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<h1 align="center" style="line-height: 150%; margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0"><b style='mso-bidi-font-weight:normal'>
<font size="4">On
Food</font><o:p></o:p></b></h1>
<div class=Section1>

<p class=MsoNormal style='text-align:justify;line-height:150%;mso-pagination:
none;mso-layout-grid-align:none;text-autospace:none; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0'><b><i><span
style='font-family:"Arial Narrow"'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></i></b></p>

<p class=MsoBodyTextIndent2 style='text-indent:0in;mso-line-height-alt:11.75pt;
border:medium none;mso-padding-alt:0in 0in 0in 0in; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0'>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 than now. </p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='text-align:justify;text-indent:9.0pt;mso-line-height-alt:
11.75pt;mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none;text-autospace:none; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0'>Originally
very material in nature, much like the animal, man in he 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 objects of sense, to have greed, to be a glutton.</p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='text-align:justify;text-indent:11.25pt;mso-line-height-alt:
11.75pt;mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none;text-autospace:none; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0'>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 an idea or notion with taste, which means not perhaps a 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.</p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='text-align:justify;text-indent:12.7pt;mso-line-height-alt:
11.75pt;mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none;text-autospace:none; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0'>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
<o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></p>

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<p class=MsoNormal align=center style='text-align:center;line-height:150%;
mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none;text-autospace:none;border:medium none;
mso-border-bottom-alt:solid windowtext .75pt;padding:0in;mso-padding-alt:0in 0in 1.0pt 0in; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0'>
<span
style='font-size:10.0pt;mso-bidi-font-size:12.0pt;'>Page – 68</span><span
style='font-family:"Arial Narrow"'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

</div>

<p class=MsoNormal style='text-align:justify;mso-line-height-alt:11.75pt;
mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none;text-autospace:none; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0'>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 do not have many desires.
They live in their aesthetic sensibility, in their senses turned to the
enjoyment and creation of beauty. They are not the kind of people who live by
their vital impulses and physical desires.</p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='text-align:justify;text-indent:9.0pt;mso-line-height-alt:
11.75pt;mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none;text-autospace:none; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0'>In
a general way, education, cultures, 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 acquire to a sense of harmony and exactitude 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 itself, it becomes wider and more comprehensive
than the minds 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.</p>

<div style='border:none;border-bottom:solid windowtext 1.0pt;mso-border-bottom-alt:
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<p class=MsoNormal style='text-align:justify;text-indent:11.75pt;mso-line-height-alt:
11.75pt;mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none;text-autospace:none;
border:medium none;mso-border-bottom-alt:solid windowtext .75pt;padding:0in;
mso-padding-alt:0in 0in 1.0pt 0in; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0'>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.<o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></p>

<p class=MsoNormal align=center style='text-align:center;line-height:150%;
mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none;text-autospace:none;border:medium none;
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<span
style='font-size:10.0pt;mso-bidi-font-size:12.0pt;'>Page – 69</span><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></p>

</div>

<p class=MsoNormal style='text-align:justify;line-height:150%;mso-pagination:
none;mso-layout-grid-align:none;text-autospace:none; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0'><i>How does fasting bring
about a state of receptiviry?</i></p>
<p class=MsoNormal style='text-align:justify;line-height:150%;mso-pagination:
none;mso-layout-grid-align:none;text-autospace:none; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0'>&nbsp;</p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0;text-align:justify;text-indent:9.0pt;
mso-line-height-alt:11.75pt;mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none;
text-autospace:none; line-height:150%; margin-bottom:0'>Usually the vital being is concentrated very much in the
body. And when the body is well fed, it draws its force and energy through the
food – it is one way of absorbing energy, almost the the only way, at least the
more important way, under the existing conditions of life, but it is a tamasic
way.</p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='text-align:justify;text-indent:9.0pt;mso-line-height-alt:
11.75pt;mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none;text-autospace:none; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0'>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: in order to liberate
energy in you. Then, as there is an instinct in the being to make up for the
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.</p>

<div style='border:none;border-bottom:solid windowtext 1.0pt;mso-border-bottom-alt:
solid windowtext .75pt;padding:0in 0in 1.0pt 0in'>

<p class=MsoNormal style='text-align:justify;text-indent:9.0pt;mso-line-height-alt:
11.75pt;mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none;text-autospace:none;
border:medium none;mso-border-bottom-alt:solid windowtext .75pt;padding:0in;
mso-padding-alt:0in 0in 1.0pt 0in; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0'>It is not like your stomach which can digest
only a limited quantity of food and this food again can give 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 doing. 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 needed
energy from the environment. <span style='mso-bidi-font-weight:bold'>It<b> </b></span>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<o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></p>

<p class=MsoNormal align=center style='text-align:center;line-height:150%;
mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none;text-autospace:none;border:medium none;
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<span
style='font-size:10.0pt;mso-bidi-font-size:12.0pt;'>Page – 70</span><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></p>

</div>

<p class=MsoNormal style='text-align:justify;mso-line-height-alt:11.75pt;
mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none;text-autospace:none; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0'>your
nature. But if your body does not have 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
breathe in serves as food, it gives you energy and this you would not have
known but for the fasting.</p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='text-align:justify;text-indent:10.05pt;mso-line-height-alt:
11.75pt;mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none;text-autospace:none; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0'>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
it, 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 your body except making it a little slimmer. 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.</p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='text-align:justify;text-indent:10.55pt;mso-line-height-alt:
11.75pt;mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none;text-autospace:none; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0'>Maeterlinck,
– you must have heard of him, the author of <i>The Blue Bird-was </i>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.</p>

<div style='border:none;border-bottom:solid windowtext 1.0pt;mso-border-bottom-alt:
solid windowtext .75pt;padding:0in 0in 1.0pt 0in'>

<p class=MsoNormal style='text-align:justify;text-indent:10.55pt;mso-line-height-alt:
11.75pt;mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none;text-autospace:none;
border:medium none;mso-border-bottom-alt:solid windowtext .75pt;padding:0in;
mso-padding-alt:0in 0in 1.0pt 0in; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0'>The moral then is this: you must not think
about food: you should regulate your life in such an automatic manner that you
do not have to think about it. Eat at fixed hours, reasonably – calmly,
quietly, composedly. Do not eat too much; for then you will have to concern
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,<o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></p>

<p class=MsoNormal align=center style='text-align:center;line-height:150%;
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<span
style='font-size:10.0pt;mso-bidi-font-size:12.0pt;'>Page – 71</span><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></p>

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<p class=MsoBodyText2 style='line-height:150%;tab-stops:.5in;border:medium none;
mso-border-bottom-alt:solid windowtext .75pt;padding:0in;mso-padding-alt:0in 0in 1.0pt 0in; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0'>then
the body will tell you in a very precise and exact manner when it has taken
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 dish
that you eat in multiples of the quantity needed and oppress your body and make
it lose its natural perception.<o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></p>

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<span style='font-size:10.0pt;
mso-bidi-font-size:12.0pt;'>Page – 72<o:p></o:p></span></p>

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