Animal Cruelty

The meat eater is a self-deluder. You cannot eat meat without firstly lying to yourself. He will not want to know what the reality of meat consumption is. He will not want to know how animals are kept and how they are slaughtered. He will not know what the conditions…

One can become an entrepreneur, for example, in the field of killing animals, cutting animal flesh, and supplying freshly cut flesh to people at their doorsteps. And this might be a successful business model.

This kind of an entrepreneurship is idiocy, perversion, profanity. The evil was present right in the…

If an apple and an animal are the same thing, then an animal and a human being are the same thing. Eat the human being as well. And if you do not eat the human being, then extend the same logic to not eat the animal as well.

The best…

Obviously it is inhumane to kill an animal to consume its flesh, and that’s one of the biggest indicators of our inner depravity. But then, who are the Americans really to point fingers at China? You kill pigs, you kill lambs, you kill cows—what to say of chicken and fish?…

If someone comes to you quoting this kind of a logic that, “You know, if I am eating the goat or the chicken, then you too are eating the rice grain and the wheat grain, and the rice plant and wheat plant have been slaughtered. So, if I am guilty…

Instead of proceeding with a packaged product like meat, why don’t you slaughter the thing yourself? And when you slaughter the animal yourself, why don’t you know it fully even as you slaughter it? After all, even from a perspective of self-interest, if something is going into your body, it…

Every time you walk past a meat shop or come across a menu containing a lot of flesh, let that harden your resolve. No point throwing that menu on the waiter’s face. The waiter is a puny fellow. He didn’t even write the menu; he has nothing to do with…

When you eat meat, when you eat chicken, you are actually not paying for the environmental damage that your plate of meat has cost. You are not paying for the climate change. You are not paying for the biodiversity depletion. You are not paying for the loss of tropical jungles,…

If you can smilingly tolerate an animal being slaughtered for your diet, then you will equally well tolerate you being psychologically slaughtered for the profit of your profit-minded organization. If you are slaughtering a chicken so that you may eat it and fatten yourself, then you will equally well tolerate…

If you are alright seeing animals slaughtered for food, for consumption, for anything, you are bound to then be alright seeing yourself slaughtered as well.

The attitude that you have towards others’ suffering is bound to be similar to the attitude that you have towards yourself. If you can smilingly…

If you see an animal being slaughtered for somebody’s diet and something within you cries out, then the animal has been saved; maybe not that particular animal but several other animals. Why was the animal killed in the first place? Because somebody wanted it killed. So, the want led to…

Look at your food, how you kill animals and eat them—is that not rape? If rape is just the violation of body, are we not violating the bodies of animals all the time?

A woman’s body is exposed and penetrated, and you say that is rape. And what else are…

To be a lion does not mean that you are violent. To be a rat is not necessarily to be violent. In fact, the word ‘violence’ does not apply to the lion or to the rat; it applies only to the human being. The lion kills all his life but…

Find out from where in the world you can get all the nutrients that are not animal-sourced. Let industries come up. If it is required that artificial meat be made in order to satisfy people who necessarily want to have meat, I am all in favor of more technological research…

The less you love yourself, the more likely it is that you will be a flesh eater. And the more you love yourself, the more you know your welfare. The more determined you are to help yourself out of this mess, the more loving and more compassionate you will be…

We worship the cow, and we torture it no end. When people talk about desi gai ka doodh (milk from the Indian cow), desi gai ka ghee (clarified butter from the Indian cow), they do not even know what they are doing to the creature they call as ‘mother’.

Is…

There are many who say, “You know, eating flesh is alright.” If eating flesh is alright, why is it not all right to eat human flesh? A line is drawn between the human being and the animal. You say, “No, the human being cannot be eaten because he is highly…

There will be people who will be prepared to lay down their lives if they are asked to eat meat. They will say, “We are prepared to get killed, but we will not take meat!” I respect that sentiment. But these are the very same people who have no scruples,…

Australia is one of the last continents that man colonized. Of all the animals that weighed more than 50 kg, and were therefore very useful in terms of meat, 90% are extinct. How many? 90%! Such is the devastating and deadly touch of this new god. Those animal species were…

Questioner (Q): When I see how meat is produced, how vaccines are produced, how wool is produced, how silk is produced, it seems so obvious that I am contributing to that cruelty by consuming those things. But it seems that the rest of the world does not see that; it…

Questioner (Q): Talking about this recent controversy between PETA and a dairy producer, people are saying that lakhs of people are going to lose their employment if they switched to plant-based milk. So, what do you have to say about this?

Acharya Prashant (AP): See the employment argument, I appreciate…

Eat that in which you are causing minimum damage to consciousness.

So, eating an apple and eating an animal are not the same thing.

The less you love yourself, the more likely it is that you will be a flesh eater;

You are in grief even when somebody disrespects you.

In fact, you are in grief the moment somebody is not loving towards you.

So, Veganism is, in its true sense, Love.

Questioner (Q): Sir, everything was going alright back in November 2019; the world was operating as it does. And within three months, everything has just turned upside-down. We’re talking about the Corona outbreak.

It has always been enlightening sitting with you and talking about life. Most of us today are

When consciousness is your only hope, your only liberator,

How can you kill consciousness wherever it is?

If you are the body, then your real benefit lies in appeasing the body.

Question: Pranaam Acharya Ji! I have watched many of your videos related to Veganism, and I would like to know your take on teaching Veganism to children. I know that Veganism has to be a thing of the heart and just forcing dry ideology is not good for anyone.

As…

The world is your playground. So don’t be so particular about moving only within your pre-existing circle. If your cause is worth it, show some courage and move out.

If you have a tender and precious sapling in your palm, would you plant it in a desert? No. You will…

Hurt is not automatic. Somewhere there is an admission from you that you are hurt, and that you would be hurt, and that you would call yourself as hurt. Don’t call yourself as hurt, and see what happens.

Hurt is not an obligation. Hurt is a choice. Insecurity, fear, temptations—none…

Have you looked at kids playing? If you look at kids playing and if you look at animals playing, you won’t find much difference. In fact, human kids go along very well with animal kids. Later on, when we cover ourselves with a lot of acquired knowledge, with a lot…

Welcome pain. You have no option. That’s the way life is meant to be. Life is suffering. Because not only are you designed to have pain, you are also designed to resist pain.

Have pain, and have a lot of depth in your being. So much depth that it can…

Just as the ego loves to take credit, it also loves to play the victim.

If something good has happened, “I did it!”

If something bad happened, “It happened to me.”

Happiness and sadness are both wonderful, are both welcome.

But in some deep sense, sadness is a little better than happiness. It teaches us a little more than happiness does. It elevates us a little more than happiness does. It has a certain purifying effect that happiness does not quite…

If you are suffering, there is nobody but you who is responsible. Unless you fully accept that responsibility, there is no freedom. If your suffering is just incidental, then how can there be freedom from it?—because incidents can happen any way, any day.

You have to, first of all, clearly…

To love is to see that the other is in trouble. To love is to extend a helping hand. Love is not about admiring somebody’s physicality or using someone for some means. Love has to be an exercise in compassion.

Only two kinds of associations are right in this world.…

Both the genders have become even more anchored to their physical identity. The more you do that, the more you are in misery because, really, the body is not who you are.

There are places better and higher than the place of your gender specific hormones. Why do you want…

When you say sadness is just sadness, then you have gained freedom from sadness. It means being free from the obligation to label sadness as a loss of self-worth. If you let sadness go deeply into you, there is no way it is not going to touch joy.

It is…

How do we justify our anger? We justify our anger by feeling short-changed, cheated, or victimized; by continuing to assert that we are incomplete, while simultaneously bemoaning the incompleteness. If you have grudges within, if you feel a victim of situations, or past, or persons, and if you lend credence…

The approach of self-help is: “I am sad because my desires have not met fulfillment. So, the way to help myself is: fulfill desires.” It’s a dimensional difference. Therefore, self-help pleases but helps not. It is not then ‘self-help’; the genre should be more correctly called ‘self-gratification’.

And if you…

The temperature of this city is already higher than what it should be. It won’t be higher in the next twenty years; it is already higher today. Read how many people are dying and by how many years has the average life expectancy already reduced—already reduced.

What do you mean…

The Earth doesn’t have resources to support eight billion or eleven billion vegans. Veganism doesn’t help the cause of climate change beyond a point. We need two things: less people and less consumption, and both of them together.

You need a situation where there are not more than two or…

If the two of you could together shout and scratch and bite and tear and break—if all those things could be done together, why not meditate and be loving and compassionate together? Or is companionship only for biting into each other?

So, having been companions, now it is your responsibility…

Episodes of physical sickness are occasions when you can truly test how much spiritual mettle you have.

You do not want to deliberately have a sick body; as far as possible, avoid sickness. But then, sickness is inevitable, just as old age is inevitable. Sickness will come.

You need to

The shopkeeper’s business is to sell his goods, and that’s what most gurus of today are: they have to sell their goods. When that is what you want to do, how can you afford to antagonize a big chunk of the population? And you would never, never do that if…

What is it that is keeping beef affordable? It is milk consumption, because it is in circulation.

You see, you have an asset; if the only thing that you can have from it is its flesh, then you will be required to firstly raise it to its maximum weight, and…

There is someone you say you love dearly. You tell that person, “You are my life!” That person passes away; within a few hours, you are found having your meals. You are in grief—the body is not in grief, the brain is not in grief. The brain is telling the…

We don’t need to do anything fancy to check climate change. Limit the number of human beings, and the Earth’s health will be restored very quickly. Nothing else is needed.

The biggest contributor to climate change, rather the only contributor to climate change is human beings and their consumption, quantity…

If it was possible for one man to move towards greatness, it was possible for everybody. Nothing hurts the small man more than seeing a great man in his vicinity, or a small man trying to move towards greatness. It’s an utter insult.