Prana Krishna Nanda (Krishnananda)
My name is Prana Krishna Nanda; you can all call me Dada (a Hindi word meaning “brother”). I am very happy to see so many vegetarians gathered here today, working to bring more people into the vegetarian fold. I wish you great success in creating a vegetarian world.
I have been a vegetarian for 30 years. I do not eat meat or fish, nor eggs, garlic, onions, or mushrooms. I teach yogic seated meditation, a way of reaching a state of meditative absorption. In Sanskrit this state is called the chakras.
Today the topic I want to speak about is the effect of diet on the mind. I will draw a diagram to explain the yogic understanding of the mind. According to yogic theory, the spinal cord is the protector of our nervous system. Please note that what yoga calls “nerves” is not quite the same as what medicine means by the word.
There are three main channels in the spinal cord. One runs from the brain down to the base of the spinal cord, and the other two wind around this central channel like vines along the spinal cord. The points where these channels intersect are the centers of the chakras, so the chakras are made up mainly of nerves.
The second component of the chakras is the glands. According to the principles of meditation, the human body has 50 glands. In each chakra there are many mental tendencies that govern our greed, hunger, and thirst, our kindness and compassion in helping others, and behavioral traits such as stubbornness and cruelty.
So all the possible traits of the human mind can be found in the spinal cord, the nervous system, and the glands. The process works like this: the glands first produce different kinds of hormones, and once the hormones enter the blood they arouse different mental tendencies. When these tendencies are aroused again and again, they become part of our personality. So if you eat the meat of a particular kind of animal, you will take on the personality of that kind of animal. Just by observing our own behavior, we can tell that we have eaten foods that stimulate those particular traits.
The pig is a very friendly animal; in Asia it is often treated like a household dog. Though it is a very interesting animal, it has a flaw: it eats, eats, and eats without stopping. I know some people who behave like this, and they are all lovers of pork. The ram is also a very interesting animal; rams like to butt their heads together. Many people do the same thing, because they have developed this habit from eating mutton.
Big fish have the habit of eating small fish. In this age where capital reigns, the social and economic situation is exactly like the fish: the big fish eat the small fish.
The conclusion is that our personality traits are, to some degree, closely related to the food we eat.
Yet human beings are not merely organic life; we have thoughts and souls. We must bring these out, and meditation leads us along the path of this discovery. The goal of yoga is to reach meditative absorption, and yoga practitioners engage in the spiritual practice of guiding all our energies into a certain degree of balance.
Yoga holds that energy has three qualities. The first is sentient, the second is mutative (mutable), and the third is an intermediate state. These three forces run side by side in our consciousness. The lowest two chakras of the body are governed by static energy, and the highest two by sentient energy. When we analyze the world around us, we want to know what type of energy we need to arouse in order to stimulate our consciousness.
Clearly, if we want to approach the state of meditative absorption, we must stay away from static energy and draw close to sentient energy. This explains why yoga practitioners do not eat meat, fish, eggs, garlic, onions, or mushrooms: all these foods stimulate static mental energy. Coffee, tea, cocoa, and condiments stimulate the mutative mind. Other foods stimulate the sentient mind.
So when we reach meditative absorption through meditation, we look at how plants, animals, minerals, and other elements affect our reaching that state, because we need all kinds of help from these things. If a food deprives us of the chance to reach this experience, we do not consider that food important, so we eliminate the problematic foods.
The body has the function of digestion, or purification. Digested food takes 28 days to be purified. Its end product is lymph, a raw material the glands use to make hormones. Non-vegetarian food, lacking chlorophyll, can produce only a little lymph, while vegetarian food contains a great deal of chlorophyll. The lymph produced is then converted into hormones in the glands, and chlorophyll is the catalyst needed in this conversion.
This explains why yoga practitioners and meditators choose foods high in chlorophyll: to give more energy to the sentient glands, brain, channels and nervous system, skin, and so on.
Two dietary ideas of vegetarianism are very important: first, the sentient foods we eat; second, that lymph needs the help of chlorophyll. For yoga practitioners, the meaning of food lies not merely in the food itself; it is a means of stimulating the subtler levels of our consciousness and thereby bringing us into direct contact with the divine, the spiritual, awakening, God (or whatever name you consider fitting). The human mind has the potential to answer every question; it only needs a little concentration. This idea of concentration is meditation, a form of self-realization. That is why we see a vegetarian diet as a means to self-realization.
Question: What is your view of cows being used to produce milk?
Answer: This is a question of the morality of capital. In modern society, milk is produced not for our health and happiness, nor for the cows or calves, but to make money. The sole purpose of capital is to make money; the more it seeks money, the greedier it becomes, and once people become greedy they have no sense of morality. It is futile to talk morality to capital. If you want to change society, you must take more active measures—not only discuss the question of cows and calves, but do something substantial to change the morality of capital.