After he eats, he is aware of a sense of lightness and physical freedom, a soft wildness. The spirit of the deer becomes his. He also has prepared a small dish of gnarled roots and wild greens. He knows that these will give him access to the silent, earthy wisdom of the plant kingdom, an “ inside knowledge” that the deer meat alone could not provide. From the wild roots, he absorbs a quality of tenacious rootedness, and from the sharp-tasting leaves, a pliant flexibility. To the plants, he murmurs his thanks as well. Now he is ready for his trek.
Before the Fall
In times long past, among both tribal and high civilizations of a golden age, food was an integral part of the living philosophies that formed and developed human character. Long before the Industrial and Information Ages, we humans had a unified perspective of life borne of our regular interactions with nature. We learned from all these interactions with utmost care, since we knew nature both as our source, our partner in living, and the perpetual force that would answer our own needs and ensure the future of our offspring.
We did not perceive ourselves as something other than nature—we were nature. We knew that nature was simply humanity turned inside out—and humanity was nature turned outside in. When we referred to our individual characters as “my own nature,” we knew this to be the literal truth.
Living closely with nature gave us the opportunity to observe, experience, and recognize many qualities in ourselves, qualities that corresponded with the growth processes and actions of plants and animals. Stirred in the pots of trial and error and heated by the fire of intuition and ancestral wisdom, our observations also revealed to us the many possibilities recorded in the plant and animal kingdoms, and how these possibilities corresponded to our own lives.
We learned to apply these living metaphors to every aspect of life, culminating in the extraordinary dietary philosophies that were handed down from the prehistoric golden age civilizations to the ancient Egyptians, Maya, Sumerian, Indian, and many other sophisticated ancient cultures. After the global cataclysm that nearly decimated the human species some 11,500 years ago, some of the survivors were able to salvage seeds and remnants of this ancient knowledge. Many of these ideas were later codified into formal systems of thought, such as the ancient Ayurvedic system of India, traditional Chinese medical systems, the Greek “four humors,” the medicinal systems of Hippocrates, Paracelsus, Maimonides, and others. Perhaps the most well-known of these systems is the Medieval “Doctrine of Signatures.”
The Doctrine of Signatures is a systematic viewpoint of nature wherein the structure or function of a particular plant or animal was taken as a signal from nature to man. These signals revealed the purposes the plant or animal could serve.
For example: watercress, a plant that easily thrives in its watery environment, was recognized as beneficial for patients with a water imbalance in their own internal environments. Walnuts, with their convoluted, hemispherical surface, physically resemble the human brain; today we have discovered that walnuts contain brain-supporting omega-3 fatty acids.
The Doctrine of Signatures observed such similarities and would (to take this last example) ascribe to walnuts a special effect on the human nervous system.
At their height, such systems became phenomenally complex and involved encyclopedic compilations of observations concerning health-promoting foods and remedies for specific illnesses. Yet the guiding principle was never complex at all, for all such systems are based on the knowledge derived from experience and ancestral wisdom.
The Decline of Energetics
Some time after the cataclysm of 11,500 years ago, a few survivors salvaged what remained of their great cultures and journeyed to new lands to reestablish civilization. Through years of hardship, these ancestors endured famine, sunless skies, and frigid temperatures. Finally, though deeply scarred (both psychologically and spiritually), they managed to begin again. Only this time, it wouldn’t be a golden age, but one filled with warfare, strife, extreme environmental adjustments, and other related challenges.
Many who had reverted to a more primitive lifestyle remained fixed in that historical niche. Others rebuilt civilization, ever on guard from the dangers they faced from predators and fellow humans ready to conquer and destroy those nascent remnants of what once was.
For more than 10,000 years this cycle of on-again, off-again warfare and enlightenment prevailed, while most of humanity remained cloaked in a veil of amnesia concerning their true history. Even today, we desperately hold on to the beliefs and dogma that have finally culminated in the modern scientific and religious misunderstandings of who we are and where we have come from.
Yet even through these thousands of years, humankind at various stages of culture has maintained at least some connection with natural, wholesome foods and the knowledge of nature. It is only a comparatively recent occurrence that humanity has more fully disengaged from this intimacy with nourishing food and the wisdom gained from our ancestors. In the last hundred years or so, as food has become more refined and processed, people have become more segregated from the sources of their food, causing this food knowledge to fade, its currency debased to that of fragmentary traditions and empty imitation.
Some of the simple, early folk remedies, along with the herbs and foods upon which they were based, would later serve as the foundation for what would become modern pharmaceutical medicine; but while the ingredients and their physical effects were often handed down, the knowledge that inspired them was not. Later, even the ingredients were abandoned in favor of synthesized versions with dangerous side effects.
With the Renaissance and the Age of Reason came a mechanical view of nature and the world around us. Instead of being guided by a vision of a universe inspired by consciousness, spirit, and energetics, the new order saw the universe as a great cosmic machine, engineered by impeccable mechanics and oiled by infallible logic.
The very act of knowing was increasingly edged out and dominated by the supernatural god of religion along with the god of scientific materialism. Our new methods of “knowing” ourselves and our food are now, for the most part, either faith-based or the result of dissection, analysis, and linear logic.
The study of anatomy is based on the observation of dissected corpses—not of live people. Interestingly, the study of nutrition has also been based largely on the “dissection” of food “corpses”—the analysis of the ash left after burning a food in a laboratory. Such an abstract approach, divorced as it is from living reality, has little in common with energetic knowledge.
The Legacy of the Machine Age The shift from a world guided by energetics to one steered by mechanics brought about one earthshaking change in our approach to life. Before the Machine Age we knew the importance of adapting to nature and living within nature. Once we’d bought into the simplified metaphors of the Machine Age, we came to believe that we could hop into the engineer’s room and run this train ourselves. We even started to think we could improve on nature.
Advanced technology came married to a peculiar mentality—one guided by the audacity to think that the environment would or could adapt to us. This is the basic difference between some of the great civilizations and peoples of yesterday and the “advanced” civilizations of today. It is a difference that has uprooted the foundation of life as we knew it.
This confusion of the many for the one, of our human theories of life for life itself, has resulted in the dismemberment of a unified grasp of life into isolated branches of nutrition, medicine, science, religion, biology, psychology, etcetera ad infinitum—each with its human specialists trained to explore and analyze their particular branch alone.
With the atmospheric disasters created by the oil and coal industries in full view, with headlines blaring daily warnings about global warming, and with a litany of sobering events from the Dust Bowl to Chernobyl behind us, you would think we would have awakened from that Emperor’s New Clothes fantasy, wouldn’t you? But no! For the most part, we’re still locked in that deep sleep.
Look at what is being funded today in the way of biotechnology. The Machine Age dream of Man the Divine Engineer is today’s living nightmare.
The Informed Battleground
We speak of the modern epoch as the “Age of Information”—and it’s true, amidst the dizzying babble of data, a Renaissance of true knowledge is struggling to emerge. But to a great extent, we still live within the conceptual prison of the Machine Age. The rise of mechanistic, analytical views on life meant redefining food, history, health, and human life in terms of concrete, empirical information and data.
In short, the value of quality was supplanted by a value of quantity.
In the Machine Age, the new model of health was based on warfare and aggression. Illness was seen not as our deviation from nature, but as an aggressive act by nature. The energetic approach to addressing illness by restoring natural immunity was replaced with a model that through its medicaments served to weaken natural immunity. Nature’s aggression countered by man’s aggression.
This aggressive bias is even evident in the language of modern medicine, which is essentially a military terminology. When our bodies are “invaded” by a pathogen, we are “under attack,” and build up our immune “defenses” or take antibiotics, antihistamines, and anticongestants. Medical people speak of their “armamentarium” of medical weaponry, and of how well we are doing in the “war on . . .” (Fill in the blank.)
Healing in the Machine Age actually has little to do with wholeness or health. Rather than dealing with a sense of what health is, it has become a detailed cataloging of illnesses and their appro priate pharmaceutical countermeasures. Today, most “health care” is really “illness care” and “health science” is actually “illness science.”
Genuine health care is relegated to the “secondary” health services—nursing, counseling, physical therapy, and rehabilitation—to actually deal with health—with recovering wholeness and not just vanquishing symptoms of sickness.
Our Confused Substance
Our modern war with food has resulted in much confusion, as evident through the many dietary programs available to choose from these days. Several decades ago, a popular book on natural health was published with the title Are You Confused? Unfortunately, the book’s contents didn’t clear up the confusion, and the answer today is generally the same as it was decades ago.
Ancient peoples, whether nomadic or agricultural, certainly were not confused on this point. They had to know nature—they had to adapt to their environment constantly in order to survive. In the process of doing so (and in a way humans seldom do today), they showed a great respect and gratitude for nature and her gifts. Along with that respect went keen observation and understanding.
In those pre–Machine Age circumstances, we knew our food as the foundation of our blood, bones, and nervous system. It was the catalyst of our thinking and way of living. Food was the basic substance—a word that literally means “what exists behind, or the quality of, a stand or position.” We knew that food was more than mere fuel—it was living experience incarnate.
Today, we have traded much of the intuitive wisdom and common sense of our ancestors for the technological ingenuity of sophisticated tools, chemicals, and other indulgences. Many of these new toys designed to improve our lifestyles are helpful and serve a useful purpose. Yet we continue to direct most of the progress gained through our newly acquired god, science, toward waging war with our environment, our food, our diseases, and most of all with each other.
This is especially true of modern cosmopolitan medicine, a medical model that has lost the slightest connection to its planetary roots. Happily though, the food folklore of our “unscientific” past finally is reemerging as the foundation of healing, and what was condemned yesterday as blind superstition is reappearing as today’s validated scientific fact.
Like our ancestors, we have begun to realize that we too must learn to adapt to our ever-changing environment—and we may soon even grasp that our daily food, our substance, is a critical link in doing so.
If science can prove beyond a reasonable doubt that food is indeed our best medicine, then pharmacology just might be reunited with its past to become the healing tool it so desperately needs to be. For this to happen, though, there will have to occur a major shift in the way people perceive the conventional paradigm of food and health.
By Steve Gagné in "Food Energetics - The Spiritual, Emotional, and Nutritional Power of What We Eat", Healing Arts Press, USA,2008, excerpts chapter 2. Adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Thanks for your comments...