Ayurveda - Sattvic, Rajasic, And Tamasic Foods, And The Peat Connection

[Vajra]

Nowadays many monks are very ill and diabetic as they age because the villagers will give them tons of sweets and rolls and poorly made Thai/Sri Lanakan Street food. They start their monasticism very skinny and eventually many get fat as they age. I used to think this was due to a slowing down of metabolism from the long term intermittent fasting, now I suspect it’s due to the nasty cheap vegetable oils and sugary wheat foods they are given. Just my thoughts on it.

Yeah it's definitely all the PUFA and in their case intermittent fasting probably does more good than harm. But isn't this the case for basically every location? What country has the peatiest alms? In certain areas of the 1st world I guess there's less 'street food' type stuff but probably less fruit. Tibetans are (China) were probably the best off.

You ever take a gigantic bong rip in highschool and just stare at a spot on the wall of my friend Jeff’s Led Zeppelin poster and just sort of fall into a state of pure apathy and thoughtless dullness, so much so that you couldn’t move a muscle in your arms if you wanted to, and the desire to do so completely removed even though there’s a box of cookies directly to your right, which previous to the epic rip you had very much wanted, but you still don’t grab one...not so much out of a sense of peace and equanimity, but out of sheer freaking laziness? And then Jeff says, “Whoa that was a huge rip man, do you want a glass a water?” But you have forgotten what water is. You don’t even have the capacity to ask yourself the question, “What is water?” You can only exist in a dull, dark, state of motionless ignorance as you stare blankly at the spot on the poster which has become the emblem of the eternal void you will remember for the rest of your natural life?

Lmao

 

[AdR]

If an artificial-laden food like Cheetos causes twitching and acute stimulation I’d say that’s more indicative of an adverse reaction to something in the food versus the distinct nature of its gunas. (And twitching would likely be more indicative of vata rather than pitta, IMO. But that’s not the point.)

But maybe Cheetos was a bad example. It’s been too long since I’ve had some. I can say that those pre-packaged lifeless pastries you can find at most gas stations which have been sitting there for months will reliably produce a tamasic state for me: apathy, inertia, dullness. But it’s been a long time since I’ve had some of those, too.

My point was you can identify the guna quality of food for yourself, not that Cheetos were the definitive tamasic quality producing food.

Something to consider that might seem like a tangent is that gunas make up our entire material existence. I believe nearly everything has shades of tamas, rajas, and sattva to varying degrees. So in that sense, yes, red meat inherently likely contains some tamas, but it’s almost semantics at this point, because the overwhelming quality of fresh beef, for example, is pretty obviously not causing inertia, dullness, darkness, and apathy in most people. (It could produce ama though, especially in someone who couldn’t digest it, and the clogging, toxic nature of ama could produce tamasic qualities...but that’s also besides the point.) When you identify the quality of a guna like tamas you then know what mantras (or rather what repeated combination of sounds) will produce a state of tamas. What music. What foods. What people. What drugs. What thoughtforms. What postures. Is it to some degree individual? Probably. But like everything else in life, there are general trends, including food qualities. But you don’t need an “expert“ telling you the sky is blue, you can look up and see it for yourself.

The main point I wanted to get across by ranting and raving here is that we know pretty clearly that cultures that lived almost exclusively on red meat for the majority of the year, such as the mongols, were clearly not filled with an overwhelming sense of inertia, apathy, and dullness. (As I said, you can’t be an effective warrior if you’re overall state is tamasic.) So thus it is impossible red meat is de facto tamasic. The proof is in the (blood) pudding.

I find it interesting btw, that the standard way the Mongolians ate their red meat, was by boiling it in a pot with hot rocks. Boiling is, as I mentioned earlier, the most sattvic way of preparing meat.

Also, I don’t think your mind feeling “massive” or the slow and steady way cheese and red meat make your movements feel is a quality of inertia. Inertia is the tendency to not move at all. Your reaction to slow and steady movement from those foods is more indicative of it’s quality of density, which both of those foods are. As is the feeling of your head feeling “massive” which has nothing to do with inertia either. Again that is density. As I said earlier, it’s easy to mistake density with tamas.

You ever take a gigantic bong rip in highschool and just stare at a spot on the wall of my friend Jeff’s Led Zeppelin poster and just sort of fall into a state of pure apathy and thoughtless dullness, so much so that you couldn’t move a muscle in your arms if you wanted to, and the desire to do so completely removed even though there’s a box of cookies directly to your right, which previous to the epic rip you had very much wanted, but you still don’t grab one...not so much out of a sense of peace and equanimity, but out of sheer freaking laziness? And then Jeff says, “Whoa that was a huge rip man, do you want a glass a water?” But you have forgotten what water is. You don’t even have the capacity to ask yourself the question, “What is water?” You can only exist in a dull, dark, state of motionless ignorance as you stare blankly at the spot on the poster which has become the emblem of the eternal void you will remember for the rest of your natural life?

That’s tamas.

Hopefully that example is more exact than eating Cheetos and we’ve all been in my old friend’s Jeff’s basement taking overly huge bong rips once or twice.

I got my start in Ayurveda with the free Charaka Samhita from iBooks a few years ago (lol). I was born in India myself, and that is part of the reason for my interest. I visited an ayurvedic resort in India about a year after I started learning about it. The guys there had their own cows, lived in the jungle on solar power, used rainwater or water from a natural spring, etc. I agree with a lot of what you have said, agni is the main thing and can invalidate much of what we believe about food combinations, though not all of it. I also agree that people on this forum who are mixing and matching whatever they want should try cleaner combinations and see if they don't end up noticing a positive difference.

With regard to the topic of sattva, rajas, and tamas. I would say there is a dark and a light side to all three, even sattva. All of the things that fall into a particular category have similar impacts of keenness of perception, but certainly not on long-term health. Some mushrooms for example may be outstanding for long term health, but they all weigh heavily on the perception by means of creating tremendous groundedness and a sense of uniformity within the body. You might call it a very loud sensation that is tremendously difficult to ignore. Old/decayed food also has this quality, but it is quite detrimental to long term health.

In the rajasic category, coffee will have similar impacts on insight and intellect as something like tobacco, but will have different impact on the body over time.

Sattvic things include bitter herbs, which break down and strip away things in the body. Also included in the sattvic category is milk, which builds the body up. All in all they both remove distractions from the mind, but in totally different ways, and with different impacts on the path the body follows in the long-term.

Having said all this, I think a sattvic diet produces health, both by healing the body and creating space for a mind that does not crave unhealthy foods or an unhealthy lifestyle. Rajasic and tamasic foods taken in the right proportion for the right reasons can produce highly sattvic effects. The thing about the developed world is that things that are supposed to be sattvic have spent so much time getting to us that they no longer are, so we have to do a massive amount of perceiving and subsequent tailoring of our diets just to produce sattvic effects in ourselves.

Make no mistake, if you move to a farm/ranch (where things are done as they should be) or move in with pastoralists, sattvic foods and their effects will abound, and you will prosper if you want to, but the challenge of growing up and getting along in a complex and totally suboptimal world is creating a generation of truth-seekers who will rise to that challenge. In doing so, they are attaining a level of nuance that previous generations had no need for-- the same way that living through Ice Ages made some tough men and women. It's like swimming with a weight chained to your leg and one arm behind your back. Once you finally break the rope fastening your arm and find yourself strong enough to swim with the weight, you will be a special brand of human being that has never existed and may not exist again for a very long time.