Vaheguru Vaheguru
When it comes to me, it's awkward.
I'll tell you why.
Because what most people in this world want is a yes or no answer.
They just need to be told I can or I can't.
But Sikhi is not telling you that answer.
It's saying "use your brain".
Human beings have been given a brain.
So therefore Maharaj is giving us to say "it's not black or white."
It's a great thing you need to use your brain.
So Sikhi is a thinking person's religion.
What does Sikhi say about meat? that would be better.
What does it say about it?
It does not recommend eating meat.
It recommends you don't eat meat.
Because most of the time people eat meat for taste.
Now I'm not doubting you what you are, but you're not really involved in fighting on the battlefield.
Right, fair enough.
Okay, that's good.
Just make you honest
So you don't really need the protein from animals.
Now do you eat organic food?
No, okay.
What are the principles?
Remember I said it gives guidance.
The first principle of Sikhi
is compassion.
[Quoted Gurbani]
From compassion -Daya- you then get its child,
Dhoul Dharam Daya ka pooth
Pooth means child.
So the child of compassion,
what child compassion gives birth to.
Compassion gives birth to
Justice
or Dharam and
Sikhi is all about Dharam.
Dharamyudh, righteous battle.
So we're actually fighting for this thing which is justice.
Animals are a beings with souls as well.
So exploiting an animal is creating what?
Not living in line with this is creating Karma.
Bad Karma.
Everything we do creates karma, Karam.
Good or bad.
What do we say right at the end of Japji Sahib?
[Quoted Gurbani]
It's your own actions which determine how close you are from God or how far you are from God.
So Sikhi is about walking towards God.
That's the first part.
If Sikhi is about walking towards God, the first thing we need is Dharam.
So Maharaj says,
[Quoted Gurbani]
Sant ka marag "the road of the saints"
to walk to the road of the saints which is the road to the One,
the first step is Dharam, righteousness.
So you need this to get to
Ik.
Compassion leads to justice;
justice is the first step to get to the One on the path of the saints.
So I am trying to draw it out.
Take Bani and put it on paper and draw it out.
Sant ka marag, Dharam ki pauri ko vadbhagi bhae.
You're lucky to walk this path,
but to get to the One, you are lucky to have compassion.
So actually if you are a nice person, you're lucky.
If you have compassion inside your heart, you're lucky.
If you're not compassionate, if you see that animal
and you don't care that it's being tortured,
You don't care and you have no compassion, then you are unlucky.
Because you haven't been given this gift of compassion.
Then you can't be just.
You can never bring justice into this world, if you don't have compassion first.
Yeah, so Maharaj says "build compassion."
So go to Gurudwara, do langar sewa,
serve people until you become compassionate person.
and your soul opens up.
Karma is a prominent, we creating Karma.
There is a book about today's modern food system called Farmageddon.
The true cost of cheap meat.
Buy it or you can read the synopsis online.
Cows that don't see grass,
cows that can't walk,
cows that are supposed to live 15 years, but live only for about four years.
This is the true cost of milk and meat today, okay?
Eggs, all the male chickens get killed like they're only a baby born chicks.
Shredded .
Because there's no need for male chicks in this system.
Chickens,
they're supposed to grow over about two years or three years to get a full-grown chicken.
That's too much, so what do we do?
We're not feed them normal food, we feed them soya.
We pump them full of chemicals to grow faster.
So this poor chickens body grows so fast
that the bones haven't become strong enough to accommodate the chicken, so they can hardly walk.
I'm not telling you stuff that's not real,
this is what's happening.
The food that you buy it comes packaged.
The meat you buy comes packaged.
You don't see that chicken.
If I invited you to someone's house and
gave you chicken and I said "here's a machete go ahead kill it."
Most of the people that do eat meat, couldn't do it.
They couldn't do it
But if I gave it to them in a sandwich, wrapped up in some bread and some lettuce,
they would eat it.
But is that the principle of truth?
that Sat?
Because Maharaj says that the five qualities we need to have:
Sat, Santokh, Daya, Dharam
and Khima forgiveness or Pyar.
Sat means truth.
So the qualities you've been given is compassion, justice, truth,
Sat and Santokh (contentment).
So we don't tell no one the truth nowadays.
Do we? we don't tell them where the meat came from.
Why do they make them so far away and you can't even get in there?
If you're a reporter you want to go see these things, you have to do secret filming.
if It's normal food, if it's good for us,
why can't they show us how it's made?
Why are they hiding?
It's not compassionate, that's why.
It's cruel.
It's not compassionate, it's cruel.
As simple as that.
And it's not actually good for us either.
Because you're eating something which is born out of exploitation.
Not compassion, exploitation.
You know when Guru Nanak Dev Ji picked up that roti,
and they squeeze the blood out of it.
Why has the Roti got blood inside of it?
meat inside of it.
Why did they squeeze the roti and get blood out of that?
Because of exploitation.
I'm just telling the truth.
The food we eat nowadays is based upon exploitation.
It is not based upon compassion.
And we don't try to face that truth.
We don't like that truth.
I'll give you a prime example.
Baljit Singh ji was doing katha at a Gurudwara and
they asked him to do Katha at a wedding
and he said "are you sure?"
He ended up talking about the fact
that these guys now are going to go to a party and clubbing
and they're going to put meat and stuff down on top of the Prassad they were just having.
And he goes "you've had Prasaad now."
"Don't pollute your stomach with gand(dirt)"
"Don't add gand on top of Prasaad."
"Don't sit there drinking alcohol and putting this gand and meat on top."
They didn't want to hear it.
They were sitting there in the party afterwards,
looking Dukhi,
with sad faces on it,
having that chicken
and thinking about it.
We don't like to hear the truth nowadays.
People don't like to hear the truth nowadays.
They even tell the people at the front
"you can't talk about these things in this Gurudwara."
"We don't want to hear the truth."
It's not compassionate
and therefore it goes against Sikhi.
So that's why I asked you the question about organic meat.
If it's not organic, I wouldn't touch it with a barge pole.
Especially the stuff that you see in some shops which doesn't look like meat,
it looks like water stuffed into thin slices of ham.
It's not slice of ham.
Proving it.
The sausages are not sausages.
They made out of pickings on the floor, awful.
They were selling chicken meat for ages that had gone off.
And they were microwaving it and making it healthy again.
And then putting in a washing machine,
with some kind of white bleach to dye white to make it look it was healthy and fresh.
Yeah, it's not nice.
And these are sentient beings,
these are beings that are going to the same lifecycle that we are.
And more importantly,
from a social point of view, what we're doing is we're feeding these animals
with high quality product.
Cows are supposed to eat grass.
We don't feed them grass.
We feed them soya.
Because they want them to grow quicker.
Cows aren't meant to eat soya.
They've got two stomachs to chew the cud.
they don't get to chew the cud now.
What's the problem? people are starving,
but we don't feed the people the soya.
We feed it to cows instead.
You know a cow, if you look at like the Kg.
Like one Kg of meat from a cow.
Do you know how much water and food is going to make that 1 Kg of beef?
A hell of a lot, it's very inefficient.
You could take that same water and give it to people.
The same crops food and give it to people.
People will prefer
and there won't be a water shortage.
And if you look at most climate change people like Bill Clinton and all the people,
what they say the biggest thing we can do is to cut down meat consumption.
Because it's unsustainable.
It's unsustainable.
They want a methane gas,
they want the food that we feed animals
should be fed to human beings because human beings are starving.
The only reason we feed pigs and chickens is because
we want to eat them instead of the food.
The fish also is fed to other fish.
Did you read that?
They take fish out of the oceans and then feed the captive fish stock
to make them grow bigger so we can eat those fish.
That's very inefficient.
So on the basis of efficiency and feeding people,
on the basis of compassion,
I will say it's wrong to eat meat in today's society.
Unless you know it's come from ethical farm,
it's been raised with a nice life,
allowed to go outside and live a normal life and then it's killed.
Then the question comes up should I eat it or not?
Ethically has to be ethical.
The question is should I eat it or not?
Most of the time, we eat it because of taste.
The true person who eats meat is that
that person who is going to be a warrior in the battlefield,
who doesn't actually want to eat meat,
but eats it because they need to grow strong because nothing else is available.
To give them that amount of strength what they need.
That's the kind of person the Nihang Singhs are.
They should be.
Nihang Singhs didn't really want to eat meat, but they had to
because at that time they didn't have anything else.
So only in certain circumstances would we say eating meat is permissible.
If it's ethical, compassionate,
it's killed with compassion, so halal meat is out.
No halal meat is allowed whatsoever.
So it's not at halal, it's compassionate,
it's killed with compassion in one blow.
Finally, a lot of the meat you see nowadays is meant to be stunned before it's killed.
A lot of times, it isn't.
Proven that they've had cows from McDonald's factories
that they were skinned alive.
The cow was supposed to be shot dead.
But the bolt gun wasn't working,
so it just was on the conveyor belt
and they just skimmed it alive,
hanging upside down still alive. Then they got chopped into pieces.
She was alive that time.
So these industrial methods do not work.
Cat food is not industrial.
Food is something very natural to us.
What I love is the fact that in Italy,
there is a Gurdwara that has got its own buffalos.
They feed the buffalo.
Then they get milk from the buffalo,
And that's the milk that's using langar
and for making tea and all that kind of stuff.
I think that's awesome.
Every Gurdwara should have a little farm.
Why not?
All these people were saying I belong to farmer caste
ain't it?
so go on then do some farming!
Let's get some buffaloes over here.
Why don't we get our own farms and all that kind of stuff,
grow our own food?
That's what we should be doing definitely,
hundred percent.
The point was that it's not compassionate.
It's not about justice,
It's not about truth
and most of the time we're eating it.
Because of our taste.
We like the taste of it, so we haven't got contentment.
[Quoted Gurbani]
Today, I was in Kingston giving our food,
and there was a guy there saying "bro, I can't eat this"
I just need meat.
I can't live without meat.
Is that person content in his life?
No
Because he needs meat.
If you're one of those people,
that's in that situation,
realize you have an addiction.
You have an addiction to this situation you don't need to be.
So break your addiction.
Go without it for a little while.
You'll feel lighter as well.
It should only be eaten as a last resort
and only if you're a warrior,
On that path of righteousness.
Nobody else needs to eat it.
I don't criticize the Nihang Singhs for eating meat,
Because at the end the day, they're supposed to be doing their job.
I don't want to judge them what they do nowadays, but
the point is there were people in our history that ate meat.
Average person is happy with his roti (bread) and daal (pulses).
Because that's quite good for you as well.
It's not that Jats of Punjab were quite weak living on the roti and daal.
They were quite being strong as well.