There are some who, through systematic regulation of their diet, come to gain a complete mastery over themselves and their appetites and passions. Dieting is not at all a new technique in India. The ancient Rishis not only knew the vitamin-contents and the caloric-values of the various food materials, but also prescribed very scientific combinations of the available vegetables and cereals to suit the temperament, function, and duties of persons belonging to different levels of society. Not only this; they so well perfected their knowledge that they even showed how, through regulated dieting, a man’s character and behaviour, and ultimately his very cultural quality, can be purified and raised.
The verse adds that all these “KNOWERS OF Yajna,” meaning all those who know “the art of living these techniques,” when they practice them in a spirit of self-dedication and selfless enthusiasm, can fully come to profit by them. These methods and techniques do not promise that they will, of themselves, guide us or lead us to the Supreme. It is promised that all those who practise all, or a few, or even one of them for a sufficiently long period, can become “PURIFIED OF THEIR SINS.”
Sin, we have already discussed, is but a wrong pattern of thought-channels that is etched in a mind by devolutionary thoughts, entertained by a deluded ego in its extreme misunderstanding and its consequent attachment with the body and sense-objects. It is these sinful vasanas that make the ego act like an animal and force it to commit low and vicious criminalities. The above-mentioned practices not only wipe clean the existing wrong-vasanas but cut out in their place new-channels-of-thoughts, more constructive and evolutionary in their very nature.
Thus, it must be carefully noted that all practices, physical, mental, or intellectual, that are generally known as divine and religious, are, without exception, only techniques by which the mind-and-intellect equipment gets adjusted for greater and more effective self-application in meditation. Meditation is the “path” in which the ego learns to withdraw its false evaluations of itself in particular, and of life in general, and comes to the final experience of its own divine nature. We often find sincere seekers getting so extremely attached to their own “path” of practice that they constantly argue about it among themselves. Therefore, Arjuna has been instructed here that all “paths,” however noble and great they may be, are all but means, and not an end in themselves.
IN ALL THE ABOVE-ENUMERATED TWELVE DIFFERENT “YAJNA-TECHNIQUES,” SELF-EFFORT IS A COMMON FACTOR, AND THEREFORE, THE LORD SAYS:
