Diving Into the Mystery

I have been thinking much about why live food is so significant, not just that it is healthy and this can actually be backed up now by much research but why consuming live food is actually significant, important to us in other ways. Here is part of it. The consumption of food, our choice of food, can take us to the highest high or the lowest low. My meditation teacher once spoke of heaven and hell as taking place right in the body. We can eat foods that elevate us, uplift us, even give us a sublime experience of bliss. We can consume foods that make us depressed or that deplete us or take us toward illness. In a way, our diet itself can a path to enlightenment, to self-awareness.

I was moved by Michael Pollan's observation in the Omnivore's Dilemma that the act of eating causes us to interact with nature at least 3 times each day. That really struck me because we have at times gotten so very far away from nature. And yet, to truly survive, we must have that connection not once a month or once a week, but 3 times or more each day.

The mystery I wanted to talk about is the food world itself. Or maybe I should say, the plant world. I think that eating live food is valuable because we are more inclined to contemplate the mystery of food itself. For example, let's look at the mighty watermelon. Watermelon has an outrageous and surprising array of nutrition. It has tryptophan and glutathione, 2 amazing amino acids. It is rich in minerals, it is a wonderful kidney and colon cleanser. But we can go deeper. Look at the beautiful shape of the watermelon. Round or oval, it is full, abundant, actually an amazing feat of growth! The little seed, growing to a size thousands times larger, with this tough protective shell, and this sweet delicious fruit inside. Victoras Kulvinskas said in Survival in the 21st Century that fruit is the only karma-free food that we can consume. In other words, nothing had to die for us to fill our bellies for that meal. Not true with lettuce, spinach, kale, etc. And finally, what about the seeds? We receive the resonance, the energy signature of the plant as well as all of the nutrition. We are receiving a beautiful energy of abundance, fertility, creativity! That is why I always recommend SEEDED watermelons! What a terrible affront on nature to genetically modify fruits to not bear seeds!!! We do this so that we do not have to be bothered spitting out the seeds? arrrrggghhhh! Our entire purpose in being the fruit eaters on the planet is to consume the fruit with the seeds, recycle them out the back end and keep the planet fruit filled forever!

But seriously...our connection with food, real food, live food, takes us deeper into a connection with ourselves. We can have a deeply spiritual relationship with the food we are consuming. We can even experience ecstasy in recognition of the mystery that is contained in each fruit, in each vegetable, nut, seed, herb and more. We receive this both intellectually in knowing but also within ourselves in the appreciation, observation and even assimilation of live foods. The plant world has so much to teach us! How exciting!