Talks Excerpt 570. Swamiji says, do not eat the leavings of others, unless from one you respect as divine. With the leavings, a person’s karmas come to you.

From Mother Radha’s recordings of Swamiji.

Along with sadhana goes diet. You must try to eat a sattvic diet as far as possible, and as directed in the Bhagavad Gita. A sattvic diet gives you good health, it gives you good digestion and it gives you calmness. And you do not have to go to the gym if you are putting on weight. [laughter] Just take a sattvic diet.

Some people wait until their weight has increased three times in a year and then they go in for lifting weights. But what can the weights do then? All the cells are already expanded. So, eat a sattvic diet.

Do not eat the leavings of others, that is the first rule. Do not eat the leavings of others unless it is left by the one that you respect as divine. With the leavings, a person’s karmas come to you. When you take prasad and worship a sattvic deity, you will gain sattvic qualities. If you take some fruit (or other things) and worship a rajasic deity and then eat that prasad, rajasic qualities are yours. If you take flesh and other things, worship a deity, and then eat those things, you become tamasic. It works like that with other people’s leavings.

A similar thing happens when you accept gifts. You should not accept gifts at random from others. I know the ashramites [those living in the ashram] are very careful about this.

Sri Ramakrishna was very careful. He would not take anything, especially a dead man’s offerings. Sri Ramakrishna would say, ‘Keep it there, keep it there.’ He would not want to hurt anybody’s feelings but at night he would tell them to put the whole lot in the Ganges [Ganga]. Somebody asked him, ‘But why not give it to the poor people?’ He said ‘Why should I, who can tangibly see karma working, give them the karma of others to eat?’

Only one person was allowed to eat anything he chose and that was Swami Vivekananda. He was able to digest anything and convert it into divine energy. [We must bear in mind that he was one of the Sapta Rishis who incarnated for our benefit and to execute Sri Ramakrishna’s mandate].

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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.