Edward’s Diary Entry 119: Cultivating Awareness 4 – Eating

All too often, eating is just a question of seeing, smelling and tasting to satisfy un-analysed taste buds and a stomach that needs filling. We have been conditioned to accept the kind of food our local society offers us, from frozen hamburgers (see Extra today), the hottest Indian curry you can imagine, all the way through to seal blubber near the North pole. Or fresh vegetables from the market gardens. It’s all about availability and who’s doing the producing and marketing.

What we eat.

An intelligent practitioner of Self-Awareness will have his or her own criteria. We analyse our tastes, analyse what society provides for us, and try to make the best possible choices along the way. It’s just a question of common sense. “Experts” will confound us day in, day out. “Nutritional science” changes every few years or decade. Economic factors preside over all, and we poor consumers just have to lump it. Now it’s low fat, no fat, full fat, fortified, vitaminised, farm-fresh, natural, organic, gluten-free, naturally sweetened, whatever… It’s all double-speak nowadays, meaning nothing, as George Orwell predicated for 1984. But common sense says food comes from the Earth, and should be consumed as quickly as possible for the best possible effect. There are no short-cuts, although different forms of preservation have existed for survival purposes in adverse climates. To stay healthy, you need to ingest things that are alive and have just popped out of the soil or the water. Some things keep longer, some less, and you have to know this and act accordingly. We can’t be totally natural in today’s society, so if we don’t have our own means of organic production, we simply have to make our bodies accept things of dubious quality so we can live in and adapt to society, working maybe on the next front, which is how we eat what we eat.

How we eat.

So Awareness works on various levels: 1) food type – evaluating what to eat and how much; 2) food origin – evaluating where food comes from and how long it has been separated from its origin before consumption, and how it is cooked or prepared. The next step up is 3) attitude to food: maintaining a thankful or grateful attitude towards food as it enters our bodies. This is why Grace was said at the table, and there were table manners. It was an attempt to heighten our Self-Awareness, to stop for a minute before eating to give thanks to the Universe for supplying the food. We have to realise that something has died, or has been uprooted or picked so that we can put it into our mouths, digest it and convert it into our bodies, thoughts and emotions. This is no mean feat. It’s really a miracle. And if we are not aware of this, all kinds of misbehaviour enters the equation – the kind we see nowadays, where food means nothing in affluent countries, being consumed at all hours of the day and night just about anywhere, whereas 26,300 people die of hunger every day in a world with 750 million “undernourished people”, vs. 1.64 billion “overweights” in the same world. If it were one family, one tribe, or even one village with percentages like these, something would be seriously wrong and the inhabitants would try to correct it. But no, the world is such a big place, and TV doesn’t tell you and me what to do, does it?

Step 4) Awareness of Self while Eating: we bear in mind and remember that food is being converted into body, mind and energies, being transubstantiating for a higher good, fuelling common sense (hopefully) and brotherhood (miraculously) and thereby creating better all-round health for oneself and for everyone around us. At least that is the ideal.

Being thankful for food and transubstantiating it for higher purposes is within the grasp of everyone. It is not a philosophy. It is a practise. And practise makes perfect, or at least helps to increase what we most need in today’s world: greater human Self-Awareness, at every moment of the day, particularly when eating.