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Why Do We Eat?

Man shall give to the healthy body what it needs. He shall observe it with all the care requisite for the proper activity of this most necessary implement in the World of Gross matter.

ABD-RU-SHIN, IN THE LIGHT OF TRUTH: THE GRAIL MESSAGE

We begin our exploration with a seemingly simple question: Why do we eat? The answer seems obvious: we eat because our body needs food in order to function. More precisely it needs fuel (carbohydrates and fats) to provide energy to power physical activity and maintain body temperature, as well as the materials (minerals and proteins) that serve to build and maintain the body, to support growth, and to repair the wear and tear on the body’s tissues. Everyone knows that we cannot avoid eating for long. The body does not contain all the fuel it needs over the course of its life. External supply is therefore indispensable. In the opinion of some, eating nothing, or fasting, would lead to death in a few days. Although this is not exactly true—it would take several weeks or even months for death to occur by starvation—it remains no less true that feeding the body is a vital necessity. We eat so that our body can survive and function.

But is that the only reason? By examining the many different ways in which people consume food, all the various modern diets that seem so different from traditional ways of eating, we can easily recognize that we also eat for many reasons other than mere nourishment.

Eating food can, for instance, have a therapeutic purpose. “Let food be your only medicine,” counseled Hippocrates, the father of Western medicine. In fact, many foods are commonly used for their curative value, such as spinach and eggs for anemia, rice for high blood pressure and kidney problems, prunes in the case of constipation, milk products to avoid calcium deficiency, or potato juice for gastritis and stomach ulcers.

Diet also occupies an important place in maintaining wellness and preventing illness. A high fiber diet, for example, is needed to prevent constipation; a low-fat diet combats cardiovascular problems; foods rich in calcium are used for growth; and so on. Not only do the foods chosen for these special diets nourish the body, they have, at the same time, a therapeutic effect because they support, relieve, or reinforce the work of the different organs.

Conversely, a number of illnesses can be made worse through inappropriate food choices. For instance, diabetes is aggravated by the overconsumption of sugar, and liver problems are associated with eating excessive amounts of fat. Other diseases can be directly caused by incorrect nutrition, for example, arteriosclerosis by high consumption of cholesterol from a high-fat diet, rheumatism by too much acidic food, and immune deficiencies by inadequate intake of vitamins. And so by carefully choosing one’s food, that is, by reducing or completely eliminating those foods that cause problems or by adding those that the body needs to heal or function optimally, it is possible to achieve effective disease prevention through diet alone.

In addition, food can be used to achieve certain aesthetic goals, for example, to give the body a certain shape or size considered to be more ideal by the person following the diet in question. One can barely keep track of the countless diets for losing weight, for gaining weight, for building muscle, for reducing stomach fat, and so on.

Finally, taking nourishment is accompanied quite naturally by the sensation of pleasure in eating. However, this pleasure can be pursued to excess, by overindulging and cultivating it so that it becomes a propensity. Whereas most people in the world eat to live, some people end up just living to eat. The initially healthy pleasure that accompanies the act of eating turns into a craving for food and later into gluttony, the overconsumption of food. At this point food is no longer used simply to nourish the body, but to satisfy an addiction.

The Spiritual Goals of Eating

Food is not always used just in the physical sense, as in the examples we have just described. It can also have a spiritual purpose. In this case the goal of a specific diet is not so much to achieve a certain effect on the body and its function, but rather to effect a change to the spirit. Historically, this primarily involves restrictive types of diets, diets in which one or more types of food are omitted. It is even common to see the elimination of all food for short or longer periods, that is, a time of complete fasting.

The great monotheistic religions advocate various degrees of abstinence in order to reach a spiritual goal. Christians have the period of Lent, forty-six days of fasting and abstinence starting on Ash Wednesday until Easter Sunday. Ramadan is the month during which Muslims areobliged to fast between sunrise and sunset. In the fall of each year, Jews celebrate Yom Kippur, the Feast of Atonement, and fast for twenty-four hours on this day.

In ancient times fasting for religious reasons was practiced by the Phoenicians, Assyrians, Greeks, and Romans. In Egypt participants in the ceremonies of Isis and Osiris prepared themselves by a period of fasting, which could last from seven to forty-two days. In Greece participants in the ceremonies of Eleusis fasted for seven to nine days.

What is the reasoning behind these periods of abstinence? What were the spiritual goals that people hoped to achieve? Because of the restrictive nature of fasting, we tend to associate it with the concept of punishment and penance, meant to help the spirit to expiate or atone for its “sins” and thereby free itself from the weight of its errors. However, in the field of health care, it is well known that fasting and highly restrictive diets actually have a cleansing and health-enhancing effect. At the physical level, this means cleansing works in the following way: when the body no longer receives the nutrients it requires from the exterior, it takes them from its own tissues through a biological process called autolysis. Autolysis is the internal process of breaking down body tissue and is carried out by enzymes secreted by the body itself. Autolysis literally means self (auto) and digestion (lysis).

Fortunately, the wisdom that governs all natural processes sees to it that autolysis of tissues takes place in a logical way. In effect, tissues are autolyzed in the inverse order of their usefulness. This means that it is metabolic wastes (toxins) and diseased tissues (cysts, fat deposits, tumors) that are the first to be autolyzed. As for healthy tissues and organs, these come only afterward. The heart and brain, as well as the other vital organs, are practically untouched by autolysis, even in the case of death by starvation.

Because autolysis “burns off” toxins and diseased tissues, it results in a cleansing of the body. The blood is purified and the organs are freed from wastes that may have accumulated—leading to the healing of any number of diseases caused or maintained by the accumulation of undesirable toxins.

As I have already noted, simultaneous with this purification of the body, a purification of the spirit also seems to take place. It is said that fasting and a strict diet can enhance our perception of our surroundings by affecting the sensitivity of our five senses. Those who practice fasting from one to several weeks often say that their thinking becomes clearer and that they have acquired a strength and clarity that they never experience outside of fasting. Our discernment becomes sharper and our spirit opens itself to intuitions or even sudden premonitions. Dramatic improvements or even outright curing of depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and mental illnesses have also been reported.

These beneficial effects on the spirit were certainly what the various religious traditions were seeking. Religious practitioners throughout the ages have recognized that the purification of the body leads to a kind of purification of the spirit, making it more receptive and more open to experiencing spiritual upliftment. By freeing oneself from the domination of the body, the desires and needs of the flesh, one can turn toward the heights, where contact with our higher powers can be established more easily. In addition to short periods of abstinence to prepare for particular ceremonies, longer-term dietary instructions have often been provided by various religions as well. It seems all religions saw a clear connection between the diet and the life of the spirit and therefore encouraged their faithful to pay attention to what they ate in order to promote the life of the spirit.

This being the case, it stands to reason that if a short period of abstinence could have a favorable effect on the spirit, then a less stringent form of diet followed over a longer time, perhaps over a whole lifetime, would provide even more beneficial spiritual effects.

That the diets recommended for spiritual practitioners exclude alcohol and other drugs that alter the physical senses and reduce self-control and discernment will not surprise anyone. But the idea of restricting or totally eliminating a common food item like meat is more complicated.

Contrary to certain primitive tribal people, who ate the eyes of their enemies slain in battle in order to see better, or their tongues to be able to speak better, or their hearts to have more courage and strength, later religions conceived of the idea that by not eating animal flesh, one could avoid awakening the animal forces within human beings.

Eating large amounts of meat actually increases sexual drive and acts as a stimulant in humans. A meat diet can make a person more active and excitable and even aggressive or violent. In contrast it is well known that a diet without meat greatly loosens the bond between the spirit and the body. Vegetarianism tends to reduce interest in material things in general, while physical passions are attenuated. A person who follows this kind of diet will be less interested in material possessions and will be less greedy, ambitious, and confrontational. Self-control, including mastery of desires and impulses, becomes easier. Opening toward higher values is favored on such a diet.

These effects are even more evident, but can become unhealthy, when the diet is even more restrictive and, in addition to meat, other foods are eliminated as well. This can happen with a vegan diet, where only plant-based foods (fruit, vegetables, cereals, and legumes) are allowed, or a fruit diet, where only fresh, dried, and oleaginous fruit comprise the basis of nutrition, as contrasted with a less restrictive, more moderate lacto-vegetarian diet, which still allows certain animal products such as eggs and milk. In the extreme a person who follows these kinds of highly restrictive dietary regimes might completely turn away from material things and could even lose touch with reality. Those around such a person will say that he is ungrounded or “has his head in the clouds.” Such a person might even go to such an extreme that he acknowledges that the physical world no longer matters.

Food as a Means to Enhance Spiritual Development

The possibility of influencing one’s spiritual and psychic development through food is such a long-standing tradition that students of the occult still regularly use this, as well as other techniques, to promote the development of special psychic abilities such as mediumship, clairvoyance, clairaudience, or visionary experiences.

Today more and more people are following nontraditional diets, initially not for spiritual goals, but as a path to good health. The dramatic changes that are then experienced on the inner plane as a result of altering one’s diet eventually lead the person to realize how much food can affect the spirit. So for many it starts out as a quest for good health, which then becomes a quest for development of the total person. Under these circumstances it is not uncommon to hear people speak of the spiritual progress they have made since they changed their diet.

Yet we may well ask if this effect on the spirit is real or just an illusion, and if the followers of these restrictive diets are only deluding themselves. These questions deserve to be asked, because up until now no one has been able to explain precisely how food can have this effect on the spirit and why purification of the body can also bring about a purification of the spirit.

If the spirit were identified with the brain, this influence would be easy to explain. Good nutrition provides the brain with all the minerals and vitamins it needs, and cleansing the blood improves the circulation and therefore oxygen uptake by the brain. But in the thinking outlined above, the spirit is regarded as the nonmaterial principle of man, as what is commonly called his “soul.” We therefore have to ask ourselves how something material like food can influence something nonmaterial like the spirit.

Even if the brain were to be considered as the location of the spirit, we are still confronted by a significant problem, in the sense that it would mean that spiritual development depends primarily on proper nutrition of the brain—on diet alone—and not on the efforts and perseverance of the person.

To understand how food affects the spirit, we must first know exactly what the spirit really is.