Beamer,
30 some odd years ago, I was in my mid-twenties and also pre-macro vegetarian and not vegan, which means I ate eggs. dairy and on rare occasions some kind of meat (living on a farm in central Maine, where a commune of young hippies had started out helping a farmer and his family do everything including grow, and raise organic vegetables that was supposed to be harvested by the time I arrived in the fall, but the farmer who had served as the crew chief, broke his back and was laid up in a body cast, so the hippies stopped working and were playing hooky [including smoking dope and having affairs] and when Thanksgiving approached, more than 15 of the hippie crew members took off to be with their families in other parts of the country.
As the frost set in and the hippies having not done their chores including gathering and cutting firewood, not harvesting vegetables still in the ground earmarked for health food stores in Boston, us three hippies were running around cutting and burning green wood in the wood burning stoves [think
creosote city!} and trying to pull freezing carrots out of the hardening earth in the fields, and there was no earned income coming in from the the hippie crew to support the remaining hippies that were on the farm consuming the remaining miso, brown rice, vegetables and granola.
So, the farmer's wife sold handmade potholders to local stores to make money to buy eggs and potatoes from local farms and then the two organic [farmer's] pigs got loose and hit by passing vehicles and were put down and rendered for lard amd pork products, so the vegetarian farm that had been comprised of mostly vegetarian hippies, now became a bacon, eggs, and potatoes farm.
Then I left to replace my broken eyeglasses [you see, we often need eyeglasses when we eat an extreme or unbalanced diet] and found out about macrobiotics in a local restaurant and found out that I did not need glasses after all [and never have since]), so the point is, when we call ourselves vegetarians, it's difficult to draw the line where and when we eat the more yang animal food products.
Vegans are not the same as ova lacto vegetarians, and when one calls themselves vegetarian, not vegan, then it is easy to think ova (egg), lacto [dairy] consumption, and it's important to consider this because egg consumption is very yang and many types of dairy are yang, too, so like the yang meat eating types people who identify themselves as vegetarians who might be ova-lacto vegetarians might be yang enough to give blood (which is a yin process).
So, Beamer,... what kind of vegetarian are you and have you started to consider the yin/yang ramifications of your diet and lifestyle, yet?
A lot of young adults, who are learning about life on their own, do very yin things like smoke dope, take various other drugs illegal and legal, drink a lot of beer, wine and hard liquor, have a lot of sex and do a lot of other very yin things, before many of them wake up to the fact that they are trying to live a very extremely balanced lifestyle, and then start to reel it in.
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I, too, donated blood while being a idealistic vegetarian and I sold blood during a depressing impoverished period almost ten years later and when I was giving blood I was more yang and I rebounded quickly, and when I sold the blood I was much more yin and deteriorating quickly (and rebounded slowly), and the point being that when humans are yang (and a lot of the American population is very yang) they usually can give up their blood (notice how many have given up their lives on the battlefield, lately!) so if you can give up your blood without much negative affect, then maybe you are very yang but people who are trying to follow a life of simple and slight yin and yang, need their blood and don't need more yang (and sentimental) people coming to them and telling them to give up their much needed to live, life energy!
Maybe, we, who are practicing macrobiotics, need to stay centered and attract those who are living a wider and often unstable balance, to a simpler and more stable lifestyle.
If most of the people in the world were living a simple balancing, lifestyle, do you think there would be as much, malice, greed, crazyness, disease, and war?
I think not!
I believe that people who live an extremely balanced or unbalanced lifestyle need blood and medicine when they harm themselves and/or put themselves in harm's way.
If we continue to give blood, then we are support that solution to solving those problems.
Imagine if all the blood banks and unnatural medicines in the world were to disappear.
People could not afford to take risks doing extreme things and would have to take more responsibility for their lives.
Do you recycle your glass, plastics, paper and food wastes?
That is being responsible to the society and world in a way to better it than it was before.
Let's not give blood or take medicine but instead eat and live a more balanced way and support others to do the same by our actions and our teachings!
Don't feel bad for having given or sold blood, or taken medicine.
That is something we did and hopefully, learned from.
We are now practicing a simpler way,... macrobiotics!
Please, come join us.
Thank you, very much.
Bruce Paine