The Yoga of Sri Aurobindo - Part 8

On Food

I believe the primitive man was very near to the animal. He lived more by instinct than by intelligence. He ate when he was hungry without any kind of fixed rule. He might have had his own tastes and preferences, we do not know much about it; but we know that he lived much more physically, much less mentally or even vitally as now.

Originally very material in nature, much like the animal, man in the course of his progress through centuries or millenniums became more and more mental, more and more vital. And as he grew more mental and more vital, refinement became possible, the intelligence increased, but the possibility too of perversion and deformation. It is one thing to educate the senses so as to bring into them every variety of refinement, growth, knowledge, appreciation, taste and all that, meaning a progress in consciousness: it is quite another to be attached to the object of your sense, to have greed, to be a glutton.

You can make a very thorough study of taste, for example: you can acquire a detailed knowledge of the different tastes of different things, the association of idea or notion with taste, which means not perhaps a

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progress in the vital, but at least a development of this particular sense. That is permissible but there is a great difference between that and eating out of greed, thinking of food all the while, eating not because of its need but because of desire and gluttony.

Indeed, people who try to develop their taste are rarely very much attached to food. They cultivate their taste for developing, refining their senses, not for the sake of eating. In the same way the artist, a painter for example, trains his eyes so that he can know how to appraise the beauty of form and colour, line and design, composition and harmony that is found in physical nature. It is not mere desire or hunger that drives them, it is taste, culture, development of the sense of sight, appreciation of beauty that is his preoccupation. Generally, artists who are truly artists, who love and live their art, who are in search of beauty are people who have not many desires. They live in their aesthetic sensibility, in their senses turned to the enjoyment and creation of beauty. They are not of the kind of people who live by their vital impulses and physical desires.

In a general way, education, culture, refinement of the senses are the means of curing movements of crude instinct and desire and passion. To obliterate them is not curing them; instead, they have to be cultivated, intellectualised, refined. That is the surest way of curing them. To give them their maximum growth in view of the progress and development of consciousness, so that one may attain to a sense of harmony and exactitude

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of perception is part of culture and education for the human being. Men cultivate their intelligence in the same way: they read, they think, compare and contrast, they make a study. In this way their mind enlarges, it becomes wider and more comprehensive than the mind of those who live without a mental education, who possess only a few ideas that perhaps even contradict each other. They are moved wholly by these as they have no other, they think those are the only ideas that should govern them: such minds are extremely narrow and limited. On the other hand, they who have cultivated their intelligence, who have studied and thought, who have widened their mental range a little and so can see and note and compare other ideas and possible notions discover easily that it is sheer ignorance and absurdity to be attached to a limited set of ideas and to consider that alone as the expression of truth.

This training of taste, this education of the senses is a very good, a necessary means to prepare the consciousness for a higher development. There are persons who are very crude and very simple in nature. They can have a strong inspiration and arrive at a certain spiritual growth but the foundation will always remain of a somewhat inferior quality: and when they come back to their ordinary consciousness they find there great obstacles: for the stuff is missing there, there are not, in the vital and physical consciousness, elements enough to enable it to support a descent of the higher force.

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How does fasting bring a state of receptivity ?

Usually the vital being is concentrated very much in the body. And when the body is well fed, it takes its force and energy through the food—it is one way of absorbing energy, almost the only way, at least the more important way, under the existing conditions of life, but it is a tamasic way.

This energy that one takes in, if you reflect upon the matter you will easily admit, is the vital energy that is in the plant or the animal and logically it is of an inferior quality to that which should be man's who is supposed to be on a higher level in the scale of species. So it is impossible to eat without absorbing a large quantity of unconsciousness. Inevitably that makes you heavy and dense. And if you are in the habit of eating much, a good part of your consciousness is engaged in digesting and assimilating what you eat. Thus if you do not take food, that already frees you from this unconsciousness that you have no longer to assimilate and transform within you: that liberates energy in you. Then, as there is an instinct in the being to make up for energy spent, if you do not gather it from food i.e. from below, you make automatically an effort to draw it from the universal vital energy which is free around you. And if you can assimilate that energy, assimilate it directly, then there is no limit to your energy.

It is not like your stomach which can digest only a limited quantity of food and this food again can give

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out only a portion—a very small portion—of its energy. For after the energy spent in swallowing, masticating, digesting etc. how much of it still remains available? If, on the other hand, you learn—you learn instinctively, it is a kind of instinct—to draw from the universal energy which is freely available in the world and in any quantity, you can take it in and absorb as much as you are capable of it. Thus, as I have said, when there is not the support from below coming from food, the body makes an automatic movement to get the wanted energy from the environment. It gets at times, more than enough, even an overdose and that puts you in a state of tension or stimulation. And if your body is strong and can remain without food for some time, then you can maintain your poise and utilise the energies in all ways—to make inner progress, for example, to become more conscious, to change your nature. But if your body has not much reserve, it gets easily weakened by fast, then there occurs a disharmony between the intensity of the energies you absorb and the capacity of the body to hold them and that upsets you. You lose your poise, the equilibrium of the forces is broken and anything can happen. In any case, if such a thing happens, you lose a good deal of self-control, you get excited and this unnatural excitement you consider as a higher state of consciousness. But it is an inner unbalance, nothing more. Otherwise, in that state your senses get refined and receptive. Thus when you fast and do not draw energy from below, if you smell a flower, you feel nourished, the perfume you

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breathe in serves as food, it gives you energy and this you would not have known but for the fasting.

In this condition certain faculties become intensified and that is taken as a spiritual effect. But in reality it has very little to do with spirituality. However, instead of thinking all the while about food, how to get it and eat, if one were to take to fasting for the sake of freeing oneself from the bondage of food preoccupation, rising a little in the scale of consciousness, it would be a good thing. If you have the faith it will do you good, it will purify you, make you progress a little. In that way it is all right: it will not do any harm to our body excepting making it a little thinner. But if you fast and then continuously turn back to it and think of the food that you might have eaten or are likely to eat after the fasting, well, such fasting is worse than feasting.

Materlinck,—you must have heard of him, the author of BLUE BIRD—was a very corpulent person. As he had some sense of beauty he disliked corpulency, and in order to reduce it or keep it within bounds, he took to fasting for one day a week regularly. As he was an intelligent man, he did not on that day give any thought to food, but he kept himself wholly engaged in writing and studying. Fasting was of use to him.

The moral then is this: you must not think about food: you should regulate your life in such an automatic manner that you have not got to think about it. Eat at fixed hours, reasonably—calmly, quietiy, composedly. Do not eat too much; for then you will have to concern

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yourself with digestion: that would be a disagreeable thing; it will make you lose time. Eat just what is necessary. You must give up all desire and attraction, all vital movement. When you eat only because the body needs food, then the body will tell you in a very precise and exact manner when it has just the amount necessary. It is only when you have notions in your mind or desires in your vital, when for example, you are in love with a particular item, that you eat in multiples of the quantity needed and oppress your body and make it lose its natural perception.

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