At the end of the day in the silence and quiet.
Today I was around food a lot, but had no appetite.
You are not supposed to tempt yourself in the fast.
Because it is not a game, perhaps. Remembering Gandhi’s brahmacharya experiments.
Brahmacharya, traditionally interpreted as “chastity” now is commonly translated as “right conduct.”
Because “right conduct,” conduct that does not cause harm to others, can not limited to single sphere of sexual behavior, or restrictions of any single kind.
For example a fast from eating.
Because in the fast you are also not supposed to: raise your voice, get overly emotion, talk badly about other people, gossip, act in violence of any kind, smoke, take drugs, or swear or talk coarsely.
In other words your relationship to the community and world around you has to switch from a contestational relationship to one of acceptance and receptiveness.
It’s not that I’ve lost my appetite for food, but I find myself craving whole and healthy foods like brown rice, fruits, beans, and kale.
There are two huge squashes on the counter that came from our garden. I want to slice them very thin and then make a curry with them.
One changes one’s relationship to pleasure in a fast.
Is the pleasure merely instantaneous, on the surface, with one experiential quality–for example, taste.
Or does the pleasure sink to all the various levels in the body, does the food continue to give pleasure at every stage of the body’s experience of food: taste, digestion, and egestion, and then afterwards how it builds the body.
I know I would always laugh when we would learn yoga poses that were supposed to aid with expelling matter from the body, but honestly: isn’t how food leaves the body at least as important as how it enters the body?
In this, just like in The Matrix, our bodies really are little processing plants for the physical matter of the earth and the universe.
Maybe the mind and what it thinks and how it speaks is also like this.
Contributing to the help and well-being of all creatures in the world or impeding it.
You free yourself from food during the day but then you are supposed to eat at night. So you free yourself from food maybe so you can actually experience it at night.
When I ate a tomato, warm off the plant, in Santa Cruz, California in September 2004, I had tasted the first real tomato in my life.
Same for the white peach I ate, orchard-warm, on the island of Corsica, July, 200. First peach of my life.
Purifying the spirit in an impure body is tough challenge.
And purifying the body with our current food production and distribution system is impossible. Fruits and vegetables are driven thousands of miles across the country and taste nothing like themselves upon delivery to massive grocery stores.
And anyone who really knew where factory meat and milk came from wouldn’t want to eat or drink it. Check out www.themeatrix.com to see what I mean.
We have an opportunity now to come to understand our body as a little ecosystem with its own environmental crisis going on. What we’ve done to the outside we’ve also done to the inside.
I do not think we will be able to fix one without fixing the other.