Martinus answers
1 Sensory perception, time and space
2 The principle of reincarnation
9 Raw vegetables, cooking and fruit
10 Correspondence with the “dead”
13 The principle of world redemption
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About vegetable food and killing, the inkling consciousness of plants
Question
Does eating vegetable food not mean just as much
destruction of life as the eating of animal food?
Answer
It is true that vegetable products, like animal products,
consist of micro-life but the micro-life in the plant substance has no day-conscious ability to feel
physical suffering in the way that the animal micro-life does. The physical conscious life of the plant
consists only of being able to vaguely sense pleasantness and unpleasantness. Pain in the plant can
therefore in the worst case only be noticed or felt as a hint or vague feeling of unpleasantness. In
situations where animal life would shrink in excruciating pain vegetable life would feel only a hint or
vague feeling of unpleasantness, and at that only when it is a matter of roots, leaves, stalks, grains
and unripe fruit. By eating the ripe fruit flesh around the kernel in the edible fruits no killing
whatsoever takes place, since the micro-life here gets a normal and perfect unhindered promotion in its
lifecycle by being consumed as nourishment in an organism. But as yet vegetable nourishment has to
contain the above-mentioned roots, leaves, stalks and grains because ripe fruit does not create enough
filling in the intestinal structure which the terrestrial human being possesses. But this structure will
change with evolution to the advantage of the flesh and juices of ripe fruit which will then become the
terrestrial human being's only acceptable source of nourishment.
The same source of nourishment will at that time together with refined ethical thinking and considerate and healthy care of the structure of the body create the perfect human being in God's image whose atmosphere will be devoid of the physical misery of today with its disease and all too violent undermining and mortality of the organisms.
First published in Contact Letter no. 2/1950
Translation: Mary McGovern,
1989
Published in the English edition of Kosmos no 3/1989
© Martinus Institut 1981, www.martinus.dk.
May be reproduced stating the copyright and the source
of the material.
