"Gurur Brahma Gurur Vishnuhu Guru Devo Maheswaraha
Guru Saakshaat Parabhrahma Tasmai Sri Gurave Namaha”
So, its the first Thurday of the Shravan Maas today. The tithi is called Shukla Panchmi. Both the day and the tithi are said to be ruled by the deity Brihaspati who is also called the Guru or teacher of all the other deities or demi-gods. This deity is none other than the biggest planet in our solar system called Jupiter, also known as Brihaspati, the teacher of all other planets.
The ancients probably understood a bit about Jupiter's influence over life on earth and thus coded this information in stories based on the life of a master priest and scholar named Brihaspati who embodied the similar characteristics and position so had the planet named after him. You can read these mythological stories in many places but the significance of Jupiter as the highest planet (named after Brihaspati, the highest order priest) is mentioned in the Geeta when Krishna says:
purodhasāḿ ca mukhyaḿ māḿ
viddhi pārtha bṛhaspatim
senānīnām ahaḿ skandaḥ
sarasām asmi sāgaraḥ
meaning:
Of priests, O Arjuna, know Me to be the chief, Brihaspati. Of generals I am Kartikeya, and of bodies of water I am the ocean.
Wearing yellow clothes and eating one meal (without salt) a day which includes yellow items like moongdal or channadal, yellow fruits and yellow spice (turmeric) is the ritual. An important part of this ritualistic fasting is, listening to the Vrat Katha associated with Lord Vishnu.
Listening to the Vrat Kathas before having the meal of the day is considered very important. These Kathas or stories often revolve around people seeking specific fruitive results to rid miseries from their life.
If you look at the cause of all dissatisfaction and miseries in our life, we can pin it down to our mind which is influenced by our eating habits. This is all connected to the Water element. Water is also the element of emotion and fluidity and it the element responsible for our sense of taste.
The next question why yellow?
Yellow color is said to decrease taste sensitivity (color does affect the basic sensitivity of tastes). How it works is when your taste buds come in contact with food, they send signals to your brain to interpret flavor. Because we look at our food before eating, our eyes send signals to our brain well before our taste buds get the chance. This can predetermine how we will perceive the taste and flavor of what we' re about to eat.
Besides, most yellow fruits and foods such as the dals mentioned above, even turmeric are all dominant in the astringent taste which is produced from a combination of Earth and Air elements.
Earth when combined with Air in an individual makes for someone well-versed in contradiction. Air lends a certain amount of caution and thoughtfulness to the earthy pursuit of sensation and experience. On the other side, Earth forces Air to interact with the world as a whole, not allowing it to deny the value of the senses. The result is a healthy internal conflict. And when you add water to this combo, you get potential for great depths of feeling, a sound grounding in reality, and the rational instinct needed to function truly effectively in a rationally ordered world. With this triad, a person is not prone to excesses of any of these elements; he will not delve into hedonism, nor will he withdraw from the universe entirely. His emotions are very real things to him, but not overwhelmingly so.
It is exactly the path to self-realization as described in the Bhagwat Geeta. In chapter 3 Verse 36, when Arjun asks Krishna:
by what is one impelled to sinful acts, even unwillingly, as if engaged by force?
To which Krishna replies in Verse 37:
It is lust, which is born of contact with the material modes of passion and later transformed into wrath, and which is the all-devouring, sinful enemy of this world.
What follows in the next few Verses is a lengthy explanation about how our mind senses and intelligence are the main seat for this lust. The purpose of this conversation then is to be able to control them systematically to achieve the state of balance which requires first and foremost to recognize the problem or enemy that needs to be destroyed. Verse 38, 39, 40 describes the problem as follows:
As fire is covered by smoke, as a mirror is covered by dust, or as the embryo is covered by the womb, similarly, the living entity is covered by different degrees of this lust.
Thus, a man's pure consciousness is covered by his eternal enemy in the form of lust, which is never satisfied and which burns like fire.
The senses, the mind and the intelligence are the sitting places of this lust, which veils the real knowledge of the living entity and bewilders him.
This lust described here is nothing but an imbalance of the basic elements that make us up.
The next question, Why avoid Salt during guruvaar fasting?
It helps to know here that the salty taste is made of Fire and Water elements, often described as the most"unstable" combination of elements because both of these elements are given over to passion of some sort. Water's depth is powered by the inherent force in fire viz. raw power, the creator and destroyer (recall the Panchmahabhuta Theory, the element water is formed when fire burns itself out). Like fire, it is a flux element, one that is very easily changeable and it is what is responsible for deep emotions and moodiness.
Salt (or a combination of fire and water elements) affects these emotions which are prone to change, often without warning, and without apparent reason by holding the waters within the body.
Problems tend to phase a fire/water combination, as their general inclinations are either to blast through or flow around them. And both these approaches are fairly contradictory leading to indecisiveness and dissatisfaction. Dissatisfaction in our mind often results in overindulgence of senses and we misread our needs as conveyed by the self, this causes problems to become cyclic in nature.
Such sense gratification also dulls our intelligence and thinking. Hence in Verse 41, Krishna advices Arjun:
tasmāt tvam indriyāṇy ādau
niyamya bharatarṣabha
pāpmānaṁ prajahi hy enaṁ
jñāna-vijñāna-nāśanam
meaning:
Therefore, O Arjuna, best of the Bhāratas, in the very beginning curb this great symbol of sin [lust] by regulating the senses, and slay this destroyer of knowledge and self-realization.
Earth and water in combination leads to something very sensual and moody indeed. Without any of the distancing possible from the light elements like air, this personality is easily drawn into the sensual, the exotic, and the new. While earth does mitigate some of water's tendencies towards mutability, this combination is still somewhat unpredictable, particularly if water edges out earth as the dominant force. The combination of deep-felt emotion and links to the senses makes this person very tied to the world as it is, as well as its experiences. Fasting and yellow foods help introduce the missing Air element to fix the imbalance.
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