HT 5: Beyond Vegetarianism

"If one offers Me with love and devotion a leaf, a flower, fruit, or water, I will accept it."

Beyond concerns of health, psychology, economics, ethics, and even karma, vegetarianism has a higher, spiritual dimension that can help us develop our natural appreciation and love for God.

Walking through a supermarket, people may forget a very basic fact of nature-it's not man but God who makes food. There's something mystical about the way food grows. You put a tiny seed in the ground, it sprouts, and by the mysterious life force within it a food factory arises-a tomato plant producing dozens of tasty red tomatoes, an apple tree producing bushels of sweet apples. No team of scientists anywhere has yet invented anything as amazing as the simplest green creation of God.

But rather than admit the existence of a superior intelligence, scientists mislead the public with their theories of chemical evolution. Without substantial evidence, they proclaim that life comes from chemicals. Yet these cannot utilize those chemicals to make a seed that will grow into a shaft of wheat that will produce more seeds that will sprout into hundreds of more shafts of wheat.

Once we admit that life comes only from life, it's entirely reasonable to suppose that all life originates from a common living source, the one Supreme Lord, known to the Muslims as Allah, to the Jews as Yahweh, to the Christians as Jehovah, and to the followers of the Vedas as Krsna.

So at very least we should offer our food to God out of gratitude. Every religion has such a process of thanksgiving. But the spiritual path outlined in the Vedic scriptures of India is unique in that the offering of food to the Lord is part of a highly developed form of yoga that helps one develop one's personal loving relationship with God. This is called bhakti-yoga.

Originally, each soul has a direct relationship with God in the spiritual world, and according to the Vedas the main purpose of life is to revive this lost relationship. The Srimad-Bhagavatam, a classic Sanskrit work known as the ripened fruit of the tree of Vedic knowledge, states, "The human form of life affords one a chance to return home, back to Godhead. Therefore every living entity, especially in the human form of life, must engage in devotional sewice.

Devotional service, or bhakti-yoga, is the highest form of yoga. In Bhagavad-gita, after discussing various kinds of yoga, Lord Krsna, the master of all yoga, declares, "Of all yogis, one who always abides in Me with great faith, worshiping Me in transcendental loving service [bhakti], is most intimately united with Me in yoga and is highest of all." Lord Krsna further states, "One can understand the Supreme Personality as He is only by devotional service. And when one is in full consciousness of the Supreme Lord by such devotion, he can enter into the kingdom of God."