Yogi Bhajan Lecture Archive
Lecture by :
Siri Singh Sahib Bhai Sahib Harbhajan Singh Khalsa Yogi Ji
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Lecture on: 09/29/1988
Category: Class Lectures
Location: Los Angeles, CA
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Public

Food and Your Mental Attitude

(SSSji sits on the teacher's bench, and then picks up a note and reads it out loud)... "You may want to announce that you will be on the radio tomorrow at 11:00 am on KFOX, 93.5"... I'll be on a show, I'll be talking to you, something about health, something about systems, something about water, something...it's very funny what I can say to you guys. Oh, you must listen to this radio talk tomorrow because... Oh, this is money (opening gift). A lot of it! Wow! Good. That's fun. What else? That's it? Okay, the homework is done. Anyway...

I do not want to scare you. I give you the right to disagree with me. But just understand how foolishly we live in America. I am going to give you a description and I want you to understand what I am saying. There is 60% water in our body; 40% is solids. Do you understand what I am saying? Out of this 60% water, comes the minerals we need. If you change a living space, I mean, Los Angeles to Phoenix, you change the water. The water changes within a range of 12 miles whether you like it or you don't like it. There's nothing you can do about it. The problem with Los Angeles is we have smog here, and we have water from Arizona, from the Colorado River, and water from San Francisco, which is 450 miles away. Do you understand what I mean? And actually what is required (which is in this note I was reading) is that a person who changes his residence or her residence beyond 12 miles should see what the minerals are in the body, what the minerals are in the water, and then decide proportionately what needs to be made up through food. And I didn't understand that.

Normally what we do is, if we have shortage of zinc, and we take zinc, we should cure ourselves. But sometimes you have a shortage of zinc and you do not cure yourself. You do not know why. They say that one who wants to cure himself through the efficiency and deficiency of minerals (and they say all diseases are based on deficiency of minerals) should get them from those particular vegetables and fruits. Do you understand? And the note has a one funny heading on it: "The Mouth Has the Answer.” So they feel that you should get certain minerals out of your food and add them to your body, when the water changes.
Now in America, how many people will take the local water and the blood and check the minerals in their blood and exchange it and find it out? Has anybody ever done it? Then what is the guarantee we'll be healthy? The water gives you only 72 hours worth of minerals. Isn't that news? Four thousand years ago people knew it. They had a whole system about it. This was considered to be a part of the medical system, if you can find in some old books, there is a book called, "Aqua Therapy." The book is this thick. If somebody can track that book, you can save the universe. It is whole book on how the water, through mineral deficiency, can create problems correspondingly, and also it contains how many proportionate deficiencies -- what type of disease you can get, and what kind of food and fruits you can eat to cover that. Are you with me? Serious, huh?

I was watching the television and they said, people who are diabetic have to change their diet. Did you see, Saram, that article on the television? Some kids, one is Indian doctor and there are other four, five, six doctors. They are in the university. They are experimenting in Texas University. And they have found out, if the lean meat like chicken and fish, is totally saturated... done in olive oil and given to the patients, their diabetes is cured fast, intake of insulin is taken away, and the clogging of the cholesterol and the arteries open up and they have found this is a heavenly situation. And they say, "All along in the medical science we have been advising people to have high carbohydrate, low this, low that, was wrong." And they were admitting it publicly. And now they say, "No, we have to do a better therapy for it."

And you know these days is a great fad going on. If you take aspirin you will not have a heart attack. You will not have attack, but you will have something on the side effect, too. But nobody talks about that. People go crazy for one thing, and there they go, they don't want to change.

Third situation you can find out in your life is that everybody wants to understand that tofu is the most powerful thing. But if you do not cook it right and eat it right, you can never digest it. So....

Everything has a good and a bad point. Meat is wonderful protein. You should have it. Then you eat meat today -- today is what day? Thursday? Then you should water fast Friday, Saturday and then eat it on Sunday.

Eat meat, no problem. Because you must give 72 hours what you eat, in meat, and any such thing, to come out of you. Eat meat, I have no objection. I am saying it. Then eat it today, and for 72 hours live on a water fast. Then eat again. That's understandable. But eating meat in the morning, eating meat in the evening, eating in the afternoon, eating meat at night... a pig will be more intelligent than you as a human. Because you must understand, they call it "colon cramps." That's what meat does. Meat you alone can't eat. You have to have wine. You have to have other necessities with meat, because of the urea. It makes you a monkey. I'm not against meat, for God's sake. Don't read me wrong. And I am not being paid by what you call it? Vegetarians. I have no problem with that. But what I am saying to you is that you can eat anything in the world you want to eat. Just understand before eating what it gives you.

Granted our eating habits are commercial and quick. There are two things bad in our food: commercial and quick. I was looking at that advertisement and they are using the sulfates on the food which is very killing and very deforming and skin rash, putting on vegetables and all that. And this lady said, "If I buy an apple, I want the apple which looks like an apple. I don't want to buy an apple which is an apple." In other words, natural organic apple is no good. You have to have an apple which should not be healthy for stomach, good for mouth, good for taste, good for energy, good for colon, good for intestine, good for coming out. No. You want to have an apple which is good for eyes. Am I agreeing? Then eat it through eyes, push it through there. Why you are putting in mouth anything? I don't understand the philosophy.

There's a tremendous amount of greed. First of all we want to beef up every vegetable, everything, so it should look big and great... One. Secondly, we want it should stay, because of this system, marketing system, we want to give everything shelf value. You understand shelf value? That means, shelf value means it can stay there for a month and still look it is fresh right now.

And those of you who are to eat meat, one day I was going through the market and I said, "Well, what are these pieces?" He said, "These are cut of this and that." You'll find meat looking fresh, cut, red, beautiful. It's not true. It is dyed with something that is very lethal. And they all do it.

You know you sometimes go in a bar and you drink, and they put some little cherry in it? It is very well-colored. It can be either green or it can be red. And you all eat it. And sometimes we don't want somebody's drink but we want that thing. You know what makes it red? It is a poison. And it is very bad for health. And you know, funny part is, on any food they serve they put parsley on it? You know what we do? We pick the parsley and put it on the side. Something which can do wonderful things, we take it out, and start eating.

Food is not which makes you healthy nor keeps you alive. Food also constitutes your mental attitude. Food is responsible for your mental attitude. Exercise is responsible for your nervous response. You are with me? If your attitude and your nervous response is not what you are, then you are not a human being. You have a body, look, structure, and right of vote of a human being, but you are not. What are those two things I said? (Class responds: Food is responsible for your mental attitude. Exercise is responsible for your nervous response.) Yah, nervous response. Nerve response, they call it. Nerve response. And food is for mental attitude. Write it down. Mental attitude plus nerve response is what you can achieve in life. And this depends on food. Are you with me?

Any food you eat, which grows in the ground, will give you grit. From ground to three feet, it will give you strength. Physical strength. And physical nourishment. Three feet to eleven feet, those seven feet in between, all food grown in that area will give you nourishment, nourishing. And above eleven feet, it gives you instant energy. Try it. And man discovered it in 2000 B.C. They knew it. Man knew much more about food, mind, nature, activity, response, though he lived totally naked like an animal. Because when man survives by his own effort, he knows everything. Now we do not go by our effort, by intuition. We have nothing to develop that. Now we have absolutely expert opinions. Expert opinion should always be right, with 30% margin of human error. And if you fall in that 30% error, you are done. But there is something in you which you feel.

I'm not talking to you to become psychic and intuitive and this and that. I'm not asking you to become super human beings. For God's sake, if you live in a country where you think you have everything, except you have a very empty, hollow, shallow mind and you cannot deliver goods, you cannot keep relationships, you cannot have a family, you cannot keep your promise, you cannot get going, you can look good and come out bad. That's not fair. Is that true? The time and amount of money we spend on looking physically beautiful is absolutely proportionately worth nothing if we mentally cannot deliver that beauty we project. It is better we look very ugly, stinking, smelly, neurotically bad, poor, rotten. Nobody should talk to us so that we must not fool others.

You see how ugly it is when you look very beautiful and you behave very ugly? And you prove to be nothing but worth nothing? Do you understand, there is a story of a king who was such a big emperor, the whole world was under his command. And one day Narad came to him. He said, "Whose power is in you?" He said, "That of God." He said, "What do you think I am?" He said, "You are a devotee of God." He said, "If I ask you something, will you give it to me?" He said, "Sure. It is all yours. Tell me." He said, "Give me all what you have." "All you have to wear is a loin cloth, and get out with your family." He obeyed. He walked out. Tragedy after tragedy. His son died. He didn't have money to give to the man to do his last rites. He had to leave the dead body. That king one day was walking and he saw a very shining red thing. He thought it might be a ruby. He picked it up. It was a fruit pit somebody has spitted. He looked at himself and he said, "These rubies, when I left, they were
bag loads. But the circumstances can make a man. That's what man is." And then he started researching, what is the protection of the man? In his richness? No. In his power? No. In his deficiency? No. How man in life can be above all? Not to become victim of the circumstances which he cannot handle, or he should have a grit to change the environments to his decision, his proportions then as it proportionately changes him.


You cannot be happy in life if you are very rich or you are very poor, or you give away everything or you take away everything. If you have everything, what you have, you cannot be happy. If you have nothing you cannot be happy. Only you have to have environment. Man is product of his social environment. And when Aristotle said, "Man is a social animal," he was not wrong.

So psychologically and biologically we need comforting environments. That's why we build houses. That's why we build cars. That's why we build planes. In the whole world, the term of happiness is useless if we do not understand what happiness is. To us, happiness is when we have everything comfortable around us. But when it comes to body, we don't have a time to understand. I have been sick for two years... more than that... and I wish somebody would have checked my blood in a cardiovascular investigation, my blood, its minerals and water, I drink its minerals, and then come out with a resultant to find it out, what is the deficiency in my body which is causing the problem? What is causing the problem? The quality of the blood is not what can be sustained. And when the quality of oxygen in the air is not, quality of the mineral in water is not, and the noise level in Los Angeles is +3 points above the normal that a man can handle, plus the emotional think situation, nobody knows who's going to be married, who's going to be
divorced... and plus you do not know whose car is going to hit you in your back or hit you in the front, plus you do not know whether you can come out of your car belt or not -- what do you think life is about?

However, there is a solution. We are going to do three very wonderful exercises....

© YB Teachings, LLC 1988

Above Article Copyright © Yogi Bhajan 2002. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.



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