Do you know that feel­ing – hun­ger? Most people no longer know this feel­ing. Food ends up in the rub­bish by the ton. Prosper­ity, it seems, helps cer­tain notions and exper­i­ences to die out, while, thanks to over­feed­ing, pre­vi­ously unknown dis­eases of civil­isa­tion are appear­ing.

Hun­ger is being without a morsel to eat. Then your con­scious­ness nar­rows, and at first you can think only of food, and after a while of noth­ing at all. Your vital func­tions slow down, you would act, but your strength deserts you, and slowly you waste away if you find no nour­ish­ment. Without solid food you could hold out for long weeks, without water for a few days, without air – what a strange, airy food! – for a few minutes at most. And yet you pay the most atten­tion to eat­ing, and the least to breath­ing.

When you are hungry, if for­tune is kind, you can eat. Eat­ing is an exchange of energy – you take some­thing into your­self, you absorb a part of your sur­round­ings. You earn your bread by the sweat of your brow, that is, first you give, and then you accept the fruit of your labours, that is, you receive. You become like the energy you take in: viol­ent intake – viol­ent reac­tion, pure food – pure con­scious­ness, muddled ideas – muddled thoughts. The noblest nour­ish­ment is Real­ity, Truth, Beauty. Fill your­self with Real­ity, Truth and Beauty – and your soul, too, may become like them. And when you nour­ish your­self, you may exper­i­ence three things: your sense of lack lessens, you gain energy, and your con­tent­ment grows. In body and soul alike.

But what do the gods hun­ger for? The gods feed on the offer­ings of man. When they hun­ger and thirst, it is man's offer­ings they long for. It is not mater­i­al goods, ritu­al art­icles or rich sac­ri­fices that are needed. The heav­enly ones may be served with the noblest things in the world: flower petals, incense, pray­ers and a bowed head… Whatever man offers, what counts bey­ond the mater­i­al qual­ity of his sac­ri­fice is a finer qual­ity: inten­tion, love, devo­tion. The true offer­ing is noth­ing other than the wor­ship of God. Not as man thinks, but as the heav­enly ones think.

Many know, and oth­ers only sense, that man's per­son­al con­tent­ment is secured by the con­tent­ment of the world, of the cos­mic order and of the divine hier­archy. The key to man's inner peace is the ser­vice of a high­er truth, a high­er full­ness. Thus man's inner con­tent­ment runs in strict and well-struc­tured par­al­lel with the divine real­ity. When for­tune is kind, heav­en and earth, the heav­enly ones and men, help and serve one anoth­er as part­ners work­ing togeth­er in the uni­verse. When it is not, this bond of sac­ri­fice is broken, and dis­order enters the work­ings of the uni­verse. Man falls out of his cos­mic role and begins to feel unwell.

Accord­ing to sac­red tra­di­tion, wor­ship has sixty-four items: a great many things, from the ringing of the bell, through the offer­ing of incense, to the flower petals strewn at the feet of God. One par­tic­u­lar item makes the offi­cial list intensely per­son­al – offer, too, what is dearest to you. Wor­ship is an offer­ing: man's gift to God… And this stills the cos­mic, divine hun­ger and thirst. To receive is good, to give is very good.

Once, in India, a great saint had a vis­ion: he met the good Lord. Our saint was a pen­ni­less wan­der­ing ascet­ic and fas­ted the whole day long, yet these were the words he heard: ‘In my vil­lage no one goes hungry!’ If the whole uni­verse is the good Lord's vil­lage, then in that vil­lage let no one go hungry: neither men nor the gods.