Meditation gives back your sensitivity.

                  Wherever meditation has happened, people have become vegetarian, always, for thousands of years.You have to know this fact, in jainism that all their twenty-four teachers -- they call them tirthankaras, their messiahs -- came from the warrior caste. They were all meat-eaters. They were professional warriors. Meditation transformed their whole vision. Not only did their swords fall from their hands, their warriorhood disappeared, but a new phenomenon started happening. A tremendous feeling of love towards existence.

                   The same happened in Buddhism. Buddha did not believe in God, did not believe in prayer.The moment God and prayer are discarded, the only thing that is left is to go in. Buddha also was from the warrior caste, son of a king, trained to kill. He was not a vegetarian. But when meditation started blossoming in him, just as a by-product the vegetarian idea came into his being.

                   This is nothing to do with religion. This is simply to do with your sensitiveness, your aesthetic understanding. Be more alert, more silent, more joyful, more ecstatic, and find your innermost center. Many things will follow of their own accord; and when they come of their own accord, there is no repression, there is no fight, no hardship, no torture.
                  But if you live vegetarianism as a religion or a philosophy, you will be continually hankering for meat, continually thinking and your vegetarianism will be just a decoration for your ego.If you meditate you are going to grow new perceptivity, new sensitivity, and you cannot kill animals.Meditation slowly slowly gives you back your sensitivity.

                 It is a gain, not a loss. It will make you simultaneously more loving, more compassionate, more feeling, more understanding of beauty. It will make you aware of great music, even the music that happens when the wind blows through the pine trees, or the sound of the running water-even the music that happens, that is happening, in this gap, in this silence.Silence is the highest music. It is soundless, but it can be felt.

                  Vegetarianism is a small thing. We have to create a world of really sensitive people, who can understand music, poetry, paintings, who can understand nature, who can understand human beauty, who can understand the world that surrounds them: the stars, the moon, the sun. Just a bird on the wing can fill you with immense rejoicing. The freedom of the small bird, the song of the small bird, may make you dance, sing. Humanity has lost its heart, and we have to give it back to everyone who is willing.