38.17  Since vegetable life units do not have any awake day-conscious life on the physical plane over and above a feeble faculty to sense vaguely, and thus do not suffer when their organisms are injured and digested as nourishment in an organism, it is evident that this substance, among others, is intended as food for the highly evolved human being. The physical nervous structure and organic functions of a being that is evolving away from killing and murdering are changed so much by this evolution that meat is far too coarse a substance for its refined organism to digest and convert into nutrition. On the lowest step in the symbol we have symbolised the coarseness of a meat diet with an orange-coloured zigzag line. On the step above we have symbolised the coarse vegetable substance consisting of roots, leaves and stems by a yellow zigzag line. These two zigzag lines thus symbolise the difference between a coarse, animal, meat diet and a vegetarian diet, which is more refined and is adapted and intended for aspirants to cosmic consciousness or initiation as absolutely vital food or nutrition. Between the organism of the terrestrial human being and the organism of the beast of prey there thus exists a conspicuous difference in evolution that results in a vegetarian diet being the natural food for the human being, while a meat diet is the natural food for the beasts of prey and other carnivorous animals. When the modern human being, who is much further advanced intellectually and bodily than the animal, eats meat, which is the same food as that of the beast of prey, it can be only something unnatural, a derailment that people in the distant past have embarked upon, possibly because of catastrophic events in Nature with famine and other obstacles to vegetarian life. We see too that digesting meat or animal food has not been any relief for the human being. People have had to get used to cooking and frying animal food in order to ease the digestion of this coarse food for their stomachs. The gastric acid, as we know, has to kill and decompose the green and yellow life units that occur in the meat life unit in order to free the red life units that constitute exclusively the nourishment in the animal life units.