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With Mystics and Magicians in Tibet – Alexandra David-Neel

"Most men," he said, "eat like beasts, to satisfy their hunger without pondering upon the act they are accomplishing nor upon its consequences. Such ignorant people do well to abstain from eating meat and fish.

" Others consider what becomes of the material elements they absorb when eating animals. They now that the assimilation of these elements involves the assimilation of the psychic elements which are inherent in them. Anyone who has acquired that knowledge may, at his risk and peril, contract these associations and endeavour himself to obtain results useful to the victims sacrificed.

"The question is to find out whether the animal elements which he absorbs strengthen the animal propensities of the man, or whether this man will be capable of transmuting these elements into intellectual and spiritual forces, so that the substance of the animal passing into the man will be reborn in the form of human activity.

I then asked him if this explained the esoteric sense of the belief common among Tibetans, that the lamas can send the spirits of the slaughtered animals to the Paradise of the Great Bliss.

‘Do not think that I can answer your question in a few words," he replied.  ‘The subject is intricate

Animals have several 'consciousnesses’ just as  we have ourselves, and as it also happens in our case these 'consciousnesses' do not all  follow the same road after death. A living being is an assemblage, not a unity.

But one must have been initiated by a proper master before being able to realize these doctrines.