Orders of the food-chain to the Sun and the moral issues
Photograph by Richard A. Whittaker
We all living beings on Earth need energy to power our bodies and there are many ways to get it, but all go to the Sun and some few of us can get it in the Prana, which is even more complex and strange for science because it’s all about cosmic energy. Carnivores eat Sun in meat just like vegetarians eat Sun in vegetables—they are both getting indirect nourishment of the Sun’s energy. Plants are much better equipped for an efficient use of energy from the Sun, they use some minerals and water to get protein (living beings building blocks) but the energy itself comes from the Sun and it’s directly absorbed by chlorophyll in photosynthesis. Plants seem to be smarter than animals at that. We, animals, need to drive energy from the Sun by eating those plants that have stored minerals and the Sun’s energy. Vegetarians are not better than carnivores they are just one step closer to the Sun, it’s a scale thing one might say. Carnivores are two steps further from the Sun if they eat vegetarian animals and they are in exponential steps further from the Sun if they eat carnivore animals.
It’s that simple. If we eat a bunch of spinach we’re getting sunlight in second hand (Sun – spinach - us), if we eat grass fed cow's meat we’re getting sunlight in third hand (Sun – grass – cow - us). If we eat wild duck's meat we may be getting sunlight in forth hand (Sun – grasses – worms – duck - us) but we may be getting it in fifth hand (Sun – algae – larvae – fish – duck - us). And what about a duck that ate a dragonfly? Dragonflies eat mosquitos among other insects and mosquitos, as we all know, feed on animals and love human blood. So in that case it’s an exponential order of food chain… it could be: Sun – grass – cow – human – mosquito – dragonfly – duck – us, but it could be a much bigger food chain and a much bigger distance to the Sun. The advantage of being a carnivore is that carnivores are eating compressed sunlight, they can get a huge amount of Sun energy in just a pound of meat, but they are usually quite far from the original source.
In this order of things the animals that are closer to the Sun—some are almost as close as plants and some even claim they are as close—are sungazers. Successful sungazers claim they are able to drive a big part of their energy needs directly from the Sun and say they eat less and less indirect sunlight energy (from plants and animals) while they get better at sungazing. Sungazing is a very sophisticated technique of feeding (and a lot more than feeding) that if done correctly can be very nutritional but if done wrongly it may harm the eyes, thus there is a strong opposition to it from the common sciences. There are several successful sungazers around the world and some have already been submitted to scientific analyses and have gone through many tests, showing that they are getting proper nutrition without eating either plants or animals, but these tests are usually found to be inconclusive because the results are considered inconceivable by most scientists. And if this is already strange for science imagine those that claim they have been without eating plants or animals and don’t sungaze? There are some few that seem to have developed a special meditation technique to get ‘feeding’ energy from Prana.
After this and only after this, comes the ethical questions of how we should act with other living beings, and in the current general belief system there is a notion that we have accumulated karma and that we can get rid of some of that burden by following some special feeding practices. It’s a bit like the food-chain that leads to the Sun but in this case in a reverse order. If we hurt sentient beings we accumulate bad karma, we all know that, so if we eat a carrot (plants are also sentient beings even if they have no central nervous system like ours) we’re accumulating one order of bad karma in distance to the Sun, if we eat a rabbit we’re accumulating two orders of bad karma in distance to the Sun, and so on. The dragonfly eating duck would mean accumulating a huge order of bad karma because we could even be getting bad karma orders from ourselves. Imagine eating omnivore animals like pork… we never know. But the number of orders on karma accumulated from eating animals is very difficult to access because we don’t even know how these animals have been treated to serve as our food-stock, it’s not only about what they eat any longer… there is a lot of bad karma there. So, the less we get sunlight energy from animals the better our karma will be, and if we can even pass without eating plants the karma will be even better.
As to the moral issues, something that is very different from the ethical problems of feeding, if we try to enforce our own ideas on how it should be and how others should eat and so on, if we get aggressive and try to domineer carnivores into being vegetarians or ‘converting vegetarians’ into carnivores, we get even more bad karma. Each one of us knows what’s the best way to feed by themselves, and no one is in its right to judge others by what and how they feed themselves. So, as to the moral issues here in question, which are the main reason why carnivores tend to attack vegetarians, there is not really a better way to feed on the Sun’s energy but only different stages of it. And while some vegetarians may be accumulating less bad karma by not eating animals they sure are getting a huge amount of bad karma when they impose their views and think they are better morally just because they don’t eat animals.
Each person is a whole universe in itself and no one can be the measure for all.
Even if it may be biologically and karmically better to be closer to the Sun's energy in our feeding, it will never be better morally. No one should judge others by the way they feed, just like no one should judge others for what they believe in. One should only judge him/herself.
