Page:Hatha yoga - or the yogi philosophy of physical well-being, with numberous excercises.djvu/74

74 grow into a more rational method of eating, rather than have it forced upon him suddenly. It is hard for one to adopt a non-meat diet, if he has been used to animal flesh all his life, and it is equally difficult for one to take up an uncooked dietary list, if he has been eating cooked dishes all his life. All we ask of you is to think a little on the subject and to trust your own instinct regarding the choice of food, giving yourself as great a variety as possible. The instinct, if trusted, will usually cause you to select that which you need for that particular meal, and we would prefer to trust the instinct rather than to bind ourselves to any fixed, unchangeable dietary. Eat pretty much what you feel like, providing you masticate it thoroughly and slowly, and give yourself a wide range of choice. We will speak, in this chapter, of a few things which the rational man will avoid, but will do so merely in the way of general advice. In the matter of non-meat eating, we believe that mankind will gradually grow to feel that meat is not its proper diet, but we believe that one must outgrow that feeling, rather than to have it beaten out of him, for if he "longs" for the flesh-pots of Egypt, it is about as bad as if he really participated in the feast. Man will cease to desire meat, as he grows, but until that time comes, any forced restraint of the meat habit will not do him much good. We are aware that this will be considered heterodox by many of our readers, but we cannot help that fact—our statements will stand the test of experience.

If our students are interested in the question of the relative advantages of particular kinds of foods, let