Importance of Eating Properly
Anandamurti gave the advice that, "If you want to eat more, eat less". The meaning is to avoid over-eating, which will keep the body much healthier and allow a person to live a longer life. Over the course of those added years or decades you would consume more food than in a life cut short by illness from habitual over-eating!
Diet for Consciousness
The Cosmic Force is the resultant of 3 forces (sentient, mutative and static forces - or generating, operating and decaying - god).
The Cosmic Force creating this universe is not always the same. When the mutative force is active (dominating the 2 other forces), we witness changes and growth in all the structural levels (atomic, molecular, cellular, individual entities, and society). When the sentient force dominates, beauty, peace and harmony are expressed by the fully grown, mature structure. And when the static force is dominant, we witness decay and death of the same structures.
In this way, the play of these 3 forces gives expression to a grand variety of thoughts, objects and other animated or unanimated structures each of them dominated by one of the 3 forces. The effects of the 3 forces are:
· The sentient force will create subtle feelings of love, compassion, harmony, and peace and desire for the Great, joy and enthusiasm.
· The mutative force will create feelings of doer-ship, restlessness, and desire for movement and action, egoism, ambition, desire for retribution.
· The static force will create feelings of lethargy, dullness, laziness, helplessness, fear, anger, negative thinking, lack of vision.
Food is also of 3 kinds. As are all objects in the universe, each food is dominated by one of these 3 forces. The effects are:
· Sentient foods will help generate subtle or inspiring feelings and thoughts.
· Mutative foods will help generate restless or action-oriented feelings and thoughts.
· Static foods will help generate lack of vision, technical way of thinking, non-recognition of sense of oneness between all beings.
Yogic practitioners for centuries have classified food in this way derived by experimenting with various foods and noticing the effects on their minds. We should eat mostly sentient food, take as little mutative food as possible, and completely avoid static food. Generally, the classification is:
· Sentient Food: Food which produces sentient cells and is thus conducive to physical and mental well-being is sentient. Examples of sentient food are rice, wheat, barley, all kinds of pulses, fruit, milk and milk products (but not from a newly calved cow).
· Mutative Food: Food which is good for the body and may or may not be good for the mind, but certainly not harmful, is mutative.
· Static Food: Food which is harmful for the mind and may or may not be good for the body is static. Onion, garlic, wine, stale and rotten food, meat of large animals such as cows and buffaloes, fish, eggs, etc., are static. Many static foods are decomposed or do not undergo a process of photosynthesis.
However, the effects of some food depend on the climate, where the mutative or static effect in a cold climate can be less. Very often people eat food without knowing its intrinsic value.
Fasting
Fasting is a panacea for physical and mental well-being. Fasting will rest all bodily functions (digestive, glandular, senses, nervous, etc) and is indispensable for physical wellbeing and mental balance. On a fasting day (from sunrise to sunrise) allows the good effects to take place, without weakening too much the body. A total fast (dry) gives the bests results, so it should be done if the health condition allows it, otherwise fast on water, or if still not able then with some fruit juices.
Two fasting days each month is the proper amount needed. The best dates are the Ekadashi (about 4 days before new moon and full moon) to counterbalance water's upward pull by the moon which disturbs the brain by concentrating the water from the cells of the body into the head and brain cells. A dry fast will force the cells to pull back the surplus water from the head, needed for their proper functioning.
Starting and breaking a fast has to be done in a scientific and progressive way. Before starting fasting at the sunrise, sufficient amount of liquid have to be taken to provide the body with sufficient fluids during the fast. For example, one litre of water would give a comfortable start to the fast. When the time to break the fast comes, after the second sunrise, a sufficient amount of lemon water with salt can be taken. This is soon to be followed by a ripe banana, then take your breakfast which should have more fruits than usual.
Nutritious Balanced Diet
Anandamurti also advised, citing the sixth of Lord Shiva's seven secrets of success, that while controlling the quantity of food one should take a nutritious, well-balanced diet.
In Sanskrit the 6th secret is: "Sasthainca pramitahara", that is, balanced diet, balanced food.
You should not take large amounts, but take smaller amounts. But the food should be substantial. And not only that, it should be good for your body, mind and spirit. Meat and other animal products may be good for the body, but not good for the mind and spirit. So yours should be a careful selection of food.
It is called 'pramitahara - Pramita means 'balanced'; Ahara means 'food'.
Source: Discourse on "Shiva's Seven Secrets"
Ananda Vacanamitram Part 12
21 May 1979, Timmern, Germany
Cardinal Human Values and Eating
All living beings progress with the help of three factors: physical clash, psychic clash and spiritual longing.
Living in the relative world we find it helpful and necessary to consider the benevolent or malevolent consequences of a particular action on other animate or inanimate beings - in doing so we undergo a type of mental clash in working out what to do. Such consideration is crucial towards developing harmonious relations in the world. Morality/ethics comes into play when a living being begins to distinguish between benevolence and malevolence in actions. In an evolutionary sense, the ability to make ethical distinctions marks the end of animality and the beginning of humanity. Morality means living benevolently, rather than focusing on others' defects and preaching, one is to nurture one's own conduct towards benevolence.
As people learn to accept and appreciate the value of each living being's existence they tend to acquire sympathetic attitudes towards all beings. As one's mind grows in magnitude one makes choices that result in greater benevolence and harmony.
Animate life is a continuum from the least expression of consciousness as in a unicellular creature through ever-greater expressions of consciousness to the human being. Therefore a gradation list is used to determine one's food in yogic practices and Ananda Marga philosophy. When no food is available it is better to die than to take another human life as food; when only an animal with somewhat developed consciousness like a cow is available, one might choose to eat it than to die because human consciousness is more developed than the cow's; similarly one would choose to eat a goat rather than a cow, a bird rather than goat, a reptile rather than a bird, a fish rather than a reptile, and when there is scope to live on just plants, one would choose plants. That scope exists in most of the world today, although some places are easier than others. In any case, with technology and scientific knowledge it is readily possible to grow plant food in all sorts of geographies and climates.
We need to take life as food to survive, so taking food from the lower end of the gradation list (food chain) allows all beings, and in particular higher evolved animals, to enjoy their lives and progress in their environments. An ethical question comes into play at every meal: can I survive without taking a higher life form as my food? One may wish to debate over which animal species have higher evolved consciousness than others, but it is not difficult to discern that animals have a greater expression of consciousness than plants. Once your circle of compassion grows to include all beings, your choice becomes easy - you take the plant food only.
Caring for Plants
Just dissect a plant and you will find no complex nervous system in it comparable to a human being or animal. Dissect a cockroach and there is no brain in it compared to the human being. Dissect a rat and a small brain is there, but not much.
The experiences of a human being come from mind translated through nervous system and brain. The more complex these are the larger they are and the more the nerve cells and fibres. A large animal does not necessarily have an advanced nervous system or brain, but they certainly have a nervous system and brain. The size of a dinosaur brain is very small even though it had a big body. The complexity of life and the ability to express intellect, feeling and intuition is much more in complex metazoic structures than simple protozoic structures or very simple metazoic structures. The dinosaur was not a complex metazoic structure despite its size.
Plants and animals do not behave and think to the capability of human beings. Of courses, plants and animals use instinct and some higher animal forms can have an ability to use intelligence and reason to a limited degree. But they do not have the same qualities of conscious expression as a human being. Nor can it be logically or rationally inferred from observation or study that they have capabilities to that of a human being. However, all living things have a sensory system of some type and to some degree - all have a feeling of existence (the expression of which various from greater to lesser).
Plants and animals have some sensory structures, and even nerve fibres, and then even brains (depending on their evolution) - but nowhere near that of human capacity. Animals can feel pain and would feel more pain than plants which have a lesser evolved sensory structure. So clearly plants and animals require care and have rights of some extent. They have some propensities no doubt, but not the conscious awareness of a human being or the ability to express it in their bodily structure and social activities, eg the capability of human beings to invent is remarkable, while animals only have some instinctual ability, such as to build a nest.
However, from a spiritual point of view, everything needs to be cared for while higher life forms (such as animals and human beings) should be given scope to expand. This means one should take food only from the lowest life forms which inflicts the least or no harm or pain.
Useful Article
Vegetarian diet: panacea for modern lifestyle diseases?
http://qjmed.oupjournals.org/cgi/content/full/92/9/531
http://qjmed.oupjournals.org/cgi/reprint/92/9/531.pdf
Author: Segasothy M; Phillips PA
Department of Medicine, Northern Territory Clinical School of Medicine of Flinders University, Alice Springs, Australia
QJM: An International Journal of Medicine, Volume 92, Issue 9, pp.531-544
Summary: We review the beneficial and adverse effects of vegetarian diets in various medical conditions. Soybean-protein diet, legumes, nuts and soluble fibre significantly decrease total cholesterol, low-density lipoprotein cholesterol and triglycerides. Diets rich in fibre and complex carbohydrate, and restricted in fat, improve control of blood glucose concentration, lower insulin requirement and aid in weight control in diabetic patients. An inverse association has been reported between nut, fruit, vegetable and fibre consumption, and the risk of coronary heart disease. Patients eating a vegetarian diet, with comprehensive lifestyle changes, have had reduced frequency, duration and severity of angina as well as regression of coronary atherosclerosis and improved coronary perfusion. An inverse association between fruit and vegetable consumption and stroke has been suggested. Consumption of fruits and vegetables, especially spinach and collard green, was associated with a lower risk of age-related ocular macular degeneration. There is an inverse association between dietary fibre intake and incidence of colon and breast cancer as well as prevalence of colonic diverticula and gallstones. A decreased breast cancer risk has been associated with high intake of soy bean products. The beneficial effects could be due to the diet (monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fatty acids, minerals, fibre, complex carbohydrate, antioxidant vitamins, flavanoids, folic acid and phytoestrogens) as well as the associated healthy lifestyle in vegetarians. There are few adverse effects, mainly increased intestinal gas production and a small risk of vitamin B12 deficiency.