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1️⃣ From the spiritual perspective, a non-vegetarian diet is permitted, if the disciple needs it to sustain the health of the body
(Satprem asked for Mother’s permission to stop his meat diet and return to simple vegetarian food. Mother refused because of Satprem’s state of health.)
Satprem: I find that all those meats they have given me to “build me up” make me heavy, especially with the hot days starting again. Couldn’t I go back to vegetarian food?
The Mother: Meat can give the body a feeling of great solidity…You must understand and accept that the purpose of this heaviness is to repair the body’s internal damage, and the body must in fact change this heaviness into a sort of constant tranquility so that order is restored everywhere.
On the contrary, (meat) is good for the nerves to calm down…and that gives the impression of a heaviness, almost the impression of a tamas, but it’s a sort of quiet stability, which is necessary. There. That’s how I see it.
– Mother Mirra, Mother’s Agenda 1965 (Date of conversation: March 27, 1965)
2️⃣ To disciples who were craving non-vegetarian food to satisfy the palate, Mother & Sri Aurobindo denied permission
As to diet, a light quality of food sufficient for the strength and sustenance is the best for you — meat is not advisable.
– Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga – II
3️⃣ The most important factor for sadhaks is to overcome greed. Craving vegetarian delicacies is equally bad. These impulses of the vital (emotional) mind, must be conquered by all aspirants.
Everything is allowed. I haven’t refused meat to one who needed it. There were people who ate it because they needed it.
But if someone comes asking me for something just in order to satisfy a desire, I say “No”, whatever it may be, even ice-cream!
– Mother Mirra, Questions and Answers 1954
If you have greed for food you are no more the master of food, it is the food that masters you. A sadhak must eat to satisfy the needs of his body and not to meet the demands of his greed.
One must take sufficient food for the maintenance of the body and its strength and health, but without attachment or desire.
To conquer the greed for food an equanimity in the being must be developed such that you are perfectly indifferent towards food. Conquest over the greed for food: a promise of good health.
– The Mother, Words of The Mother II
Onions can be described as rajaso-tamasic in their character. They are heavy and material and at the same time excitant of certain strong material-vital forces.
If one wants to conquer the physical passions and is still very much subject to the body nature and the things that affect it, free indulgence in onions is not advisable.
Onions are allowed here because the palate of the sadhaks demands something to give a taste to the food. We do not insist on these details, or make an absolutely strict rule, as the stress here is more on the inward change, the outward coming as its result.
– Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga – IV
4️⃣ A vegetarian diet is not sufficient to make the mind sattvic
Q: If one takes only vegetarian food, does it help in controlling the senses?
The Mother: It avoids some of the difficulties which the meat eaters have, but it is not sufficient by itself.
– Mother Mirra, Questions and Answers 1954
5️⃣ A vegetarian diet does help calm the agitations of the mind
You swallow along with the meat a little of the consciousness of the animal you eat. It is not very serious, but it is not always very pleasant.
– Mother Mirra, Questions and Answers 1954
Vegetarian in the sense of becoming a plant – the peaceful life of a plant, like that (gesture, stretched out in the sun).
Yes, there is a kind of vegetative immobility which is excellent for overcoming the agitation – the frantic agitation – of that physical mind.
– The Mother, Mother’s Agenda 1965 (Date of conversation: March 27, 1965)
6️⃣ Even those who eat non-vegetarian food can attain to God-realization. The main factor being the extent to which they have exercised control over greed and other impulses of the mind.
Prime examples of this truth, were Swami Vivekananda and Sri Aurobindo. Being Bengali, both ate non-vegetarian food growing up, yet both attained to God-realization. In later life, Sri Aurobindo gave up his non-vegetarian diet, but Swami Vivekananda continued it till the end.
It may well be that different kinds of food nourish the action of the different gunas and so indirectly are helpful or harmful apart from their physical action. But that is as far as we can confidently go.
Spiritually, I should say that the effect of food depends more on the occult atmosphere and influences that come with it than on anything in the food itself.
– Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga – IV
I must say that the abstinence from rajasic or tamasic foods does not of itself assure freedom from the things they help to stimulate.
Vegetarians, for instance, can be as sensual and excitable as meat-eaters; a man may abstain from onions and yet be in these respects no better than before.
It is a change of consciousness that is effective and this kind of abstention helps only in so far as it tends to create a less heavy and more refined and plastic physical consciousness for the higher will to act upon.
That is something, but it is not all; the change of consciousness can come even in spite of non-abstinence.
– Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga – IV
Credit: Om Aurorayoga
