Batman,
With reference to the song, are you suggesting then that slicing a turkey is murder? And perhaps cooking it and later eating it is also murder? So even a dead body can be killed and one turkey is murdered again and again? Is this not odd?
As far as I’m concerned the quoted text from the Bhagavad Gita, rather than a correct statement about “ignorance” is itself a manifestation not only of the same, but also of wrong understanding about cause and effect (karma) and very misleading.
If you wish to make a statement about a particular wrong or right moral action, you’d need to discriminate one course of action from another and not bunch different things together.
Rules are laid out in order to give a sense of direction but easily become object of clinging. “Not to kill” points to the danger of the bad intention involved in the act and the result that follows from this. Failing to study the mind when involved in any action, one ends up going by outward actions. This is an instance of ignorance coming in when instead, wisdom should be there. From this attachment follows, which in turn encourages more ignorance and attachment to what then must be “rules and rituals”. This latter are in fact a manifestation of wrong understanding and a source of much mischief. At some point wrong understanding with the help of conceit leads to creation of rules that are completely unfounded, such as those professed by vegetarians and vegans in the name of moral purity.
For killing to take place there must be not only the intention to kill, but also a being (living), the act of killing and the resultant death. So you can see here, that intention alone is not enough, not to speak of times when the particular intention is not even present, such as when slicing turkey or cooking and eating it. Indeed someone may cook with the intention to feed someone and allow that person to enjoy a tasty meal, and this must be good, must it not? Why then allow a rule which has no basis in reality to decide what is good and what is bad moral action?
People attach to rules because in following them, they sense that they have achieved something. Creating more rules allows for the same to happen at what is perceived as ‘higher level’ of success. But really, this is all about me, me and me. Attachment will attach to anything and wrong understanding will create imagined rules for attachment to feed upon. But just as wisdom is the forerunner of all that is good, wrong understanding is the forerunner of all that is evil.
Today you think that you are being morally good because you do not kill. But not only does “not killing” have anything to do with an overall behavior, but is an instance of restraint when faced with the prospect of killing, making the wrong association between killing and eating is to encourage a perverted understanding about cause and effect which leads further and further away from the prospect of understanding killing as killing. And the result of this down the road, in this life or the following ones, is all forms of immoral actions, including killing.
There are members here who quickly dismiss karma due to their preferred world view. This too opens the way for all kinds of evil actions as I’ve seen directly and indirectly professed. But I don’t know which is worse, whether this or the one which mistake wrong moral action for right.
Ps: I don’t know how long I will be writing here for. I quit sometime back and am sure some here will ask, why I have decided to come back. I have just embarked on a discussion with a particular teacher from India who I met a few times when he visited Bangkok. I talked to him once about my participation in this group and expressed my frustration with regard to the discouragement of the concept of karma here. He of course does believe in karma and thinks that those who do not, are wrong. (But he is a vegetarian. :-/) Anyway, this is what led me to come here and read again. But I don’t know for how long.
