Question: What should I do if I’m a vegetarian, but my activities are connected with meat selling?
Answer: If possible, change your activities.
I’ll tell you a personal story. I became a vegetarian before I knew anything about this philosophy. And, uniquely enough, I was working in a steakhouse as a waiter. I knew about karma, and I knew if you ate meat, you’d get a lot of karma. But I was a vegetarian. So every night when I went to work, I would serve all of my customers their meat. And I would think, “They are getting so much karma from eating this meat!”
But, of course, I was thinking, “I’m a vegetarian, I don’t get this karma, I know better!” Then I met my spiritual master. He asked me what I did and I told him, and then he told me, “If you are serving that meat, you are getting the karma, too.”
So here I was. A customer eating this meat was getting the karma from one serving of meat, and I was getting the karma from the whole restaurant as I served it, all my customer’s karma.
So it woke me up very quickly, I never went there again, I quit, never went back.