According to eastern mystic tradition, all that you think you are is nothing but food. Your body is food, your mind is food, your soul is food. Beyond the soul there is certainly something which is not food. That something is known as anatta, no-self. It is utter emptiness. Buddha calls it shunya, the void. It is pure space. It contains nothing but itself; it is contentless consciousness.
While the content persists, the food persists. By 'food' is meant that which is ingested from the outside. The body needs physical food; without it, it will start deteriorating. This is how it survives; it contains nothing but physical food.
Your mind contains memories, thoughts, desires, jealousies, power trips, and a thousand and one things. All that is also food; on a more subtle plane it is food. Thought is food. Hence when you have nourishing thoughts your chest expands. When you have thoughts which give you energy you feel good. Somebody compliments you, and look what happens to you — you are nourished. And somebody says something uncomplimentary about you, and watch — it is as if something has been snatched away from you...
The mind is food in a subtle form. The mind is the inner side of the body; hence what you eat affects your mind... You can watch it yourself. Eat something and watch, eat something else and watch. Keep notes, and you will become aware and surprised to find that each thing that you digest is not only physical, it has a psychological part to it. It makes your mind vulnerable to certain ideas, to certain desires.
Since long, there has been a search for a kind of food that will not strengthen the mind but will help it to finally dissolve; a kind of food which, instead of strengthening the mind, will strengthen meditation, no-mind. No fixed and certain rules can be given, because people are different and each one has to decide for himself.
Talk less, listen only to the essential, be telegraphic in talking and listening. If you talk less, if you listen less, slowly you will see that a feeling of purity will start rising within you. That becomes the necessary soil for meditation. Don't go on reading all kinds of nonsense.
Leave a few gaps in your mind unoccupied. Those moments of unoccupied consciousness are the first glimpses of meditation, the first penetrations of the beyond, the first flashes of no-mind. And then if you can manage to do this, the other thing is to choose physical food which does not help aggression and violence, which is not poisonous. Become bigger, become huge. Why are you living in tunnels? Why are you creeping into small dark black holes? But you think you are living in great ideological systems. You are not living in great ideological systems, because there are no great ideological systems. No idea is great enough to contain a human being; being-hood cannot be contained by any concept. All concepts cripple and paralyse.
Your body is not poisoned as much as your mind is. The body is a simple phenomenon, it can be easily cleaned. If you change your poisonous foods you will be surprised; a new intelligence will be released in you. And this new intelligence will make it possible not to go on stuffing yourself with nonsense. This new intelligence will make you capable of dropping the past and its memories, of dropping unnecessary desires and dreams, dropping jealousies, angers, traumas and all kinds of psychological wounds.
Excerpted from The Book of Wisdom. Courtesy: Osho International Foundation. www.osho.com.