1. 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 than 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 of 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.

    Indeed, people who try to develop their taste are rarely very much attached to food. They cultivate their taste for

Page-115

developing, refining their sense, 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 m physical nature. It is not mere desire or hunger that drives him, it is taste, culture, development of the sense pf 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 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 of perception is part of culture and edification 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 these are the only ideas that should govern totem: such minds are extremely narrow and limited. On the p«r hand, they who have cultivated their intelligence, who have studied and thought, who have widened:

Page-116

    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 ancl 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 ancl 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 and 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.