To Be Fed, Meet Desire
Universe, what is the intelligent approach to food? What is the right relationship?
You really want to know?
Yes! Of course I do.
Okay. Here it goes: food is fuel.
Oh, come on. Everyone says that.
You said yourself that for the body to know itself it requires stimulation—that is, input.
Yes, I did.
Food is an intimate input, much like sex. One life form is being placed inside another. A sort of oneness comes about. “You” and “I” create “We,” the space between us. “We” is the culmination of our collective energies. It is our vibe.
I’m listening.
Each food has its own vibe. Your body does, too, based upon your perception of it. When you eat foods with low vibes, you are perceiving that your body is a lowly thing, worthy of abuse. So your body’s vibe decreases, and your experience of your body becomes heavier. Note this is only if the vibe of the food is lower than that of the body.
So, who comes first—the body’s vibe or the perception of the body?
I’m not done.
Carry on.
The food and the body come together to form a new body. Some of this is formed on and in your body: the rest is removed from your body as waste. So the new body becomes you as well as, ultimately, the Earth (From the waste). Every bit of energy that enters your body influences its future. The perception of the body changes when its vibe is more or less the same for a substantial period of time. Of course, as you know, there is no causation, but instead simultaneity. Vibe and perception change together, via action of the consciousness.
Okay. This makes sense. So what is hunger?
Hunger is similar to the desire for sex, only hunger tends to be more frequent (in most humans, anyway). It is the body’s desire to connect. It wants to know more about who it is. This is the nature of all desire: the one who desires ultimately desires to know who she is. Any object is defined in relation to the objects around it. As such, interacting with and being aware of the surrounding objects is data that informs the object in question of what it is.
Remember: intelligence is a process of considering oneself in relationship to everything else—including oneself. Without other objects in the world- things you refer to as Not me- you would have no self-concept whatsoever. You would be everything—and, simultaneously, you might as well be nothing.
Desire for food, sex, exercise, and nature really are all the same. Desire for anything is.
If that’s the case, why does failing to meet some desires, such as that for food, kill us, while others don’t?
A failure to meet any desire weakens one in all regards unless the failure is attended to very consciously. This is achieved by acknowledging that what was desired was indeed desired, and considering how to go about meeting desire differently in the future. The acknowledgment is most important. Any denial of desire is a denial of who you are. To deny who you are is to say that you do not exist. Whenever desire is not met, stagnation occurs. Whenever desire is denied, a piece of self dies.
As for false, imagined desires, any occupation with these- whether in thought or in action- is likewise stagnating. Similarly, you can attend to this mistake consciously by acknowledging that you do not want this, and then stating clearly what you truly desire. Again, the acknowledgment is most important. When you preoccupy yourself with what you do not want, you stagnate. As long as you claim to desire what you do not really desire, you die slowly.
Wow. This makes perfect sense.
When people supposedly die of starvation, it usually is their whole being that is starved. One after another, time and time again, desire is squelched and denied. With each denial a piece of self dies.
Extreme starvation can come with a heart attack. This is because the heart has been crushed and silenced. It lets out one final scream—all it has left… And then it keels over, defeated.
This is how so many of your people die: they may look large, but their hearts are small. It does not matter whether a person is bone thin or the size of a large mammal: both are starved.
The reason you can handle hunger now so much better than in the past is that you have a much livelier self-concept. You are very good at acknowledging your desires, and you typically rise to meet them. When you don’t succeed, you don’t go dark and say, Oh, it doesn’t matter. Instead, you own the failure, and reconsider what it is you really want and how you might go about meeting that desire in the future.
Three years ago, when you lost 10% of your body weight, your character and resolve were much weaker. Your commitment to life was weak. Your opinion of self was very low—you basically regarded yourself as a putrid sack of meat. Your head was filled with all sorts of ideas about who you were and what you wanted, but they were so far off the mark. You were incredibly disconnected. Your life was hanging by a thread. It is a wonder that you survived.
Gee… Thanks, I guess?
You took the thread and grabbed it with both hands. You pulled yourself up enough to see more threads, and soon you tied them together into one—the common thread.
Up you climbed the common thread, weeding out fragile threads and tying in strong ones as you went along. Each climb is relative to the strength of your thread: the stronger the thread, the higher the climb. These days you climb mountains with grace, and always you are grateful and excited to reach new heights.
That is beautiful.
Eschewing Eating
So, how do people go without eating, like monks meditating in caves?
They are deeply and intimately connected to who they are. Their souls are fed.
But it doesn’t make sense to me. What desire does doing nothing all day fulfill? It doesn’t appear very intelligent to me—not for long, anyway.
Hm. Well… People don’t respond that way very often!
Consider that desire is filled, but character is not built.
Okay. Now this really doesn’t make sense. I thought desire and the building of character were intertwined, and had the same ends.
Look at it this way. Someone who manages to eschew eating by doing nothing all day is similar to a person who does nothing all day AND eats all day—you know, overweight people who sit on the couch watching TV. The two groups are very similar. They just appear different.
What! How can you say that?! People who can forego eating are very enlightened! And you just said that they are deeply and intimately connected to who they are, and that their souls are fed!
Haha. I’ve got you in a good one here. Watch this. No one knows who they really are.
Oh, now you’re going dark on me. Every loser in their forties says that.
Keep playing. If everyone knew who they are in an absolute sense, no one would be here. There would be no need for it. We could all dissolve into oneness and get it all over with.
Oh, now you’re being facetious.
Just with that last part, baby. Anyway, I don’t think I need to explain more than that.
OK, I’ll take that piece of it, but you still need to explain what you said about monks and lazy people. My guess would be that meditating all day for years on end becomes equivalent to TV-watching. You’re just putting junk in, distracting yourself, and wasting your time.
That’s basically correct, though meditating in small doses is far more beneficial than television could ever be.
I agree.
So what distinguishes the monk from the lazy man is that the monk has an intellectual understanding of the bigger picture. He more or less gets how the ship of reality runs, whereas the person chronically drowned in junk-media has hardly ever considered it. Ask him what God is-- he’ll tell you either what his parents told him or the exact opposite.
So when I say the monk is deeply connected to who he is, I mean that his intellectual understanding of this is vast.
OK. Most of that makes sense. But you also said his soul is fed. I find that hard to believe. Plus, I don’t know if it’s accurate to say he’s “connected” to himself. He is aligned with Truth, in that he has knowledge, but not so much with Love or Power.
I’m sure he experiences immense feelings of love in his meditations—perhaps that is why you say he is connected. But power? Power asks that you take action on your desires. What, does a monk have no more desire than to sit in quiet meditation? Or is this whole conversation bunk, since I don’t really know what monks’ lives are like?
No, no—it’s not bunk. People have done this type of thing for years at a stretch. It is very real.
So, the building of character comes from exercising power. No action, no character. When you spend very long periods of time in meditation, your character is dry. You might come off as a wise or loving individual, but no one would call you powerful—not when you have not done much.
So, when you meditate for long periods of time- on the span of months to years, in particular- here is what happens. Your intellectual understanding of how reality functions (refer to the beginning of this conversation) enables you to bypass the desire for hunger. You do this by focusing solely on the essence of consciousness. You observe yourself. Thoughts pass, and you identify with none of them. As you have experienced, this activity can bring about an immense sense of well-being. When the person in meditation refuses to identify with thought they demonstrate an understanding of who they are, which is higher than their thoughts (it is consciousness itself).
So this is what I mean when I say that the chronic meditators are deeply and intimately connected to who they are: they spend much time as the true self—the self beyond thought. As we established, mere connection is not enough for the building of character: that requires power, which is embodied in action in the world.
So, why do the meditators not die? They have found sort of a “hack” to survival. We said that when desire is denied, a piece of self dies. Well, the meditator has bypassed desire and gone straight to self. However, this strategy of mere knowing requires doing absolutely nothing. Additionally, while the self does not die, it does not grow, either. It faces the same consequence as that self whose desire is not met: it stagnates.
So, a chronic meditator is more or less frozen, much like a person trapped in front of the television. Overall, it is not something to aspire to. You survive, but you do not live.
OK. But here’s the thing. We all know there’s no such thing as stagnation. You’re either living or dying. There is no neutral. You’re either part of the solution or part of the problem—you’re black or you’re white. There’s no ifs, ands, or buts about it.
All it Takes to Be Human
Want to know what I’m going to say?
Get on with it.
It doesn’t matter.
What?
This whole conversation. It doesn’t really matter. You just do what you have to do. You can’t be anybody else.
Well then WHY did you bother going down this rabbithole, oh wise one?
Well, you asked.
I did?
“So, how do people go without eating, like monks meditating in caves?”
Oh. I did.
You ask, I answer. That’s how it works, sister. You can have whatever you want.
So… Can I have food?
Not yet. Let me finish from earlier.
So, you’re right—there is no neutral. People who appear to be doing no harm and not much else… Well, I will leave this to human judgment.
What do you mean?
Well, you know I don’t care for morality. Good and bad, right and wrong… Phooey. All beings are wonderful in my eyes. They are part of me, after all. You can do no wrong. No one can.
Of course, you also know that I do not regard many of your supposed problems as problems. None of them, in fact. I just bring about what you request. That’s it.
What? I thought we were expressing you through ourselves. I thought that was the whole point.
It’s not like you and I are separate, you know. The universe is simply the whole of all beings. You and I are one. You are life itself. You are the universe itself. Intelligence is indeed universal. By intelligence, you all create the universe together—every last cell. The whole of you declare who I am, and I am that thus. So it follows that I just do what you say. Of course, you aren’t aware of all that you say. That would be too much data for the conscious mind to handle.
Hence you have the universe, which is the culmination, ultimately, of every idea you’ve ever had and ever will have.
Really. That’s what you are? Ideas?
Well, if the nature of this reality is consciousness, what else can I be? I’m just the physical manifestation of consciousness, organized by time and space (which in themselves are ideas, of course).
Well, you are making sense to me. There’s a lot here. It’s hard to argue with.
Well, I hope you’d find no need to fight with yourself.
Right…
Yet you seek this out all the time.
Hey!
I don’t need to go over it with you. Just be firm that nothing is wrong with you, and carry on with acknowledging and meeting your desires. That’s all you have to do. In practice, that’s all it takes to be human.
It isn’t complicated. Your people have made it seem so, however, so as to distract themselves from their small hearts and lack of power.
Well, that isn’t very nice.
But it’s true, and you know it is. You’ve said it more harshly yourself.
Yeah, I have.
The Role of Food
This has been a very important and insightful conversation. I don’t know that the question that started it has been answered, however. How am I to relate to food?
I told you, food is fuel. It is input for the body, so it may know what it is. It is food, too, for the soul, so you may declare, define and know who you are.
And when you are eating so little your body is weakened by it?
You must go within and connect with yourself. Be clear about all of your desires, and resolve to meet them—no matter what.
Have no shame about any of it. Shame is your biggest enemy. It says that who you are is no good, and is deserving of death. Do not listen to shame. If you do, shame will have its way by coercing you into denying your desires. And you know what happens when you do that.
On the other hand, when you acknowledge and meet your desires the body’s need for food is reduced: at the same time, it is given reason to make itself strong—to tie in more threads and climb ever-higher mountains.
Food makes the body strong by providing it with data that enables it to define what it is. Of course, as we discovered earlier, the specific foods consumed matter in regards to how the body defines itself.
So, here’s the lowdown: the more food of higher vibrations that you eat, the more energetic your body becomes. Simultaneously, the more connected you are to yourself, the less food you need. So eating becomes more or less a choice, as you grow. It is a choice to continually encourage your body to higher energetic states (well, or the opposite, depending on the specific foods). Hear me when I say that food is choice, and it becomes more so as your self-actualization accumulates.
Remember that desire is intertwined with the building of character, so choosing whether to acknowledge your food-related desires plays into the development of your character. Bypass desire, as we said, and character is flat. On the other hand, when you eat as desired, and with high vibrations, character is built.
Food connects you to this physical world, as does character. It thus follows that the two are connected: they make you a worldly person. This is in opposition to chronically isolating yourself from the world, whereby you take in and put out nothing.
Food is a major vehicle by which humans connect to and create their world and themselves. It has its role in the playing-out of the universe. Food is a choice, and it is a tool. Understand it: do not fear it nor the lack of it. You can get on without it for longer than you think, even while living dynamically.
The main advice is this: never allow food to hinder you, whether by eating poorly nor by viewing the lack of it as suffering. Food is meant to be enjoyed, not only by the experience of eating it but also what it does for you, physically and metaphysically. As with people, go for food that is empowering only.
Food is a tool and a way of connecting to this world—a way of experiencing the phenomenon of being human. Food can serve you. Use it well.
Thank you.
Read Related Articles: