From: Mahabharatta:
अहिंसा परमो धर्मः धर्म हिंसा तथीव च
Meaning: Ahimsa Paramo Dharma; Dharma himsa tathaiva cha[3]
Non-violence is the ultimate dharma. So too is violence in service of Dharma. Dharma ki Raksha ke liye hinsa karna sarvouttam hai.
From: Manusmriti 8.15
धर्म एव हतो हन्ति धर्मो रक्षति रक्षितः
dharma eva hato hanti dharmo rakṣati rakṣitaḥ
"Those who protect the Dharma are protected by the Dharma’
सत्यमेव जयते नानृतं सत्येन पन्था विततो देवयानः ।
येनाक्रमन्त्यृषयो ह्याप्तकामा यत्र तत् सत्यस्य परमं निधानम् ॥
satyameva jayate nānṛtaṃ
satyena panthā vitato devayānaḥ
yenākramantyṛṣayo hyāptakāmā
yatra tat satyasya paramaṃ nidhānam
The question of 'ahimsa', which in the plainest English, means non-violence, has always been a source of soul-searching for me an for millions of people, especially Hindus, and most relevantly from the past 40 years of science and techology that have led to factory farming in agriculture with intensive livestock farming that provides tasty and nutritious in terms of protein-richness and vitamins and minerals too for humanity. As a non-vegetarian person brought up in a family who consumed fish, meat and eggs all my life and in fact encouraged my wife and daughter to do the same since our marriage in 1985, and as a scientist in the Animal Nutrition and Husbandry, I was enjoying the taste and health that it generated.
On reflection today at the age of 64, it is not that I do not wish to live healthily from continuing to consume animal products, but the attachment to the body's needs hampers my mind towards clarity of thought and actions based on such clarity of thought for a vision into my next few years.
Since my fall from grace in 1998, having lived a Life of Riley, as they say in the United Kingdom, having during the course of the previous 18 years of work as an Animal Scientist and experimented with laboratory animals like rats, mice, guinea pigs and chickens, and farm animals in a looser manner, to gain a reputation as an established Poultry Scientist with nearly 35 scientific papers in international journals to my credit, I was in mental and material doldrums, and I was then examining myself, and have done that continuously from 1998 to date. From Animal Science I went into Humanology Science instead, to find out if there were any clues to be obtained there from probing and experimentation, of course not through physical interference, let alone killing humans, to find the truth, but through dialogue with humanity at large. I had visions that I was being Awakened to abandon the noddy work of experimental science to concentrate on learning about myself, and how my mind works, and through that swadhaya or self-examination, in the exchange of information with the societies of the world, attain a better degree of understanding of what animals are in real, in the thoughts they have that chart their course of lives. This is on reflection what happened to me. During the process of the past 23 years, I was merely surviving, seemingly pre-destined to live on up to the day that I would gain an understanding of Life Sciences within my short life time, for I never took anything for granted.
This process of re-examination of Humanology had to be conducted in the seclusion of my home because I was classified from 2004 especially as a mental patient of the State of the United Kingdom, and had I know suffered a nervous breakdown whilst still at the University of Greenwich in its Natural Resources Institute when my conduct was brought into question and I was dismissed from service as disruptive and blameworthy of gross misconduct, that the Employment Tribunals and the Courts have endorsed despite a long-drawn out process of trying to have my reputation restored by treating the event as defamatory to me as a human being, with a reputation.
I had to survive out of responsibility to my wife (and daughter) who I brought to the United Kingdom, so did menial jobs in petrol stations and warehouses to assist in running the family that my wife took charge of centrally. Otherwise we would have become destitute with nowhere go. I had a very bad reputation in society. I asked God, if He existed, and I always believed He existed because we went to temples in India, took bath in the Ganga river to dip in to get rid of our sins, and all the other associated rituals of Hindu culture and tradition. The visions and utterances during the very early part of my struggle puzzled me deeply as if some inner Power was getting me to wake up to reality. In that light from the day that I was released from the mental hospital in 2004, in deep depression, I had no one to help me, not even God for any durable period, I had to find that out myself thorough a bizarre method of taking instructions from 'Him' through a digital clock where times of initially 3, 6, and 9, and latterly 7 (as in 2.41, 1.15, 3.04, 5.20, 6.10, 7.00, 8.08, 9.25, 10.33, etc) meant to me that in my surrender to 'Him' I had to do some specific actions. All that are detailed in considerable clarity in my hand-written Diaries. But it still did not sort out my material future and I ended up in another mental hospital in 2008 for 1 month (the 2004 episode had been for 3 months) so this time it was not as bad a mental state that I was in. All it meant that I had not learnt my lesson not to rely on God anymore for my material welfare. I had lost my second lucrative job at Shell Petrol Station on a disciplinary charge again.
From 2010, I started going to internet forums (Freethought and Rationalism Discussion Board where I posted over a 1000 time and became a 'Contributor'), then Secular Cafe, Rational Skepticism, Advaita List, Religious Fourms, etc, nearly all of whom banned me as a 'Troll' and Disruptive'. I set up my own Blog 'Towards Knowlege for World Conservation' determined to reform myself to do some good in my life, at Wordpress: https://shantanup.wordpress.com, but a year and half ago, on apparent the Consultant Psychiatrists lead, the United Kingdom State and seemingly the United States of America banned me by archiving and suspending the Blog that had vast amounts of evidential data on Humanology that I felt the world was entitled to have ready access to and so initiated legal proceedings under Claims at the Civil and Criminal Courts of the United Kingdom and beyond. All to no avail as things stand today. I was however not deterred from continuing my studies of Humanology, for I understood nothing, I still had to take even more severe anti-psychotic and anti-depressant and mood stabilising agents, and nearly was incarcerated a third time in a mental hospital for my continuing erratic behaviour and words of vile nature to anyone who stood in my way to the truth.
The Humanology Blog is still not lost: https://shanpanigrahi.co.uk, and this was complemented with articles and publicaitons in Facebook 'The Allurement of Reality' The Climate Change Phenomenon, Gaza Humanitarian Crisis, and Searching for Mental Health Services, as well as under my Linkedin Profile articles. These contain vast amounts of real data on the human condition for anyone who may be interested. I certainly am for it makes me reflect upon my mentality now on a fresh new day of what these materials tell us. Since 2008, I have managed to live in the Community, because I am intelligent and through the satya-advaita yoga that I fined-tuned and which from experience led me to lose all my attachments, I mean all of them, I operated nonchalantly, spontaneously and un-premeditatedly in all my daily actions. This is the final realisation of karma. I had transformed form a tamasic mode of life from 1997 an prior to that, very gradually from daily studies with the utmost concentration (dhyanyoga): through sattvic mode of creating 'Green Socialism' concept, to finally the rajasic mode of creating The Conservative Libertarian Society https://theconservativelibertariansociety.com under the umbrella of Vishista Advaita Vedanta and the practice of Vaishnavism as a religious faith.
So going back to the initial question, what does ahimsa mean under this conception: it can be read here: https://www.theconservativelibertariansociety.com/post/hindu-shlokas-associated-vaishnavism-for-our-society-of-conservative-libertarians .