The Yogi’s Diet
It’s pretty obvious what’s wrong with eating meat – you have to kill other living beings to get it. But its not so obvious why some other foods are forbidden on the plates of yogis.
Some are easy or obvious. Wines and so on, for example, obviously have a fuzzing effect on the mind and a liberating effect on animal instincts. So a yogi avoids intoxication. But there are some prohibited foods that just seem mysterious. Garlic and onion is the most popular. There are other vegetables also, but for some reason they mostly get overlooked by most contemporary Western practitioners these days.
Garlic-abstainers will often quote fabulous stories about how these vegetables originated from the corpse of a slain cow, or the blood of a demon, or some variety of tale. We are going to ignore these, because they do not appeal to logical persons. They are meant for the masses who simply require a vivid storyline.
There are valid reasons why certain vegetables should be avoided.
Every substance in the world has a specific effect on you when you perceive it. It’s just the way the world works, food included. Each food has a different effect on you when you ingest it. We don’t even notice it most of the time. If your room is filthy you don’t notice a little extra disorganization in your top shelf, but if you are trying to keep your room very clean and organized, you notice things right away. Similarly, our psychological nature is so radically disturbed by things like FaceBook, text messages, billboards, talk shows, and video games that we really have no idea at all if something as innocuous as garlic might or might not have some effect on our mind.
So perhaps it’s a bit myopic for an aspiring yogi to insist on fastidious abstinence from onions, garlic, and so on, while at the same time indulging his eyes in the comparatively raucous stream of images, videos, and ideas from FaceBook and Twitter on an iPhone in a movie theatre? Yes. Priorities, please.
Still, if you are one of those very few people who really sit down and want to focus your mind clearly on mantra-meditation, you will rightly want to not only govern (or abandon) your addictions to the internet and so on, you’ll also want to double-check your choice of vegetables.
What garlic does (and I guess presumably onions and other “forbidden” vegetables too; although, I have to admit that in my personal experience onions seem innocuous compared to garlic) is make the mind “fuzzy.” In yogic terminology it aggravates “rajas” – the effect of which is to disturb clarity of mind, and make it more easily distracted by “interesting” ideas and plans.
There are a few non-yogi, modern-medical-type people (like Bob Beck) who have also noticed this. And it’s not just an Indian thing. Romans (like Horace) and Chinese (like Tsang-Tsze) also noticed this. But as for you and I… we should also be able to experience it. And we can. But here is what you would have to do to notice it:
(a) For one month abstain entirely from: internet, video games, television, movies, newspapers, and casual reading.
(b) During this time abstain of course from intoxications, meats, and sexual activity of any sort.
(c) During this time, abstain also from garlic (and why not also onions).
(d) Try to meditate for an extended period on a single mantra, with great focus.
The purpose of this cleansing month is to “organize the room of your mind.” Then, after one month of this, eat a nice big dose of the “forbidden” veggies (while still practicing the A andB) and take a note how it makes you feel when you try to do D.
When you compare your mantra meditation in the few days at the end of the month with your mantra meditation after you feasted on garlic like a cured vampire, you’ll notice for yourself that this is for real. Garlic, and so on, really does make a difference to the quality of your concentration.
But you’ll also notice that unless you are regularly doing A and B pretty fastidiously, it doesn’t really matter.
So, my advice?
Focus on D, the mantra.
If you do, you will want to try your best to do A and B.
If you do, C will make a difference, too. But if you are not really focusing on the Mantra, eating or not eating smelly or non-smelly veggies is not going to help or hinder your spiritual life enough to register on any micro-sensitive yogi-ometer.
Priorities please! Not checklists for being “on the team.” Thanks.
Hare Krishna.
The purpose of this cleansing is to “organize the room of your mind.”
I see scriptures as divine instruction manuals. They guide us away from excessive materialism with all its attendant stresses and struggles, and toward the peace and happiness of spirituality. The real joy we seek lies within us not without. So in future I think I will try to check my massive male ego and stick to following the manual. Read more › 
Drutakarma prabhu (Michael Cremo): There's already a lot of questioning going on. And what I'm proposing is not actually so extreme. Most people already agree with what I say. It just so happens that because of this government enforced monopoly that the Darwinists now have on the education system, it's not a message that's really being gotten out [in the classrooms]. But what I would like to see is some diversity. Not that just immediately these other [Darwinian evolutionary] ideas are going to be taken out of the textbooks. But in the textbooks and classrooms it should be admitted there are other ideas. The textbooks should say, yes, today most scientists believe in this theory of evolution - but there are other scientists who do not accept it - here are their reasons. And let's have a discussion about it...let people make up their own minds, rather than having the government, through its judicial system, dictate to us what everybody should believe. 
Here are the pictures from the Surabaya (East Java) Ratha-yatra held on the 4th of May at the town's 721 birthday celebration. 
