Renouncing
the Search for the Edible Deity
PART
2
excerpt
from
The
Eating Gorilla Comes In Peace
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Now
how do you stay healthy? By being responsible for reception
and release, assimilation and elimination. If you are
not so responsible, you become toxic and enervated. Toxicity
is the failure to release, to eliminate. Enervation is
the failure to receive, to be sustained, to assimilate.
Therefore, in the process represented by this Teaching
of the Way of Adidam, we begin with the ordinary individual,
who is just a beast in the desert. We allow him or her
to consider the Condition in which he or she exists, and
to consider this primal emotional reaction, this metaphysics
of separation and unlove, to the point that he or she
can live like the eating gorilla and be human, be love.
And then we ask the individual to observe this cycle of
his own existence, his own process in relationship to
the great pattern in which he appears, within which he
is totally dependent and which he himself has not created.
The process by which you appear is not within you. It
does not originate in you. You are simply a reflection
of a great pattern. But the process that you represent
within this pattern is expressed everywhere in the form
of all the processes, all the individuals, all the cycles
everywhere to be observed. It is simply the cycle of reception
and release, inhalation and exhalation, assimilation and
elimination, activity and rest.
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AVATAR
ADI DA SAMRAJ: Once
you have become responsible as love through this whole consideration
of the Truth of your Condition, then you are starting to grow
again. Only then are you truly human. At that stage there are
some more sophisticated things to be observed about sustenance,
about diet and health and gross existence. You observe that in
terms of your conventional or mechanical state of existence, you
are a very simple process. You feel your Condition to be unspeakable,
unqualified, undefined, radiant as love, as feeling-attention,
Communion. And the whole of your functional, bodily, manifest
life is fundamentally a very simple process, albeit a complicated
play on a simple process. You are simply
reception and release. That
dynamism is epitomized in the cycle of inhalation and exhalation,
but is also the very foundation of our entire psycho-physical
life. And the matter of diet and health is simply a matter of
applying yourself with intelligence to this dynamic process, to
the law that is this process itself.
Now
how do you stay healthy? By being responsible for reception and
release, assimilation and elimination. If you are not so responsible,
you become toxic and enervated. Toxicity is the failure to release,
to eliminate. Enervation is the failure to receive, to be sustained,
to assimilate. Therefore, in the process represented by this Teaching
of the Way of Adidam, we begin with the ordinary individual, who
is just a beast in the desert. We allow him or her to consider
the Condition in which he or she exists, and to consider this
primal emotional reaction, this metaphysics of separation and
unlove, to the point that he or she can live like the eating gorilla
and be human, be love. And then we ask the individual to observe
this cycle of his own existence, his own process in relationship
to the great pattern in which he appears, within which he is totally
dependent and which he himself has not created. The process by
which you appear is not within you. It does not originate in you.
You are simply a reflection of a great pattern. But the process
that you represent within this pattern is expressed everywhere
in the form of all the processes, all the individuals, all the
cycles everywhere to be observed. It is simply the cycle of reception
and release, inhalation and exhalation, assimilation and elimination,
activity and rest.
So
how do we get healthy, having come to this point of understanding?
The matter of diet and health is a procedure, a sequence of responsible
adaptation. And that sequence is something we may animate similarly
at every meal, or differently every day, or even, occasionally,
in more revolutionary fashion, through fasting and other more
radical practices. But it is a single procedure, a procedure of
reception and release. The failure of health is the failure of
the cycle of reception and release. In other words, it is a case
of allowing the bodily being to become toxic and enervated. If
we take a great amount into ourselves that we cannot assimilate,
it collects in us. We accumulate it, you see. This is not only
true of gross food, it is true of all our experience. The more
full of accumulations we become, then the more toxic or poisoned
in the body and obstructed in our feeling-attention we become,
and consequently the less energy we represent and the less love
we are.
The discipline relative to ordinary eating and drinking and managing
the body is to take conscious responsibility for the fundamental
cycle of reception and release.
The
primary factor that is obstructing our energy in the moment is
accumulation, or toxemia. Thus, the first phase in the regaining
of health or in the ordinary maintenance of health is purification,
the elimination of toxins, accumulations, obstructions. This is
the effect of our practice at the level of gross diet. (It is
also the initial effect of real meditation. The first level of
spiritual life is essentially purifying.)
However,
that purification is not adaptation to asceticism for its own
sake, not purification only, not exhalation only, not elimination
only. Having gone through a period of purification, the release
of toxins, we enter into the second phase of true health practice,
the phase of assimilation, regeneration, and rejuvenation. In
this phase the mechanisms of the body are restimulated, and inhalation
and receptivity of the whole body may be engaged fully. This purifying
and regenerative procedure is the process of the whole body, in
which both reception and release, the eliminative and the assimilative
aspects of this single or whole body process, must become a matter
of responsibility. Our Way of life is the whole body Way, in which
both the purifying and the regenerative aspects of the process
of the being must become a matter of responsibility.
The
principle of health is the balancing of these two natural phases
of the life process. If either the purification phase or the rejuvenation
phase of the cycle becomes exaggerated, we become psycho-physically
imbalanced, and therefore no longer healthy. If our participation
in the purification phase becomes exaggerated, we become enervated,
because essential nutrients have been depleted from the system.
If we exaggerate the assimilative or regenerative phase by consuming
more food substance than the body can easily and quickly use and
eliminate, we become toxic.
At
times we must exercise this process of elimination and assimilation
most intensely: as a treatment or curative during a period of
illness, as an annual cleansing and revitalization, or perhaps
as an occasional profound attempt to purify and rejuvenate ourselves.
But we must also engage this process daily. We must sit down to
meals like the gorilla. We must breathe like the gorilla. We are
always feeding, you see, always in touch with what sustains us,
always in Communion with the Real, the Truth, the Infinite Source
and Condition. What we choose to eat should not toxify or enervate
us. What we choose to eat on a daily basis should be easily assimilated
by the body and should be completely satisfying. In other words,
our diet should include everything that every part of the whole
body needs. Just so, the body should be easily able to eliminate
the unusable portion of the food it ingests. It should not have
to shuffle wastes off into the cells to hide them until eventually
they emerge as disease. Thus, our eating itself must satisfy the
law of our own structure, the law of assimilation, of being sustained,
and the law of elimination, of being purified. Such a lawful diet
must be our daily choice once we become responsible for ourselves,
once we understand our condition in Truth and are no longer mad
like the beast in the desert, but are happy.
There
are substances that we may consume that toxify and enervate, but
that in the moment of use seem to be enlivening, stimulating,
pleasurable. These are the traditional dietary accessories, such
as meat, alcohol, tobacco, and refined or processed foods. You
need not use these substances for very long, nor need you use
them particularly to excess, in order to become aware of their
toxifying effects. To use them at all will toxify and enervate
you to one or another degree, depending on your metabolism and
your state of health in general. And, indeed, the foods we might
choose on a daily basis that are essentially sustaining and easily
eliminated can also toxify and enervate us, if not taken in the
right balance or if eaten to excess. Our functional life itself
can toxify and enervate us. Sexuality can toxify and enervate
us. All of our involvements can wear us out and obstruct us, not
only physically but emotionally, mentally, psychically. You are
the evidence of it. Our whole society is the evidence of it!
Everyone
is toxic and enervated by tobacco, alcohol, killed food, junk
food, drugs-and bad company! Some just have a little better ability
to keep smiling, to keep laughing longer than others. But everybody
dies through the influence of habits. It is commonplace for people
to die from toxic, enervated, and diseased conditions. We presume
that disease is the cause of death. But that presumption is just
part of the whole philosophy that we are not loved to begin with,
that we are cut off from what sustains us, that we are mortal
and, therefore, that everything we do kills us. And eventually
we do die, you see —
pure
justice!
Now
it is true that death is part of our cycle. At some point the
gross aspect of the bodily being is eliminated like the unusable
portion of food. It is literally eliminated, thrown off in the
natural process, just like the flowers. Flowers eliminate themselves.
They obviously want to live —
they
made the gesture to begin with. Why don't they just go on living?
We do not have to go out and cut off their heads —
they
die anyway. They do not even die from sickness. They simply pass
through a cycle of appearance and then disappear.
Similarly,
the human being is also structurally potentiated toward death
or the elimination of the gross part. But death need not and should
not be the result of toxemia and enervation. Such an end is simply
a social consequence of ignorant, foolish habits and irresponsibility.
We should die healthy, not from a long period of disease and suffering
and wretchedness and senility or accidents and all the rest of
the craziness that happens to a human being in our desert world.
Basically,
we should each live quite a long life, perhaps one hundred or
two hundred years or more. Perhaps we will experience cycles of
aging, but not degraded deterioration and disease. We should be
essentially full and happy, one day just becoming very tired and
then dying. That should be the way it is for us. We are structurally
disposed to die that way, but we are habitually disposed to die
from toxemia and enervation. We are philosophically disposed toward
that degradation also, to die from unlove and doubting and fear
and anger and all the rest of the effects of being ourselves bad
company to everything.
If
you can come to the point of responsibility for this reaction,
this separative gesture in which you interpret everything as separating
from you and rejecting you, if you can come to the point of being
a devotee and living in Divine Communion, absolutely sustained,
already happy, observing your own process and taking it into account,
if you can become responsible in your daily practice for assimilation
and elimination, reception and release, then, just as you choose
to remain active in the ordinary functional way itself, you may
also choose to celebrate from time to time, to use the substances
that would seriously toxify and enervate you if you were to use
them aggressively and for a long period of time. But you will
use them in intimate company as true celebration, fully aware
of their effects, fully aware of your own bodily reactions. You
will know how to bring the celebration to an end as well as how
to carry it on, and you will know how to purify yourself afterwards.
And, eventually, you will choose to abandon such substances altogether.
However,
people get into patterns of more or less perpetual indulgence
of a toxifying and enervating diet as well as all the other negative
habits of life. They do not bring them to an end, and they do
not pass through the process of elimination and regeneration.
Therefore, they create a cycle, a habit of unlove and degeneration.
They inevitably fall into a pattern of negative psychological
states, obsessive sexual desires, confusion, psychological distress,
and all the rest of it —
and
really what they are suffering is overloaded intestines and a
bad blood condition! They have forgotten the Law. They have forgotten
that for which they are responsible. It is fine for you to celebrate
a little in your transition to maturity, but afterward you must
do what is necessary to eliminate toxic accumulations while they
are still superficial to the body —
purify the blood again, perhaps fast for a few days or take juices
and raw foods, and so forth. Do whatever you must do to return
to a harmonious and purified condition, so that you may assimilate
in regenerative fashion the benign substances that form your ordinary,
natural, routine diet.
Your
whole life must be this process. Your whole life must take into
account this simple procedure, at every level of functioning.
It is true relative to diet, it is true relative to sexuality,
it is true relative to all your relations, it is true relative
to exercise and action, it is true relative to breath and thought
and meditation and all forms of growth. This simple process of
reception-release reflects our structure as a whole and does not
allow exclusive choices in one or the other direction, toward
self-exploitation or self-denial. Thus, we are not obliged to
be ascetics. We are obliged to be love and to be happy and to
be sustained absolutely, not to appear ascetic except in adhering
to this simple procedure for eliminating toxic accumulations and
gradually transcending our degenerative habits.
reception
and release —In
Conscious Exercise and the Transcendental Sun,
Avatar
Adi Da Samraj explains "reception and release" in terms
of expansion and contraction, the two principal movements of the
body and all phenomena in the cosmos. And He shows how this process
operates in terms of breath and feeling:
"In
the simplest terms, the living body is an expression of two tendencies,
uses, or currents of Life. And, again in the simplest or most
basic terms, these tendencies are the two motions of contraction
and expansion, or reception and release. There is a negative or
exclusive and unbalanced expression of each of these tendencies.
When reactivity, or reaction to experience, becomes stronger than
the force of Life and unobstructed or free feeling-attention that
we commonly bring to experience, then reception and contraction
disable us. We become self-possessed, confined to subjectivity,
negatively emotional, vitally weak, and self-defeating in action.
Then expansion or release is confined to patterns of mere self-indulgence,
so that we are constantly emptied until death.
"But
there is a positive or true functional development of each of
these motions, when they ate in balance, and when attention and
bodily form and action are controlled by full central communion
or feeling into the universal environment of the Life-Force. In
that case, even each breath becomes a balanced cycle of reception-release,
contraction-expansion, in the constant field of fully felt intensity
or Life.
"The
inhalation of breath, or Life, is associated with reception, infilling,
and natural conductivity or movement toward the whole body. Likewise,
the exhalation is associated with release of the wastes, the accumulated
contents or old circumstances and adaptations of Life (not the
release or emptying of Life itself), and natural expansion, which
is conductivity
or
movement from the whole body outward."
