Readers! This subject is like the heart of the Gītā's whole form. For this body, which is almost wholly made of food, it is food itself (food itself) that confers the low states and the high. Among those who seek to reach the highest state, it has become the way of the world to practise only the disciplines of sādhana as what matters, and it has become a habit to pay no attention to the discipline of “breakfast”. From this it is evident that the discipline of breakfast matters more than the discipline of sādhana. However great the souls, however eminent the scholars, they carry on their sādhanas resting only on the preaching and spreading of Vedānta, but they do not keep the rules of food. In this age no one looks in the least to the purity of the ingredients, the purity of the vessel or the purity of those who cook. Filling the belly and satisfying hunger is all they care about. As soon as it dawns, the first act of worship is coffee, and idli and sāmbār at the hotel is the naivedya offered to Ātmārāma. How can such gluttons find one-pointedness? Purity of the vessel, purity of the cooking, purity of the ingredients: how can these be had in coffee hotels? Who is there to inquire into them? Yet it is precisely because they practise without inquiring into these things that they rack their heads, crying out madly that they have no one-pointedness. The holiness that ought to come comes only when what ought to be done is done properly; but if the very thing being made is a bitter substance, how can it come to have flavour and sweetness? How can they be had? The Gītā has been most severe in its condemnation where food and recreation are concerned. No one notices that; no one takes it as important. That is why, though wherever one looks there is no shortage of those who recite it and those who preach it, its holiness is not seen in the world in the form of practice in the least. The ślokas reach the throat, but their grief does not leave the belly. Only when food and recreation are free of fault will Ānanda and Śānti be gained. Darkness and light cannot both be in one place; they are never so. Kāma and Rāma cannot keep company; theirs is the relation of fire and water. In one hand a book about God, in the other piping hot coffee, or tea, or a cigarette or bīḍī, or snuff... what else can happen but that it turns back on them? (reaction) Nor do they stop there: ‘Whatever one eats, however one eats, wherever one eats, all of it is burnt to ash in the fire of Jñāna,’ they say, and so cover up their own faults. Like the bitter melon that went on pilgrimage and came back as bitter as before, some go on tours of lecturing and preaching. Seeing and hearing the false conduct of such people becomes a cause for atheistic argument to grow stronger still. How can those who cannot restrain even their food hold back the senses? How will those who cannot curb even their food tie down the senses? The strength they cannot bring to bear on that, how will it come to them over these? Can a nose that drops off when one coughs stay on when one sneezes? If a man cannot climb even as high as the hanging pot-sling, how will he crawl up to heaven? Can those who cannot give up even coffee, bīḍīs and snuff give up kāma, krodha, lobha and the rest? Can one who cannot renounce even impurity restrain the Manas? So first give up the craving of the tongue, and the craving of the sexual organ will go. As the foot is bound to the eye, so is the tongue bound to the sexual organ.