Falling asleep for a while... and ponderings on sexual energy

Just recently I've resumed normal eating (cooked vegan), eating a lot more than I have for a long time. Typical family life, the cold weather, and a bug that I've caught, make me unable or unwilling to reach out any further, at this time. Perhaps I also feel that with Christmas coming, to opt out would be a mean thing to do, with the children and my wife who has happily adjusted to my veganism, and often fruit tendencies...

I don't feel bad about it, and I also feel that some beings out there see this as a welcome thing to do, for a variety of reasons.

And yet... I feel somehow that my connection to many things has dimmed, because of the food. Also, I've been having random sexual thoughts, which I look at with detachment, even humour. These thoughts, interestingly, are associated with the consumption of food. I read somewhere once, in a Buddhist text, that appetite for food and sexual appetite are closely related. Certainly, these instincts seem to come from basically the same areas of the body. 

In a study related by Richard Wrangham, in his book Catching Fire (How Cooking Made Us Human), I was interested to see that a study conducted on raw vegans and fruitarians, showed decreased sexual appetite and where some women even stopped having periods. This was regarded as a bad thing in the study (as of course, the success of the human race depends on reproduction) and therefor showed the detrimental nature of these diets. Obviously, in general culture, decreased libido is seen as a 'bad' thing, and where somehow happiness is meant to be attained by people having sex. And yet, in spiritual culture, happiness is attained from rising above sex or food impulses - and where sexual unions, or eating, are based on principles of love and decision.

Anyway, I've found this before, that food, especially certain foods, stimulate areas of the body that generate sexual feelings.

Eating has its drawbacks. A yogi text I read once recommended staying away from spicey foods, as these were 'rajasic', fire inducing (and would therefor increase sexual appetite).

I'll get back food refinement after the Christmas period.

Negative Emotions and Food

Something is definitely going on inside of me. Sometimes I feel like my body is a totally different entity to who or what I’m used to. I also feel that it’s turning into something different, and I can feel different energies at work. I can feel an accumulation of energy in me, that is so solid that it even feels physical,  it’s like an energy of light with real opacity, or substance. So i feel strong at the moment.  For me, this is a deeply welcome transformation - I even feel that everything that I have gone through in my life, is to bring me to this point.

An aspect of things, is that I find myself continually challenged as to my thought patterns on basically everything. I might write one thing or another, but it’s only a perspective, an opinion. In many ways, I really don’t know what to think anymore. I don’t even think (!), that thinking in an analytical fashion has any great use in the scheme of things. I don’t know.

While working on what I put into my body, I’ve been experiencing real irritation recently. On the one hand I feel that I’m working  through stuff, and getting rid of stuff, while on the other, I feel that inner essences are being re-balanced, to get to a better blend of passivity/assertiveness. This irritation is a curious thing - I feel so irritable, when there’s no real reason for it. Conventionally I might think to myself, it’s because my blood sugar levels are down, but I know that this isn’t the whole answer. As irritability passes, I feel peaceful and somehow secure. Then feelings of irritation and sort of soreness come back. It makes me think of when I cut down drastically from being veggie to vegan, an incessant pain that I had across my chest area - this was emotional pain, for various reasons, but which went some time ago now, and no longer experience.

I’m learning that it isn’t so much what I eat, it’s quantity that matters - the less the better. For example, this morning I had some orange juice, for lunch a sandwhich with lettuce and a veggie sausage in it (ha ha, like a good old fashioned sausage butty). This evening? I don’t feel like I want to have anything really, but will be eating with my other half some cooked food, due to a difficult day (last night was just fruits again). Just being outside under the moon and the stars, in the cold air, was enough. But  today has been difficult for various reasons.

Which brings me onto the title of this blogpost: negative emotions and food. They are so connected I think (just my subjective opinion). There’s nothing much to conclude about this, except that negative emotions clearly trigger a need for something - usually food. And negative emotions can lead to so many different types of food problems, addiction or aversion. This is also why I have been so keen to keep a healthy approach to food, and its place. The refinement of a bodyspiritual nature, which I find myself writing about, and this need to refine food intake, I want to conduct in a positive and even cheerful way, perhaps as a way of rooting out negativities and avoiding potential (psychological) problems. This means being happy about eating, if it lasts, and allowing the subtle processes to slowly become more established.

What was going to happen?

When I had an astonishing urge to refine things in my life, including my diet, I turned vegan from vegetarian. I lost a lot of weight, from just under 13 stone (about 82 kg)  to now 10 stone (about 63 kg) (I'm 6ft2 in height = 1.87m). At first, my weight dropped to 11 stone, and I was happy with that. I just cut out all of the rubbish really and of course dairy and so on. I've felt great - more flexible, stronger, greater endurance, and of course I look skinnier. I felt like 11 stone was my personal weight, but without really depriving myself, my weight continued to drop, levelling off at 10 stone. At first I wasn't happy about that, but I've easily adapted to this new weight which is normal for me now.

But something has been pushing me onward, and I've been eating less and less recently (well, that is, until 4 days ago), where for 3 days I ate very little, just a little bit of food at one point in the day, and on one day nothing, just juices. I could feel the deeper things of existence with greater clarity. This was a kind of juice-fasting. I could feel a kind of alliance between myself and a deeper reality. And yet...

When I checked my weight, I had dropped to nearly 9 and a half stone (about 61.5kg) and was beginning to look outlandishly slim (but not lacking in energy, I have to say). Still, that was enough for me to worry, and since then I've been eating a lot more. Ironically, while I was worrying about this weight issue, and deciding to get back onto food (cooked and non-cooked), I could feel the strongest impulse yet from deeper sources, toward refinement, which was saying 'don't worry, we have you in hand'. Yet, I haven't been willing (yet) to follow this impulse fully (at this time).

The thing is that being back on the eating, is that I don't feel great on it. In a way it's a series of eating inputs, to mask over the somewhat down feeling from the previous inputs -  a cycle at work. Experiencing things this clearly though is very instructive, to see how food works.

What was going to happen with my weight loss? would it have stabilised? I'll have to reduce again at some point, for the spiritual reasons that seem to drive me on.

I'm beginning to see the value also of a quick  process, such as the well-walked path of the 21 day process, to make a clean break, though I have little attraction toward it.

Generally, I also have this feeling that there are changes going on inside of me, that are really quite unhindered whether I eat or not, and that it's just a question to time and timing.

The thinning out of food

I thought it was time to update my blog, to chart my progress. I've discovered that maintaining an account can be a useful and an interesting thing. Even if... the intellect is ultimately a rather futile tool when grasping the deeper wonders of our existence. I - or we - think one thing, believing a certain thing to be true or at least a plausible explanation for something, but in fact, it appears to me that intellectualisations of any kind, are only made-up structures that attempt to explain what is already there, or what has already happened. It appeals to the ego, really; some process that exists in time, and needs a map of some kind. But who knows why anything works, why anything exists at all; why humans appeared on earth, how it happened, and indeed, why humans evolved certain eating habits. It happened, and it happens....

Personally, apart from the above abstract, there's more personal stuff I'll detail, with regards to my change of diet. In some ways I've become even more orientated toward fruits, avoiding cooked food. And yet, foods which have been cooked in the past e.g. an oat biscuit, don't weigh as much on me as say, a freshly cooked bean stew. So I still go to some extent for pre-cooked oat based things; and yet, it's fresh fruits that really do it for me.

And yet... Often I feel like the things I'm eating, are equivalent to eating stones or metal. I use this analogy to describe how solid foods often feel to me - really extreme. Extreme inputing o substances... And yet, the hit I get from them, is amazing! When I observe myself eating, I can see that eating really is an imposition on the self, in some ways. Not a bad thing, but a sort of exaggeration of things, a thing learned from the ancestors. At this point in time, I see no real way out of it.

However, recently, I drank juices for breakfast and lunch, which suited me well, though I ate more later in the evening. I think what I need to do, is set aside a time for proper fasting. Not for the sake of 'not eating', but because, I experience the fact that when I'm empty of food, I feel things much more clearly. I'll do a day's fast soon, and see how I feel.

A Curtain Of Light

Today I've been mostly fruit based again - and how much better I  feel!

In my last post I mentioned an alleviating of fear, and I want to expand on that a little. At the moment, I feel like fear in all its forms and guises is being dislodged from within me; it feels like a very practical and even deliberate process. And with this refining of food, I've been re-experiencing things as I used to do as a child, before I became absorbed by all the confusing signals of this world. This happens to so many of us - we experience the wonderment of creation as a child, but somehow are unable to draw down this reality, until a little later in life, and create an expression of it in our environment - we became beset by fears and other constrictions. When I say wonderment, I don't mean so much as an imaginative approach to life, as a direct experience of the forces and glue that bind this world together - the quality of the experience is very different. Which brings me to my title for today's journal.

I've been feeling this implaccable wall or curtain of light, that comes down onto me. The experience is quite different to communications or sensations from the 'other' side, rather, it's a force that somehow goes deeper than that. In some ways it feels like Love, that is there regardless of who I am; and so, I'm both caught by this drastic sense of impersonality, and yet also by this sense of Divine reality. And I realise, that Love really is automatic, blesses evenly, regardless of whether someone is a murderer or a saint. Perhaps this 'fear of God' that crops up in religions, is an experience of this type. The only way that I can take, or stand firmly in the light of this force, is to work on myself and work up my inner balance. Like everyone else, the Being behind creation Loves me, but how much of it can I truly, really accept? Mysticism often refers to the levels of existence, and that higher forces and beings are too much to bear for souls who are lower down the steps/wheels of creation; perhaps this is something along those lines.

Another thing I experience, is that turning away from food isn't done because food is bad  per se (er-humm.... obviously!!), but because being filled with the Spirit, for want of a better (and less religious!) description, is far more satisfying than the sensations of food. Perhaps an analogy could be: once someone has eaten great food from a great cook, they realise how unsatisfying the food they used to eat before was, from the not-so-great cook! Same thing, but in a deeper way...

A few days of Cooked food

A few days on cooked food

There's so much I'm learning with regards to food. For the last three nights I had cooked food, and I can't say that I feel good on it. In the mornings I can feel kind of muddy - nothing like the lightness from just eating fruit. This process of change in me is unstoppable. I can feel all these things going on inside my body, and my being. I seem to have moved past a whole aspect of fear. More and more I'm feeling the supportive nature of existence. It's strange how experiences of things that penetrate and encompass the material world, are infinite in tone and quality, ever new. I hope that these dark ages that humanity exists in, passes for a while - and all this automatic belief in food consumption with all of the so-called empirical science to support these notions, are seen for what they are. Knowledge bases that really are only self-referring, but that never comprehend the deeper causes of things.

There are so many mysteries, that can only be understood through intuition. So much value is put on empirical methods, and yet, when there's something that doesn't fit a certain model, these things are discarded. For example, evolutionary theory can never answer where on earth (excuse the pun) the Aboriginal people of Australia came from. And that is only one hole, of many, that exist in modern thinking.

Even though I prefer fruits, I find rice ok. But even then, food feels like such blockage. I feel like my body is just saying no to these things; but for the while, from habit and situation, I'm likely to continue eating things, even though I feel that it has short term period for me. I feel more and more attracted to juices. Which I find a little surprising, as I seem to be following a general pattern so far i.e. flesh-eating, vegetarian, vegan, raw-vegan, fruitarian, liquidarian... But who knows what will happen next.

 Really, it's such an odd thing ingesting matter. Even fruits and so on, are things of the earth, which are there for their own sake, and that of creation. All things have an effect. Even though eating fruits doesn't have the same impact on self and others as flesh-eating, it's still part of the loop of creation.

I'm really learning the ultra-importance of non-judgement toward everyone, in whatever people do. This seems to be an essential factor in progress, on all levels.

Some developments and realisations, a recap

For a while now I've been feeling this urge to refine my food intake. On this path, I've become vegan from being a vegetarian (though I can't technically call myself a fruitarian nor raw vegan at this point, though I have strong tendencies that way), and I have to say, it feel fantastic leaving these animal products behind e.g. milk and eggs. It isn't only the ethical side of it, and compassion for living creatures that have a sense of self, but also to avoid putting animal energy into my body. It's funny how one becomes accustomed to eating certain things. I remember I always felt eggs to be somewhat weird to eat, but got used to it; and now I can see the weirdness for what it really is. It's putting chicken energy into my body! Do I want chicken energy in my body?? So it isn't just an ethical aspect, in some ways, it's about purifying oneself. It's the aspect associated with forging a path toward unity.

The main drive behind this refinement, is this feeling that we're evolving as a planet, and that each individual who works at their lives, and their food intake, adds to the overall effect of change. We're all changing together. One day we will exist in this planet without needing physical food, once the addictions and attachments have passed. A main angle to this urge toward refinement, is an experience of reality beyond the physical, and a dimension of love that exists only a hair's breadth away from us, every micro second of the day.

What I'm realising, is that it's possible to experience this truth, whether one eats or not. Love and compassion extends to all beings, regardless of activity. And yet, through fasting or refining one's food intake, it's definitely true to say, that it brings one closer to things that are true.

Personally, if I've eaten very little (and I have a very busy life, and work consistently hard when I'm working on someone's house, or looking after my children), I see that energy generates energy. I take very minimal breaks when I work, breaks just slow me down. In fact, I generally sit down for 2 minutes at lunch, to rest my legs, and that's it. Then I'm off again. Perhaps this is also why I prefer working alone, where I can set my own pace. The pace of work generates it's own momentum. This snowballing effect of energy, can be applied across most phenomena I think.

But what I have also found, through restricting my food intake - e.g. small breakfast, no lunch, fruits in the evening, is that my own fears and limitations loom mightily in my mind. On the one hand, I know that I'm fine, and have lots of energy, and yet on the other, a part of me is saying: 'You're a fool. You're going to die. Look at all the weight you've lost. You're a sick man!' etc. Weight loss is a significant issue. It's difficult to look and feel thin, when it isn't something one is used to. It is very amazing how many negativities arise when the stomach hasn't got something to latch onto!

Then there is the issue of hunger. It is all entirely psychological I believe. A significant thing I've observed, is that the feeling of hunger I might have when I'm eating next to nothing (which will come and go), is no different to the feeling I have when I have just eating well. So what is going on? How can I feel hungry in both scenarios? I think that it's really only got to do with the stomach expanding or contracting, giving the brain signals. Rather like the hunger one can feel a bit later after a large meal. It isn't hunger of course, it's just that the stomach has been stretched, and now it's beginning to settle back again.

I'm realising that little steps at a time are the best thing for me. Slowly, and appreciatively of what life has to offer. If I was in a different situation, I would definitely want to do a long fast. But it's worth remembering, that  large changes in many ways should come from an inner urge, not as a mental concept having seen what someone else has done. I think this is very important. I think there are people out there who have maybe become a bit mixed up, borrowing someone else's life-path, and trying to apply it to themselves. This might work for them (after all, all things do have to start as an idea), but there has to be a genuine resonance for it to be really appropriate for them.

Rooting one's experience and urges in love and respect, without letting the ego always latch onto things, is really the safest way.

Good cheer without cooking?

In the darkness of space, eating cooked food warms us up, and fills our life with cheer - a cheer we feel we lack, sometimes. And there's the rub; this separation from truth, from love, is the very thing that provokes hunger and a sense of separation and loneliness. But we are not alone. The physical world is just one of endless others. When we are attuned to the truth, we feel love, and no hunger, for we are fed from higher sources. It is our birthright.

Two Steps Forward, One Step Back

The thing I'm finding at the moment, is that any progression toward refinement, is often slowed by doubt and going back to old habits, even if briefly. This is not surprising.

While a part of me wants to forget about spiritual refinement, I know that stagnation isn't the answer. Stagnation leads to disease and ultimately death. Illness is stagnation of energy.

Everytime I think to myself, 'let's forget about this whole deal', two things happen. One, is that I truly deeply feel that I just can't and don't want to eat how I used to; Secondly, I feel a calling that I hardly understand at this point. To move things forward. In some ways, I feel that time is running out. It's now or never, for purification. I wonder how many people feel the same?

I don't resent this calling toward purging my body, but it is hard. Working on the concept of food and eating, strikes at the very core of what it means to be a human being, in many ways. Which is also why there is an enormous and automatic resistance from many sides toward the concept of inedia, even hostility. 'If you don't eat you die!' everybody shouts. Addiction. Something I remember that Jericho Sunfire said in one of his videos: 'Don't mess with my tastebuds!', with regards to people who can accept many things, but definitely not refining food intake, or removing it completely.

An increase in energy

This evening I felt an increase in energy that was quite disorientating. For lunch I  had an apple, a banana, some nuts and dates. It was about 8pm and I hadn't had anything to eat since then. This surprised me really, as I had been working hard all day painting and decorating someone's house, while my wife looked after the children.  I was feeling wonderful, sensing the energies all around me, going through me, the web of creation. I was doing some spontaneous moves with my body, feeling the coursing of energy. I wasn't feeling hungry particularly, such was the energy.

This increase in energy was disorientating, because I was experiencing what one might call 'reality', in a different way, and myself also in a different way. Of all the other experiences of an abstract nature I've had before, this was a bit different. As if the  physical nature of space all around me was changing.

Also, I was experiencing the entrancement of sense-perception (which humans mostly all fall prey to, including myself), and how freedom from the limitations of life, requires one to lay down attachment to so many things. To expand is to move beyond the automatic conditioning of the mind. I could see the very narrow margin which our sense perceptions occupy, and which are so rooted into eating. I could feel so keenly how the removal of eating, totally removes any sense of normality in life, a sensation I feel I'll have to get used to - if I do eventually end up breatharian. The way we have evolved eating, and eating cooked food, is a curious journey...

My wife asked me whether I was eating this evening (meaning am I eating with her or some fruits and such like as I usually do), as she had taken from the garden a nice spaghetti squash which we have growing. I found it impossible to say no, such was the care she was taking in preparing the food. It can be very demoralising for someone to live with a person, who doesn't want to eat the same food. The food felt very gentle.  The taste was enjoyable, but I could feel it like a slight  hindrance inside of me.

It's somehow making me sad this eating of cooked vegetables - this must sound weird though. What a strange thing to rip a vegetable from the earth,  chop it up, heat it up until it changes its shape, and then eat it? For beings of an eternal nature, where is the value in that? Isn't a vegetable, or a fruit, just a beautiful thing that exists for itself?

No place for the intellect

I see that really there is no final analysis with regards to moving beyond food. The intellect won't get it. There are deeper and greater impulses that govern the process. So much talk of a technical nature, of energy this or that, while perhaps keeping the mind focused, doesn't really lead to breatharianism. It's a way of entertaining the mind, in the right direction, nothing more.

What actually happens, is so subtle that the intellect is helpless. Only experiential feeling matters.

Moments of Doubt

Sometimes I stop myself in my tracks, and think to myself, what am I doing refining my food intake? Doubt and fear sets in, but it takes only a short while for me to see the conditioning in my mind. That I need this or that to live. That I will become ill and/or die if I continue down this path. My analytical mind steps in, and it starts to lecture me on topics such as Vitamin B12 deficiency, Calcium deficiency, Protein deficiency... and so on. The list could be endless.

And yet at the same time, I feel a strong flow of energy into me, that tells me clearly that the physical body lives without food. That it is the essential energy that animates all life. That the scientific analysis of the body's composition, while being valid, can't tell the whole story - that huge chunks of knowledge are simply missing from the scientific mind. The kind of knowledge that only comes from expansion and self-development, of an intuitive nature.

So my doubts I see, are like hoary old men, ruminating and grumbling all the time. Using logic that certainly works on one level, but which can't operate outside of the sphere, which it already knows about...

When nuts and fruits are too much - that's nuts!

There's a distinct change in the way I feel hungry - or not hungry - since I've been eating only fruits in the evenings, nuts and lettuce type things and a wrap at lunch, and a small amount of oats in the mornings. Hunger used to be a growling sensation in the stomach, but these days, it's quite different. It's hard to describe, but it's something like an upward feeling in my torso, a  sort of tightening as well (I used to have an ongoing pain there, but it has shifted, this I think was to do with something contracting and readjusting). But not really a feeling of hunger. And I certainly don't lack in energy. On the contrary, I'm more focused for longer periods of time, and manage to keep up with certain creative interests, as well as caring for my two young children during the day. I got to bed late and get up early, usually with disturbed nights because of the children.

However, even the consumption of fruits and nuts etc, and especially wraps and oats, feels like a drag on my system often. Recently, when I've been thinking to myself, in a sort of automatic manner 'time to eat' (e.g. mid afternoon when the kids are having a snack), I've had a small fruit smoothy or juice of some description and it does the job fine, when in the past I might have had something more solid. The more I substitute something I used to have, with something more refined, I feel like something shifts. As if I'm working with a wider process, and energies, that are wanting to establish themselves more firmly.

I often feel like I eat when I don't really need to eat.

A gentle stepping stone toward something deeper

I realise more and more, that this strong tendency of mine to prefer eating only raw vegan food, is only a step on a longer journey. In fact, it feels more like a preparation for something deeper. It seems to me, that evolution happens in sudden leaps - something that is observable even from an Darwinian perspective - and this journey toward living without food, which many people are now embracing, is part of this process of evolution.

We are, after all, beings of  consciousness, and if the records are to be believed, the world is moving into a new dimension of reality - this is even observable from a mundane scientific viewpoint, with n-dimensional strings in mathematics, and quantum theory, emerging. The fact that quantum theory is credible, and scientifically observable, always makes me wonder how the scientific community can be at all closed minded about living on different energy sources. But that is another story...

So many are feeling the draw toward a more refined diet, as the physical body is adapting to fundamental changes - changes that could one day, lead many, many people to live without food. There is an opening now for people to do this. It's an exciting time for the human race.

Working with the process toward breatharianism

As my food intake becomes more refined, it's as if there's a sort of cyclical redundancy going on, in terms of my attachments to certain things. I view something as a 'treat', like a biscuit, that I might have very occasionally, though I also know that it's got a shelf-life within my consciousness. This has happened before with certain things in the past: cheese, for example. The time has to be right for something to be abandoned completely, but in the interim, it's really not necessary to deprive oneself. The process of veering toward lighter foods - and eventually possibly no physical food - should be a gentle, loving process. There's no point on being hard on oneself. If something is taken as a treat, but ultimately is not enjoyable, then perhaps the time is right to move on. But if something feels amazingly good to have, without any drawbacks, removing that item is deprivation.

After all, moving toward lighter food isn't about deprivation, it's about fulfillment so great, that moving beyond that constant craving for food subsides.

There's clearly a host of beings dedicated to this process, for people who are undertaking this journey

No going back

One thing that is most interesting to observe, is the way my consciousness is functioning in relation to past food intake - both from a vegan and fruitarian perspective. I can feel inside myself a zero desire to going back to milk or eggs or even honey; and at the same time, I can feel myself moving forward into the realm of 'raw food'. This really is entering the land of freaky dieting, and yet this is where I'm going. I am resistant to it, and yet, if I think about what I would go back to, would that be any better? That is, back to processed products and even milk based things? This changeover in my body is quite remarkable. I can feel it reinventing itself, from some deep impulse. No going back.

I am a food addict

The main thing that I have come to realise is that I am a food addict. Not in the sense that I stuff myself silly all the time, and am grossly over-weight, which is not the case, but more in the sense that I usually eat to somehow make myself feel better. That is, I see a distinction between what I really need to survive, and what I don't need. And so much of what I'm eating, I don't really need at all. I eat out of habit. I'm like a machine - even an out-of-control machine - that needs to be fed just to feel normal. This is really crazy. This focus on food is really quite extreme in society, and in our minds. Everything is food related, commercially, or so it seems. Why?

The Calling to a refined diet

I've always felt that we're entities of consciousness that exist beyond the confines of a physical body, even as a child I felt this. It's as if we're crammed into tiny frames -  in tiny frames of time and matter - with our real intelligence located outside of the brain (this is quite enjoyably contrary to the abysmal scientific viewpoint that the brain creates consciousness - but whatever...) As such, it also makes sense that the body can only reflect the levels of being that exist beyond the body, if it is refined enough to do so. Someone who eats a lot of meat, for example, and is pumped with animal adrenaline, and perhaps has a lot of aggression and anger, won't be in a fit state to experience some of the more subtle elements of the psyche.Conversely, someone who fasts and refines the body, will be in a better position to experience wider realities.

These rationalisations are quite distinctly different from the actual experience of needing to refine ones diet. The experiences to move things forward radically, can often come from strange and deep sources. When the impulse came over me to move toward eating much less, I felt like there was an actual link- astoundingly real - to a small group of people, who were interested and intent on helping me move beyond the necessity to eat food. I know that sounds strange. These people, or beings, quite simply exist on a higher level of reality. But because the physical world is directly linked to the higher, through subtle energy, it is possible to connect the two.

How my relationship to food has changed

Years ago (in 1994 roughly) I became vegetarian, both for conscious and unconscious reasons. On the one hand I didn't like the treatment of animals which were intended for our plates, nor did I like the chemicalisation of the meat industry (e.g. feeding growth hormones to cattle which then went into our bodies), while on the other, I felt like I was experiencing an overall feeling about it, which I couldn't really define. In some ways, I was feeling my way forward in the dark, just following my intuition. There was something about meat eating, other than the obvious ethical reasons, which was gnawing away at me... It was only as the years went by, that I began to understand more deeply the implications of eating meat, or not eating meat. It was a refining process, and slowly but surely the doubting cynical mind, was being chipped away. The same cynical mind that either scoffs or finds scientific reasons to disqualify certain realisations of a spiritual nature.

But as I've started to understand, this change to vegetarianism was just the very beginning. I wouldn't have known back then, that I would have felt compelled to take a step further... That is, to become a vegan. So, forward wind to the present day. For a number of reasons that will become evident during the course of this blog, I've become a vegan.

I dislike the nomenclature: vegan, veganism - it sounds so whacky and weird, extreme and unbalanced. But vegan is what I have become, in the last few months. In the same way that I felt I couldn't turn back once I had become vegetarian, I now feel that I can't and won't turn back on being a vegan. Even if veganism sounds like something that comes straight from an episode of Star Trek... It's funny really, I used to be so down on veganism, for various reasons. I used to think of it as a type of extremism. I also used to think, that while treating the animal kingdom with fairness was good, it was also possible to go a bit far over it. I would model the human race as somehow being part of a cycle, an inescapable cycle, and that it was nature's way to eat or be eaten, and so just having milk and honey, was a minor thing. Unfortunately, this is not so true if you happen to live next to a dairy farm, as I do now - and you get to see the suffering going on, the removal of calves, hearing the anguish of the cows, and so on. Also, it's not so true when you begin to experience and consider some of the more subtle things relating to the consumption of animal products.

But in terms of avoiding veganism, an important point was that  I was majorly put off by practically all the vegans I had met. I've had to learn to withhold my judgement over other people's motives for becoming vegan. At the end of the day, I have to do what feels right for me, even if it means putting myself in line with a whole host of people whose motives and views I find difficult, and the imbalances I thought I perceived in vegans.

This slow change of dietary intake has been a gradual thing. Through the years, it's as if parts of me have been slowly changing - as if reactionary elements of my mind, have been slowly trying the inevitable dead-ends, knowing that greater light has always been around the corner. Rather like playing an off-key note, over and over again, boringly repetitive, but knowing that eventually better sense will prevail. This is how it has been for me. This has also gone on alongside an inner strengthening, that really I MUST do what my inner sense tells me to do, whether people agree with it, or not.

So my relationship to food has evolved considerably from my childhood days. As a child I always felt uncomfortable with meat eating, even though I did enjoy the taste of a lot of it, at the time. This tension between 'tastes good' and 'feels bad' is the very nature of the food struggle we all suffer from. And in a sense, this is the very thing I want to get to the bottom of.