According to AdiSankarar hunger is in the nature of a pain for which the
medicine is food. Your connection with food should stop there and you should
not become attached to comestibles. Headache is also a pain which comes in three
months or so. To tackle it don’t you take an analgesic tablet
? Hunger is no different except that it arises every three hours.
Other
living beings such as birds and animals also have the problem of hunger. They
go for and consume their meal in the raw without waiting for it to be
processed. Humans, being endowed with the sixth sense cook their food, add flavours and tastes to it and dress it up before bringing
the same to the dining table. Taste yields pleasure to the mind through the
sense-organ tongue. Do you know that the portion of the tongue transmitting
taste is only about one-and-a quarter inches of the organ which contains taste buds. Throat does not experience taste, nor the oesophagus, or the stomach or the intestines. And yet what
importance we attach to taste ! A price however has to
be paid for this pleasure-enjoyment. What is that price Sirs
? The price has to be paid in terms of the life-energy which is your
sole-capital for transacting the business of living. Do you hear the soft and
firm voice of J.Krishnamurti telling you : “A life was given to you, the most precious thing
possible. And what have you done with it ? You have
divided it, you have distorted it.” ?
The principle
which governs our pleasure-enjoyment through the tongue applies four-square to
the other four sense-organs too --- skin, ears, eyes and nose. Tiruvalluvar, one of the most eminent thinkers of all time
has said as under in a couplet of his: ‘Even if the diameter of the inlet is
limited you have nothing to fear if the outlet is not broadened more.’
A
Tamil poem of Sage-poetess Avvaiyar was once quoted
in the presence of Bhagavan Ramana
Maharishi at the Tiruvannamalai
Asramam. It reads :
O ye troublesome stomach !
you cannot be
persuaded
to forgo food even
for a day;
nor are you able
to contain
food for two days
together;
you do not seem to realise
the travails I’m put to
through your recurring demands;
and I am led to
conclude
that it is
verily an ordeal
to
co-exist with you !
On
hearing the poem, Ramana Maharishi
who was himself a competent poet laughed and commented that it should be the
other way about. The stomach should groan and complain and not the person. He
composed a counter-poem :
O ye troublesome Life
!
you do not give any respite
to me your hapless stomach
even for a few
moments;
and not a day passes
without your
stuffing me;
you do not seem to realise
the travails I am
put to
through your gluttonous habits
and it is I who
should conclude
that to co-exist with you
is verily an
ordeal !
(The poems originally in Tamil Venba
meter rendered into English by Sage TGN)
- Excerpt from Sage TGN’s Talk
on Bhaja Govindham
: Conquer the World
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