Latest / Vegetarianism and Occultism / Episode 1 - We Want the Best

Transcript

Episode 1 - We Want the Best · Vegetarianism and Occultism

• 0:00
  Section one. We want the best, I take it. Then, in
• 0:05
  food as well as in everything else, we all of us want the best
• 0:11
  that is within our means. We should like to bring our lives, and
• 0:15
  therefore our daily food, as a not unimportant part of our lives, into
• 0:20
  harmony with our aspirations, into harmony with the highest that we know. We
• 0:26
  should be glad to take what is really best. And if we do not
• 0:30
  yet know enough to be able to appreciate what is best, then we should
• 0:35
  be glad to learn to do so. If we think of it, we
• 0:39
  shall see that this is the case along other lines, as for example,
• 0:44
  in music, art or literature. We have been taught from childhood that if
• 0:50
  we want our musical taste developed along the best lines, we must select only
• 0:54
  the best music, And if at first we do not fully appreciate or understand
• 1:00
  stand it, we must be willing patiently to wait and to listen, until
• 1:04
  at length something of its sweet beauty dawns upon our souls and we come to
• 1:10
  comprehend that which at first awaken no response within our hearts. If we want
• 1:17
  to appreciate the best in art, we must not fill our eyes with the
• 1:21
  sensational broadcasts of police news, or with the hideous abominations which are miscalled comic
• 1:27
  pictures. But we must steadily look and learn until the mystery of the work
• 1:34
  of Turner begins to unfold to our patient contemplation, or the grand breadth of
• 1:40
  the last case comes within our power to understand. So too, in literature,
• 1:47
  it has been the sad experience of many that much of the best and
• 1:51
  the most beautiful is lost to those whose mental food consists exclusively of the sensational
• 1:57
  paper, or the cheap novel, or that frothy mass of waste material which
• 2:02
  is thrown up like scum upon the molten metal of life, novelettes, cereals,
• 2:08
  and fragments of a type which neither teach the ignorant, nor strengthen the
• 2:14
  weak, nor develop the immature. If we wish to unfold the mind in
• 2:19
  our children, we do not leave them to their own uncultivated taste in all
• 2:23
  these things, but we try to help them to train that taste, whether
• 2:28
  it be in art, in music, or in literature. Surely, then
• 2:34
  we may seek to find the best in physical as well as in mental food.
• 2:38
  And surely we must find this not by mere blind instinct, but by
• 2:44
  learning to think and to reason out the matter from the higher point of view.
• 2:49
  There may be those in the world who have no desire for the best,
• 2:53
  who are willing to remain on the lower levels, and consciously and intentionally
• 2:58
  to build into themselves that which is coarse and degrading. But surely there are
• 3:04
  many who wish to rise above this, who would gladly and eagerly take the
• 3:07
  best, if only they knew what it was, or if their attention was
• 3:12
  directed to it. There are men and women who are morally of the highest
• 3:17
  class, who yet have been brought up to feed with the hyaenas and the
• 3:22
  wolves of life, and have been taught that their necessary dietary was the corpse
• 3:27
  of a slaughtered animal. It needs but little thought to show us that this
• 3:31
  horror cannot be the highest and the purest, and that if we ever wish
• 3:37
  to raise ourselves in the scale of nature, if we ever wish that our
• 3:40
  bodies shall be pure and clean, as the temples of the Master should be,
• 3:46
  we must abandon this lothesome custom and take our place among the princely hosts
• 3:52
  who are striving for the evolution of mankind, striving for the highest and the
• 3:57
  purest in everything, for themselves as well as for their fellow men. Let
• 4:02
  Us see in detail why a vegetarian diet is emphatically the purest and the best
• 4:11
  end of Section one.