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.