Omar, in his late forties, was a senior executive at a multi-billion-dollar telecommunications company. He had been happily married for twenty-one years and had a son and a daughter, both in their teens. He worked out at the gym and ate organic foods. He was in control of his professional life. The whole world, including his wife, saw Omar as a successful and happy man. He brought presents for his wife and took his family out to dinner. They would vacation in a new country for two weeks every year. He managed his personal and professional relationships well. All in all, you couldn’t possibly think that he had any problem.
Omar was healthy until recently when, out of the blue, he had three severe episodes of anxiety attacks with heart palpitations within two weeks. He confided in me, saying that he was torn from the inside and lived in a constant state of fear and helplessness. He thought God was punishing him because he had been sleeping with other women for years. He had started this in the fourth year of his marriage, when his wife was pregnant with their first child, seventeen years ago, he said.
Omar told me, "I love my wife to bits. She’s the perfect wife. I can’t imagine living without her and I love my children. I don’t want to wreck my family and my life, but I’m addicted, Swami. I’m addicted to sex. A million times I’ve promised myself that I will not do this to my wife, but a million times I’ve broken my own promise. I live with this constant guilt. I don’t want to do this, but I can’t help it. I have tried curbing it, I’ve tried distracting myself, but nothing works. I know my wife will leave me if she ever finds out.
"When I look at her, I feel terrible for being disloyal to her for so long. I buy her gifts, I take her on vacations, I donate to charities, I pray, I do everything to somehow make me feel light, but it all fails. My past haunts me and the present tortures me. Sometimes in the middle of a meeting, sometimes while on the treadmill, sometimes in bed, other times while reading, sometimes while watching a movie, I get these thoughts that really worry me. Even if I stop now, what will happen if something from the past springs up? I want to change, Swami. I’m tired of being like this. Please tell me why I am like this. What do I do? How do I fix myself? I think very soon I’m going to die of a heart attack. I can’t take it any more."
Omar broke down. I could see his helplessness.
"Omar," I said, "I’ll ask you just two questions. If the answer is yes to both of them, I know I’ll be able to help you. If not, you’ll have to see a therapist.
"Anything, Swami."
"Was your father an aggressive man? And did your mother put up with his aggression?"
"Yes, Swami. Sometimes she answered back, but it was always a mistake because first my father would shout at her and then withdraw for days and weeks at a stretch to punish her. The atmosphere at home would be extremely tense and unbearable.
"Okay then, Omar. I know what we need to do. I’m not a psychologist or a therapist. But I will tell you that you have to become a strict vegetarian, and you have to practice a certain type of meditation. I promise you’ll see the results within three months."
Omar emailed me every two weeks with a progress report. Three months later, he saw me again and said he hadn’t ever felt as light, energetic, calm, or happy. Meditation and a change in his diet worked for him. It has been over two years, and his sexual urges no longer drive him insane. He wanted to know how and why it worked, but more than that, he was intrigued. What did his father’s aggression or mother’s suffering have to do with his sexual temperament and conduct? And particularly, how did becoming a vegetarian impact his sexual addiction?
From my perspective, it was quite simple. Just like the three physical humours, there’s a certain genetic mental disposition everyone is born with. This relates to the mental, or psychical, humours: they are purity (sattva), passion (rajas), and aggression (tamas). Omar was not conceived in an act of love but lust. His father must have been aggressive at the time. Like an animal, he was simply looking for an outlet to sate his lust. His mother was unhappy in the relationship and felt betrayed, for her husband’s actions had no care, tenderness, or love. In the mixture of passion and lust, in the combination of confusion and indifference, Omar was conceived. I asked him to become a vegetarian because non-vegetarian food is tamasic in nature. Although I’ve seen many vegetarians with similar issues, I particularly wanted Omar to stay off anything that strengthened his genetic disposition.
He was born out of passion and aggression and, as a result, for the better part of his adult life, Omar experienced uncontrollable sexual urges. Aggression doesn’t always mean that you yell or are feisty. Many people express it by withdrawing from others. Either way, it is tamas. Withdrawing to avoid someone is not the same as withdrawing to punish her. Tamas can express itself in the form of extreme negative emotions: anger, hatred, or aggression. Omar’s tamas was not in his behavior towards his wife but in his untamed libido. Our mental humours are the primary driving force behind our habits. Whether they are eating, sleeping, sexual, or social habits, behind all our reactive and impulsive actions, the subtle forces of nature are at work. These are called the modes of material nature. They have the same name as the mental humours. In fact, the scriptures make no distinction between individual dispositions and the modes of material nature. They are identical because we are nature.
Ayurveda specifically documents the correlation and interdependence between one’s mental and physical states. Your state of mind affects your physical health, and your physical health impacts your mental state. Just as your physical body is governed by the three humours, your mind is governed by the three mental humours. The physical humours are called dosha, which literally means fault, principally because they require the most careful balance. An excess in any dosha is never good for the body. Doshas must be balanced and moderated. The mental humours, on the other hand, are not called dosha but guna. Guna means quality.
Taking a cue from yogic and Vedic texts, Ayurveda recognizes that the humours of the mind cannot be absolutely bad or absolutely good. They are subjective. Aggression of the mind may be detrimental to your digestion, but if you are a soldier out on the battlefield, you need adrenaline pumping through your body: you need that aggression to fight, to survive – to do your job. Hence, the humours of the mind are known as virtues or qualities because it’s not so much about what we have, as much as it is about how we use what we have.
The health of your nervous system, vitals, and digestion – and the strength of your immune system – have a direct and definitive correlation with the three mental humours. Unlike the physical humours, these three humours are not permanent. They are forever fluctuating in every individual. Sometimes rajas will win over tamas, other times tamas will win over rajas, and sometimes sattva will win over both. This constant struggle between the humours is the cause of varying moods and mental states in people. Anyone in a physical body is affected by the mental humours. With mindful and righteous living, it is possible to tame the fluctuations to a great degree, directly improving your physical and mental health. Let me elucidate the three humours for you.
This is called tamas in Sanskrit. Tamas also means darkness, illusion, error, and gloom. It primarily refers to a state of aggression. Nature destroys with tamas. The functions of deterioration, death, decay, disintegration, and complete destruction are governed by the mode of ignorance. Anything comprising the five elements must eventually decay. This is the fate of any material entity. These entities may be living or non-living, moving or still, natural or artificial, organic or inorganic. Upon decomposition, they merge back into the five elements.
No matter how dearly or intelligently you hold on to whatever matters to you, eventually, it will meet destruction; it will separate from you. The fundamental law of nature is that everything must go back to its original state. If you boil water and leave it aside, it will go back to a normal temperature. It can’t remain hot forever. If you freeze it and leave it aside, it’ll go back to being water. This is the law of nature. So, not only is tamas not bad, it is necessary because it is simply the stage before restoration and rejuvenation. The destruction in tamas is illusory because nothing is really getting destroyed. Only the forms are changing; it is merely a change of appearance—a sort of transformation.
Tamas in the human mind is the seed of aggression, negativity, hatred, depression, delusion, fear, and anger. In the darkness of tamas, in that illusion, one no longer sees right from wrong. In fact, its rising and gripping ignorance justifies all wrong acts as right. Whether it’s partners lying to each other, people killing each other, governments fooling their people, or countries going on a spree of territorial aggression, tamas makes it all look like a normal part of our contemporary world.
Additionally, tamas means inertia, dullness, and lethargy. Ego is tamas.
Passion is called "rajas" in Sanskrit. Rajas also means blood. Interestingly, rajas also signifies a vaporous cloud or a sphere of mist. This description gives us crucial insight into the nature of passions: they are impermanent and fleeting. Like a cloud of mist, they disappear as soon as they appear. This is the essence of human life.
Throughout our lives, we work hard to feel good, to feel happy. But pleasures are never like a gentle stream – they come in squirts and spurts, as if happiness is teasing us. All pleasures spring from the pursuit of passion. The writer at his desk, the athlete on the field, the scientist in her lab, and the artist with her painting – they all derive a certain pleasure in pursuing their passion. Every time a passion is fulfilled, it gives us a glimpse of happiness. A neurotransmitter is fired in the brain. It feels good. This tiny experience of happiness and euphoria subsides after a while, and then we begin pursuing the passion again.
Consider someone overcome with passion and engaging in the sexual act. It disappears completely as soon as they are done. The passion is gone. Fast-moving currents in a river of urges flow into a gentle sea of calmness and equipoise. Until they come back, that is. This is the nature of passion: it’s transient, it’s short-lived, it’s temporary.
Rajas sits in the middle of the modes of ignorance and goodness because during the arousal of passion, one may lean towards either ignorance or goodness. When one’s passion is dominated by ignorance, one could easily harm another person or even take someone's life. But when goodness dominates passion, one may even jump into the sea, risking one's life to save another person. Passion, when tamed and harnessed, brings out the extraordinary in an individual. Such a person may become an inventor, a scientist, a mathematician, a preacher, an artist, a musician, a peace worker, or an administrative officer. When it is channelled, this energy bestows exceptional absorption, concentration, and persistence on a person.
The fact that the word rajas also means blood signifies that every person has some passion, just as everyone has blood in their bodies. Not everyone discovers their passion, though. Each individual has certain talents and passions hidden within them; it’s in their blood. It’s only a matter of bringing them out. Nature creates with rajas. Therefore, in your microcosm too, creativity is a function of passion. Rajas represents transience, desire, and action.
Purity is called sattva in Sanskrit. Sattva also means goodness, light, and knowledge. But most importantly, it means your innate nature; your basic fabric. Your inherent nature is pure bliss and light. Imagine you are hiding a small lamp in your hands, and you walk into a dark room. As soon as you open your hands, the whole room will light up. The light in your hands has removed the darkness. But what if you walk into a lit room, hiding a bit of darkness in your closed hands? The room will not become dark when you open your hands. There’ll be light all around. Because light is the dharma of nature; it is the way of nature. Similarly, our own true nature is light and bliss. If we become aware of our passions and ignorance, they automatically become feeble because sattva is boosted with awareness.
In fact, yogic and Ayurvedic texts mention knowledge (jnana), scientific knowledge (vijnana), restraint (samyam), mindfulness (smriti), and concentration (ekagrata) as the antidote and treatment for mental afflictions caused by imbalanced mental humours. Each of these five strengthens sattva.
The sage-physician Charaka makes it clear that ignorance and passion can be faults, and therefore may be detrimental to a person’s physical and mental health, but sattva can never be harmful – no matter what. Sattva represents the quintessential mental, psychical, and emotional balance. Nature sustains with sattva. If nature goes out of balance, the world will cease to exist. If rajas is pleasure and joy, then sattva is happiness and bliss.
The constant play and competition between sattva, rajas, and tamas triggers changes in mood, emotion, and the flow of thoughts. Tamas causes a disease, rajas treats it, and sattva heals the sufferer. Sattva represents steadiness, peace, clarity, and balance.
Imagine someone shouts at you aggressively, with an intent to upset you. If then, you contemplate physically abusing or harming this person, it means tamas is strong; it is governing you. In the same situation, if you feel your aggressive emotions well up, but you do not yell at the other person, rajas has won over tamas. If, however, you don’t feel any negativity or aggression; you don’t feel like giving it back to the person, nor do you have to curb your reaction – in simple terms, you remain unaffected – it means that your mode of goodness, sattva, has won over both tamas and rajas.
Our mental and physical humours have an intricate relationship with the energy flow and the digestive fire in our bodies. Vedic texts list many types of fire, notably, the fire of wisdom (jnana-agni), the fire of the senses (darshana-agni), the fire of passions (kama-agni), and the fire of love (prema-agni). For our benefit or to our detriment, these are the fires that heat, transform, mould, and shape us. When unchecked, they can also burn us. Most people in our world are burning in one or more of these fires – the burning to have more money, be famous, be recognized, own something, have someone, be something and do more. These fires first give us warmth, then they dry us out – and then they burn us. These mental fires arise out of fluctuations in our mental humours. They affect the fire in our body directly, impacting our health and well-being.
There are thirteen fires in the human body that control various metabolic functions within the organs and tissues, as well as at the cellular and molecular levels. Among these, the four digestive fires are dominant; they govern the others.
Fire does not discriminate between the good and the bad. It rejects nothing. Imagine a fireplace in a wooden cottage, well-lit and heated. The embers are glowing, and the wood is burning. If this fire goes out of control, it will burn the house down. The fire does not differentiate between the firewood and the wood that the house is made of. A similar lack of discrimination is a critical property of digestive fire. First, it burns the fluids in the stomach, then it burns the solids. If it does not die down, it first burns the vital bodily fluids (apa) and then the life force (prana); the person feels acidic, suffers from heartburn, and becomes parched and dehydrated. Digestive fire only helps the body if it is moderated and managed.
The fire in the physical body is called jathara-agni in Ayurveda. Jathara means stomach, and agni means fire. It helps every living entity digest food. The Vedas name it vaishvanara, meaning universal, sacred, and the sun. From the outside, it may appear that our bodies are generating heat, but the view of the Vedas is far more profound than that. The digestive fire is also called the sun because everything we consume already has the fire of the sun in it. Grains, vegetables, roots – or, in fact, any food items – were all nourished by the sun before they became our food. Hence, the heat was already in them. Our metabolic processes simply reclaimed the heat and passed it on to our system. Later in this book, I talk about how food can be hot or cold – not just in temperature, but in its effect on the body. For now, let me elaborate on the four types of digestive fire.
It is called sama-agni. "Sama" means even and balanced. A stomach with a balanced digestive fire is the sign of a healthy body. In fact, a body can only remain healthy if the digestive fire is in balance. Sama-agni means that vata, pitta, and kapha are even and not vitiated at all. Food digests and assimilates properly in those endowed with balanced digestive fire. It increases the quality of the seven dhatus. It not only leads to fine physical health but perfect mental equilibrium too.
Wicked fire is called vishama-agni. When wind (vata) is vitiated and it affects your digestive fire, it is called vishama-agni. Imagine a flag planted in a place where the wind is blowing sporadically. The flag flutters whenever the wind blows and remains still otherwise. Similarly, vishama-agni alternates between increased secretion of digestive juices and then barely any secretion. The food either gets digested too quickly or too slowly. The patient may think that something is wrong with his food, but his problem is an imbalanced digestive fire. It can lead to diarrhea, dysentery, stomach ulcers, rumbling in the stomach, flatulence, and eructation.
Sharp fire is called "tikshna-agni" in Sanskrit. When the digestive fire is imbalanced due to vitiated heat (pitta), the condition of tikshna-agni arises. The word "tikshna" also means acidic. This fire is particularly acidic in nature. Regardless of the type of food consumed, it digests rather quickly. A person with tikshna-agni tends to feel hungry again soon after having a meal. As soon as the food digests, their throat, mouth cavity, and lips become dry. There is a burning sensation in the chest and stomach, which robs the body of its strength. Tikshna-agni can cause anomalies in urine, colic, hyperacidity, and vertigo. In some cases, it can also lead to hepatomegaly or hematoma.
Slow fire is called manda-agni. When deranged phlegm (kapha) affects the digestive fire, it becomes manda-agni. Manda means slow. A patient with manda-agni eats much less than the average person, and even then is unable to digest the smallest quantity of food. This individual is particularly intolerant of dairy products and feels heaviness in the abdomen and head. This is a highly unhealthy condition. The undigested food produces toxins that rise through the windpipe, causing it to swell temporarily, creating breathing difficulties and other problems. This is the primary cause of asthma, bronchitis, cough, nausea, and fatigue. Patients suffering from manda-agni experience irregular bowel movements and tend to drool while sleeping due to excess salivation.
People governed by sattva generally have a balanced fire. Those with a predominance of rajas tend to have either wicked or sharp fire, depending on the state of vata in their body. Those with more tamas have slow fire. We can either align our mental humors and fix our physical ailments, or we can change our lifestyle and soothe our mental afflictions. Neither option is mutually exclusive. Yogic scriptures advocate building mental and moral discipline to attain perfect health. Ayurveda, on the other hand, focuses on the outward influencing the inward. It encourages an external discipline to feel happy and healthy. It demonstrates how food can transform us.
Ayurveda states that one should consume foods according to one’s constitution. When we do that, our nature starts to synchronize with nature, and the foods we eat lead to better health and harmony. Each food has a certain quality that affects our well-being. Just like we have physical and mental humors, food too has something similar.
Every natural food has a living energy in it. This is the mystical aspect of our food. It is why the fermentation of grapes and the fermentation of wheat are not the same. Even if two foods have identical tastes throughout the four stages of digestion, it doesn’t mean that they’ll have the same effect on your mind. In the short term, they may appear to have the same effect on your body. Ultimately, it’s their effect on your mind that will determine the outcome for your body.
Foods invigorate or aggravate your genetic disposition. The food you eat and the manner in which you eat it make a great difference to your physical and mental health. No, I’m not asking you to become a vegetarian, I’m simply giving you a new perspective on food.