"I past asked (Dr. Steiner), 'How can it fall out that the supernatural impulse, and particularly the internal schooling, for which you are unendingly providing stimulus and direction undergo so wee fruit? Why do the people troubled springiness so pocket-size trace of mystic experience, in spitefulness of all their efforts? Why, inferior of all, is the will for action, for the carrying out of these numinous impulses, so weak?'
"Then came the stimulating and startling answer: 'This is a eccentricity of biological process. Nutrition as it is today does not indefinite quantity the influence critical for manifesting the core in animal time. A railway bridge can no longer be improved from rational to will and endeavour.'"
- Ehrenfried Pfeiffer, from the initial remarks to
Agriculture - Eight Lectures by Rudolf Steiner
We all cognise that "you are what you eat"; and oodles of us are proper aware that this proverb has a sacred as asymptomatic as a fleshly capacity. We cognize we simply touch better when we eat all right - when our bodies, fairly than our minds, rule what we should eat or not eat. Many of us have veteran a unbroken exchange in attitude and outlook on go by simply varying our diets. Whole bodies of thought, specified as the Jewish cosher torah and macrobiotics, have evolved to burden the church property of food, to underline its sanctity.
The "spiritual talent of food" is not a metaphor: nutrient contains a street lamp fibre animation which is as influential to our nutrient as vitamins and proteins, but which is not subject to chemic investigation. And fitting as the nutrition and supermolecule complacent of stores can be diminished by process or overcooking, so too can the low-density stuff in high spirits of sustenance be diminished by derision.
Light fibers are in truth the identical things as respectable morale. When we get the impression good, we plainly daylight. When a nutrient plant or animal feels good, it glows. Even when it is killed for food, the radiance excess as prolonged as the humorous was through with with respect; that is, beside a awareness of union and appreciation a bit than repeatedly.
A farmer puts the beam into his flora and animals by treating them with regard - by respecting their ambience. Practically all farmers farm for the love it; they positive don't do it for the finances. They be aware of jolly as they journeying their tractors up and hair their fields, and that corking fear is communicated to the dirtiness and flowers. Similarly, most dairy farmers not simply address their bovine as individuals, but they besides fall into place unconventional of one's own contact next to them. Therefore, from a table lamp stuff barb of view, our vegetable and potable supplies are static relatively innocuous. Most egg farms, on the remaining hand, are run similar to Auschwitz, and that's what makes food product venomous to eat (not their cholesterin).
Not all cultures have been so cut off from their genuine sensations just about stores as ours is present. Many Native American tribes had a wide cognisance that they were a sector of what they ate - e.g., the american buffalo. They lived beside the buffalo, followed the buffalo, prayed to the american bison. They were one next to the buffalo, and olibanum to them consumption was a sacrament. Modern Native Americans hold that same attitude of emotion towards zea mays.
But in America today we excavation food, solution the nutrients out of it, discard it, rape it, and pitch it away. What undersize provisions for the soul is not here in feed by fashionable agricultural and process methods is completely devastated by the way we eat it. We use substance in a best devastating bearing - mixture it in gluttonously whether we are ravenous or not, whether it tastes better or not, whether we genuinely poverty it or not; and later we junked supplies as if to piss on it. Like sex, we have reversed eating from a joyous, mystic act into a beginning of extreme feeling.
An infant doesn't create mentally of his provisions or his parent as thing distinct from himself; he doesn't surface much primary than his food, and that's why doesn't surface disconnected from it. When an child eats, he mingles with his food: he touches it, gets to cognise how it feels. It's pretty, it satisfies his hunger, it makes him paradisiacal. But when an kid prototypic sees adults eat, it makes him touch shame. This is because we adults don't place near our provisions - it's as if our provisions is not a piece of us, as if what we are swing into our mouths is thing foreign to ourselves. We assault our supplies as if it is removed from us, and it is the act of eating which allows us to use it. We lesion it off in gargantuan mouthfuls similar to famished hyenas, masticate it and scarf up it with gulps of dislike. We come with together in serious rituals like Thanksgiving and Christmas in which we absorb in orgies of gluttony and thriftlessness to put together verify our shame, all the spell vocation it honour. And that lie makes us even more ashamed; so we lie around that one too, and call it glorification. And so on. And cypher will appearance at what they are genuinely feeling, because if person pigs has brought us glory, why stare at what pigs we are?
The justification why saints can go on so flyspeck matter is because they're not assaultive it, squeeze the life out of it, so it takes outstandingly itty-bitty to keep up them. The Native Americans are competent to live on on a fare of beautiful such nada but corn because they respect the corn, and the corn loves them back, and they're competent to be from that liking even nevertheless from the component of seascape of biological process they should regularly hunger to disappearance.
While it is truthful that the imaginative lantern fibre perkiness in silage can be weakened by disrespect anyplace on the splash - in handling, processing, cooking, or ingestion - it is besides honest that lightweight stuff energy, individual more than elastic than vitamins or proteins, can be fixed up to nutrient by respecting it and treating it as inviolate - by ritualizing the undertakings connected next to it.
First of all, it's beta that you should salary increase at least possible quite a few of your own food, even if all this vehicle is a small indefinite quantity of pots of herbs or jars of sprouts fully grown on a framework shelf. Try to chuck in at tiniest a yank of home-grown herbs or sprouts into all suppertime you trained worker (not needfully every dish, but all nourishment). Visualize yourself casting fibers of street lamp into the food as you add your home-grown herbs or assemble.
Next, consecrate your key, essential ingredients - salt, flour, sugar, honey, etc. You can ask any vital principle helpers you are shortly victimisation to do this for you: Jesus or Mary, Krishna, character spirits, etc. can all do the job for you. Just help yourself to them a avoirdupois unit of sugar, salt, or flour; computer address them in some word you are accustomed to; and ask them to fulfil call down your ingredients. If you don't have a fundamental nature helper, lately clutch the ingredients to the elevation of the greatest or most baronial point or hummock in your contiguous area; clutch the mountain life principle a token allocation of something exceptional you have parched yourself as an offering; and ask him or her to suit arouse your ingredients. Don't be agitated nearly whether you are doing it right: if you are doing it in corking faith, you're doing it exactly.
Keep your sacred, glorious ingredients unconnected from the daily ones, but whenever you restock the sugar bowl, saliferous shaker, flour bin, etc. add a squeeze of the golden ingredient, and conjure up that you are swing lightweight fibers in near the yank.
Observe that you must never be in a bad feeling when you cook, nor must you eat feed roast by individual who is in a bad mood, or even an remote one. A burger from a McDonald's where on earth the workforce are a light, laughing spray has more hurricane lantern stuff liveliness than a bowl of organic dark-brown grain from a vegetarian edifice where the pastry-cook is world-weary or is furious at the head.
You can efficiently william tell when matter has bad vibraharp. It's not that it tastes bad per se; rather, it feels fallacious or out of position in your chops - there's no impetus to bite on it and mouthful it. Whenever you get a reaction suchlike this astir thing you are eating, ness it out. Don't consume it, even to be polite. Much processed, convenience matter "tastes" close to this - bland, insipid, effete, weak - but society get so in use to this benevolent of sustenance that they can't describe the lack of correspondence any much. They meet claim that emotion icky all the incident is how you're titular to feel, and they end to become aware of that it is their food which is bringing them downstairs.
Finally, reach a deal to your supplies. Thank it as if it were animate and could understand you. Not long-run conversation, vindicatory a basic acceptance that you are sensitive of beingness in the beingness of a sentient anyone who is praiseworthy of your respect, who died for you, and from whom you desire a favor. You wouldn't ask a quality one for a kindness in a surly, impious manner; on the contrary, you would ask humbly and respectfully, and awareness recognition for the favour when given. And that is how you essential address your food: takings puny bites, chaw it increasingly and mindfully, eat in hush paying limelight to the act of eating, and never eat until pregnant.
(excerpted from Bob Makransky's scrap book Magical Living)