Food

Letters on Yoga – IV
“Food”

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(Shyam Sundar:) “I pray to You to give me indications for food.

(Mother:) What you should eat depends on your condition of general health, what is lacking in your body and what your body cannot tolerate. This only a doctor, expert in the subject, can say.
         The food must be very clean, very healthy and strengthening. Moral restrictions are inventions of human mind and should be neglected if necessary.
         Food should be taken exclusively according to the body's needs and not after rules, conventions and desires.”

(Mother:) “As long as our body is compelled to take in foreign matter in order to subsist, it will absorb at the same time a considerable amount of inert and unconscious forces or those having a rather undesirable consciousness, and this alchemy must take place inside the body. We were speaking of the kinds of consciousness absorbed with food, but there is also the inconscience that’s absorbed with food — quite a deal of it. And that is why in many yogas there was the advice to offer to the Divine what one was going to eat before eating it (Mother makes a gesture of offering, hands joined, palms open). It consists in calling the Divine down into the food before eating it. One offers it to Him — that is, one puts it in contact with the Divine, so that it may be under the divine influence when one eats it. It is very useful, it is very good. If one knows how to do it, it is very useful, it considerably reduces the work of inner transformation which has to be done.”

(Mother:) “In fact, the best thing is not to think about it but to regulate one’s life automatically enough not to need to think of eating. You eat at fixed hours, eat reasonably, you don’t even need to think of the food when you are taking it; you must eat calmly, that’s all, quietly, with concentration, and when you do not eat you must never think about it. You must not eat too much, because then you will have to think about your digestion, and it will be very unpleasant for you and will make you waste much time. You must eat just... you must put an end to all desire, all attraction, all movements of the vital, because when you eat simply because the body needs to eat, the body will tell you absolutely precisely and exactly when it has had enough; you see, when one is not moved by a vital desire or mental ideas, one grasps this with surety. “Now it is enough,” says the body, “I don’t want any more.” So one stops. …
         Of course there are people who prepare food for themselves and for others, and who are obliged to think about it, but just a very little. One can prepare food while thinking about more interesting things. But in any case, the less one thinks about it the better; and when one is not concerned with it, either mentally or vitally, the body becomes a very good indicator. When it is hungry it will tell you, when it needs to take in something, it will tell you; when it has finished, when it doesn’t need any more, it will tell you; and when it doesn’t need food, it doesn’t think about it, it thinks of something else. It is only the head which creates all the trouble. In fact it is always the head which creates the trouble, because one doesn’t know how to use it. If one knew how to use it, it could also create harmony.”

(Amal Kiran:) “The Mother did not encourage any kind of food-faddism. Cleanliness and restrained spicing were favoured, but too much preoccupation with one type of diet or another implied for her a lowered consciousness, an extreme externalisation of interest. Even on the subject of vegetarianism which is frequently linked in the East to the spiritual ideal she had no fixed ideas. In an institution like the Ashram she has established the rule of vegetarian food as the most rational, helpful and economical on the whole, but as between vegetarianism and meat-eating in general she has said that the kind of food consumed does not matter much until the stage is reached when physical transformation concretely starts. Then the body, increasingly Truth-sensitized by the Supermind, will have to be very selective in what subtle vibrations the stuff eaten may set up in the changing metabolic process.”

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See also

• Diet
• Cooking
• Fasting