Conscious and Subconscious Dietary Needs
From the whole content of this website we can see that the human being is
a very complex being consisting of various bodies, systems, and polarities
with different characteristics. We could even say that we have inside us a
host of 'sub-beings' which we need to lead with the aim to serve our
personality in the most suitable manner. How we can do this? By the power of
our 'I', the spiritual core of our being. But, as we know from our
experiences, our 'I' is not always that which manages the situations and
challenges of modern life – we are often thrown to and fro in the 'wild sea
of life' from the sides of influences we cannot control. There are several
reasons for this, but the basic one is the following fact which has to with
the relationships among the four bodies of our being.
"In describing man, we say he is composed of physical body, etheric body,
astral body and ego. In certain connections it is certainly true that
the
ego is the highest of man's principles; but as things are today
the ego is the
baby among the four principles of man's nature. The ego contains the seed of
the highest to which man can attain, but it is at present, in its own way,
at the lowest stage. The physical body therefore is in its way the most
perfect of the human principles. The astral body even is more perfect than
the ego. If we consider the human ego we find that it is that which is so
close to us, that we identify ourselves with it. Anyone who does not
wilfully shut his eyes and is not too trivial to do so, needs but to look
inwards to find his ego. Compared with this, how far is man removed from the
comprehension of the secret things of his own physical body and its present
perfection of structure. Between the physical body and the ego come the
astral and etheric bodies. The astral body is also an imperfect principle of
human nature as compared with the physical body. In it are the emotions,
passions, desires, etc. Through the emotions of the astral body many things
are enjoyed which affect detrimentally the wonderful organism of the
physical body, in spite of the fact that the etheric body stands as a buffer
between the two."
[1]
Everyone who observes his own impulses related to his or her dietary
needs can distinguish three ways in which they manifest. Some are conscious,
such as when we decide to eat specific food because we have read about its
healing properties. Others are half-conscious, such as when we get a wish to
eat food we like very much but we do not know the reason for its sudden
emergence. But there are also unconscious dietary needs which we are not
aware of at all until our organism sends us the message through the
emergence of various disorders which disrupt our lives. Then we might
realise that we need to change our existing dietary habits.
Therefore we have the following states of the four bodies of man:
[2]
- The physical body is the oldest and consequently the
most perfect.
- The etheric body is the second by age and consequently very mature.
- The astral body is younger and consequently less mature.
- The ego is the youngest and consequently the least mature.
When looking at this, the question arises: "What, then, really is the man
who actually walks about the earth? He is neither the ego-less man, purely
under the influence of astral, etheric and physical bodies, nor is he only
the ego-man, but a compromise between the two, something coming about as the
result of a combination of both. The man we see before us is a composite
being." [3] This
means that the human being is a mixture of the influences coming from the ego
and from the rest of the members of his organism.
These relationships among the four bodies of our being
are especially well seen in the realm of nutrition. Everyone who observes
his own impulses related to his or her dietary needs can distinguish three
ways in which they manifest:
- Some impulses are conscious, such as when we
decide to eat specific food because we have read about its healing
properties.
- Other impulses are half-conscious, such as when we suddenly get an
unstoppable wish to eat favourite food just because we smelled a specific
aroma (or heard a specific sound, or saw a specific image) which is in our
memory associated with this dish.
- There are also subconscious dietary needs about which we are not
aware of until our organism sends us the message in the form of hunger
or thirst, or in more serious instances with the emergence of various
nutritional disorders and health problems.
The differentiation of nutritional needs into three groups
is the consequence of the fact that we experience in our daily life
THREE STATES OF HUMAN CONSCIOUSNESS:
- We are in the state of full consciousness only when
we think.
- In our feeling life we are in the state of dream-consciousness, with
the help of which we are only partially aware of what is causing the
emergence of specific feelings.
- In our life of the Will [4] which
is happening inside our physical body we are the whole day in a state of
sleep-consciousness (i.e., in the state of unconsciousness).
Therefore we can say, that we are from the perspective of our everyday
ego awake in our spirit, we are dreaming in our soul, and we are asleep in
our body. One of the consequences of the existence of three states of
consciousness is the following fact: We are carrying our physical body
around throughout our life, but when it comes to the question of how much do
we understand its needs we must admit that we know them the least of all.
What is the deeper underlying reason for this real life contradiction?
"You all know that the human being could never attain to knowledge if he
did not think, if in his mind he did not carry on something akin to work in
ideation or thinking. Knowledge does not come of itself. The human being has
to undertake work within himself. We must first endeavour to get to know
ourselves, to get to know what we are. Now all our knowledge takes its
course in the process of ideation. Our life of mental
representation which reproduces for us all the things outside us, we
experience in the form of mirrored image. The process does not penetrate at
all into what we are as physical bodily organism; it is thrown back to us,
and the human being can no more see into his own physical being than he can
see what is behind the mirror. Moreover he does not penetrate into his
physical organisation because his soul-life is completely filled by this
process of representation. One is obliged to say: Then it is quite
impossible to learn to know oneself, one can come to know nothing but this
process of ideation which has turned one into a reflecting apparatus for
thoughts. It is
impossible to penetrate further, we can only reach as far as the frontier;
and at the frontier the whole life of the soul is thrown back again, as a
man's image is thrown back in a mirror." [5]
This means that our physical body serves as the mirror for our conscious
soul-life [6] and the consequence of such arrangement is that "the content
of our life of ideation, what constitutes the work of our soul in ideation,
in mental representation, which is what brings knowledge about, does not go
as far as the physical body." [7] This prevents
activities inside our own body rising into our consciousness; instead they
remain in the obscure realm of existence. For that reason we cannot by means
of ordinary knowledge recognise what the specific dietary needs of our own
bodily organism are. The most we experience is hunger and thirst, but we are
not simultaneously capable of recognising what is the best way to satisfy
them. We also cannot rely on instincts as animals do. [8] And
in spite of the fact that modern science has been discovering a huge number
of details about the working of our organism, food ingredients, and
so-called
metabolic pathways –
which to a great extent depend on what we take into our body via food – we
still cannot say that we know for sure how to nourish ourselves properly. On
the contrary, there is more than enough evidence that the modern
materialistic approach leads to greater confusion and uncertainty in regard
to the question of how we can nourish ourselves in such a way that we will
satisfy both our conscious and unconscious nutritional needs.
Freedom in Relation to Our Food Choices
It seems that there is no solution out of this difficulty, for we cannot
know what is in the subconscious realm of our organism – otherwise it
wouldn't be subconscious! Nevertheless there is a roundabout way out of this
seemingly blind alley. One of the main characteristics which distinguish us
from animals is that we can think and reason. This holds especially true for
the domain of nutrition. Animals are driven by their instincts in regard to
their eating preferences, but we possess the ability to review our practices
and change them on the basis of understanding of their consequences. In the
growing up and in the later period of life we were exposed to:
- the influences coming from the outside (such as
attractive food, smells, eating environment, etc);
- unconscious or half-conscious impulses working inside us (needs
desires, urges, drives, cravings, etc).
All this is now the store of our past experiences in relation to food – we
could call it our personal food biography – which
has been transformed into our present food preferences and habits. But as adults
we can use our thinking and decide what we want to keep from it and what we want
to change. This is possible only if we start to develop more comprehensive
understanding of our own being and the role of nutrition.
If we acquire spiritual-scientific understanding of our being then we can
start to influence our organism from the outside with the choice of what we
consume and do in our lives – that is, with the conscious choices in regard
to our life style. As it is demonstrated on this website we can gain many
important insights about our whole organism and our dietary needs with the
help of a spiritual scientific explanation of the human being and his
relationships to the various kingdoms of nature. For example, when we become
familiar with the fourfold nature of our being, then we are protected from
one-sided focus on the needs of the physical body for mineral substances;
instead we will consume food which has also enough life forces inside it. In
this way we can take better care of the needs of all our bodies – the
physical body, the etheric body, the astral body and our 'I'.
We live now in the period of human evolution when "one should become clear
about the fact that humanity should increasingly pass over into more
conscious manner of nourishment." [9] The need for a more conscious manner
of eating and drinking is related also to the need to develop freedom in
various domains of our lives. Nowadays there is widely promoted an illusory
freedom of choice of whatever food and drink one desires. This is mainly
done by those who want to sell more of their products. But the real freedom
is based on the understanding of the motives for our dietary choices,
because "an action is not free if it is carried out without knowledge of the
reason for doing it." [10] It is obvious that we can't
decide if we will feel hunger or thirst, but we can decide how we will
satisfy these needs. Here is the space for our freedom in the domain of
nutrition. Here we also have an opportunity to experience the fruitfulness
of the spiritual-scientific approach when we set the task of finding out
what our individual nutritional needs are.
Nobody else can do this work for us if we want to become really free. Of
course, we can get help from others who already have developed an
understanding of specific nutritional topics, but in the end we ourselves
need to grasp whatever we hear or read. The path to freedom is the path of
conscious striving to attain the knowledge with our own efforts. The essence
of freedom is to understand the consequences of our decisions and actions
and then to shape our life in accordance with our intentions and goals. [11]
Whoever wants to become more free in the realm of nutrition needs to 'take
stock' of what (s)he 'inherited' from the specific food culture(s) which
influenced him/her in the past. This doesn't mean that you cannot keep some
elements from your past food biography, but it is different if this is your
conscious decision or if you eat something because of the 'inherited' habit.
This is the essential difference between a free and unfree habit in the
domain of nutrition! In the same manner as an artist decides to take
existing and new materials which (s)he combines in an unique combination, so
we can create our own unique food style from existing and new elements which
are the fruit of our own understanding and creativity.
Our 'I' lives in our organism consisting of astral body, etheric body and
physical body like a resident in a house. But we are not just residents; we
are maintaining and rebuilding our 'house': we are continually removing old
materials out of the body and bringing in new ones, in us are constant
active processes of decomposition and upbuilding of our bodily tissues.
Because of this we can – if we decide to – become 'architect' of our new
'residence', the transformed body. And as architects need to know laws of
statics and other physical laws of building a house, and besides this the
nature of materials used in its construction, so we need to be familiar with
the fundamental principles of nutrition if we want to design our own body in
a way that will serve to create whatever we want to become in the future.
Therefore we shouldn't be surprised that "the wrong food can easily transform us
into what we eat, but by permeating ourselves with knowledge of the
spiritual life, we can strive to become free and independent. Then the food
we eat will not hinder us from achieving the full potential of what we, as
men, ought to be." [12]
Thus we can conclude that in the case of human beings "all dietary
measures are completely individual and are absolutely dependent upon the way
and manner in which the person is developed in this or that way."
[13] But what we have in common is the need to find
out what our individual needs are, with the help of the youngest and the
least experienced member of our being – with the help of the spiritual core
of our personality, our 'I'. In this journey we can be inspired by other
people, ideas and examples, but in the end we ourselves need to do – if we
want to become free from all constraints in the form of "You should… !" or
"You shouldn't… !" – the main work in getting to know our own being. In this
way the individual creation of personal diet becomes part of "the influence
of spiritual-scientific life upon the sheaths
of man, which may be described as the perfecting, the regeneration of
the physical body from outside, through the external substances human being
consumes." [14]
And the quality of these influences is dependent to a great extent on the
knowledge of the fundamental principles of nutrition which are enabling us
to be aware of the consequences of our food choices – not only of the short
term consequences, but equally of the long term consequences on which
depends our future.
For a complementary perspective see:
♦ LOCAL VERSUS GLOBAL FOOD
DIETARY CONCLUSIONS & PRACTICAL INSTRUCTIONS
The whole
GENERAL
NUTRITIONAL GUIDELINES are created out of an awareness of the
distinction between general and individual needs of human beings. For
that reason the guidelines do not include any specific dietary regimes,
because this is the domain where people need to find their own individual
styles of eating. [15]
What we have in common is the fact that bad quality food has a negative
effect and good quality food has a positive effect on our being.
[16] For that reason the food quality has such a prominent role in
the
HOLISTIC
FOOD 'PYRAMID'. It is very common practice that food pyramids (or food
plates, or any other kind of presentation of food groups) have only
recommendations about the quantity of foods. This does not make any sense when one grasps that
food
quality is the most important general aspect of any diet. If we look at
NINE
ASPECTS OF A HEALTHY MEAL we can even conclude that all aspects presented
there are just various aspects of the final quality of the meal.
Nine aspects include also the aspect of individual needs.
And just because of the existence of this aspect we cannot generalise in
regard to the question of what is the best diet for all human beings. All attempts to create
'one-diet-suits-all' made by nutritional experts, governmental bodies and
other organisations promoting healthy eating are doomed to fail, because
they do not take into account the reality of human individuality and the
role of each person to find what is best for him or her.
[17]
How can one find out what suits his or her individual needs? The only way
is through exploration of various diets, and the careful observation of the
effects they produce. Of course, fundamental principles of nutrition provide
the insights that will help you to evaluate your dietary experiences. But
don't stick to a specific diet just because nutritionists or doctors or
other nutritional authorities proclaim it as the best for specific health
problems, or even as the best for all people. Sometimes you might find that only one or a few aspects of a
specific diet will suit you. Then you need to move further. In this way the
search goes on. But do not forget on the extreme importance of the food
quality – whichever diet you are implementing now or you will implement in
the future.
For those more adventurous there exists another, more effective way: to
do at least a week long fasting, and then slowly introduce various groups of
food back on the menu. Another variation is juice fasting [18]
or consuming only fresh fruit. Of course, this will work only if one is fit
for such radical experience and if one also helps the body to eliminate the
remnants of the consumed substances from the intestines in a safe way.
[19] The main reason for the
effectiveness of this method is in the fact that after such a radical change we become more sensitive to the real
needs of the body in the period immediately after fasting. Then we get an
opportunity to find
a new diet which will suit our individual needs better than the old one.
♣ For another perspective on this
topic see DEVELOPMENT OF NEW EATING 'INSTINCTS'
From the content of this principle it is also evident why
balancing
meals according to the principle of the threefold plant will
have positive effects on our well-being. In spite of our individual
characteristics we all have to deal with the extreme polarity between
spiritual and physical parts of our constitution. For that reason it is
better to use the preventative approach and implement this relatively
easy cooking principle for balancing the meals. Another option is to wait for our body to tell
us that we have gone out of healthy balance. But this option is more
painful in comparison with relatively small changes of our meals based
on insight about the importance of balancing the head system, the chest
system and the metabolic system.
♣ For practical guidelines see the
PRINCIPLE OF THREEFOLD PLANT
WARNING: You always have to put the above
practical dietary instructions inside the framework of
GENERAL NUTRITIONAL
GUIDELINES with the aim to know their limits when looking for a solution
of a specific nutritional problem. You also need to be familiar with
THE ROLE OF NUTRITIONAL GUIDELINES
with the aim to avoid any one-sided conclusions.
