A student of mine asked me yesterday, is it good or bad Karma to be a Non-Vegetarian?
Here is my answer:
Choosing to live a vegetarian or vegan life is the way to create good karma.
By making daily choices that protect and respect life, we plant the seeds for happiness and freedom in our lives. By doing all that we can to minimize the suffering of other beings, we can root out the seeds for our own future suffering.
In his commentary, Shri Brahmananda Saraswati explains that past and present pain are unavoidable, because they stem from our past karmic seeds coming to fruition. The yogi is concerned with future pain, that can be avoided by rooting out the causes of suffering.
The Yoga Sutras tell us that the karma we acquire from eating animals is the karma of stealing, because while we do not kill the animals ourselves, they are being killed for our consumption.
The act of eating another’s flesh is a tremendously harmful karma, because we have preemptively taken away their vehicle for enlightenment.
All beings long to feel connected to one another and long to experience wholeness. When we contribute to the suffering and to the shortened life of an animal, it becomes a dark seed in our hearts. The seed ripens and forces us to experience a similar result to the cause.
If we have shortened the lives of others, then we must experience a shortened life in return. We can already see the latter effect in the large numbers of people who suffer from heart attacks and diseases such cancer and diabetes. The karmic correlations are obvious if you only look.
How would you feel if you were to be consumed as food? The feeling of insecurity, hatred, fear and pain would envelope you in totality, secreting poisonous chemicals in your physical body through various glands and also creating negative consciousness in your Astral Mind, which would affect the consciousness of the being going to eat you.
Let us choose wisely what we wish to experience and propagate in the world.