It is a moral thing to abstain from meat, because thereby you are lessening the infliction of suffering; it is not a moral act to abstain from meat from the yogic standpoint, but only a means to an end.  Some of the greatest yogis in Hindu literature were, and are, men whom you would rightly call black magicians.  But still they are yogis.  One of the greatest yogis of all was Ravana, the anti-Christ, the Avatara of evil, who summed up all the evil of the world in his own person in order to oppose the Avatara of good.  He was a great, a marvellous yogi, and by Yoga he gained his power.  Ravana was a typical yogi of the left-hand path, a great destroyer, and he practiced Yoga to obtain the power of destruction, in order to force from the hands of the Planetary Logos the boon that no man should be able to kill him.  You may say:  “What a strange thing that a man can force from God such a power.”  The laws of Nature are the expression of Divinity, and if a man follows a law of Nature, he reaps the result which that law inevitably brings; the question whether he is good or bad to his fellow men does not touch this matter at all.  Whether some other law is or is not obeyed, is entirely outside the question.  It is a matter of dry fact that the scientific man may be moral or immoral, provided that his immorality does not upset his eyesight or nervous system.  It is the same with Yoga.  Morality matters profoundly, but it does not affect these particular things, and if you think it does, you are always getting into bogs and changing your moral standpoint, either lowering or making it absurd.  Try to understand; that is what the Theosophist should do; and when you understand, you will not fall into the blunders nor suffer the bewilderment many do, when you expect laws belonging to one region of the universe to bring about results in another.  The scientific man understands that.  He knows that a discovery in chemistry does not depend upon his morality, and he would not think of doing an act of charity with a view to finding out a new element.  He will not fail in a well-wrought experiment, however vicious his private life may be.  The things are in different regions, and he does not confuse the laws of the two.  As Ishvara is absolutely just, the man who obeys a law reaps the fruit of that law, whether his actions, in any other fields, are beneficial to man or not.  If you sow rice, you will reap rice; if you sow weeds, you will reap weeds; rice for rice, and weed for weed.  The harvest is according to the sowing.  For this is a universe of law.  By law we conquer, by law we succeed.  Where does morality come in, then?  When you are dealing with a magician of the right-hand path, the servant of the White Lodge, there morality is an all-important factor.  Inasmuch as he is learning to be a servant of humanity, he must observe the highest morality, not merely the morality of the world, for the white magician has to deal with helping on harmonious relations between man and man.  The white magician must be patient.  The black magician may quite well be harsh.  The white magician must be compassionate; compassion widens out his nature, and he is trying to make his consciousness include the whole of humanity.  But not so the black magician.  He can afford to ignore compassion.