On this day, March 31st, which celebrates the Day of Health worldwide, the importance of vegetarian food for physical, mental, and spiritual health is emphasized.
According to data from recent research, the number of vegetarian individuals has significantly increased in Brazil, with 16% of the population at this time living in the large centers declare themselves vegetarian.
Among the factors that influence the choice for this type of diet are ethical and/or religious principles, social and economic factors, health or environment concerns, among others.
Dealing with Food
According to a collaborator who is active in the House of Light on the Hill and the Parque Tibetano School, the work with food is a very fertile field for the development of individual, group, and planetary consciousness.
The Light-Community of Figueira, affiliated with the Fraternity – International Humanitarian Federation (FIHF), since its foundation, has been under the guidelines of nutrition free of any product of animal origin. The basis of its food comes from the agroforests with its sustainable orchards and vegetable gardens, which produce the most diverse kinds of food, such as beans, corn, millet, soybeans, legumes, vegetables, and roots.
Tainá reminds us that “the 5th Attribute of the Sector of Health and Healing of the House of Light on the Hill presents us with the following mission: “Help beings to respect the planetary reserves.”
Within those principles, the dynamics of production in the Light-Community of Figueira is based on not exploiting the earth and its elements, and in a form of interaction of human beings with the ecological environment. As another collaborator, Florence, emphasizes, “nature creates and recreates and we try to incorporate that movement by interacting with the Kingdoms, in contact with God, doing everything as an offering and in praise of Him.”
In the same way, and with the intervention of Friar Renatto, there is respect for the seeds in their primary principle and their handling is done with dedication, care and affection.
From the beginning, everything has been done as a group: the planting, the harvesting, and the meals.
“The opportunity for cooperation with the Kingdoms of Nature through simplicity fosters the development of reverence for what is sacred and brings about full health and wholesome nutrition on several levels of the being, besides the physical,” Tainá says.
The Physical Body
According to the study done by Doctor José Maria Campos Amorim, Friar Ameino, “Foods, an invitation to simplicity” (a talk available in Portuguese here), modern illnesses such as obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular problems, high cholesterol, hypertension, arthritis, and gout are the result of warped eating habits.
“A body overburdened with heavy, processed food of an animal origin receives and spreads morbid poisons that affect not only the related organs, but also the blood, the brain, and the nerves,” explains Friar Ameinó.
According to this study, the modern person has distanced themselves from the foods essential to good health, produced in a simple way by nature, and has allowed themselves to be carried away by desires and wants, eating processed and unhealthy products.
The Emotional and the Mind
Concurrently, José Trigueirinho Netto teaches us that the benefits of vegetarianism are broad and well known since remote times. It is a food system used by the Essenes both as a way of purification and as a stimulus to perfecting the faculties of the soul and the body.
And he clarifies that the ingestion of animal flesh, among other damages to health, carries toxicity into the mind, causing the mental cells to become dull.
“… the cells that are fed with animal flesh form a limited mind that understands things up to a certain point because of the toxins of the meat in the physical cells,” he explains.
For him, besides that toxicity, the unjustified fear that resides in the human being is another factor that many times manifests depending on the ingestion of meat, because the animal experiences terror, a very strong pain, when it is killed, and all that is reflected in the psychic part of the meat, in all the material that the being will ingest.”
Food and Spirituality
The following phrase is from the Bhagavad Gita:
“Food for spiritual practitioners must be light and easy to digest.”
According to Friar Ameinó, the body of the human being is basically maintained by two streams of nutrition: the material and the cosmic.
The material deals with the dematerialization of the food from the time it is placed in the mouth, which begins the freeing of the subtle elements. The cosmic stream, through our sensory organs and nervous system, connects with etheric currents of creative energy. “Our body is basically built of the substance that this cosmic current of nutrition produces,” he emphasizes.
Friar Ameinó teaches that to have full health, with adequate nutrition, it is not enough to change habits from the outside in, with diets and different foods; it is also necessary to try to enter into contact with one’s inner being and make a connection with one’s own existence, with the essence of life, because subtle and creative energies are always active in our being.
In another study, Trigueirinho adds to this, saying that correct nutrition can cause the individual to shift to a different level in consciousness. Food can provide an unaltered state of harmony through the contact of each being with the Ono-Zone energy – that some call prana or God. “Within food there exists an occult part that is awakened, developed, and assimilated by us occultly, not only through digestive processes. It is the Ono-Zone energy, that unique energy that causes that occult part to become active,” he affirms.
When we eat, we must make that connection with what is higher, and if we did that, he says: “the bodies gradually become more subtle and abstract. Dreams become clearer, more evolved. We gain more clarity in our brain and in the mind, and that will draw a new way of eating to us. The chemistry of the food changes.”
Trigueirinho proposes that each one seek within themselves a better way of understanding and developing the value of suitable food, respecting the essence and the nature of each food, trying to perceive what is really necessary to supply the body and at the same time, unite with the experience of surrender to the One.
“If you begin to interact with this Ono-Zone energy through your food, you will end up perceiving the value of a plant, not only tasting it. If you eat a carrot, joining with that energy, the carrot will have a different effect on you.”
And he ends with: “God is in each food. It is possible to perceive the giving of self of the Plant Kingdom and unite with It through eating a carrot.”
What is sought, then, on dealing with food in the Light-Community of Figueira, through eating vegetarian, from the crops, the harvests, from all the group life itself, is not only to be healthy or maintaining sustainability and ecologic collaboration but what is being truly and essentially sought is surrender to a higher level of consciousness, to the Creator. And for that, individually and as a group, it is necessary to have a life on Earth as it should be for all: in cooperation, ethical, with respect, integration, unity, gratitude, and upliftment, of one with another and each one and all with God.
