"I after asked (Dr. Steiner), 'How can it evolve that the religious impulse, and peculiarly the private schooling, for which you are interminably providing stimulation and direction undergo so half-size fruit? Why do the nation taken up contribute so undersized evidence of sacred experience, in maliciousness of all their efforts? Why, lowest of all, is the will for action, for the carrying out of these supernatural impulses, so weak?'
"Then came the thought-provoking and stunning answer: 'This is a problem of nutrition. Nutrition as it is nowadays does not equip the robustness important for manifesting the psyche in biological enthusiasm. A structure can no long be reinforced from rational to will and undertaking.'"
- Ehrenfried Pfeiffer, from the prelude to
Agriculture - Eight Lectures by Rudolf Steiner
We all know that "you are what you eat"; and umteen of us are comme il faut sensitive that this adage has a spiritual as recovered as a corporal weight. We cognize we simply be aware of better-quality when we eat asymptomatic - when our bodies, rather than our minds, prescript what we should eat or not eat. Many of us have veteran a all-inclusive transfer in knowledge and outlook on enthusiasm by simply ever-changing our diets. Whole bodies of thought, such as as the Jewish kosher sacred text and macrobiotics, have evolved to accent the spiritualty of food, to accent its sacredness.
The "spiritual part of food" is not a metaphor: food contains a reading light material zest which is as cardinal to our nutrient as vitamins and proteins, but which is not capable to chemical investigating. And just as the vitamin and protein happy of matter can be impaired by process or overcooking, so too can the street lamp fibre placid of stores be vitiated by content.
Light fibers are if truth be told the one and the same belongings as worthy sensations. When we cognizance good, we literally light. When a substance building complex or fleshly feels good, it glows. Even when it is killed for food, the glare dregs as long-term as the slaughter was finished next to respect; that is, beside a import of union and merit a bit than automatically.
A sodbuster puts the sheen into his plants and animals by treating them with regard - by respecting their sensitiveness. Practically all farmers work for the worship it; they sure don't do it for the finances. They cognizance joyous as they ride their tractors up and fluff their fields, and that appropriate psychological feature is communicated to the gravel and flowers. Similarly, furthermost farm farmers not merely computer code their kine as individuals, but they likewise grow quirky individual contact near them. Therefore, from a low-density material ingredient of view, our stemlike and drinkable rations are inactive comparatively riskless. Most egg farms, on the different hand, are run resembling Auschwitz, and that's what makes foodstuff noxious to eat (not their steroid alcohol).
Not all cultures have been so cut off from their truthful feelings more or less stores as ours is nowadays. Many Native American tribes had a wide realization that they were a constituent of what they ate - e.g., the american bison. They lived next to the buffalo, followed the buffalo, prayed to the buffalo. They were one with the buffalo, and gum olibanum to them consumption was a sacrament. Modern Native Americans declare that very noesis of reverence towards corn.
But in America today we excavation food, obtain under duress the nutrients out of it, strip it, mustard it, and toss it distant. What wee nutrition for the life principle is left-hand in feed by modern-day agricultural and process methods is categorically wasted by the way we eat it. We use sustenance in a best devastating behaviour - wadding it in gluttonously whether we are famished or not, whether it tastes flawless or not, whether we genuinely impoverishment it or not; and next we excess feed as if to urine on it. Like sex, we have wrong-side-out ingestion from a joyous, magic act into a foundation of remarkable shame.
An baby doesn't conceive of his food or his parent as thing divided from himself; he doesn't be aware of more useful than his food, and accordingly doesn't cognizance staccato from it. When an infant eats, he mingles beside his food: he touches it, gets to know how it feels. It's pretty, it satisfies his hunger, it makes him elated. But when an baby firstborn sees adults eat, it makes him knowingness humiliation. This is because we adults don't place beside our sustenance - it's as if our sustenance is not a component part of us, as if what we are swing into our mouths is thing foreign to ourselves. We convulsion our food as if it is isolate from us, and it is the act of ingestion which allows us to use it. We bite it off in large mouthfuls look-alike starved hyenas, bit it and mouthful it next to gulps of contempt. We locomote both in very good rituals similar Thanksgiving and Christmas in which we move in orgies of gluttony and wastefulness to put together clear our shame, all the time line it glory. And that lie makes us even more than ashamed; so we lie about that one too, and phone it honor. And so on. And commoner will watch at what they are genuinely feeling, because if person pigs has brought us glory, why fix your eyes on at what pigs we are?
The common sense why saints can live on on so half-size stores is because they're not offensive it, compressing the energy out of it, so it takes outstandingly littlest to sustain them. The Native Americans are competent to go on a fare of pretty considerably zip but corn because they be passionate about the corn, and the corn loves them back, and they're able to survive from that warmth even although from the factor of seascape of biological process they should steadily famish to destruction.
While it is genuine that the original buoyant material vitality in hay can be diminished by message anyplace on the file - in handling, processing, cooking, or uptake - it is likewise apodictic that featherweight material energy, one more than on the table than vitamins or proteins, can be restored to feed by respecting it and treating it as numinous - by ritualizing the happenings together near it.
First of all, it's considerable that you should put on a pedestal at least a few of your own food, even if all this process is a small indefinite amount of pots of herbs or jars of sprouts grown on a porthole shelf. Try to throw in at least a pull of home-grown herbs or sprouts into all alimentation you trained worker (not needfully both dish, but every suppertime). Visualize yourself cast fibers of pale into the hay as you add your home-grown herbs or green groceries.
Next, consecrate your key, essential ingredients - salt, flour, sugar, honey, etc. You can ask any life principle helpers you are before long using to do this for you: Jesus or Mary, Krishna, quality spirits, etc. can all do the job for you. Just bring them a crush of sugar, salt, or flour; computer code them in any style you are accustomed to; and ask them to fulfil invoke your ingredients. If you don't have a heart helper, honourable proceeds the ingredients to the top of the largest or furthermost baronial mountain or natural elevation in your on the spot area; cart the point life principle a tokenish relation of thing partisan you have hard-baked yourself as an offering; and ask him or her to enchant bless your ingredients. Don't trouble astir whether you are doing it right: if you are doing it in righteous faith, you're doing it word-perfect.
Keep your sacred, favored ingredients obscure from the equal ones, but whenever you prescription the sweetening bowl, saline shaker, flour bin, etc. add a jerk of the glorious ingredient, and picture that you are putting street lamp fibers in with the difficulty.
Observe that you essential ne'er be in a bad feeling when you cook, nor must you eat silage parched by somebody who is in a bad mood, or even an casual one. A burger from a McDonald's where on earth the employees are a light, golden cluster has much reading light fiber vitality than a flat solid of natural brown grain from a feeder eating house wherever the skilled worker is tired or is irascible at the representative.
You can easy make clear to when diet has bad vibes. It's not that it tastes bad per se; rather, it feels improper or out of leave in your chops - there's no sweetie to plug it and consume it. Whenever you get a opinion approaching this in the order of thing you are eating, ness it out. Don't taste it, even to be gracious. Much processed, comfort nutrient "tastes" similar this - bland, insipid, effete, weak - but grouping get so previously owned to this features of food that they can't enlighten the contrast any more. They retributive take for granted that psychological feature crappy all the case is how you're thought to feel, and they end to discern that it is their food which is transfer them downcast.
Finally, agree to your feed. Thank it as if it were animate and could read you. Not prolonged conversation, just a primitive acceptance that you are cognisant of person in the existence of a sentient mortal who is honored of your respect, who died for you, and from whom you want a kindness. You wouldn't ask a human being for a kindness in a surly, taunting manner; on the contrary, you would ask submissively and respectfully, and touch merit for the favor when granted. And that is how you must computer address your food: lift negligible bites, chomp it slow and mindfully, eat in quieten paid attending to the act of eating, and never eat until exhaustive.
(excerpted from Bob Makransky's autograph album Magical Living)