By Luke J. Terry;
Our health and vitality was described by the ancient sages of China as
having a single major source -- our 'essence.' This essence is thought
to be the rich substance that life springs from. We can think of it as
the powerful substances at our core: bone marrow, sperm and reproductive
fluids, and the brain and spinal cord. These tissues are absolutely
critical in supporting life and consciousness. According to the ancient
sages, the essence springs forth from two sources: the prenatal essence
(what we get from our parents) and the postnatal essence (what we take
in from our experience after birth).
The prenatal essence is
inherited not only from your parents, but from every living being that
has contributed genetic material and energetic imprints or karma from
the entire chain of evolution. Thus we can see that essence is
quantitative but also very qualitative, containing the seeds of
adaptations and clever evolutionary strategies, as well as the dead
ends, the mistakes, the karmic retribution of a thousand million
generations. The prenatal essence cannot be calculated as a sum total
substance arriving at a single bottom line, but must be seen as a
brilliantly faceted diamond that appears vastly different when viewed
from different angles and contextual environments.
We can improve our health and our lives by working with our essence.
The
process of changing the prenatal essence we are given moves slowly; but
we can highlight it, work with it, and nurture it, preventing its loss.
With a monumental effort, we may be able to add to it, but this effort
begins by nourishing the postnatal essence.
This we can do. We
can develop vast stores of energy and vitality through our habits. We
can build internal power through our actions, through what we eat, how
we manage stress and emotion, through our ability to tap into a state of
divine ecstasy. These three topics contain much material for
exploration and understanding. Today we'll deal with the historical and
ontological basis for one of these three foundational principles:
nutrition.
We are absolutely what we eat. This old cliche does
not go far enough in elucidating the necessity of proper nutrition. To
paint as clear a picture as possible, I'll cop one of Mark Twain's turns
of phrase:
"The difference in results of nurturing one's vitality in eating
the right foods versus eating almost the right foods is exactly the
same as the distinction between a lightning bolt and a lightning bug."
Nutrition
will make or break you over your lifetime. It will bring you great joy,
happiness, energy, health, and vitality, or it will bring you disease,
decay, pain, suffering, and regret -- if you live that long.
How
can we know this? It's a simple fact, really. There are hundreds of
definitive studies, including the recent renowned China study, but one
needs no hard-edged academic study to see the truth. Look at primitive
cultures, or what's left of them, or better yet, read historical
accounts of early scientific interactions with "primitive" and
traditional cultures by explorers specifically seeking information on
mortality and morbidity. The touchstone research was compiled in the
1930's by Weston Price, DDS & Francis Pottinger, MD. They were
looking for traditional cultures that had the lowest rates of heart
disease, cancer, diabetes, and dental disease. They demonstrated that
the cultures with the healthiest populations were those who consumed a
seasonal, plant-based, and widely varied diet that was rich in enzymes
and nutrient density, and had few empty calories in terms of grains
& refined products. They also used sea vegetables or minerals, and
ate most of their food
raw. The Inuit were the exception proving the rule -- they ate mostly
raw meats, fats, and organs from the fish and sea mammals that sustained
them most of the year. In recent years, Inuit health has declined as
they began eating a typical western diet rich in refined industrial
foods.
Other clinicians have found these same correlations upon
visiting "primitive" cultures. Sidney MacDonald Baker, MD, found
virtually no modern degenerative disease when practicing with the Peace
Corps in Nepal and Chad in 1958 and 1966-68, respectively. When human
beings eat refined, fractionated foods, when the nutrient density
declines, when fiber and water are removed from foods, human health
declines, vitality recedes, wellness wilts, and the human spirit dulls.
The father of the study of anatomy, Herophiles, said, "When health is
absent wisdom cannot reveal itself, art cannot become manifest, strength
cannot be exerted, wealth is useless and reason is powerless."
Therefore
vibrant health and well-being facilitate the process of personal growth
and intellectual, emotional, and spiritual development. Nutrition, as a
foundational component, engenders the conditions of personal evolution.
Therefore we may co-opt the phrase Evolutionary Nutrition to describe
the practices of nutrition that kindle the Vital Fires of consciousness.
We should be very grateful to the pioneering work of other physicians
who endeavored mightily to light this torch and keep it burning. Many
kind thanks to Gabriel Cousens, MD, a shining star in a long line of
eminent physicians stretching back into antiquity. There are many others
carrying that torch today, too many past and present physicians to
mention (but too few for the needs of the world) who bring forth the
idea that food facilitates consciousness and vibrant health.
Back
to Evolutionary Nutrition. The term has, until now, implied a
historical view of nutrition, using discoveries and understanding about
the natural world of antiquity to place human nutrition in the context
of the pre-industrialized world. This is certainly a valuable
perspective. Yet, it doesn't appear to go far enough. Implications can
be seen from an evolutionary perspective connecting the decline of the
natural environment to the rise of chronic disease, dissatisfaction,
unhappiness, sectarianism, violence, and conflict.
We can see in
the rear-view mirror that human consciousness and health as well as
human societies began to degrade in proportion to the environmental
degradation that took place. Food clearly holds the key to understanding
these changes in human health over the millennia. Since our goal, in
the light of present environmental and geopolitical conditions should be
to advance our culture, creating peace, prosperity, and good health for
all humans, we must look forward with equal clarity. Therefore any
concept of Evolutionary Nutrition must look to the future, viewing
evolution as an ongoing process, and help us understand how food plays a
dominant role in development of consciousness. Ironically, we can see
this clearly in the historical record, making the heretofore limited
model of Evolutionary Nutrition all the more relevant.
One rather
controversial view holds that the Old Testament is a collection of
stories of a vanquished tribe as told by their conquerors. Daniel Quinn
brilliantly tells this story in his acclaimed book, Ishmael. Thus
the story of Adam & Eve and the Garden of Eden represents actual
events, but the twist is that Adam and Eve were actually tribes, not
individuals. In this context, the fall from Eden represents mankind's
departure from nature. The biting of the apple represents the moment
that man began to subjugate nature, rather than living in divine harmony
with all of creation, evident everywhere including in their eating.
Historical
record suggests that these events actually took place, in the cradle of
civilization, the Fertile Crescent: the area between the Rivers Tigris
and Euphrates, in what is now Iraq. How ironic, then, that the U.S.
today is involved in yet another war in the same physical location,
though the environment there couldn't be more different from today.
Archeology tells us that at one time, all of the Middle East was a
Primeval deciduous forest. Numerous references tell us that at one time,
one could walk from the Atlantic coast of North Africa, due east
through to Egypt and beyond, through all of the present-day Middle East,
and one would never leave the shade of the primeval deciduous forest.
At that time, those forests provided all the nutrition that humans
needed; the forest yielded innumerable roots, tubers, vegetables,
fruits, leaves, shoots, nuts, seeds, game animals, fish from its rivers
and streams, and medicines. Agriculture had yet to be invented, and was
irrelevant because all was forest, and the forest provided all, in a
more grand fashion than any farm yet to be devised.
Ancient
peoples of the region deforested the area for fuel and building
material. The Bible and the Torah tell us the story of Nebuchadnezzar, a
king who lived around 560 BC. He ordered his workmen to cut down the
trees, to be burned in brick-making ovens. His ovens churned out
millions of bricks, all inscribed with his name and the story of how he
ousted the Jews from Jerusalem in 586 BC. He built palaces, castles,
cities, and their surrounding triple-walled fortresses, all of these
bricks, millions of which still exist today. People in Iraq still build
houses out of these bricks. Saddam Hussein was building a dam by
bulldozing Nebuchadnezzar's bricks into a gorge.
The fall of the
Jews from Jerusalem was as portentous for the state of the world as the
fall of the forests, because the fall of the forests continues today in
the destruction of rainforests of the world. The process in ancient
times is very similar to the process as it is now: the trees are felled
to make way for agriculture. Agriculture steps in, growing grains for
foodstuffs, supplanting the bounty of the forest with an inferior
monoculture of nutrient-deficient crops. Even that ends, because
eventually and far too quickly the soils are bereft, and the only thing
that will grow is grass.
This is where the livestock steps in,
with the intervention of animal husbandry. The shepherds tend their
flocks, mostly to excess, denuding the grass, further despoiling the
soil. Soon all that is left is... dust and sand. This is the story of
how the entire Middle East became a desert. Mankind, in his lust for
power and ego-fueling pride, spoiled Eden, and changing our way of
eating, from a forest-centered way of life, to one centered around
agriculturism and pastoralism. This way of relating to the world,
through conquest rather than through harmony, produced the way of eating
that we know today as the Standard American Diet. Meat and grains, both
of which rot in the gut into toxic compounds with names like putrescine
and cadaverine, disconnect the human organism further from nature.
Thus
Wendell Berry's revelatory statement "Eating is an agricultural act"
alludes to the environmental consequences of eating, but not its
spiritual consequences. Take it several steps further: Eating is an
Evolutionary Act. Each meal, each bite takes us closer to our original
nature, closer to the Garden of Eden, or further away. Most humans alive
today are thousands of evolutionary miles away from the Garden of Eden
-- they're in the desert, eating synthetic foods from an industrial
wasteland.
We may never remake the forests in all their glory,
but we will do well to emulate them, by creating farms and reserves that
work with nature, nurturing biodiversity while creating food. This is
the ethic of bio dynamic and organic farming at their core, though
organic can mean a lot of things today.
From the evolutionary
perspective, we can see that the best way to eat for human beings is
also the best way to eat for the sake of the natural world. By eating of
the Garden of Eden, we can save it. By eating sustainably harvested
Amazonian plants -- or plants sustainably harvested from any natural
environment, from organic farms supporting biodiversity, we guarantee
the survival of these bio-diversifying food sources, because they are
worth more alive, vibrant, and churning out the herbs, rather than dead,
decertified, and grazing a few lonely Big-Macs-to-be. Thus eating bears
karmic implications -- you can eat foods that support biodiversity in
the Garden of Eden, or those that destroy it, and your health will
reflect those choices.
On our lifetime journeys, the Garden of
Eden can only be a layover on the road to Heaven. We need to return to
Eden metaphorically and through nutrition to examine and fully manifest
our original nature, our authentic selves, so that we can move past the
dualities of this sphere, and experience the non-dual, the unity
consciousness with all that is. Of course, it's possible to experience
non-duality, to experience the Void, to experience God and the divine
ecstasy, all while eating nachos and pork ribs... but it's a whole lot
harder. Anything is possible. But why fight a billion years of evolution
by trying to reach higher levels of consciousness with inferior
biochemistry, when you can ride on the wings of those billions of
lifetimes of evolutionary drive, hook into the Primeval order stored in
DNA, and flow with the tide of evolution, instead of against it?
From
this perspective, eating in the way of our ancient and wild ancestors
to the best of our ability, that is, a widely varied, plant-based living
foods diet, rich with plant phytonutrients and flavonoids, rich with
medicinal herbs (which are food), full of fiber, water, nutrients, and
life force, this way of eating will build postnatal essence more than
any other way of eating. It also nurtures the natural world. Having a
rich supply of energy via postnatal essence supports development of
consciousness. Is it possible to eat your way to an enlightened state of
being? Doubtful, but you can eat in such a way as to remove biochemical
barriers while creating vibrant health, deep vitality, and lasting
energy to fuel consciousness and growth.
Your question: Do you eat consciously? (post your comments below)
_________________________________________________________________________
About the Author: Luke practices acupuncture, Oriental & natural medicine, and
conducts wellness retreats in the mountain resort community of
Breckenridge, Colorado.
He sees clients at Sacred Tree, an integrative healthcare & wellness spa, located at the base of Peak 8 at Blue Sky. Visit us at http://www.sacredtree.com
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