Consciousness is your only savior || On Advait Vedanta (2019)

Questioner (Q): You said that consciousness is precious, it should be valued, and that is why we shouldn’t kill animals. We can take it the other way around also, that if we are killing animals, it means we are killing our own consciousness somewhere, and therefore we are not valuing consciousness. So, if there is meat consumption, there is killing of consciousness, and therefore we don’t love our consciousness.

Acharya Prashant (AP): True. 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 towards all conscious beings.

Q: So, we can say that when the mind is at rest and the mind is more loving towards consciousness, then that is a more permanent and a right solution to not only get rid of animal cruelty but other cruelties also. For example, rape is also such a cruelty where the consciousness is not valued.

AP: Correct. And there is a definite correlation between these things. All kinds of cruelty come from the same source. Be it rape, be it debauchery, be it environmental damage, or be it flesh consumption, or be it dairy consumption, all of them are co-related. They all have a…