Talks Excerpt 451. Swamiji gives dietary and other advice.
From Mother Radha’s recordings of Swamiji.
As you know, a yogi is not supposed to eat excessive ginger, garlic, onions and my dear favourite chillies. [laughter] Then there is the inner nature of a thing – like potatoes. They don’t disturb your mind but they disturb your health. If you eat a lot of potatoes you get too much starch in your body and this can lead to sugar diabetes. In this way some foods affect the mind and others affect the body.
Sri Krishna made it very clear in the Bhagavad Gita: Moderation, moderation, moderation. So what I want you to know is that you should have everything under the sun, but in moderation.
A sannyasi on the other hand has his own dharma. He can’t have everything. Brahmacharis can’t have some things. But a person like Swami Vivekananda can walk around with a pepper [chillie] in his pocket. [laughter].
So what is spirituality? What is yoga? It is common-sense. We are complicating the sense.
It is said that Sri Ramakrishna and truth are one. No wonder therefore that Sri Ramakrishna – whose advent [incarnation] on Earth was for the establishment of dharma – upholds truth [satyam] through all his words and deeds. He says the best name he can give to God is Truth.
Wasn’t it [Mohandas, ‘Mahatma’] Gandhi who later said the same thing? [ Yes – click HERE]. Not that God is truth, but that truth is God.
God is not ‘true’, because your ‘true’ may be relative [and subjective]. But truth is not related to anything. Sri Ramakrishna says that the best name you can give to God is Truth.
Under no circumstances should one give up truth. Under no circumstances.
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These recordings or the excerpts from them, were made from the early 1970s onward, by Mother Radha, a close devotee of Swamiji’s and edited for uploading here by our gurubhai and her son, Brother Tim. Please be mindful that what Swamiji was saying may have been specific to an individual or a group of people with him, at the time.