If we confine our focus to the physical health of the body, we are ignoring the moral, ethical, and spiritual issues of what life is about; we are limiting ourselves to a materialistic viewpoint. This book, and the entire scope of holistic veganism, goes far beyond this limited, physical-health perspective on veganism.
The holistic vegan diet looks beyond the narrow perspective of what is best for the physical body and health, to ask: How can we bring the most light into the world through our dietary choices? This key question gives us the opportunity to teach morals, ethics, and spirituality to our child in the context of diet. Holistic veganism’s benefits are not limited to physical health. Holistic veganism is part of an entire worldview for the health of the planet, and the evolution and uplifting of humanity. Holistic veganism is the evolutionary diet of the future. Truly, in each generation, we are given the medicine for the healing of that generation; holistic veganism is the medicine for the healing of our current generation, on multiple levels.
Holistic veganism is a way of life that is a way of love, peace, harmony, and evolution for the planet. The Hindu tradition refers to this emphasis on peace as ahimsa—minimizing the amount of harm we cause to other living creatures on the planet. Our mere presence on Earth inevitably creates a certain amount of harm, and the purpose of ahimsa is to minimize this negative impact. A holistic vegan diet creates minimal harm in many ways compared with an omnivorous diet.
At its highest octave, the ethic and wisdom of holistic veganism goes beyond the teaching of ethical veganism to ask the questions: How can we eat in a way that enhances holiness and vitality in all of life? How can we eat in a way that sanctifies all of life? How can we eat in a way that heals and uplifts the individual and planetary body, mind, and soul, and the entire planetary web of life? How can we eat in a way that amplifies our ability to be in touch with the central meaning of life? How can we, in essence, eat in a way that enhances the evolution of the planetary web of life?
When we are killing animals, or supporting cruelty and misery by paying those who do, we are not accomplishing this. We are degrading and degenerating life. This is the deeper reason why holistic veganism is so important.
The history of veganism goes back at least 6,000 years. It includes the Pelasgians, were 100% live-food vegans who lived in southern Greece around 3,000 BCE, as reported by the great Greek historian Herodotus. Their average age at death was reported to be 200 years. Some people uninformed about its history say that veganism is untested—but for us, 6,000-plus years seems a pretty good test. Veganism was the original diet prescribed for humanity in Genesis 1:29—it was the Garden of Eden cuisine.
In other words, veganism is not a new idea that began when Donald Watson coined the term in 1944. It is said that Pythagoras studied with the Essenes on Mount Carmel around 500 BCE, and took the teaching of a plant-based raw diet back to Greece. Before the term “veganism” was coined, those who ate a plant-source-only diet were called “Pythagoreans.” Prior to this, some of the Pharaohs, including Akhenaten and Nefertiti in 1,300 BCE, also prescribed live-food veganism for the priest caste.
Some anthropological findings from two to three million years ago suggest, according to Robert Leakey, the presence of tree-dwelling humans who may have been ninety-seven-percent vegan. Veganism is not new or experimental; the actually new and experimental diet is the standard American diet (SAD) being eaten by Americans at this point in history. SAD is an approximately eighty-year-old experiment that is already demonstrating a horrendously negative outcome not only for humans but also for the health and survival of the planet. The holistic vegan diet is a cuisine that supports not only personal health but the survival and enhancement of the planet’s evolution.
The 2,000-year-old Greek Orthodox Church still has a minimum of 300 days a year when church members are supposed to maintain a vegan diet. The scriptures of almost all the great wisdom traditions offer us much wisdom for choosing the compassion and ahimsa of a plant-based diet:
• Psalm 145:9 says, “God’s mercies are for all of creation.” It appears that the vegan teaching in most traditions was based on avoiding the spilling of blood. A key teaching of ahimsa is to do the least amount of harm, and veganism does the least amount of harm while allowing us humans to live fruitfully on the planet.
• Deuteronomy 4:15 says, “Be protective of your lives.”
• Sir Arthur Conan Doyle said, “At the moment, our human world is based on the suffering and destruction of millions of nonhumans. To perceive this and to do something to change it in personal and public ways is to undergo a change in perception akin to a religious conversion. Nothing can ever be seen in quite the same way again, because once you have admitted the terror and pain of other species you will, unless you resist conversion, be always aware of the endless permutations of suffering that supports our society.”
• The Laws of Manu (Manusmriti) 5.49 says, “Having well considered the origin of flesh foods, the cruelty of fettering and flaying of sentient beings, a person should abstain from eating flesh.” The same text (Manusmriti 6.60) further states, “By not killing any living being, one becomes fit for liberation.”
• Proverbs 12:10 says, “The righteous person regards the life of his or her animal.”
• The Laws of Manu 5.45 says, “He who injures harmless beings from a wish to give himself pleasure never knows happiness in life or death.” Verse 5.51 says, “He who permits the slaughter of an animal and kills it, he who cuts it up, he who cooks it, he who serves it, and he who eats it, are all slayers.”
• Psalm 24:1 says, “The Earth is the Lord’s, and everything in it.”
• Psalm 34:14 says, “Seek peace and pursue it.”
• The famous fifteenth-century Jewish rabbi Joseph Albo, and the great twentieth-century visionary mystic Rudolph Steiner, both said that people would become vegetarian in the Messianic era. We are now entering that era.
• Rabbi Joseph Albo, of the fifteenth century, also said, “Aside from cruelty, rage, and fury in killing animals, and the fact that it teaches human beings the bad trait of shedding blood for naught (lust); eating the flesh even of select animals will give rise to a mean and insensitive soul.”
• Buddha is quoted as saying, “Him I call Brahmin (priestly) who slays no creatures, who does not kill, or cause to be killed, any living thing.”
• These quotes and spiritual dietary practices attune us to the spiritual essence and motivation of holistic veganism. It is no accident that ancient Taoist masters and Indian rishis practiced live-food veganism to enhance and support spiritual life.
Applying this understanding helps us act as models for our kids. In the previous chapter, we brought out the fact that, even in pregnancy, the diet of the mother affects the diet of the child.1 Research also shows that the diet of the parents makes a strong impression to guide the children.2 By like measure, how we live our lives is a model for how to relate to the planet, and holistic veganism is a model of how to heal and uplift the planet as well as ourselves.
When we introduce our children to this way of life, it is something they can relate to. Children are not naturally cruel. They are not naturally bloodthirsty or mean. These are negative traits they may derive from their parents, their society, and/or their social environment. Our role as conscious parents is to create a better world, instead of narcissistically thinking of only our personal health. As conscious parents and grandparents, it is a blessing to the world to empower our children to create a healthier physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, ecological, and cultural world. They needn’t wait to get older to do this, or wait for Congress to pass a set of conscious laws. We can act now.
As holistic vegans, our children can learn to live in a way that uplifts their souls and the world around them, including their peers. Our children can become heroic leaders, because inherently kids want to create peace, and they want to grow up in a healthier, cruelty-free, ecologically viable world. Empowering our children with the understanding of holistic veganism gives them a powerful message about how to do this. Holistic veganism is a way to sanctify ourselves, creating holiness through our daily acts of eating and living.
We have condensed the principles of Holistic Veganism to the following seven teachings, so that one can be focused on as a teaching tool for each day of the week.
We mentioned the problem of radiation, pesticides, and herbicides, which are fifteen to thirty times more concentrated in foods such as meat, fish, chicken, and dairy that are higher on the food chain. By eating lower on the food chain, we diminish our potential exposure to higher concentrations of radiation, pesticides, herbicides, GMO “frankenfoods,” and toxic minerals such as fluoride and mercury. A diet consisting of plant foods, therefore, is best suited for the protection and survival of our germ cells, the sperm and ova.
A high exposure to environmental toxins decreases fertility. This is very important because not only are worldwide rates of infertility escalating, but we also see documented increases in a variety of congenital defects from radiation exposure and GMO foods. From this viewpoint too, holistic veganism is best suited for the healthy survival of the human species.
For example, in considering the issue of the safety of fish for human consumption, this flesh food has been found to be very detrimental to the preservation of the germ cell because of the PCBs and mercury that contaminate the water. PCBs, along with dioxin and DDT, are among the most toxic chemicals on the planet. The tenth annual report of the Council of Environmental Quality, sponsored by the U.S. government, found PCBs in 100% of sperm samples tested, as noted in Conscious Eating.
As far back as 1979, PCBs were found to be one of the main reasons that the sperm count of the average American male was approximately seventy percent of what it was thirty years ago. Twenty-five percent of all college males are sterile today, compared to one-half to one percent fifty years ago. The main source of this contamination comes from eating fish from waters high in PCBs. Fish can accumulate up to nine million times higher PCB levels than the water they swim in. Shellfish also naturally concentrate toxins. These include oysters, clams, and mussels, which may accumulate 70,000 times the toxin level of as the water they live in.
Consumer Reports in 2014 pointed out that the mercury levels in the upper layers of the ocean have more than tripled since the Industrial Revolution. Mercury is fat-soluble, and therefore hard to eliminate. Because of this, the FDA has issued new recommendations for pregnant women and breastfeeding mothers and children, to limit their mercury consumption by eating lower on the food chain and particularly by avoiding all varieties of tuna, shark, tilefish (from the Gulf of Mexico), swordfish, and king mackerel, which are larger fish and therefore higher on the food chain. Obviously, there are other sources of mercury, such as amalgam dental fillings, and even vaccines that still contain mercury, including flu vaccines recommended to be taken even during pregnancy by government agencies and many allopathic doctors.
Another way that holistic veganism helps us is through increased vitality and personal energy, which we’ve discussed in detail as it relates to children and as a template for the prevention of chronic diseases. In general, as noted in Conscious Eating and documented in approximately ten research studies dating back to 1917, those on a plant-source-only diet have approximately two to three times the endurance and energy of omnivores.
Another level in this discussion is the power of a vegan diet to feed the world’s hungry. The data on this subject is overwhelming. Twenty to forty million people starve to death each year. According to the United Nations, this includes approximately 29,000–40,000 children who starve to death each day. This is something our children can relate to, because these are their peers.
The grain that is used to feed 100 cows can feed 2,000 humans. An estimated seventy to eighty percent of all grains produced go to support a meat-centered diet through the feeding of cows. Research suggests that if just ten percent of meat-eaters in the U.S. became vegan—or if everyone just reduced their meat consumption by ten percent—there would be enough plant-based food to feed all forty million of these starving people. For perspective on this enormous humanitarian crisis, it helps to know that more people have died of starvation in the last five years than from all wars combined in the last 150 years. U.S. livestock eats enough grain and soy to feed the U.S. human population five times over. The total global livestock population eats twice the amount of calories as the world’s human population. If the whole world became vegan, there would be enough food and water to feed the global human population seven times over.
When we run plant protein through a cow or sheep, we glean only one-tenth of the plant’s protein yield for human nutrition. In other words, we lose about ninety percent of the plant’s protein when it is cycled through cow flesh. In addition, we lose approximately 100% of the plant’s complex carbohydrates, and ninety-five percent of the plant’s phytonutrients. It is estimated that approximately sixteen vegans can live off the same land and water supply it takes to sustain one meat-eater.
A meat-centered diet, seen this way, is obviously not ecologically sustainable. About twenty times more fossil fuels are needed to produce one calorie of beef as one calorie of vegetable protein. The overwhelming implication here is that a flesh-centered diet represents an unfair distribution and misappropriation of resources, because it requires so much more water, soil, air, and energy to sustain it.
The United Nations estimates that half the world’s population suffers from malnutrition, with an estimated 100–200 million people seriously malnourished and twenty-five percent of the world’s children suffering from lack of food. As stated earlier, by being vegan we could potentially save the lives of 29,000–40,000 kids daily. Our children can begin to feel heroic about the world service of their veganism. By eating lower on the food chain, we could potentially feed the global human population and all the world’s children. If our children, and we as parents, start to understand and feel the compassionate power of a vegan way of life, we can even begin to feel that we are feeding the Divine in feeding those starving children.
This is an incredibly powerful thought for our children to connect with. We can explain that by eating a vegan diet we could attain production of enough food for all the people of the world, which could keep alive the poor and starving. The less the children of the world are malnourished, the greater will be their overall ability to reach their full physical, mental, and creative potential to achieve their life purpose. A plant-sourced vegan diet is a major step toward healthily reorganizing the way that the world’s resources are distributed. There is simply no need for anyone to die of starvation in the world today.
We can help our children to understand what an important role we play through the act of eating. We don’t need an act of Congress, just an act of conscious eating. If every person became vegan, it would be possible to give four tons of grain to every starving person on Earth. Participating in this idea is an exciting gift we can give our children when they sit down with us to eat.
Holistic veganism protects against animal cruelty. People engaging in cruel actions also damage their own minds. In eating animals and fish, the eater may indirectly take on the psychology of victimhood. In eating dead animals, one takes the energy of death deep into one’s subtle body and mind. From a subtle psychological point of view, then, it is hard to separate the consumption of flesh food from a passive death wish.
It is hard to comprehend how much pain and death we are causing with a diet of meat. The average American meat-eater in one lifetime consumes eleven whole steers, one calf, three lambs, twenty-three hogs, forty-five turkeys, and 826 fish. That’s a lot of cruelty and death to digest and assimilate. In the U.S. and Canada, the average adult consumes over 200 pounds of animal flesh each year. That adds up to an estimated total of forty-eight billion cattle, calves, sheep, hogs, chickens, ducks, and turkeys.
As the thirteenth-century rabbi and physician Moshe ben Nachman (Nachmanides) said, “Cruelty expands in a man’s soul, as is well-known amongst cattle-slaughterers.” As Pythagoras said, “As long as men kill animals, they will kill each other. He who sows the seed of murder and pain cannot reap love and joy.”
Part of holistic veganism is being honest about our actions. Every day in the U.S., 60,000 broiler chickens are thrown into scalding tanks, alive and breathing. About 14,000 chickens are killed in the U.S. every minute. The great medieval physician and rabbi Moshe ben Maimon (Maimonides) said, “It should not be believed that all living things exist for the sake of humanity. On the contrary, all living things have been created for their own sake, and not for the sake of another.”
This teaching can help children to understand that, like us, all animals have a sacred design and a sacred place in the universe although, according to the Bible, humans have been given dominion over the animal and plant kingdoms. “Dominion,” however, does not mean domination; we have not been instructed, nor do we have permission, to dominate, exploit, rape, and destroy for our own egocentric lusts. A conscious vegan focuses on the positive implications of the vegan way of life.
Researchers, as well as the FBI and other law-enforcement agencies nationwide, have linked animal cruelty to domestic violence, child abuse, serial killings, and to the recent rash of killings by school-age children.
—Dr. Randall Lockwood, vice-president of Training Initiatives for The Humane Society of the United States (HSUS)
If we are to teach children how to respect their human and natural environment and all its elements, they must be taught they are a part of nature. . . . One of the objectives of education from nursery school onwards must be to give children a balanced sensitivity to life—a humane education.
—Canadian Senate Committee on Health, Welfare and Science (meeting on the rise of violent juvenile delinquencies in the 1970s)
Teaching our children compassion toward animals aids them in developing empathy, morality, and character development—skills that transfer to healthy social interactions with people. Conversely, violence toward animals is strongly linked to violence toward people. In every highly publicized school shooting where children were killed by a classmate, it is amazing to see that every young shooter had a documented history of abusing or killing animals before turning on their peers.
A sixteen-year-old boy wrote in his journal that he and another child had beaten, burned, and brutally killed his dog, Sparkle, describing the act as “true beauty.” He later stabbed his mother to death, shot and killed two classmates, and injured seven others. Another boy, at age fifteen, frequently told others how he tortured animals. This boy ended up killing both his parents, then opened fired in his high-school cafeteria, killing two students and injuring twenty-two others. Another high school student was known to smash the heads of mice with a crowbar and set them on fire, long before he and a classmate killed twelve students and a teacher at his school—Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado.
Adult violent offenders also tend to have a history of serious and repeated animal cruelty in their childhood and adolescence. Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Bundy, Andrew Cunanan, David “Son of Sam” Berkowitz, and Albert “Boston Strangler” DeSalvo were all cruel to animals before they started harming people.
These tragic examples show us that cruelty toward animals is not normal or healthy human behavior. The culture of death, which deems the inhumane treatment of animals for food production acceptable and necessary, thus perpetuates a consciousness of brutality, which we have known for millennia to be linked to violence toward humans.
The ecological destruction of the planet is being greatly accelerated by a meat-centered diet. An estimated fifty to seventy percent of the water in the U.S. is used for livestock feed and production. This is particularly significant in light of the current droughts on the West Coast, in the Southwest, and in other areas of the United States. Many other places around the world are also facing serious drought.
The math speaks clearly for itself: It takes 2,500 gallons of water to produce one pound of meat, compared with twenty-five gallons of water to produce one pound of wheat. A meat-centered diet effectively requires 4,500 gallons of water each day to sustain, whereas a vegetarian diet requires about 300. So vegan families save approximately 1.5 million gallons of water per person a year, compared to an omnivore.
Animal agriculture also uses approximately thirty-three percent of the world’s raw materials for the production of livestock, compared to the two percent of the world’s raw materials used for vegetarian agriculture.
Every individual calorie of meat consumed requires thirty-two calories of energy to produce. While estimates vary, it takes about forty times more calories of fossil fuel to get one calorie of beef protein, compared to that same calorie of protein from soybeans. Eighty-five percent of topsoil loss is due to animal agriculture. Every five seconds, an acre of trees disappears, mostly to clear land for beef cattle. Rainforests are being cut down at a rate of thirty-one million acres a year, an area roughly the size of New York City.
The livestock are also creating a tremendous amount of excrement. The farm-animal population produces over 230,000 pounds of excrement each second. By comparison, the human population produces an estimated 12,000 pounds of excrement each second. This equates to a huge amount of waste and environmental pollution caused by the livestock, as pesticides, hormones, antibiotics, and pathogens are released into our rivers, lakes, and land—which becomes an even more glaring imbalance in these times when we are facing such a critical shortage of water. Twenty-five percent of all E. coli infections can be traced back to fruits and vegetables grown with infected manure. Meat-eating and its byproducts are a public-health issue as well as a global-resource survival issue.
The United Nations and the European Union have reflected that meat-eating could be the primary reason for world deforestation. A 2006 U.N. report titled Livestock’s Long Shadow suggests that animal agriculture is one of the chief contributors to environmental problems on every scale, from local to global. The reports estimate that animal agriculture contributes to up to eighteen percent of global-warming gases, compared to CO2 production from industry and transportation contributing just nine percent. This is indeed an inconvenient truth for supporters of animal agriculture. In June 2010 the United Nations and the European Commission called for a shift toward a vegan diet to save the Earth.
The United Nations is not exactly a vegan organization, but they’ve launched a major report calling for radical change in the way that world economies use resources—because those resources are dwindling. They identified overuse of fossil fuels and animal agriculture as the two leading causes of environmental degradation. The report highlighted the fact that there is an unsustainably large proportion of the world’s crops currently fed to livestock. This results in ecological damage from excessively high water consumption and the toxic effects of pesticides and synthetic fertilizers. The report states that a global drop in meat consumption is vital to avoid devastating global-warming consequences. The authors of this report recommend that a substantial decrease in impact will only be possible with a substantial worldwide dietary shift away from a meat-centered diet.
The “cow in the living room” is also a primary source of methane, which has a twenty-seven times greater global-warming effect than CO2, and of nitrogen from manure, whose effect is 296 times greater. Nitrogen contributes as much as sixty percent of global-warming gases. Livestock’s Long Shadow also points out that for every kilogram of animal protein produced, livestock are fed about six kilograms of plant protein, a highly energy-inefficient ratio. The report further states that it takes eight times as much fossil fuel to produce animal food than plant food. Some researchers feel that this figure is too conservative, and estimate it takes twenty-two times more fossil fuel to create animal food than plant-source alternatives.
This imbalance creates a serious desecration of our ecology. Animal agriculture represents the worst synthesis of industrialization, capitalism, and technology to threaten the survival of the planet. It creates monumental costs in environmental decay and, ultimately, an overburdened healthcare system as well. Presently, cattle take up a quarter of the Earth’s arable land, and about ninety percent of U.S. agricultural land is used for animals. The resultant overgrazing affects everything in the environment including climate, water, and soil erosion.
Animal agriculture and an omnivorous diet are a dramatic, traumatic environmental insult. Each pound of animal feed produced causes the erosion of thirty-five pounds of topsoil. The impact of making one quarter-pound hamburger destroys fifty-five feet of rainforest; and 100 species of animals are estimated to become extinct with every two billion fast-food hamburgers sold.
These are things we can share with our children, so that they can become environmental protectors and heroes for saving the planet and their own lives. One acre of grain yields five times more protein than an acre of beef. One acre of leafy green vegetables yields twenty-five times more protein than an acre of beef. We can illustrate these facts very clearly to children.
Anyone who wants to blame global weather changes on that human-caused nine percent carbon dioxide, while ignoring the far more serious effects of animal agriculture—which has twice the global warming effect as the carbon dioxide from industry and transportation—is in a state of serious ignorance or gross denial. The overall ecological evidence is that animal agriculture is a primary causal factor in climate change, and leads us to the obvious conclusion about how to protect the planet: Go vegan!
The European Journal of Clinical Nutrition notes that “vegetarian diets could play an important role in preserving environmental resources and reducing hunger and malnutrition in poorer nations.” The Lancet recommended in September 2007 that if people in the industrial world ate ten percent less meat, it would reduce greenhouse-gas emissions and improve human health. The article stated,
The unprecedented serious challenge imposed by climate change necessitates radical responses. . . . For the world’s higher-income populations, greenhouse gas emissions from meat-eating warrant the same scrutiny as do emissions from driving and flying.
In considering global weather instability, the contribution of the herd of cows in the room is far more significant than the nine percent of global-warming gases claimed to be caused by carbon-dioxide emissions from industry. Those emissions cannot be ignored as a significant cause of global warming. But a vegan driving a Hummer is creating far less ecological destruction and possible global warming than an omnivore driving a Prius. Of course, we must consider all causes of global climate change, rather than seeing it as an either/or proposition.
Our children can reverse the destruction. They can stand up to and transform a meat-eating, cruel, degenerate, culture-of-death world. Part of this requires understanding that heroes are not often the most popular people. But vegan live-food children will have clearer minds, morals, ethics, and a spiritual understanding that supports them in not going along with group-think. We are here to save the planet, humanity, and our spirits. Our children, when imbued with a heroic consciousness that goes beyond fear for our health, become empowered to be ethical, moral, ecological, and spiritual heroes that can inspire their classmates to take on this heroic role as well.
Eating lower on the food chain puts fewer toxins into the mind and body. The mind is more capable of focus when it is not agitated by the pain, suffering, and cruelty we take on through eating meat. We create a mind more able to think clearly, pray, or meditate. A holistic vegan diet creates a more compassionate and peaceful mind.
Spiritually speaking, almost all the great wisdom traditions, including Hinduism, Judaism, original Christianity, Taoism, and Buddhism, make the absence of bloodshed a crucial component of a diet that best supports spiritual life. They agree that not eating death is best for a spiritual life.
The general teaching is that those who kill and eat animals are also the ones that tend to kill humans. Our internal subtle bodies—including the yogic nadis, and the sefirotic vessels of the Tree of Life in Kabbalistic wisdom, which carry the spiritual energy within us—are disrupted when the energy of death enters them and acts as sludge, slowing our inner evolution. A vegan diet is associated with spiritual growth and enlightenment in almost all the traditions.
A vegan diet best creates the conditions of ahimsa and fulfills the yogic yamas (recommended abstinences) and niyamas (positive practices) and the Ten Speakings (Ten Commandments). Holistic veganism is not about morality but about being responsible for the total impact of our actions. Eating a vegan diet creates the Sevenfold Peace—peace with the body, peace with the mind, peace with the family, peace with the community, peace with all cultures, peace with the ecology, and peace with the Divine.
The highest directive of the yamas, the niyamas and the Ten Speakings alike is the directive against violence: “Thou shalt not murder.” As of 2009, an estimated fifty-nine billion animals are being killed worldwide each year to satisfy humanity’s meat lust. Veganism results in no animal death to feed our egocentric lusts. The compassionate practice of ahimsa is the most primary and practical way to live peacefully in the world.
The yogic idea of yama satya (truthfulness) correlates with the Hebraic “Thou shalt not bear false witness.” Many omnivores do not see the ramifications of their diet as connected to the survival of the whole of life on Earth, so there is worldwide denial and self-delusion at play here. Somehow people think steak comes from the grocery counter rather than from a dead cow, and that Elsie the smiling cow is happy with her babies taken away to be tortured and slaughtered as “veal,” and to have her life shortened from approximately thirty natural years to only three to five years, by being milked to death. This lying and deceiving of self and others is a second violation of moral law.
The Eighth Speaking is “Thou shalt not commit adultery,” which correlates with the yogic brahmacharya, seeking the Divine through self-restraint. The word “adultery” in the Ten Speakings, according to Torah scholarship, is more accurately understood as “sexual perversion,” and closer to the literal Hebrew meaning, as described in the book Torah as a Guide to Enlightenment by Rabbi Gabriel Cousens, MD.3 Animal agriculture includes the artificial fertilization of chickens and cattle, and seminal extraction from bulls—all accomplished through human/animal sexual violation, and all constituting sexual perversions. These fertilization techniques require invasion of the animal’s sexual cycle by humans—certainly a perversion of the natural order, if not possibly also a diluted, indirect, conscious, or unconscious form of bestiality.4
The Ninth Speaking, “Thou shalt not steal,” is known as asteya in the yogic tradition. This is similarly dismissed in the marketing, sales, and consumption of animal products. The omnivorous diet is based on stealing milk, bodies, skin, fur, and the animals’ natural lifecycle itself. In eating this food we become complicit thieves, which undermines us physically, mentally, and spiritually as well.
Aparigraha means nongreediness in yogic terminology. “Thou shalt not covet” is the Biblical correlate. Coopting resources from the rest of the world to fuel our unsustainable lust for meat consumption violates this spiritual law. This covetousness is creating pollution of the public commons—a further violation. Twenty million acres of new desert is created each year, with approximately fifty to seventy million acres of trees cut and plowed under yearly for animal-farming purposes. We are skinning the Earth alive.
Carbon emissions and global warming are also a concern here. Normal CO2 levels were 280 parts per million, and the levels are currently around 385 ppm, with levels rising by as much as three ppm each year. Carbon dioxide is depleting the oxygen, most notably in the cities. The percentage of oxygen in the atmosphere was thirty-eight percent 200 years ago, and is presently nineteen percent, and in some cities as low as twelve percent. A twelve-percent oxygen ratio begins to create serious health problems. Lack of oxygen contributes to cancer, as cells grow in a reduced oxygen environment, as well as contributing to fungal infections such as candida.
The vegan diet supports a quiet mind, and ultimately spiritual life and liberation, if that is our aim. Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras states, “yoga chitta vritti nirodha,” meaning, “Yoga is the cessation of the fluctuations of the mind.” A vegan diet helps accomplish this quieting of the mind. As Rabbi Dr. Gabriel has said, “Each particle of food has its own vibration. Animal foods set up a chaotic vibration, whipping the mind into a state of imbalance as the culmination of the pain, suffering, and distress of the animals being exploited and slaughtered. This makes transcendence of the mind very difficult.”
This is part of how an omnivorous diet disrupts spiritual life, and how a plant-based, vegan diet supports a quiet mind. Diet affects consciousness. It affects our thoughts, and ultimately our actions. A quiet, peaceful mind tends to create peaceful actions. As Rabbi Dr. Gabriel has noted, “Food is a love-note from the Divine, and we are an act of divine love powered by that love-note.” A plant-based, holistic, vegan, live-food diet is a way of bringing love into all our actions, and bringing love into the healing of the planet.
Abhay Charanaravinda Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, founder of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, is quoted as saying, “If one can maintain it, raw fruits and vegetables are the best diet for human spiritual life.” Holistic veganism is a diet for the sanctification and healing of ourselves and the planet, and for purifying our spirits. It is distinct from a diet for strictly physical health. It is distinct from both omnivorous and vegetarian diets that are not necessarily based on morals or ethics. Holistic veganism works on every level for uplifting ourselves and the planet.
A holistic, vegan, optimally healthy diet is organic, plant-source-only, moderately low-insulin index, low-glycemic, high-mineral, nutrient-concentrated, well-hydrated, and deriving at least 80% of its calories from live foods, with moderate amounts of plant-source-only, raw fat, including short- and long-chain omega-3s for optimal brain and cognitive development and prevention of cancer and heart disease. It is individualized to one’s unique constitution, without overeating, and made with love.
The general macronutrient base of this diet is approximately 10–20% protein, depending upon age and constitution, 25–45% raw plant fat, and 25–45% carbohydrates, depending upon constitution. Our future, and the survival of the planet, depends upon a conscious application of the wisdom and practice of holistic veganism. Holistic veganism strengthens clarity and expanded consciousness. The consciousness that emerges from holistic veganism is the spiritual force pushing us toward a millennium of peace. Holistic veganism is the turning of the tide. By living this way, we are creating the preconditions for our children and grandchildren to be creative, heroic, alive, alert, conscious visionaries leading this transformation.
As Rabbi Dr. Gabriel points out in his lectures, “In each generation, we are given the medicine needed for the world’s repair. Holistic veganism is the medicine for healing today’s world. It is the wave of the present and the future on every level.”