Dr. James Hardt on Letting Go of Time and Money (Interview Archive)

Consider the position of a commodities day trader. Their entire world comes down to two things: time and money. Asking someone like that to release their grip on both, as a condition for reaching a transcendent state, turns out to be enormously difficult. Not out of reach, but it means dismantling a belief system they've built their life around. If you want to live at a high level, you have to step outside of time. A Biocybernaut training asks for exactly that. You hand over your watch and your phone. For the week, you also give up onions, garlic, alcohol, nicotine and tobacco, and caffeine.

Erik asked the obvious question: why onions and garlic? Nicotine and alcohol make sense on their own, but what do those two vegetables have to do with any of it?

James traced it back to Yogananda's correspondence lessons, which he had taken up years earlier. Very early in that material, Yogananda made the point plainly: anyone serious about meditation should drop onions and garlic, because they encourage a rajasic temperament.

He unpacked the idea a bit. Indian philosophy, much like the old Greek systems, held that the physical world is built from four elements: earth, air, fire and water. A modern person can map those onto solid, liquid, gas and plasma, which covers most of what the physical universe is made of. The three Gunas operate on a more abstract level. Tamas is the principle of ignorance and inertia. Rajas is ego, activity and will. Sattwa is the principle of enlightenment.

Onions and garlic, in Yogananda's reading, pushed a person toward rajas. They stir up the mind in a way that works against the calm you need to meditate, to let go, and above all to reach a transcendent state. Biocybernaut sends each incoming student a piece of science journalism on the subject, one James recalled coming from Wired. It described researchers who had to drop garlic eaters from their study, since the garlic was suppressing alpha activity and leaving people more agitated.

Some people are so fond of the flavor that none of this moves them. They'll argue, sometimes with real heat, about how unreasonable it is to ask them to go a single week without garlic, which is itself a small demonstration of the point. Look at cultures where garlic features heavily in the cooking and you tend to find more excitability. During a training, if someone slips at breakfast and a restaurant quietly works onions or garlic into the meal, that student will likely lose most of the day's value. Their mind stays stirred up, they can't settle, and they can't drop into the feedback.