..the food that you eat is life. Other forms of life are giving up their life to sustain ours. If we can eat with enormous gratitude for all of them, then food will behave in a very different way within us.
Above all, the food that you eat is life. Other forms of life are giving up their life to sustain ours. If we can eat with enormous gratitude for all of them, then food will behave in a very different way within us.Plant-Based Diet vs Meat
Q) Sadhguru, I am a foodie. Is it okay to eat non-vegetarian food if it feels right for me?
Sadhguru: Whether you eat a plant or an animal, it is still violence. There is substantial documentation today to show that plants are just as sensitive. There is enough evidence to show that they do scream.
You do not hear it, that is all. Among the trees, let us say there are a thousand or ten thousand trees here and an elephant came and started eating the leaves of one tree. This tree will immediately send messages to all other trees of its species that it is being eaten like this. Within minutes, if the elephant goes to the other trees, all the trees would have produced a certain amount of poisonous material in their leaves. When the elephant tries to eat the leaves, they taste bitter so it will not eat them. They are that sensitive.
Whether you pluck a fruit or a vegetable or cut an animal and eat it, everything is cruel. It is just that we must do it with some sensitivity, only to the extent that is necessary. You should drop this idea of being a foodie. We all must eat food; otherwise it will be cruel to our own body. But becoming identified with food is not right because that means we will indulge, not just nourish, ourselves. As a life we have a right to nourish ourselves – this is how the food cycle is in the world – but we have no right to take another life wantonly, just for pleasure. We have no business doing that. We have every right to nourish this life, but we have no right to enjoy taking another life. Do not call yourself a foodie because food should never become the identity. We will eat whatever we have to eat in the given moment for survival and nourishment.
Q) Is there a connection between our mind, mood, emotional state, mental health, and the food we eat? In general, what is the connection between our body and our mind?
Sadhguru: The Yogic system does not identify the body and mind as two different entities. It is just that what we generally refer to as mind is a certain amount of memory and intelligence. Your brains are part of your body. People generally think the brain is everything just because it handles the thought process. But between the brain and the rest of the body, which has more memory and intelligence? If you look at it carefully, your body’s memory goes back millions of years. It clearly remembers how your forefathers were. The mind cannot claim that kind of memory. When it comes to intelligence, what is happening in a single molecule of DNA is so complex that your whole brain cannot figure it out. In the Yogic system, there is a physical body and there is a mental body – an intelligence and memory running right across the body.
- Sadguru