Osho - Is Vegetarian Food essential for Spiritual Growth

Question - What about Food? Is it not absolutely essential to be a Vegetarian for Spiritual Growth?

Osho - What you do is never essential, what you are is always essential. Being is essential, doing is not essential. Being is essential, having is not essential. Consciousness is essential, character is not essential -- because it is not character that creates consciousness but consciousness that creates character.
If you are religious, if you are spiritual, things will change around you. You may become a vegetarian, you may not. It depends -- people are different. But to be a vegetarian cannot be an essential condition for being spiritual. There have been spiritual people who were vegetarians, and there have been spiritual people who were not. And it is good that life consists of variety, it is good that life consists of different kinds of people. Otherwise it would be utterly boring.
Just think -- only Mahaviras, roaming around the earth, naked vegetarians. No Krishna, no Christ, no Buddha, no Mohammed, no Mansoor. It will be a very poor world, it will be really ugly. And remember, Mahavira is beautiful but too many Mahaviras won't be beautiful. God never creates the same person again. And the reason is that once is enough, once is more than enough. God is completely satisfied. He never repeats, He never duplicates. He believes only in originals, He has no carbon copies.
So I cannot say that food has any essential thing to contribute to your spirituality. But your spirituality may change your food habits. That too cannot be predicted; I keep your freedom intact. less used to drink, and he is not less spiritual because of that. Patanjali will never be able to even conceive of a spiritual man drinking, but that is Patanjali's angle of seeing things. Jesus will not be able to understand: 'Why is Patanjali not drinking? If Patanjali cannot drink, then who else? If Patanjali cannot celebrate, then who else? He should be dancing, he should be singing, he should be celebrating -- he has arrived.'
But celebrations are also different. Somebody may celebrate by fasting, somebody may celebrate by feasting. People are different. If you can remember this you will never become a fanatic. Otherwise the danger is always there: on the path of spiritual growth the greatest danger is that of fanaticism. All so-called religions are fanatic, because they only allow that which THEIR scripture says, and THEIR founder says -- everything else has to be denied. That is making life very very limited. And life is unlimited, it is an infinity.
You ask: WHAT ABOUT FOOD? I don't talk about food, I talk about you -- the real thing is to happen there. When it has happened then I am not worried about you; then whatsoever you do will be right. Let me say it in this way: There is no act which is right and no act which is wrong, there are only persons who are right and persons who are wrong. When the right person does something it is right, when a wrong person does something it is wrong. Right and wrong are not qualities of any act -- all depends on who is behind the act.
For example, it happened: Buddha said to his disciples, to his monks and nuns, 'Whatsoever is given to you, you have to eat it. You should not demand, you should not become a burden on the society. You should simply go and stand before a house and if the people feel like giving they will give. You are not even to ask and you are not to give the details of what you need. Whatsoever is given, accept it in deep humbleness, gratitude, and eat it.' One day it happened, a monk was returning after begging food from the town and a crow flew upon him and dropped a piece of meat into his begging-bowl. Now, Buddha had said 'Whatsoever is given...'
The monk was disturbed. He had not asked for this meat; it had fallen, it was in the bowl, he had not desired it. What should he do? He started thinking 'Should I throw it away or should I eat it? -- because Buddha has said "Don't throw anything away. People are starving, food is always a scarcity. Don't throw anything away; eat whatsoever is given." Should I throw it away or should I take it?'
The problem was such that there was no precedent. So he thought 'It is better to ask the Buddha.' When the assembly gathered he brought his begging-bowl and he asked the Buddha 'What am I supposed to do?'
Buddha closed his eyes, for a moment he meditated. He meditated because of two seasons. One: if he says 'Throw it away' then he will be creating a precedent of throwing things away. Then later on -- such is the cunning mind of man -- people will think that Buddha has given the freedom, if you feel that something is wrong you can throw it away. But then they will start throwing away foods that they don't like. That will be a wastage . And then he thought 'Crows are not going to drop meat every day. This is just an accident and the accident should not be made a rule -- it is an exception.' So he said 'It's okay. Whatsoever is given, even if the crow has dropped meat, you have to eat it.'

That transformed the whole Buddhist history -- in subtle ways. The monks and the nuns started spreading the news to people that whatsoever is given, even if meat is given, they would accept it. And Buddhism became a meat-eating religion just because of that crow. You see? The crows are more important than your Buddhas. They transform things. Man is so stupid that he will follow a crow rather than a Buddha.
I don't give you any particular instructions, what to eat or what not to eat. I simply teach you one thing: become more and more conscious, become more and more aware, and let your awareness decide.
Life is so complicated that if I start giving you details about everything -- 'This has to be eaten and this has not to be eaten' -- it will never be a complete guide for you; things will always be left. You can look into Jaina scriptures, they give every detail. That's why Jaina scriptures are not even worth reading. They go into such unnecessary detail: how many clothes the monk should have, how much food he should eat, how he should eat -- standing or sitting. How he should beg, how many things he should accept, how many monks should go walking together for their begging, whether nuns and monks should be together or not, or how much distance should be kept -- the details are infinite. If a nun is ill, whether the monk should touch her body or not.
Then there are details within details: if she is old or young -- if she is old it is okay, if she is young, no. When a nun is taking a bath should the monk look at her or not... Now, this goes on and on. The scripture doesn't seem to be religious at all, it is concerned with such stupidities. And still it cannot be complete -- because what about whether a monk should go to a movie or not? There were no movies, so you are at a loss; you have to decide yourself. Whether a monk should see a photograph of a nun or not... Now, there were no photographs -- and you cannot add anything to the scripture, it cannot be improved upon. So you have to always invent things for yourself.
When one has to find one's own way, why create this jungle of details? I simply give a light to you -- and that light will be enough, you will be able to find your path. I don't give you the map and I don't give you instructions: 'First go a hundred miles this way, then move to the right and then to the left.' The journey is such that no details are possible. I would like to share a parable with you.
AMONG the youth of the country, there began a resurgence of interest in foods. Many different diet theories were offered, telling what was best to eat, and how and when to eat it. And with these theories came fierce loyalties, for eating is a very serious subject. One young man said 'Whole grains only, with fruit and nuts.' And his girlfriend added 'Vegetables and fruits don't mix.' Her roommate believed 'No vitamin C, but lots of D and E.' And her cousin advised 'Fast one day out of every ten.' And she had a friend who worked in a health food store, who said 'Minerals are the key.' And every evening she ground her teeth on a tablespoon of highly-advertised garden soil, attractively packaged.
Some discovered miraculous healing properties in certain foods, and for a time there were shortages of figs, apricot kernels, yak butter, sawdust and earthworms. But if these foods could be modified to bring out all their natural goodness, they might be even better. One young man read that vitamins are trapped within the cell walls of foods, and he began to prepare his meals with a blender. He blended bread, fruit and cheese with wheat germ, kelp and strawberry yogurt, and each of his meals came out a nutritious grey glue.
Then the dietary habits became more exotic. One very serious man learned that certain yogis can exist on air alone; and he tried it for a time. And he had a close friend who learned of an ancient practice of turning the stomach inside-out to improve digestive secretions. But he was forced to stop when the neighbors complained of the unusual sounds.

Now, the confusion was caused by the fact that each theory was a little bit true. And people changed from diet to diet and felt guilty because they continued to like the things they weren't supposed to. Yet their diet loyalties remained strong and, as these things go, each one believed his current diet to be the panacea for all mankind. And for all the debates heard throughout the land, the most frequent and heated was the question of vegetarian-versus -meat. One day, a wise man arrived in the city. A crowd gathered around him and he was asked all manner of questions. He was asked about Mind, Soul, God, Stars, Love, Fate, and the significance of the Sanskrit language. These were all non-controversial topics. But then a young man asked 'Should I eat meat?'
A hush fell over the crowd, for this was important. The wise man answered with another question: 'How do you feel when you eat meat?'
The young man thought about that for a moment, then said 'Well, not as good.'
And the wise man replied 'Then don't eat it.' And there was a murmur of approval from the vegetarians in the crowd.
Then another young man rose and said 'I like meat and I feel fine when I eat it.'
And the wise man said 'Fine, then eat it.' And there was a murmur of approval from the meat lovers. Then the voices became louder and the debate started anew.
Just then the wise man started to laugh. At first it was a chuckle that softened the serious crowd so that several grinning faces were seen. And the sight of the wise man sitting on the little dais laughing was so infectious that the crowd began to laugh with him. And as it often happens, there was one among the crowd that had an especially funny laugh, and this so tickled the wise man that he began to shake up and down until he nearly fell off his seat. And this so pleased the crowd that an enormous peal of laughter arose and echoed through the streets. And passers by, without knowledge of what had caused it, were so affected by the pleasing sound that they stopped and joined in, until a great throng of laughing people had gathered.

The sight and the sound of so many people enjoying themselves made the wise man... well, it went on and on until not one among them could remember having such a nice time. But the nicest thing of all was, on that day nobody had indigestion.
Remember that. Whatsoever goes well with you is fine. Don't impose unnecessary structures upon your being. You are already in a prison, don't create bigger prisons for yourself. Although remember one thing: work as diligently as possible for becoming more conscious. Forget about character; character is a concern of the stupid and the mediocre. Let your whole concern be consciousness. And when you are conscious, when you are a little bit alert, aware, when a light starts burning in your inner being, when you are able to see, many things will change. Not according to any structure, not according to any ideology, not according to any fanaticism -- but according to your own understanding, things are bound to change.
My own feeling is -- remember, it is my feeling; it need not be a commandment to you -- my own feeling is that if you become more and more alert and aware, you will find it less and less possible to eat things which depend on hurting animals, which depend on destroying animals' lives. But this is not a commandment, and this has nothing to do with spirituality. It simply has something to do with an aesthetic sense.
To me, the question is more about a esthetics than about spirituality. In that sense I will call Mahavira more aesthetic than Jesus. Spiritual they both are, but Mahavira is more aesthetic. It is simply ugly to eat meat -- not unspiritual, remember, not a sin -- just ugly, dirty. To depend on killing animals -- just visualize -- for your small taste buds which can be satisfied in many other ways, torturing millions of animals around the earth is anesthetic. You are not showing poetry, you are not showing feelings.
Spirituality is possible. But a man should not only be spiritual, he should have some aesthetic sense too. The question is like this: If you ask me 'Is it essential to have a Picasso painting in my bedroom to become spiritual?' I will say it is not essential. You can become spiritual without a Picasso painting; no painting is needed. But having a painting in the room is aesthetic -- it creates a milieu of art around you, a sense of beauty. And once you understand this difference you will not be a fanatic, because art does not create fanaticism. In that way, art is more non-violent than your so-called religions -- they create fanaticism.
If you write poetry, if you paint or if you dance, it has nothing to do with spirituality. Just by painting you will not become spiritual. A man need not be a painter to become a spiritual person; spirituality is apart. But a spiritual man may like to paint. Zen masters have been painting and they have created wonders. Zen masters have been writing poetry, and their haiku are some of the greatest insights into beauty, into splendor, into reality.
Nobody has been as penetrating as the Zen poets, and in a few small words. They have written such great poetry -- to write that poetry others need to write great books, big books; they go on writing and writing, and even then not much poetry is found. But it has nothing to do with spirituality. Spirituality is possible without being a poet, without being a dancer, without being a musician. But if you are a musician, a poet, a dancer, your life will have more fulfillment. Spirituality will be at the center and all these values will be on the circumference. You will have a far richer life. A spiritual person can be a poor person -- he may not have any capacity to enjoy music.
In fact that's what is happening in the world. If you go and see a Jaina monk and you talk about classical music he will not understand a single word of what you are talking about. And he will say 'Don't talk about worldly things to me. I am a spiritual person, I don't listen-to music.' If you talk about poetry he will not be interested. His life will be dry, it will not have juice. He may be spiritual but his life will be a desert.
And when it is possible to be spiritual and a garden too, why prefer the desert? When you can be spiritual and poetic too, why not have both? Have as many dimensions to your life as possible, have a multi-dimensional life. Become more aesthetic, more responsible. But I don't give you any details. And remember always, these are not essentials for being a spiritual person -- they will not help your enlightenment and they will not debar it. But the journey can be very very beautiful or it can be very very desert like. It all depends on you.
My own approach is to help make your journey a joy. Not only the end -- the spiritual person is only concerned with the end. He is in a hurry, impatient to reach the end; he does not bother what is happening on the roadside. And millions of flowers bloom there too, and birds sing songs and the sun rises and in the night it is full of stars. And all this too is beautiful. Let the journey also be beautiful. When you can pass through these enchanted lands, why not? But your concern should basically be for more consciousness. And whatsoever that consciousness makes luminous for you, follow it.  
Let your consciousness be the only law. I don't give you any other law. 

Osho - What you eat makes your mind, makes your body, makes your senses, gives you qualities

Question - Please comment on these statements: "survival of the fittest," and "you are what you eat."

Osho - "Survival of the fittest" appears to be true, but only to the superficial eye, because man is not the strongest animal on the earth. Why he has survived, and destroyed other animals, is not his fitness, his strength, his power, but his intelligence. So I would like to change it to survival of the conscious.

Now we are facing a world crisis. If man does not prove conscious enough, then he is going to disappear from the earth. He proved more conscious than the animals; now he has to prove more intelligent and conscious than the politicians. These are the real animals now.

And if man can prove himself more conscious, more alert, more aware, then many things can disappear immediately. For example, the nations are all artificial. The earth is one. All the boundaries of the nations are fake; they are only on the map. If man is more alert and more aware, the first thing to be done is to dissolve all the nations. Let the world be one. One world is the only guarantee, that there is not going to be any more war.

If man is conscious and aware, he can see that the essential religion is one. Only rituals differ, and rituals are meaningless. Drop the rituals and save the essential religion. Then Hinduism, Christianity, Buddhism, Jainism, Taoism -- all will come to the same point: the enquiry of your interiority, the inward journey.

If we can let the boundaries of nations disappear and the boundaries of religion disappear if the world can be one world and religion can be without any adjective -- just a quality, religiousness -- we will have survived the greatest danger that is facing us. A divided humanity -- in religions -- in nations is going to destroy itself. We need an undivided, one humanity. Anything that divides has to be dropped; it is against our survival.

And the second proverb, "you are what you eat," is certainly true.

A man who is vegetarian is basically nonviolent. You can see it: the people who have been vegetarians for centuries are absolutely non -- violent. They have not created any wars; they have not created any crusades, any JIHADS. The people who are meat eaters are bound to have little sensitivity, they are more hard. Even in the name of love they will kill; even in the name of peace they will go to war. In the name of freedom, in the name of democracy, they will murder.

There are cannibals also still in existence -- not many: a small tribe in South Africa, of three hundred people. Nobody passes through that area, because if you pass through that area you will never reach your goal -- you will become food! Because nobody passes through that area, those people have been eating their own people. In the beginning of this century their population was three thousand. Now they are only three hundred.

I am reminded of a Christian priest, a missionary, who was the first man from the West to reach to the cannibals to convert them to Christianity. They immediately got hold of him. They put him in a big pot.
He said, "What are you doing?"
They said, "Just wait a little and you will know."

Then they started putting logs and wood under the pot. The missionary saw the situation, looked around at those people's faces... ferocious. Trying somehow to persuade them that this was not good, he said, "Before you do anything, listen to me. Have you ever had any taste of Christianity?"
They said, "Wait, we will have. We will make soup of you and then everybody will have the first taste of Christianity."

A cannibal cannot be called human. If he can eat living human beings, he has no heart, he has no love, he has no sensitivity. He is just a stone.

But you don't think the same way when somebody kills a lion or a deer, because you don't think that the deer has as much life as you have. The deer may have a beloved; the deer may have children. You don't think of the lion, when you kill him, that he may have a family. His small cubs will be orphans. He is as alive as you are -- in fact more alive than you are. Destroying him only for a few taste buds on your tongue, for the taste...

It seems to me that killing animals for eating is not very far away from killing human beings. They differ only in their body, in their shape, but it is the same life that you are destroying.

With new technology the earth is perfectly capable of giving you food. You can make it as tasteful as you want, and you can give it any flavor that you love. Just for taste, destroying life is simply disgusting. And destroying life, you are destroying many qualities in you. You cannot become a Gautam Buddha. You cannot have that purity of consciousness, that sensitivity.

One day Gautam Buddha is passing a street with his disciple Ananda, talking to him. A fly sits on his forehead and he is so much involved in talking that just mechanically he waves his hand -- the way we do -- and the fly is gone. But then he suddenly stops, closes his eyes, and raises his hand very slowly, very gracefully.
Ananda said, "What are you doing? The fly is no longer there."
Buddha said, "I misbehaved with the fly. That was not the right treatment -- I should have been more graceful. I'm trying it, now I should have behaved, so that in future I don't commit the same mistake. After all, a fly is also alive, and she was just sitting on my forehead."

Now this man, who cannot even mistreat a fly, will certainly have a far purer consciousness than anybody else, a far deeper serenity than anybody else.
Vegetarian food lacks only one thing: certain proteins, which are absolutely needed for intelligence to grow. That is the reason not a single vegetarian has been awarded the Nobel prize. Even in India three persons have been awarded the Nobel prize, but all the three persons were nonvegetarians.

I have looked into the matter deeply. I have enquired from scientists, medical people, and found a substitute, the unfertilized egg. Added to vegetarian food, it makes it complete. It gives all the proteins that the old vegetarian food misses. And the nonfertilized egg is just vegetable; it has no life.

A simple change, and we can make the whole of humanity more sensitive, more artistic, more full of reverence for life. You cannot be religious if you are not full of reverence for life. God you have not seen, but life is all around you.

To you, life is the only representative that proves that existence is not dead, it is alive.
Eating anything by killing is irreligious, unspiritual, unaesthetic. And once the unfertilized egg is added to the vegetarian food, the food is perfect -- better than the none vegetarian food. It fulfills all your needs without any destruction. A man who lives by destruction will die by destruction. It is not a coincidence that both the world wars were fought in the West. And the third world war will also begin -- if it begins -- in the west.

In the East -- particularly the people who have been vegetarian for centuries -- they have never fought a war. I have researched in India whether any vegetarian has ever been caught committing suicide or murder or theft and I was surprised that not a single vegetarian has ever been put into jail for committing murder -- it is impossible.
I remember my childhood. My grandmother would not allow poor tomatoes in the house, because they look like meat.
I said, "You are mad. These poor tomatoes are not meat."
But she said, "Even the look... As long as I am alive, please don't bring any tomatoes into the house." Do you think this woman can kill somebody? Can you imagine this woman can commit suicide?

Yes, it is true, you are what you eat, because what you eat makes your mind, makes your body, makes your senses, gives you qualities. In India, I have been watching -- not a single vegetarian is a beggar. Where there are millions of beggars, not a single vegetarian is a beggar.

I have been visiting jails, and enquiring; I have never come across a vegetarian in the jail. They simply don't commit anything -- their sensitivity prevents them. If we want a really human world, a world of loving people, respectful of each others' lives, then we will have to think about our food and about our other habits. They should be changed. They are not so valuable.

And if you love the flavor of meat, that flavor can be given to any food. Now it is a simple matter. There is no need, just for that flavor, to kill a living, beautiful animal and destroy the ecology of the earth. They are our brothers and our sisters.

The day Saint Francis died -- he used to travel on a donkey -- the last thing he said is worth remembering. He addressed the donkey -- the last thing -- not his disciples. He said, "Brother donkey, please forgive me. I have been riding on you. I accept my guilt; it was not right to ride on a brother. Please forgive me before I die." But he addressed the donkey as brother.

We are part of this existence: these trees, these animals, these birds, they are our brothers and our sisters. This is our whole family. Just a slight understanding, and you can change your consciousness from being polluted, from being destroyed. You can rise as high as anybody has ever been able.

For example, in the West enlightenment is not a known phenomenon, for the simple reason that nobody was sensitive and alert and aware enough to attain it. Even a man like Jesus was eating meat, drinking wine.

Not only that, the Christians brag about his miracles, that he made water into wine -- now that is a crime, not a miracle. If he had made water out of wine, I would call it a miracle. I cannot call this a miracle. Wine makes people unconscious; it cannot help them to become enlightened.

There have been great people in the West. I love them. Socrates could have become a Buddha, an awakened one, if he had been in the East. But there, the whole atmosphere is not supportive. He was a meat eater -- not only that, he was a homosexual. Now, such a person cannot attain to the ultimate peaks of consciousness. He had the potential, he had the capacity, he had the intelligence, but just the little things missed.

So is the case with Moses; so is the case with Plato, Plotinus, Heraclitus, Pythagoras... beautiful people. I love them, and yet I feel sorry for them, because they were not in the right kind of atmosphere where they could have blossomed and flowered.

We don't know how many people in the world can become pinnacles, sky-high consciousnesses, because small things are preventing them. Food is very important. It is your body, it is your brain. And without your body and brain's support, you cannot attain to your soul.

Source - Osho Book "Socrates Poisoned Again After 25 Centuries"

Beloved Osho,
you were just talking about food, and now in the west food is a big cult. It's one of the things coming in as a basis of spirituality. You said if we're natural, we'll know what to eat and when to eat, but now we are out of touch with our childlike nature. Also, many religions say that the food you eat does make a difference to one's spiritual path. Is there anything you can tell us about food?
It is the other way round: food cannot make you spiritual, but if you are spiritual your food habits will change.
Eating anything will not make much difference. You can be a vegetarian and cruel to the extreme, and violent; you can be a non-vegetarian and kind and loving. Food will not make much difference.
In India there are communities who have lived totally with vegetarian food; many Brahmins have lived totally with vegetarian food. They are non-violent but they are not spiritual.
And Jains are the most materialistic community in India, the most attracted by possessions, accumulation; that's why they have become the wealthiest. They are the Jews in India. But a non-vegetarian world in the West is not in any way different from these vegetarian communities in India.
Rather, on the contrary, a very important thing has to be remembered: if you are violent and your food is vegetarian, then your violence will have to find some other way of expression. It is natural, because eating non-vegetarian food gives release to your violence.
So if you know some hunters you may have come to realize that hunters are the most loving people. Their whole violence is released in hunting, they are most friendly, loving. But a businessman vegetarian has no way for his violence to be released so his whole violence becomes a search for wealth and power; it becomes narrowed down.
But it happens the other way round. It happened to Mahavira. Mahavira came from a warrior family, he was a Kshatriya. Violence must have been easy for him, and then a deep meditative effort, a twelve-year-long silence changed his inner essence. When the essence changed the expression changed; when the innermost being changed, his character changed. But that character change was not basic, it was a consequence. So I say to you, if you become more meditative you will become more and more vegetarian automatically. You need not bother about it.
And only if this happens, that through meditation vegetarian food comes into you not through mind manipulation, it is good.But manipulating by the mind, argument, reasoning that vegetarian food is good, that it will help you to gain spirituality, is not going to help anything. Your clothes, your food, your habits of life, your style, everything will change; but this change is not basic. The basic change is going to be in you and then everything else follows.
If you meditate long enough, deep enough, it is impossible for you to hurt anybody for food; it is impossible. It is not a question of argument, it is not a question of scriptures, it is not who says what, it is not a question of calculating that if you take vegetarian food you will become spiritual; it is automatic. It is not a question of cunningness, you simply become spiritual. The whole thing seems so absurd. Just for food, killing animals, birds, seems so absurd, it falls down.
Your clothes change automatically; by and by you like looser and looser clothes. The more relaxed you are inside - loose clothes. Automatically I say; there will be no decision on your part. By and by, if you use tight clothes you will feel uneasy. Tight clothes belong to a tense mind, loose clothes belong to a relaxed mind.
But the inner change is the first thing and everything else is just a consequence. If you reverse the order you will miss then you will become a food addict.
One man came to me. He was just lean and thin and pale, and any moment he could die, and he said, "I want to live only on water because everything else is a hindrance to spirituality. Now I want to live on pure water."
This man is going to die. There have been a few people who have lived on pure water but that happened to them naturally, it cannot be practised. They were freaks, accidents; their body mechanism and chemistry worked differently. It has happened - somebody can survive on water but nobody can practise it.
Someday science may be able to find the basic chemical change and then everybody will be able to survive on water; then science will change your body chemistry and you will survive just on air. It is possible but you cannot practise it. And the whole effort is meaningless and the whole suffering is unnecessary, but there are mad people who try things like that. It has never happened by effort.
There was one woman in Bengal - she lived forty years without food, but it simply happened. Her husband died and she couldn't eat for a few days.just out of misery, out of sorrow, she couldn't eat. But suddenly she realized that without eating she was feeling better than ever. Then she realized that in the past whenever she was eating, she was always ill, and suddenly she became healthy as she never was. Then she lived for forty years without eating anything, just the air was the food. And this has happened in many cases.
There was one woman in Europe - for thirty years she lived without eating. She became a saint because Christians thought it a miracle. They examined her with every scientific instrument to see what was happening and they couldn't find out anything; then it seemed a miracle. It was not a miracle.
Yoga says there is a possibility of a body change, of a body chemistry change. Right now you are doing the same just by an intermediary. You cannot eat sunrays directly because your body chemistry is not in such a state; the mechanism is not such that it can absorb sunrays directly. So first the fruit of the tree absorbs the sunrays, it becomes vitamin B in the fruit, then you eat the fruit, then the vitamin B goes into your body. The fruit is just an intermediary; the fruit is working just as your agent to absorb the sunrays and then give them to you. You can absorb them through the fruit, not directly.
But if the fruit can absorb directly, why not you? So someday there is going to be a scientific discovery that some body changes will help you to absorb directly, and then fruit will not be needed. In the future - and I think not very long, fifty years - science is bound to discover it.It has to be discovered, otherwise humanity is going to die because food will not be possible. And birth control is not helping, nothing is helping; the population goes on growing. Some way has to be found so food can be dropped and direct absorption of cosmic rays becomes possible. It has happened in individual cases but it was by accident. If it can happen to one individual, it can happen to every individual but not as an accident; it will happen as a scientific change.
But don't try such things, they are not spiritual. Even if you eat sunrays directly there is nothing spiritual. What is spiritual? Just by dropping the intermediary of fruit you become spiritual? If you live only on water, nothing is spiritual.
What you eat makes no difference; what you are is a totally different phenomenon. And when that changes, everything will change; but that change will not be from the mind, it will be from the innermost being. Then things will change automatically.
Sex will disappear by and by. So I don't say be a brahamachari, be a celibate. That is foolish, because if you force celibacy you will become more and more sexual in the mind and your whole mind will become ugly and dirty; you will think only of sex and nothing else. That is not the way. you will go crazy and insane. Freud says that ninety percent of madmen are mad because of repressed sexuality.
I don't say change sex, I don't say change food; I say change your being and then things will start changing.
Why is so much sex needed? Because you are tense, sex becomes a release. Your tensions are released through it - you feel relaxed, you can go to sleep; if you repress it, you remain tense. And if you repress sex - the only release, the only possibility of release - what will happen? You will go mad. Where will you release your tensions then?
You eat food; it is needed by the body, and the body rejects only things which are not needed. Whatsoever you are eating is somehow needed by the body. If you are taking animal food, if you are taking non-vegetarian food, your mind, your body, your whole being is violent. And it is needed. don't change it otherwise your violence will have to find another channel.
Change yourself and food will change, clothes will change, sex will change. But change should come from the innermost core, it should not come from the periphery. And all turmoil is on the periphery; deep down there is no turmoil. You are just like the sea - go and watch the sea. All the turmoil, all the waves clashing, is just on the surface; deep, the deeper you go, there is more and more calm. At the deepest part in the sea there is no turmoil, not a single wave.
First go deeper into your sea so you achieve a calm crystallization, so you achieve the point where no disturbance ever reaches. Stand there. From there every change comes, every transformation comes. Once you are there you have become a master; Now whatsoever is unnecessary can be dropped, and can be dropped without any struggle and fight.
Whenever you drop something by fight, it is never dropped. You can drop smoking by fighting, and then you will start doing something else which will become a substitute. You may start chewing gum, it is the same; You may start chewing pan, it is the same, there is no difference. You need something to do with your mouth - smoking, chewing, anything. When your mouth goes on working, you feel at ease because through the mouth tensions are released. So whenever a man feels tense he starts smoking. Why is it that through smoking or chewing gum or tobacco tensions are released?
Just look at a small child. Whenever he feels tense he will put his hand in his mouth, he will start chewing his own hand. This is his substitute for smoking. And why does he feel good when his thumb is in his mouth? Why does the child feel good and go to sleep? This is the way of almost all children. Whenever they feel sleep is not coming they will put the thumb inside the mouth, feel at ease, and fall asleep. Why? The thumb becomes a substitute for the mother's breast, and food is relaxing. You cannot go to sleep on a hungry stomach, it is difficult to get sleep. When the stomach is full you feel sleepy, the body needs rest. So whenever the child takes the breast in his mouth, food is flowing, warmth, love. He is relaxed, he need not worry; tensions are relaxed. The thumb is just a substitute for the breast; it is not giving milk, it is a false thing, but still it gives the feeling.
When this child grows, if he takes his thumb in public you will think he is foolish, so he takes a cigarette. A cigarette is not foolish, it is accepted. It is just the thumb, and more harmful than the thumb. It is better if you smoke your thumb, go on smoking to your grave; it is not harmful, it is better. No harm is done but then people think you are childish, juvenile, then people think what you are doing is stupid. But there is a need so it has to be substituted.
And in countries where breast-feeding has stopped, more smoking will automatically be there. That's why the West smokes more than the East - because no mother is ready to give her breast to the child because the shape is lost. So in the West smoking is increasing more and more; even small children are smoking.
I have heard that one mother said to her child, "I don't want neighbors to tell me that you have started smoking. Be truthful and whenever you start smoking, tell me." The child said, "Don't bother Mom, I have already stopped. It is one year now, that I have stopped smoking. It is one year now so don't you bother, don't you get worried about it."
Small children smoking, and the mother is not aware that it is because the breast has been taken away.
In all primitive communities a seven-year-old child, or even an eight or nine-year-old child, will continue breast-feeding. Then there is a satisfaction and smoking will not be so necessary. That's why in primitive communities men are not so much interested in women's breasts; there is no problem that somebody will attack them. Nobody looks at the breasts.
If you had been given the breast for ten years continuously, you would get fed up and bored, you would say, "Stop now!" But every child has been taken away from the breast prematurely, and that remains a wound. So all civilized countries are obsessed with breasts. Even an old man, dying, is obsessed with breasts, goes on searching for breasts.
This seems mad, and it is, but the basic cause is there - children should be given the breast otherwise they will become addicted to it, the whole life they will be in search of it.
You cannot stop smoking directly because it has many related things, implications. You are tense, and if you stop smoking you will start something else and the other may be more harmful. Don't go on escaping problems, face them. The problem is that you are tense, so the goal should be how to be non-tense, not, smoking or not smoking.
Meditate. Relax your tensions without any object into the sky, allow catharsis to happen. When you are non-tense these things will become absurd, foolish, and they will drop. Food will change, your styles of living will change.
But my insistence is on you. Character is secondary, behavior is secondary, the essential you is the primary thing. Don't pay too much attention to what you do, pay much attention to what you are; being should become the focus, and doing should be left to itself. When being changes, doing follows.
From: Osho, A Bird on the Wing

Osho - Vegetarianism is of immense help in Meditation

Osho - Pythagoras' contribution to Western Philosophy is immense. It is incalculable. For the first time he introduced vegetarianism to the West. The idea of vegetarianism is of immense value; it is based on great reverence for life. The modern mind can understand it far better now we know that all forms of life are interrelated, interdependent. Man is not an island: man exists in an infinite web of millions of forms of life and existence. We exist in a chain, we are not separate. And to destroy other animals is not only ugly, unaesthetic, inhuman -- it is also unscientific. We are destroying our own foundation.

Life exists as one organic unity. Man can exist only as part of this orchestra. Just think of man without birds and without animals and without fish -- that life will be very very boring; it will lose all complexity, variety, richness, colour. The forests will be utterly empty, the cuckoo will not call, and the birds will not fly, and the water will look very sad without the fish. Life in its infinite forms exists as one organic unity. We are part of it: the part should feel reverence for the whole. That is the idea of vegetarianism. It simply means: don't destroy life. It simply means: life is God -- avoid destroying it, otherwise you will be destroing the very ecology.

And it has something very scientific behind it. It was not an accident that all the religions that were born in India are basically vegetarian, and all the religions that were born outside India are non-vegetarian. But the highest peaks of religious consciousness were known in India and nowhere else. Vegetarianism functioned as a purification. When you eat animals you are more under the law of necessity. You are heavy, you gravitate more towards the earth. When you are a vegetarian you are light and you are more under the law of grace, under the law of power, and you start gravitating towards the sky.

Your food is not just food: it is you. What you eat, you become. If you eat something which is fundamentally based on murder, on violence, you cannot rise above the law of necessity. You will remain more or less an animal. The human is born when you start moving above the animals, when you start doing something to yourself which no animal can do. Vegetarianism is a conscious effort, a deliberate effort, to get out of the heaviness that keeps you tethered to the earth so that you can fly -- so that the flight from the alone to the alone becomes possible.

The lighter the food, the deeper goes the meditation. The grosser the food. then meditation becomes more and more difficult. I am not saying that meditation is impossible for a non-vegetarian -- it is not impossible, but it is unnecessarily difficult. It is like a man who is going to climb a mountain, and he goes on carrying many rocks. It is possible that even when you are carrying rocks you may reach to the mountain peak, but it creates unnecessary trouble. You could have thrown those rocks, you could have unburdened yourself, and the climb would have been easier, far more pleasant.

The intelligent person will not carry rocks when he is going to the mountain, will not carry anything unnecessary. And the higher he moves, the lighter and lighter he will become. Even if he is carrying something, he will drop it. When Edmund Hillary and Tenzing reached Everest for the first time, they had to drop everything on the way -- because the higher they moved, the more difficult it was to carry anything. Even very essential things were dropped. Just to carry yourself is more than enough.

Vegetarianism is of immense help. It changes your chemistry. When you eat and live on animals.... The first thing: whenever an animal is killed the animal is angry, afraid -- naturally. When you kill an animal... just think of yourself being killed. What will be the state of your consciousness? What will be your psychology? All kinds of poisons will be released in your body, because when you are angry a certain kind of poison is released into your blood. When you are afraid, again a certain other kind of poison is released into your blood. And when you are being killed, that is the utmost in fear, anger. All the glands in your body release all their poison.

And man goes on living on that poisoned meat. If it keeps you angry, violent, aggressive, it is not strange; it is natural. Whenever you live on killing, you don't have any respect for life; you are inimical to life. And the person who is inimical to life cannot move into prayer -- because prayer means reverence for life. And one who is inimical to God's creatures cannot be very friendly towards God either. If you destroy Picasso's paintings, you cannot be very respectful towards Picasso -- it is impossible. All the creatures belong to God. God lives in them, God breathes in them, they are HIS manifestation, just as you are. They are brothers and sisters.

When you see an animal if the idea of brotherhood does not arise in you, you don't know what prayer is, you will never know what prayer is. And the very idea that just for food, just for taste, you can destroy life, is so ugly. It is impossible to believe that man goes on doing it. Pythagoras was the first to introduce vegetarianism to the West. It is of profound depth for man to learn how to live in friendship with nature, in friendship with creatures. That becomes the foundation. And only on that foundation can you base your prayer, your meditativeness. You can watch it in yourself: when you eat meat, meditation will be found to be more and more difficult.
Buddha was born in a non-vegetarian family. He was a KSHATRIYA -- belonged to the warrior race -- but the experience of meditation slowly slowly transformed him into a vegetarian. It was his inner understanding: whenever he ate meat, meditation was more difficult; whenever he avoided meat, meditation was easier. It was just a simple observation. You will be surprised to know that the greatest vegetarians in the world have been Jainas -- but all their twenty-four Masters were born into families of non-vegetarians. They were all warriors; they were brought up as fighters. All the twenty-four Masters of the Jainas were KSHATRIYAS.
What happened? Why did these people who were brought up, conditioned from their very beginning to eat meat, create one day the greatest movement in the world for vegetarianism? Just because of their experiments with meditation. It is an unavoidable fact that if you want to meditate, if you want to become thoughtless, if you want to become light -- so light that the earth cannot pull you downwards, so light that you start levitating, so light that the sky becomes available to you -- then you have to move from non-vegetarian conditioning to the freedom of vegetarianism.
Vegetarianism has nothing to do with religion: it is something basically scientific. It has nothing to do with morality, but it has much to do with aesthetics. It is unbelievable that a man of sensitivity, awareness, understanding, love, can eat meat. And if he can eat meat then something is missing he is still unconscious somewhere of what he is doing, unconscious of the implications of his acts. But Pythagoras was not heard, not believed -- on the contrary, he was ridiculed, persecuted. And he had brought one of the greatest treasures from the East to the West. He had brought a great experiment -- if he had been heard, the West would have been a totally different world.
The problem that has arisen today, that we have destroyed nature, would never have arisen. If Pythagoras had become the foundation for the Western consciousness, there would not have been these great World Wars. He would have changed the whole course of history. He tried hard, he did whatsoever HE could -- it is not his fault. But people are blind, people are deaf; they can't hear a thing, they can't understand a thing. And they are not ready to change their habits. People live in their habits, mechanically they live. And he had brought a message of becoming aware. Great meditative energy would have been released in the West. It would have become impossible to produce Adolf Hitlers and Mussolinis and Stalins. It would have been a totally different world. But still the same old habit persists.
We cannot change human consciousness unless we start by changing the human body. When you eat meat you are absorbing the animal in you -- and the animal has to be transcended. Avoid! If you really want to go higher and higher, if you really want to go to the sunlit peaks of your consciousness, if you really want to know God, then you will have to change in every possible way. You will have to look all around your life. you will have to observe each small habit in detail -- because sometimes a VERY small thing can change your whole life. Sometimes it may be a very SIMPLE thing, and it can change your life SO totally that it looks almost unbelievable.
Try vegetarianism and you will be surprised: meditation becomes far easier. Love becomes more subtle, loses its grossness -- becomes more sensitive but less sensuous, becomes more prayerful and less sexual. And your body also starts taking on a different vibe. You become more graceful, softer, more feminine, less aggressive, more receptive.
Vegetarianism is an alchemical change in you. It creates the space in which the baser metal can be transformed into gold.

Osho Quotes on vegetarian Food

1. Life in its infinite forms exists as one organic unity. We are part of it: the part should feel reverence for the whole. That is the idea of vegetarianism. It simply means: don’t destroy life. It simply means: life is God — avoid destroying it, otherwise you will be destroying the very ecology.
    
2. Jainism is the first religion that has made vegetarianism a fundamental necessity for transforming consciousness. And they are right. Killing just to eat makes your consciousness heavy, insensitive; and you need a very sensitive consciousness — very light, very loving, very compassionate. It is difficult for a non-vegetarian to be compassionate; and without being compassionate and loving you will be hindering your own progress.
    
3. Vegetarian food is not complete, and particularly for intelligence certain vitamins are missing. Those vitamins can be found in meat. Certainly I cannot support non-vegetarian food. Even though it gives you better intelligence, it destroys your very soul; it makes you cruel, violent, inhuman. So I suggested to them, "I have found something which should be immediately accepted if any intelligence is left in you, and that is eating eggs which are not fertilized, non-fertilized eggs. They are not living, there is no life. If you leave them they will simply rot and disappear. There is no life in them because the male sperm has not entered into the mother's egg; the mother has grown the egg without the male sperm. It is not alive, so there is no harm in eating it. It is vegetarian."
    
4. All the religions of the world have insisted on fasting. The reason is that when you are fasting your capacity to judge between the real and the unreal is lost after three weeks. Your mind needs the continuous nourishment of certain proteins; just a three week fast, and those proteins are finished. The mind keeps a certain emergency reserve and that emergency reserve is finished in three weeks -- and that is if you are a non-vegetarian. If you are a vegetarian, then within a week all your proteins are gone, because vegetarian food is not sufficient food as far as the mind is concerned. It is no coincidence that not a single vegetarian has received the Nobel prize! It is strange; it should be otherwise. Vegetarians think that since they are eating the purest food, they must have the purest minds, but even the three persons from India who have received the Nobel prize -- all were non-vegetarians. Being a vegetarian and fasting and isolation are all strategies to bring your mind to a position where you cannot distinguish whether what you are seeing is real or unreal.
    
5. Ma Tzu insisted on vegetarian food. In his monastery non-vegetarian food was absolutely prohibited. It takes me back to Gautam Buddha. Gautam Buddha was a vegetarian, strictly vegetarian. And all his followers were vegetarians. That was a revolution in a way, because man had lived as a non-vegetarian for millions of years. And according to Buddha, he would remain a barbarian unless he became vegetarian. Killing life is destroying your own possibility of growth. You have to respect life; a reverence for life will help your growth of consciousness. And he was absolutely right.
    
6. Vegetarianism functioned as a purification. When you eat animals you are more under the law of necessity. You are heavy, you gravitate more towards the earth. When you are a vegetarian you are light and you are more under the law of grace, under the law of power, and you start gravitating towards the sky. Your food is not just food: it is you. What you eat, you become. If you eat something which is fundamentally based on murder, on violence, you cannot rise above the law of necessity. You will remain more or less an animal. The human is born when you start moving above the animals, when you start doing something to yourself which no animal can do. Vegetarianism is a conscious effort, a deliberate effort, to get out of the heaviness that keeps you tethered to the earth so that you can fly -- so that the flight from the alone to the alone becomes possible. The lighter the food, the deeper goes the meditation. The grosser the food. then meditation becomes more and more difficult. I am not saying that meditation is impossible for a non-vegetarian -- it is not impossible, but it is unnecessarily difficult.
    
7. Remember, I am not against non-vegetarian foods for any other reasons. If a man is not meditating, if a man is not trying to grow inwards, if a man is not in search of God, then it is perfectly okay -- he can eat whatsoever he wants to eat. The higher you are trying to reach, the more and more you will have to drop any unnecessary luggage. Only then you can fly. This is unnecessary luggage.
    
8. I have not told everybody to drop non-vegetarian food, but I have told Pradeepa in a very shocking way to drop it. Her consciousness is growing; now this has become a hindrance. People who are not soaring high -- they can carry as much of a burden as they like; but those who are starting to soar high -- they have to drop all unnecessary luggage. The more pure your energy becomes, the more you will have to be careful about it, because something precious can be lost. And it is very difficult to create that precious energy, it is very easy to lose it. Those who don't have anything to lose -- they need not worry, they can go on doing all kinds of stupid things. Their whole being is in tune with those stupidities. This has to be remembered by you all: that as you will be growing I will be making more and more demands on you.
    
9. The change of food is bound to change the qualities of your physical body. Food is not just energy, it is also a qualitative thing. Food is not just a fuel, it contributes more than fuel -- it gives you either transparency, or non-transparency. The insight into this phenomenon can mutate, and you can have altogether a different type of body. And it is not so difficult to change this body, because the body is a flux, every moment changing itself; it is a process, it is not a static thing. The moment you came here, you had another body; now the body has changed. It is changing constantly, every moment; it is riverlike, moving and changing -- it is not a static thing.
   
   If you change direction, the body takes a jump; only the direction has to be changed. One should become aware, that whatsoever one is eating must be such that it doesn't make one's body