Dr. Rajesh Bhola
India
Mar 01, 2013
We depend on food. Every day nature prompts us to eat. We can do without food for a few hours–or maybe a few days–but we can never become independent of it. It is not possible to live as a human being without experiencing the discomforts associated with eating and digesting.
But over-eating also creates problems. Over-eating festers diseases and shortens our life; it does not yield happiness. On the other hand, while we may learn some very important things through such practices as fasting, carrying it to an extreme leads to exhaustion rather than release. We can live vibrantly by eating light and simple food. More importantly, we must focus completely on the present moment while eating food.
I know a very senior executive in a company, who visited me the other day. She has had a very good education, and is now pursuing a very good career – and is very well off. She is divorced – which is not unusual or uncommon nowadays. To a casual observer, she would look quite happy and successful. However, the anxieties in her life, and the stressful job, have impacted her food habits. When she feels anxious she eats excessively – cramming food into her body, and eating everything wildly. The food she chooses for this purpose is not nutritious; it is very heterogeneous, containing mostly things that she knows to be bad for her. When she fills herself up with lots of fast food, she feels so dirty that she goes to the bathroom and throws up. She does this most days at least once. She embarks to the food table with the desire that it should bring her satisfaction; but before it has a chance to demonstrate that it will fail to do so, she aborts the experiment and vomits everything out. Her habit of grasping and rejecting fills up all her time, takes up all her energy, and ensures that the intuition that she has about the emptiness of mundane life can never really be tested. She can continue to believe that all will be well when she overcomes her problem, so long as she does not overcome it. Deep down, she knows that eating excessively will not make her happy.
When she sits for eating, she hardly tastes the food at all. For her, the happiness she thinks is her due, lies beyond these things. She is in flight from the suffering in her life, rather than enjoying the pleasures that are available to her. She can enjoy and savour each bite of food if she focuses on the present moment.
Of course, food can give pleasure. If we eat a modest amount of food slowly, savouring each bite, enjoying it in the present moment, it tastes very good. The same is true of eating select nutritious food required by the body.
One of my father’s close childhood buddies visits us often, and I compare experiences with him on many subjects – food being one of those. He eats strictly what his body permits him to, and has been on this ‘controlled fasting’ for more than two decades now. He says that his daily diet includes a counted number of chapattis, four seasonal vegetables and four types of legumes, put together with contents not exceeding 200 grams cooked in solar energy; 200 grams of fresh cut fruits and salads, and 200 grams of skimmed milk. “You should chew your food for a long time, until it becomes completely liquid in your mouth. It tastes delicious,” he says. He lives on a diet of Rupees Twenty per day. Touch wood, he has never fallen sick in these years, and is vibrant with youthful energy. Not only that, he takes on his ‘young’ shoulders the responsibility of The Joint Forum of Residents Welfare Associations.
Say No To Meat
‘The lambs, sheep, cows and buffaloes lay their blood down while they cry on their fate
I saw them coming, nobody came to help; my throat was cut open – soon it was too late
I am away from the land of terror; away from hell, and safer here with my Master.’
The distress that animals have to endure before they end up as anonymous, unrecognisable bricks in the supermarket freezer made me realise that my food and my spiritual values were intimately linked. And since consciousness is everywhere, even in so-called inanimate objects as rocks, sand or mud, we can perceive oneness in all creation. In principle, all expressions of nature have an equal right to exist, and to express themselves; everything created is ultimately cosmic consciousness. On this evolutionary ladder, animals follow their instinctual dharma–or inner nature–while humans can rise above their basic instincts, and choose to follow a higher, spiritual dharma. By adhering to this simple, ethical principle, we can better live in harmony with ourselves, and with other beings in the natural world. We need to have concern for the welfare of animals, as part of our genuine environ-ment-al ethics that are based on spiritual-ity. The great G.B Shaw rightly said: “Animals are my friends, and I don’t eat my friends.”
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