Wave of Bliss

Author(s): N P Jain
Publisher: Jain Meditation International Centre

Page 31

THE WAVE OF BLISS
defenseless for profit and for our bodies, what is it that will stop us from sending beautiful sons and daughters to war, rendering ourselves helpless before the stockpilers of weapons and misguided planners of our defense? If we can think for ourselves, take our lives into our own hands, get up in arms about the arms race, then can we not also stop contributing to the perpetuation of agony, pain, and suffering in our diets? Can we not see the subtle desensitization that consumerism, taste buds, and not wanting to know is covering us with?
I don't know the answer. I only know that for me and our children, the vegetarian way of life is not only a way of removing ourselves from supporting the machines of violence and the mentality of callousness toward helpless creatures, but it has also been able to give us a new and fresh outlook on life. I feel one with the creation. I feel a deep kinship with the beings with whom I share the planet. I see them as energies, conscious, living, growing evolving energies in a myriad of different forms. They are my brothers and sisters just as much as the downtrodden, persecuted, suffering humans.
As Edgar Guest wrote: “Who for God's creatures small will plan Will seldom wrong his fellow man."
I want to go to the root of the mentality which can plan large-scale destruction, whether it is of animals or of humans. The relationship between meat-eating and war has been pointed out by Jain philosophers of India, by George Bernard Shaw, by Albert Schweitzer, by Henry David Thoreau, and others. You may not agree, pointing to Hitler who was a vegetarian. But he was only because his digestive system was so spastic that he could not digest anything else but vegetables; his vegetarianism,