[Tony 845]

Also when Enlightent happens people say it's ego death, then how do you still function is there's no inner monalog??? 

[Hellspeed]

They refer to the old body system patterns and neural pathways. 

Not eating meat is optimum, but not an impairment to enlightenment. 

 

[Adam M]

@Tony 845 many people believe that their thoughts are responsible for their decisions...

I challenge you to look into your direct experience and see that most of your decisions are not logical but feeling-based.

[Tony 845]

@Hellspeed thanks?

[Sahil Pandit]

@Tony 845 If you choose to eat meat, do so as consciously as you can  

[Leo Gura]

I challenge you to self-inquire while you are eating a rack of ribs

Test your theory.

[Shin]

No but you'll be healthier and have more energy.

[DoubleYou]

The day I stopped eating meat was the day I stopped being depressed. Which came as a huge surprise. I anticipated an impact on the body, but it also had a huuge impact on the mind. Which I never hear people talk about.

Its a very personal thing though. For me, it was simply a realigning to my own resonance. A very natural transition. For you it might be different. Try it out and see for yourself.

[Shin]

2 minutes ago, Joseph Maynor said:

Why is killing animals any more wrong than killing insects?  Why is killing animals any more wrong than killing trees?  Who is doing the killing?  

Go work in a slaugther house fo a week, then come back here to say this again.

I bet you won't.

[Shin]

8 minutes ago, Joseph Maynor said:

How do you know what it's like to be a tree?

I don't hear trees screaming for several minutes after having their throat severed.

[Charlotte]

@Outer do you not feel anything whatsoever when you see people chopping down trees? 

14 minutes ago, Joseph Maynor said:

Have you ever smelled the after affects of a bunch of trees being cut down?  Have you ever thought about all the trees that are unnecessarily cut down so people can bring dead young pine trees into their homes for Christmas?  Have you ever actually had a couple of trees that you care for and realized that trees are alive and need love just like animals do?  

♥️♥️♥️

[Charlotte]

Go and chop off a random branch of an sycamore tree and watch how it defends itself

[Shin]

8 minutes ago, Joseph Maynor said:

Does that make dying and death any less real for trees than it is for animals?  Sure you identify more with animals, but dying and death actually occurs in more than just animals.  I feel like I'm entering a Stage Green trap here and there is no reasoning about this.  This is one of those Stage Green moral triggers.  Stage Green just goes bananas when talking about the suffering of animals and there's no reasoning with them about it.  It's like criticizing God to the face of a religious Stage Blue person.  It's just not going to be received well, and they're not going to be open to discussing it.

I didn't say cutting trees are a good thing, or that I didn't care.

Even from an egotistical point of view it is stupid, since if we don't stop we will die from a lack of oxygen.

We have other ways to build what we need without killing anything now.

I'm just saying that some people use this kind of excuse to continue to eat meat, and it is a preposterous excuse.

[Charlotte]

19 minutes ago, Outer said:

A robot can also defend itself.

A robot will be programmed by man to defend itself. A tree has not.

[lmfao]

When it comes to the ethical standing of killing animals for food I'm not concerned about the fact that I've "robbed a life" the same way I am of humans,  but I wonder how much pain do animals feel compared to humans. Like when you kill a human you think "I've robbed this person of their hopes and dreams" and etc but that's not very applicable to non-humans imo. 

Could killing animals be comparable to killing human infants in terms of the suffering you generate in a conscious being? In both cases you are killing creatures of comparable intelligence. I wonder how much pain an animal feels relative to humans. Because if killing animals is comparable to killing human babies then I think there will come a time in the future where humans will look back on us past generations and think "I can't believe those barbarians ate meat when there wasn't a need to" and they will look down on us in the same way we might look down on past civilisations for human slavery and other injustices. I don't think that killing animals generates the same amount of suffering as killing a human infant, but if the comparison is at the very least a bit valid I think there may be something to reflect upon. Because I know that I myself would barely hesitate in killing an non-human animal, but this would not be the case for humans for me. Perhaps there is a double standard here.

Perhaps we suffer from "speciesism" but this speciesism is hardwired into nature at a far, far deeper level than other things like racism. Despite the arguments I've provided for not eating meat, I'm still gonna eat meat and love it and I know I'm probably a hypocrite but I don't feel guilty. 

@Tony 845 There are two angles I have on your question from both a chemical and psychological point of view. The first angle is very quick to look at. I think its extremely, extremely unlikely that eating meat will cause your body chemistry to be incompatible with enlightenment. Eating meat is natural is for us humans biologically (and even psychologically which I will now discuss). 

Let's consider "evil" in the conventional sense of the word. You cause suffering to others and are an asshole (e.g. rapist, murderer, thief etc). Even if killing animals and eating them when there is no need to is an evil act, the evil act is hardwired into our biological essence that it won't have the same impact on your psyche as other evil acts like human murder. Like theoretically speaking, a human murderer can become enlightened its just that it's unlikely because most human murderers have a fucked up psyche. But even if killing and eating animals is "evil", the act of doing so is not nearly highly correlated with a fucked up psyche the same way rape/murder is correlated with a fucked up psyche. This is further true if you are only eating the meat and are not killing the animals yourself. 

 

Edited October 28, 2018 by lmfao

[lmfao]

1 hour ago, Joseph Maynor said:

Why is killing animals any more wrong than killing insects?  Why is killing animals any more wrong than killing trees?  Who is doing the killing?  

To say that killing animals is wrong or not wrong we play the game of philosophy. We start off with axioms about reality and work from them in making arguments. It wouldn't be until you stop playing the game of philosophy that you enter non-duality and ask questions like "Who is doing the killing?". Right now I am not in a higher consciousness state, but there have been times where I have felt that in my present moment experience morality literally doesn't exist. And from that perspective killing animals isn't wrong.

But lets philosophise about this anyway. From a non-solipsistic and your bog-standard empiricist view of the world, you reach the conclusion that animals with more complex nervous system experience more suffering than trees and insects ( through science and "empiricism") and you use the axiom that (more suffering)=(bad) to conclude that killing a cow/chicken is more wrong than killing a insect. But you're probably already aware of this point of view and are just questioning people's axioms about reality .

[eleveneleven]

1 hour ago, Outer said:

What's the link between the brain and subjective reality? If you change the brain you can alter and cease subjective reality. While there is no brain and thereby no subjective reality to alter or cease in plants.

How do you know that? How do you know that something needs a brain to have a conscious experience? Is it just because that's how you think you do it yourself? Aren't you just deciding whether something is conscious and can suffer based on how similar it is to you, then? Is it not possible that something can be conscious in a way that is totally different from you?

You have a bias there. Why the hell does something need a brain to have an experience? That's completely arbitrary.

I agree with @Joseph Maynor. Moralizing about the suffering of animals is a Stage Green trap. You identify with the animal and assume that its experiences are similar to yours and that they must suffer because they look similar to humans when they suffer, and they trigger those emotional buttons of compassion in you. At the same time, you assume that plants can't suffer or have a subjective experience because they don't show the same outward signs that animals do.

But these are just assumptions. They could totally be wrong. A tree or a network of trees could absolutely be conscious and we'd have no way of knowing because they are too different from us for us to realize how they do it. This is especially true of a subjective experience, which would be personal to the plant. You make way too many assumptions.

Personally, I think it's good to be vegan and to minimize the suffering of animals. But let's not pretend like we know for a fact that plants suffer less. We absolutely don't.

Edited October 28, 2018 by eleveneleven

[Max_V]

@Joseph Maynor 

I'd say the killing of animals for food is just unnecessary these days. Maybe back when civilisation wasn't what it is now there was no other choice since we had to survive. But, in this era there is not such a need. If you live in a first world country you have access to all the plant foods you need to thrive and survive.

So, if killing an animal causes pain and it is unnecessary, why continue doing it?

[Shin]

39 minutes ago, Max_V said:

@Joseph Maynor 

I'd say the killing of animals for food is just unnecessary these days. Maybe back when civilisation wasn't what it is now there was no other choice since we had to survive. But, in this era there is not such a need. If you live in a first world country you have access to all the plant foods you need to thrive and survive.

So, if killing an animal causes pain and it is unnecessary, why continue doing it?

 

Becouse ...

 

 

???

 

 

@Charlotte

What about Arttificial intelligence ? 

?

Edited October 28, 2018 by Shin

[Tony 845]

@Joseph Maynor I don't kill insects, animals or trees either? Only grass when "I" cut it ...

Edited October 28, 2018 by Tony 845
Grammar