When you try to cook a meal, you need to have with you all the essential ingredients: rice, dal, salt, lime, spices and vegetables. But unless you have the fire in the hearth, you cannot get the edible meal. So too, with life Jnana (knowledge of your own reality as just a wave of the ocean of Divinity) is the fire which makes the material world and the external activities and experience, edible and tasty, assimilable, health-granting and joy-giving. That joy is called Anandam; it is uplifting, illuminating, and constructive. Life 'here' is to reach ‘there’ (that is to say, iha-nivasam is for para-prapthi [attaining the beyond]). Treat your body as a wound that must be washed, bandaged, and treated with medicated ointment, three or four times a day. That is the real purpose of food and drink. Thirst is the disease; drink is the drug. Hunger is the disease; food is the medicine. Craving for pleasure is the disease for which detachment is the medicine!

- Divine Discourse Mar 16, 1966.