A Healing and Nourishing Vegan Diet: Intro

I am writing this post, because in doing my healing work I often find myself motivated to address dietary issues that can support the long term healing of a person.  I wanted to write my recommendations here, so that people could refer to them if they wanted to and know what kind of guidance to follow.

I believe that the vegan diet is the most karma free of the diets that people can choose to follow.  Whenever one eats animal flesh, some animal had to die in order for us to be eaten.  Not so with eating from the plant world.  There are some who argue that a vegan still kills plants and that there is no difference between killing a plant or killing an animal.  But there are a number of very important differences.  One is that plant are pre-individualized.  They do not generally carry the energy of an individual sentient who is reincarnating through a death and rebirth cycle.  When I have done reincarnation regression work, I have not run across anyone who remembers being a plant.  I have run across a few people who remember their magical training in some traditions and have projected their consciousness into a plant form.  I have even heard of some people even projecting their consciousness into a tree form during death and hanging out in such a form for a while, but usually it is a stage in a journey into another incarnation and does not feel the same of actually undergoing the process of reincarnation.

There are other important differences, too, one is that in order to eat animal flesh, the animal has to be either severely impaired, as in chopping on a limb to eat or killed.  When an animal is killed, it is killed in the same exact way as an animal, either smashing the brain, stabbing the heart, or puncturing the intestines (which then hurts the brain and heart, and only causes death when these are affected).  Animals still mourn loss of their children or parents, fear death, avoid pain, and have emotions of love, anger, fear, sadness, laughter, and joy.  While plants have something like these states, they are in a kind of proto-form.  They are not yet developed to the point of becoming a vehicle for an individuality to live through.

Another important difference is that animals are usually killed in the prime of their live, roughly mid-point between birth and death by old age.  Hence the term "prime rib".  Plants are usually harvested later in their life cycle and are often not killed at all.  Skillful pruning of the leaves of a plant can actually help the plant to live a healthier life.  There is no way of cutting off animal limbs to eat without impairing the animal.  Plants often offer their fruit to be eaten and use the animals who eat them to carry their seeds to new locations.  Eating the fruit of the plant does not kill the plant itself.  Many of the leaves which are harvested from certain plants are, for instance, the lower leaves which will touch the ground and sometimes conduct some blight to the rest of the plant.  By pruning these lower leaves while still healthy, we encourage the life force to feed the upper leaves.  Artful pruning, again, allows us to keep harvesting food from plants while actually helping the plant to grow.  We can also thin out plants so that they live in harmony with each other in a crowded space and allow them to be healthier than if they just battled for dominance with each other.  We can also feed the soil, water the plants, compost, and many things to help plants to thrive and get rewarded by some food in the process.  This is a synergistic relationship that is rare with animals and their hunters.  Granted, some hunters may thin out a herd when it gets too overpopulated, but the massive animal flesh consumption of modern factory farms goes way beyond such a limited kind of hunting.  The modern factory farm, too, generates so much cruelty and suffering for animals that people are literally eating the suffering of animals along with their flesh, showing up in all the hormones that squirt into their bodies.  Plants do not have this kind of emotionality and are cleaner in this regard.

I disagree with modern science that says that we are omnivores.  Our canine teeth are evolutionarily "vestigial", meaning that such carnivorous tendencies are really part of our evolutionary past, not our present time.  I think that more precisely we are vegans, descended from fruitarian guerillas (showing up in our inability to produce our own Vitamin C, along with a fruitarian monkey and fruit eating bat, all of us are meant to get our Vitamin C from fruit).  We are vegans with an emergency omnivore back up system.  The Paleo diet is a good example of this.  It seems to have arisen from a time when food was scarcer, but the long term eating of animal flesh had the side effect of a much shorter lifespan.  Just because we can digest something does not mean that we should eat it.  It seems that humans were only meant to eat non-vegan food when other food was not available, but not as a permanant lifestyle.