A Reprint of the Original 1903 Article
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AS TO MEAT EATING
by
CHARLES FILLMORE
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HE subject of diet is attracting more attention every day among metaphysicians. At one time it was only necessary to quote, ”Take no thought what ye shall eat or what ye shall drink,” to dismiss the whole matter. But the revised Bible puts an entirely new phase upon this familiar quotation. It says, “Be not anxious for your life, what ye shall eat or what ye shall drink.” It was a treatment against anxiety as to the provision of God that Jesus was giving, and not an injunction to take no thought about food.
It is found that food does have a part in body struc ture, and that the metaphysician must take it into account if he would reach the higher substance demonstrations. The argument that we are putting power where no power exists, in the material, is a contradiction in itself. We eat to sustain life in the organism, therefore life is the object of eating. Every form in existence is a manifestation of life, and the life idea that pervades it is its source. If that life idea is for a moment withdrawn the form collapses. Hence we do not eat matter, but life.
This puts a new phase upon eating. If we are daily eating aggregations of life ideas hid within the material forms, we should use discrimination in choosing those forms. Our food should be full of life in its purity and vigor. There should be no idea of death and decay connected with it in any degree. The vegetable should be fresh and the fruit radiant in its sunny perfection.
I have in years of experiment tested the effect in mind and body of meat-eating and non-meat-eating,
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and I feel that I am more competent to judge of the effects than one who theorizes about the question.
Some sixteen years ago {1887} when I began the study of Truth I was told that it made no difference what I ate if I was in the right thought. This seemed to prove true up to a certain point in my experience. While my spiritual development was confined to the conscious mind there seemed no special need of food discrimination. But grad ually a new phase set in. I found that I was having vibrations in the sympathet ic nerve centres — the subconscious mind was being quickened, and I was becom ing a conscious vital battery. The vital currents gradually grew stronger and stronger until I could hardly control them. Appetite, passion, emotion, etc., were greatly increased. Then my prayers for guidance were answered and a system of communication set up with the higher realms of consciousness. I was shown that the food that entered the organism had to pass through a process of re generation every day before it was in condition to be built into the new body in Christ. Just how to carry on this re generative process in the various subconscious centres was also shown, and here is where I discerned the effects of food in body building.
The vitalizing element in food is con tained in the cell, which may be termed a mind battery vibrating with intelli gence, force and substance. These ele ments are present in the living cell — dead cells are those in which intelligence and force have withdrawn and inanimate substance only re mains. Man appropriates these cells and they become part of his consciousness according to his capacity to use them. Those who have not developed the ca pacity to conscious ly regenerate the cells get but a small part of their energies. Sufficient force is extracted through the automatic functions of the organism to build up and sustain a physical body for a few years, but the thread of life is frail and its texture coarse. In man the bulk of the cells are deposited in the
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refined seminal seed, ready for regeneration, but seldom used to that end – rather dissipated in ignorant sexual indulgence. In woman the menstrual flow relieves the system of the life elixir, which should have been regenerated and thrown onto the higher plane of consciousness.
Personal experiment has proven to me that there is but very little change in the character of the food until it passes through that refining process called re generation. The stamp of individual identity is put upon it only through a concentrated effort of the I AM, in spiritual mediation and affirmation. It is true that all those people who are much in prayer and conscious spiritual states are constantly drawing upon these reserve cells in the seminal ducts and regenerating them. But the process is not well sustained until man consciously co-operates with the law and seeks daily re generation and purification of all the cells in the organism. Then a system is established and the new body built up as designated by Jesus Christ in the symbology of the New Testament.
With this understanding of  the process of body building and body substance, both physically and psychically, we can see the necessity of discrimination in choosing foods. If the cells pass into the blood and glands essentially the same as they were formed by the animal or the vegetable from which they came, it is highly important that their character be of the highest and purest.
We eat the flesh of the animal for the life it contains, yet the fact is that life has disappeared in its highest degree — there is left only a lot of corpse-cells in various stages of corruption and de cay. These are really a burden to the organism because of the disintegrating tendency which has already set in. Instead of the vigor and force of the animal that once animated that flesh there is left a festering mass of dead cells without a single animating principle. Before upbuilding life can be put into those cells
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they must pass through earth and the vegetable kingdom to the animal. Yet ignorant man loads his system with these elements of discord and decay and expects to get life out of them. No wonder his body dies.
Again, it is proven by experiment that certain negative states of consciousness peculiar to the animal ac companies its flesh in all its journeys through the body of man. All the upbuilding life goes out with the soul of the animal when it gives up its body, but the fears, the violence, the ignorance, the anger, the lust, and all that pertains to the error side of consciousness hovers around the dead cells. In San Francisco a few years ago many people were made violently ill from eating meat bought at a certain shop. Physicians investigated and they found that the carcass of a certain steer was the source, and it was presumed that it was diseased. Further inquiry developed this to be an error — the animal was unusually healthy and vigorous — in fact so vigorous and forceful that he fought for his life for over an hour after the attempt to kill him began. He was in a frenzy of terror and anger; his eyes were bloodshot and he frothed at the mouth while the butchers were trying to slay him. The physicians decided that the anger and terror of this steer poi soned his meat in manner similar to that of the angry mother her milk, which is well known makes the infant sick.
This instance was but an exaggeration of  conditions that exist in a milder form in all animal flesh offered for food in our markets. Before they are slain the poor brutes are maltreated in ways almost beyond enumeration. Visit shipping pens, stock-trains, stock-yards and packing houses, if you want evidence of the sufferings of the poor beasts of the field. And these very sufferings are through the law of sympathetic mental vibrations transferred to the flesh of those who eat the bodies of these animals. The undefined fears, the terrors
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of the nightmare, and the many disturbances in stomach and bowels that man endures may be in a measure traced to these un suspected sources.
The argument that life is destroyed in eating fruits and vegetables is frequent ly used to excuse the slaughter of beings having intelligence, affections, and apparantly souls almost equal to man’s. It is so far-fetched that a moment’s sincere thought ought to disclose the fal lacy to anyone. The fruit, and the vege table have completed their life course and have apparently been prepared by a wise creator for food, as we are told in Genesis 1:29, “Behold! I have given you every herb yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat.” Here is plainly in dicated a vegetable and fruit diet for man. When these abundant products of nature are found spread upon her green-gar nished tables everywhere, why should man dye his hands with the life-blood of beings that resent the carnage, and cry out and bellow in terror when his cruel knife is raised against them? This is direct opposition to the Divine Law of freedom and right to life liberty and the pursuit of happiness to all of God’s creatures. Man is today suffering in his body and mind the results of this trans gressed law, and he will continue to suffer until he observes in its fullest degree the command, “Thou shalt not kill.”
We rejoice that progressive metaphysicians are giving this question experimental attention. It is so easy to theorize and argue – the ranks are well supplied with these voluable wise ones, – and it is a real pleasure to find the results of the test of non-meat eaters in our metaphysical ranks. In a recent issue of The Nautilus, William E. Towne, one of the editors, has an excellent article on this subject, from which we quote:
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“Capt. G. E. Diamond of San Francisco, is now one hundred and six years old, and engages in physical culture and cycling exercises. He has totally abstained from animal flesh foods for over eighty years. He is as straight as an arrow and richly enjoys life. It is both an illusion and a delusion to think that one must eat animal flesh ‘to keep up the strength.’ There is more
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nitrogen, more muscle, more strength in one pound of browned peanuts than in a pound and a half of beef steak.”
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Evidently if the practice of vegetarianism produces weakness of brain and body it has taken it a long time to get in its work on Capt. Diamond.
This reminds me of an old story about a temperance crank who tapped an old gentleman on the shoulder as he was about to quaff a glass of whiskey and said: “My friend, did you know you were drinking slow poison?” “Is that so?” was the reply; “it must be very slow for I’ve been drinking it for sixty years.”
Dr. Peebles is himself almost eighty-two years old, yet he rises at four o’clock every morning and works from twelve to fourteen hours of each day. He has abstained from meat eating for many years and says of himself: ” I eat no animal flesh, use no liquors, nor wines, no tobacco, no coffee nor tea, I have no aches nor pains, I can bat a ball, run like a sixteen-year-old lad, swim like a fish, and dance the ‘Highland Fling.’ At the propressive Lyceum picnic in Melbourne last year, five hundred witnesses on the ground, I ran a foot race and took the prize.”
Dr. W. R. C. Latson, a recognized authority upon diet, has this to say about meat in his book on “Food Values”: “So far from being a ‘strong food,’ flesh meat is, strictly speaking, not a food but a nutro-stimulant. The meat of the animal contains food and poisons. The food we can use. The poisons we must excrete, and in the effort to get rid of these irritating poisons the organism is thrown into a state of excitation which is mistaken for strength. As a matter of fact it is like the ‘strength’ which come from alcohol.”
Dr. Latson goes on to say that it is a fact that the heart of the habitual meat eater will beat ten more per minute at least than the heart of a person living on a pure diet. He says further: “The strongest argument against the use of flesh meat is that to eat the animal’s flesh is to eat the animal’s execreta, which is inseparable from it.”
It is a fact that at least seventh-tenths of the population of the globe never eat meat. In his book on “Physical Education” Dr. Felix L. Oswald says: “The strongest men of the three manliest races of the present world are non-flesh eating.”
In his book on “Food Values”, Dr. Latson presents various tables and diagrams in relation to the amount of nourishment contained in every-day foods, and these tables show conclusively that flesh meat is less rich in food materials than many other common articles of diet.
It is a fact that “during the heroic periods of Greek and Roman history the food of the soldiers was entirely vegetarian. The Greek athletes were trained upon vegetarian diet.”
It is a fact that the most successful athletes of the day are those who abstain from meat entirely or at least during their
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periods of training. Bernarr MacFadden, formerly a successful athlete and now editor of several physical culture magazines, has this to say regarding meat eating in his book, “Strength From Eating”: “But the most startling evidence in favor of vegetarianism is the fact proven in my own athletic experience, and in the experience of many others, that the vegetarian diet gives one far greater endurance than the meat diet.”
The italics in the preceding quotation are my own. Further on Mr. MacFadden says, “There is no doubt that a better quality of blood is made from a vegetarian than from a meat diet.”
In the light of practical experience, facts, and such as those I have here set down, I think we can safely agree with Dr. Latson, who in summing up the question of meat eating, says: “So far from being a ‘strong’ food, flesh meat is a very ‘weak’ food; and proportionately to its bulk, imparts very little energy.”
In line with the foregoing I print the following interesting item of news, clipped from The Youth’s Companion: The youth of America discovered long ago that peanuts are uncommonly filling and four students at Norwich University at Northfield, Vt., have for several months been putting that discovery to practical use. A young man working his way through college, who found it needful to pare expenses, demonstrated that a quart and a half of peanuts provided all the sustenance he needed for twenty-four hours, and when he bought the nuts by the sack his “board” costs him just a dollar a week, as against the three dollars and a half he had been paying at a fraternity house. Soon three other students joined the experimenter, and since early in March these four have stuck to the peanut diet, the only variation from the original plan being that on two days in the week each man eats three eggs “to supply the need of albumen.” The correspondent who tells the tale adds that three of the four peanuters are identified with the athletic interests of the student body, and affirms that physically as well as mentally they are in better condition than ever before. In the last twelve weeks the men have increased in weight, on an average, fifteen pounds. Let the lean, the feeble, and the wise women who run boarding-houses make a note of it.
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EDITORS NOTE:
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The original typewritten manuscript for this article ended with a final paragraph from the “Words of Truth”. Since this portion of the article was probably never published, Unity School of Christianity retains the copyright. Truth students are referred to the original manuscript at the Unity Archives for the unpublished portion of this article by Charles Fillmore.
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This article was originally published in the October, 1903 issue of Unity Magazine, Volume XIX, No. 4. This article is in the public domain and no longer protected by the copyright laws of the United States of America. Access to the manuscript and the published article was generously provided by:
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Unity Archives
Unity School of Christianity
1901 NW Blue Parkway,
Unity Village, MO
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