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When nourishment is pure, nature is pure. When
nature is pure, memory becomes firm. When memory remains firm, there is
release from all knots of the heart.
Sama Veda, Chhandogya Upanishad, 7.26.2. UPR, P. 489.

Monday
LESSON 71
Examining Your Total Diet
Each day that we live, we are striving for the
middle path, the balanced life, the existence which finds its strength
beyond joy and sorrow, beyond pleasure and pain, beyond light and
darkness. But in order to arrive at this state of contemplative
awareness, we must begin at the beginning, and this week our study is
diet: physical, mental and emotional foods. According to the ancient
science of ayurveda, nature is a primordial force of life composed in three modes, qualities or principles of manifestation called gunas, meaning "strands" or "qualities." The three gunas are: sattva, "beingness;" rajas, "dynamism;" and tamas, "darkness." Sattva is tranquil energy, rajas is active energy and tamas is energy that is inert. The nature of sattva is quiescent, rarefied, translucent, pervasive. The nature of rajas is movement, action, emotion. The nature of tamas is inertia, denseness, contraction, resistance and dissolution. The tamasic tendency is descending, odic and instinctive. The rajasic tendency is expanding, actinodic, intellectual. The sattvic tendency is ascending, actinic, superconscious. The three gunas are not separate entities, but varied dimensions or frequencies of the single, essential life force.
The
food we eat has one or more of these qualities of energy and affects
our mind, body and emotions accordingly. Hence, what we eat is
important. Sattvic food is especially good for a contemplative life.
Tamasic foods include heavy meats, and foods that are spoiled, treated, processed or refined to the point where the natural values are no longer present. Tamasic foods make the mind dull; they tend to build up the basic odic energies of the body and the instinctive subconscious mind. Tamasic foods also imbue the astral body with heavy, odic force.
Rajasic foods
include hot or spicy foods, spices and stimulants. These increase the
odic heat of the physical and astral bodies and stimulate physical and
mental activity. Sattvic foods include whole grains and legumes
and fresh fruits and vegetables that grow above the ground. These foods
help refine the astral and physical bodies, allowing the actinic,
superconscious flow to permeate and invigorate the entire being.
People who are unfolding on the yoga path manifest the sattvic nature. Their path is one of peace and serenity. The rajasic nature
is restless and manifests itself in physical and intellectual
activities. It is predominant in the spirit of nationalism, sports and
business competition, law enforcement and armed forces and other forms
of aggressive activity. The tamasic nature is dull, fearful and
heavy. It is the instinctive mind in its negative state and leads to
laziness, habitual living, physical and mental inertia. As it is by
cultivating the rajasic nature that tamas is overcome, so it is by evolving into the pure sattvic nature that the continual ramification of rajas is transcended. It is important to maintain a balance of our several natures, but to attain toward the expression of the rajasic and sattvic natures in as great a degree as possible.
As
you examine a menu closely, you will find that you may allow your inner
guidance to tell you what is most appropriate to eat. The desire body
of the conscious mind may want one type of food, but the inner body of
the subsuperconscious may realize another is better for you. It is up
to you to make the decision that will allow a creative balance in your
diet. This awakens the inner willpower, that strength from within that
gives the capacity for discrimination.
Tuesday
LESSON 72
Moderation Is The Keynote
I call our diet "nutrition for meditation." We watch
what we eat. Each type of food taken into the body tends to make us
aware in one or another area of the nerve system. When we eat gross
food, we become aware in the gross area of the nerve system, and less
aware in the refined area of the nerve system. When we eat refined
foods, such as fruit and vegetables that grow above the ground and
absorb sunlight, this then makes us aware in the refined areas of the
nerve system. When we are aware in the gross areas of the nerve system,
over time the cells of the physical body begin to reflect this and
cause the body to become gross in appearance. When we are aware in the
refined areas of the inner nerve system predominantly -- the psychic
nerve system, the superconscious nerve system -- the cells of the body
also respond and we begin to look more refined. Therefore, ayurvedic nutrition for meditation and the practice of hatha yoga asanas
are an aid in refining the physical body by allowing awareness to
travel through the perceptive areas of the nerve system that are inner,
refined and blissful.
However, we do not want to put too much
emphasis on the consciousness of food, lest our entire nature become
wrapped up in our stomach, and our subconscious and its astral body
constantly involved in eating. To allow this would not only be
detrimental to our own diet, but it would be an unnecessary disturbance
as well to those about us, since we would be held in a strange
emotional mold.
In deciding what foods you will buy and eat,
listen to the voice of your intuition, which knows best what your
current physical body needs are. It is possible that your forces might
become too sattvic, too delicately refined, for the kind of
activity and responsibilities you are engaged in. If this is the case,
perhaps you should have a little rajasic food for balance.
Likewise, you may become overstimulated from time to time through
eating spicy foods, or foods with too high a concentration of sugar. In
this case, you may need more fruits in your diet to raise the vibratory
rate of your physical and astral bodies. Should your inner
consciousness tell you that you are too rajasic, refrain from eating tamasic foods, those with lower rates of vibration. Eat more of the foods that grow naturally above the ground.
Of
course, we have an emotional diet as well. Emotion is a condition or
color of the mind. Emotions will always be with us as long as we have a
physical body, but there is a difference between having emotion and
being emotional. We have to balance our emotional activity. Our
entertainment, our cultural pursuits, our social activities should be
balanced and blended with everything else that we are doing. It would
be a good idea to plan an entire month's emotional diet along with your
physical diet. Decide ahead of time what music you wish to hear, what
plays, movies or concerts to attend. Think of your reading, the people
you plan to be with, the traveling that may be involved. Make a list of
those things which you conceive to be beneficial to your emotional
diet, but proceed along the middle path, not too much to one side, not
too much to the other. Look for a balanced emotional color in your
life.
Wednesday
LESSON 73
Choosing Your Mental Diet
Have you ever given thought to the diet of your
mind? Of course, our physical diet and our emotional diet are also
diets of the mind, because they affect our consciousness. But let's now
consider the intellectual processes. How much information, how many
facts is it necessary and healthy for us to ingest in a single day?
It's a good idea for a devotee to budget his reading, to choose and
discriminate what he wants to make a part of himself through the
process of mental digestion. We have to discriminate to the nth degree
whether or not we will have the time and the capacity to digest
everything that we desire to place in our minds. For instance, quickly
reading an article in a newspaper might stir your mind and emotions. If
it is not properly digested, it could conceivably upset your whole day.
In the realm of intellect, the commonsense rule "Don't eat when you are
already full" also applies.
You may read a book of philosophy,
and if you have time to digest it, well and good, but many people don't
and suffer from philosophical indigestion. They have read so many
things and only digested a small part of what has passed through the
window of the mind. Then again, it is one thing to digest something,
and it is still another to assimilate it and make it a part of you, for
when it becomes fully a part of you, you have a hunger and room for
something more.
Many people come to lectures and then tune
themselves out and simply benefit from the vibration created by the
teacher and others in the room. They tune themselves out so that what
is said is not absorbed consciously, but rather subconsciously. This is
a good method for those who are still digesting material received from
previous lectures. Another practice that makes for a very good mental
indigestion pill is that of opening a spiritual book and allowing your
eye to fall upon a random sentence on the page. Often you will find it
will accent ideas that you are currently concerned with.
Just
as you would participate in a seminar, gaining from the interpersonal
relationships, so can you learn from the intrapersonal relationship
established between your perceptive state of mind and the conscious and
subconscious states of mind. When you awaken to the point where your
inner mind teaches your personality, you are involving yourself in the
"innerversity" of your own being. But this will not occur until you
have balanced your physical and emotional bodies to the point where
they are functioning at a slightly higher rate of vibration.
Add
to your contemplative lifestyle a hobby or craft. Working creatively
with your hands, taking physical substance and turning it into
something different, new and beautiful is important in remolding the
subconscious mind. It is also symbolic. You are remolding something on
the physical plane and by doing so educating yourself in the process of
changing the appearance of a physical structure, thus making it easier
to change the more subtle mental and emotional structures within your
own subconscious mind. Energy, willpower and concentrated awareness are
needed for both types of accomplishments -- hard work, concentration
and concerted effort to produce an effective and useful change in
either the physical substance or the mental substance.
Thursday
LESSON 74
Balance and Discrimination
Observe your life objectively for a minute and
decide how much of a working balance actually exists between your
physical, emotional, mental and actinic aspects. Know that you have the
power to begin to readjust this balance if you find you are taking in
too much "food" at one time or another. Apply the concept of diet to
all the areas of your life. Every experience that we ingest is going to
produce its own reaction. In surveying our own internal balance of tamasic, rajasic and sattvic
tendencies, we need to apply the power of discrimination so that
everything we take into our mind and body can be easily and
harmoniously digested and assimilated. Life becomes more beautiful in
this way, and we become the master of our forces, because we have given
the guiding power of our lives to actinic will. But no diet is of much
value to anyone unless it can be consistently applied through the power
of decision.
Life becomes overly complicated, a series of self-created and unnecessary involvements, when we live too much in the tamasic and rajasic natures. It is necessary to slow down the activity of everyday life by entering into sattvic
awareness as a matter of practice. Life is tiring and overactive in the
conscious, physical plane when it is not balanced and tempered by the sattvic nature. The greater the sattvic activity, the greater the activity of the spiritual being that man is.
Here is an internal concentration exercise.
Allow the activity of your brain to relax. Let the muscles of your body
relax. Let your eyes relax and easily shut. Visualize in your mind's
eye a menu with three panels. On the left panel of the menu are all the
prepared and cooked foods of the tamasic nature, which are
instinctive, heavy and often indigestible. These are the foods which
would satisfy the purely instinctive man. In the middle panel are the rajasic foods, such as spices, garlic and onions, which provide physical energy and stimulation. On the right panel of the menu are the sattvic
foods, such as fruits, vegetables, grains and nuts, which calm, balance
and prepare the body to hold the actinic vibration of a higher
consciousness. Let's examine the three parts of this menu and see where
our consciousness is guided from within.
Let us visualize
another menu now -- which is the menu of our emotional diet. On the
left panel are the instinctive, sensual pleasures of the moment and the
more raucous forms of entertainment. On the middle panel are the
routine emotional experiences of everyday life with family, friends and
work associates. On the right panel are high cultural and artistic
expressions. Fill in your own list of specifics and see where your
consciousness leads you.
Visualize now another menu in three
panels. On the left side of this menu are books, magazines, newspapers
or websites that lead us into our tamasic, instinctive nature,
be they novels, stories, articles or Hollywood exposes. On the middle
panel are those intellectual studies, items of current interests and
news which stimulate our rajasic mind and therefore require the
close use of discrimination. At certain times, some of these readings
might offer just the required understanding and intellectual clarity to
elucidate important areas of your conscious-mind existence.
On the right side of this menu are the sattvic
writings and studies, the scriptures of East and West, the great
philosophical ideas of Socrates or Emerson, the dissertations of
Plotinus or Kant, the sayings of Lao-Tzu and Confucius, Tiruvalluvar or
the Upanishads, Adi Sankara, Ramakrishna or Gibran. Compose
your own list and then balance out your mental diet by studying this
menu from your inner consciousness.
Friday
LESSON 75
Diet and Consciousness
It is wise to have a free mind, a clear, serene and
relaxed attitude toward life before partaking of food. That is why
people on the inner path traditionally meditate for a moment, chant a mantra
or say a prayer before a meal. A simple practice is to intone "Aum."
This harmonizes the inner bodies with the external bodies and frees
awareness from entangled areas. If you find yourself in a situation
where you cannot chant Aum aloud, then chant it mentally. Take several
seconds before you begin your meal to recenter yourself in this way.
You will find that your food profits you very well. There are many
traditional Hindu ayurvedic guidelines for eating. A few rules
that we have found especially important include giving thanks in a
sacred prayer before meals; eating in a settled atmosphere, never when
upset, always sitting down and only when hungry; avoiding ice-cold food
and drink; not talking while chewing; eating at a moderate pace and
never between meals; sipping warm water with meals; eating freshly
cooked foods whenever possible; minimizing raw vegetables; avoiding
white flour and refined sugar; not cooking with honey; drinking milk
separately from meals; including a balance of protein and carbohydrates
in all meals; cooking with ghee or olive oil only; experiencing all six
tastes at least at the main meal (sweet, sour, pungent, astringent,
bitter and salty); not overeating, leaving one-third to one-quarter of
the stomach empty to aid digestion; and sitting quietly for a few
minutes after meals. I might add that ginger root is a magical potion.
Our ayurvedic doctor has taught us, and experience confirms,
that fresh ginger can settle your stomach, relieve a headache, help you
sleep if you are restless and keep the agni, fires of
digestion, strong, especially while traveling. Grate two inches of
fresh ginger, then hold the mash in your hand, add slowly an ounce of
warm water and squeeze the juice into a glass. Repeat three times.
Drink this extract fifteen or twenty minutes before meals. It is also
quite necessary to drink at least eight glasses of water each day.
Inadequate water intake results in dehydration, giving rise to many
common ailments.
Let us realize this law in our consciousness:
we don't want to place anything into our physical, emotional or mental
being that cannot be digested, assimilated and used to the best
advantage in giving birth to our highest consciousness. Let every
second be a second of discrimination. Let every minute be a minute of
realization. Let every hour be an hour of fulfillment. Let every day be
a day of blessing, and every week a week of joy. Then, in a month's
time, look at the foundation that you have laid for those who will
follow you. Let the past fade into the dream that it is. It is only
experience, to be understood as such in the "now." In keeping life
simple through our powers of discrimination, we give our greatest gift
to community, loved ones, country and the world, because we are
beginning to vibrate in the superconscious realms of the mind. Your
very presence is a blessing when you live in the eternal now, in full
command of your life's diet through the process of discrimination.
Saturday
LESSON 76
Restraining Television
Television provides so much of the mental diet of
so many people today that it deserves special attention, lest it become
a deterrent to a balanced, contemplative life. Television at its best
is the extension of storytelling. We used to sit around and tell
stories. The best storyteller, who could paint pictures in people's
minds, was the most popular person in town. Television is also the
extension of the little theater, and as soon as it became popular, the
little theater groups all over the country became unemployed. It is the
extension of the stand-up comedian, of vaudeville, drama, opera,
ballet, all of which have suffered since television has become a
popular mode of entertainment. In every country, at every point in
time, humans have sat down and been entertained, and entertainers have
stood up and entertained them.
Today, television has become an
instrument to convey knowledge and bring the world together, set new
standards of living, language, styles of dress and hair, ways of
walking, ways of standing, attitudes about people, ethics, morality,
political systems, religions and all sorts of other things, from
ecology to pornography. This vast facility unifies the thinking -- and
thus the actions -- of the peoples of the world. Today, at the flick of
a finger with the magic wand, one can change the mental flow and
emotional experience of everyone watching for the entire evening.
Saivites know that our karmas are
forces we send out from ourselves -- creative forces, preserving
forces, destroying forces, and a mixture of either two or the three --
and they usually come back to us through other people or groups of
people. Television has afforded us the ability to work through our karmas more
quickly than we could in the agricultural age. On TV, the "other
people" who play our past experiences back to us, for us to understand
in hindsight, are actors and actresses, newscasters and the people in
the news they broadcast. Saivites know nothing can happen, physically,
mentally or emotionally, but that it is seeded in our prarabdha karmas, the
action-reaction patterns brought with us to this birth. Therefore, on
the positive side, we look at television as a tool for karmic cleansing.
Saivites
know that the object of life is to go through our experiences joyously
and kindly, always forgiving and compassionately understanding, thus
avoiding making unseemly kriyamana karmas in the current life which, if enough were accumulated and added to the karmas we
did not bring into this life, would bring us back into another birth,
and the process would start all over again. The great boon that
television has given humanity, which is especially appreciated by
Saivites, is that we can soften our prarabdha karmas very
quickly by analyzing, forgiving and compassionately understanding the
happenings on the screen, as our past is portrayed before us, and as we
work with our nerve system, which laughs and cries, resents, reacts to
and avoids experiences on the TV.
Television can be very
entertaining and helpful, or it can be insidiously detrimental,
depending on how it is used. Therefore, fortify your mind with a
thorough understanding of what you are watching. Television works on
the subconscious mind. This is an area of the mind which we are not
usually conscious of when it is functioning, but it is functioning
nevertheless, constantly, twenty-four hours a day. Television works
strongly on the subconscious minds of children. If they watch TV for
long periods of time, they begin to think exactly as the programmers
want them to think. Responsible parents have to choose just what goes
into their children's minds, as well as into their own minds. It is
advisable to prerecord the shows you wish to watch, avoiding sexual
scenes, obscene language and excessive violence; and even then be ready
to fast-forward through inappropriate scenes that are found today even
on PG-rated programs.
Sunday
LESSON 77
Insights from Astrology
Astrology explores the stars and planets as they
move in the heavens and their subtle effects on our physical, mental
and emotional condition, mapping the ebb and flow of our karma. Astrology plays a very important part in every Hindu's life. An established family is not complete without their master of jyotisha. Guided by the stars from birth to death, devout Hindus choose a shubha muhurta, auspicious time, for every important experience of life. Astrology has been computerized through the efforts of brilliant jyotisha shastris of both the East and West. In our ashrama, we use jyotisha quite
a lot to determine the best times to travel, meditate, begin new
projects or just rest and let a harsh time pass. Experience assures us
that astrology is a reliable tool for maintaining a balanced life and
flowing with the forces of nature.
We take a metaphysical
approach to the "good" or "bad" news or predictions that astrology
brings from time to time. When unfavorable times arise which have to be
lived through, as they all too frequently do, we do not carp or cringe,
but look at these as most excellent periods for meditation and sadhana
rather than worldly activities. Just the reverse is true for the
positive periods. However, spiritual progress can be made during both
kinds of periods. Both negative and positive times are, in fact,
positive when used wisely. A competent jyotisha shastri is of
help in forecasting the future, as to when propitious times will come
along when advancements can be made. A positive mental attitude should
be held during all the ups and downs that are predicted to happen. Be
as the traveler in a 747 jet, flying high over the cities, rather than
a pedestrian wandering the streets below.
For raising
offspring, an astrological forecast can be of the utmost help. A baby
predicted to have a fiery temper should be raised to always be kind and
considerate of others' feelings, taught to never argue with others. Of
course, good examples must be set early on by parents. This will soften
the inclination toward temper tantrums. Fighting the child's natural
impulses will just amplify them. A child of an independent nature
should be taught early on to care for himself in all respects so that
in the life ahead he will benefit society and bring honor to the
family. So much can be gained by reading the chart when approached with
the attitude that all that is in it is helpful and necessary to know,
even if it seems to be bad news. Difficulties need not be bad news if
they are approached as opportunities to grow in facing them.
We
have for years in our monasteries lived by the Hindu calendar and
system of time divisions known as Lahiri Ayanamsha Panchanga. All purnima, amavasya and ashtami
days (full moon, new moon and the eighth day of the fortnight) are days
of retreat. They are our weekends. To be in harmony with the universe,
at least our little galaxy, it is important to observe these days for
happy, healthy, productive living.
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