For a while I have been looking to express some experiences with my experimentation with diet and its effects on spiritual advancement. Many of these experiments were initially done for health reasons, however I realized that the implications went far beyond just physical well-being, and demonstrated various effects on one’s prowess in the spiritual realm of work. So, in an effort to share some of these findings, I am going to talk about my current method of eating, raw veganism. Now, this may sound like a decent into quackery, and if you were to conduct some research on it, you would almost certainly run into your fair share of it. For this reason, I am going to approach things specifically from an spiritual viewpoint, and try to stray away from making too many comparisons, or trying to call a certain dietary medium bad. This is simply about the effects that raw veganism can have, why things might be this way, why NOT to do it, and things to consider in regards to it.
In yogic tradition, you won’t go too far in study without seeing something in regards to diet and how to eat properly. Although there are many different suggestions, but it boils down to a few things of general importance:
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Eat simply
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Eat food that easy to digest
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Eat food that adds and maintains vital force (prana).
This isn’t something exclusive to Indian yoga, although they are the most well-known for it in modern society. Many of these suggestions revolve around dieting that is often stressed towards vegetarianism, and many sources would downright denounce the use of meat. I won’t go into it, because quite frankly, I don’t really think meat is all that bad. However, this stress towards a highly vegetarian diet has been a staple attached to yoga, and many well-known spiritual movements.
It is sad that most of what is available about the reasoning behind this is clouded in New Age rhetoric, which often doesn’t lead to learning a damn thing at all. The primary reason for these dietary suggestions was simple: digestion takes energy to perform. Like any other biological process the body must use energy actually process the food it eats. The harder the food is to digest, the more energy it takes to metabolize the food. This is why people often hit the sack when they are stuffed; all their energy must go towards digesting, so the got to knock out.
Since the staple of spiritual advancement is to have a free-flowing energy matrix, the development of this can be greatly hindered if you digestion is not smooth an easy-going. However, the easier and more fulfilling the food choices are, the quicker, more comfortable, and more holistic your spiritual advancement may be. This energy will not only have spiritual effects, the energy from this spiritual advancement can be used to far greater effectiveness in all areas, making one physically, socially, and materially robust.
This was the primary reason for making these dietary rules, because the yogis found these foods to preserve vital force. However, the goal was not only to maintain vital force, but to eat food that could add to it. In order for the food to add to it, it must carry within itself a storage of pranic energy, living energy.
One of raw veganism’s main points is centered precisely around this necessity for prana-rich food. Fruits, vegetables, and plants in general, are among the only foods that humans consume while it is still alive. Even though a fruit or vegetable may be picked out of the ground, there are still vital processes that go on for days after it has been plucked from a tree or picked from the ground. This is not something that happens when a food is cooked, for any processes that might have been going on will be die from the heat. The prana leaves when the thing dies, so a cooked food item will not have that vital quality.
There are many other reasons as to why this diet makes energy available, but that’s something that won’t be discussed here. For one, I am not a scientist, and if I was, I would almost certainly concede to the complete novice ability that strict material science has in assessing how people should live. It might stir debates that no one can do much to prove or disprove, and I think it would be a huge repeat of the point. The ability of raw veganism to provide living food is the only real concern here, because it’s the alive quality that gives it the prana edge, along with an ease of digestion.
Now it should go without saying that certain things should be adhered to. However, these very things are why research analysis on food digestion is flawed, so I will point them out here. I would say that this diet loses a great deal of its effectiveness if people cannot take the time to eat slowly. More essential enzymes for digestion are found in saliva than in the stomach, and without these enzymes, you are underselling the usefulness of anything you eat, no matter how it is presented or what kingdom of life it comes from. Thoroughly chewing and masticating food into a highly liquid mass is the most important part of making this diet worthwhile, and requires being able to sit down and eat slowly. We are a pretty fast food society, and tend to just consume food rather than eating. So when you eat, make sure you are actually eating and not just “stylishly swallowing”. I have seen many research studies talking about how cooked food is easier to digest, and none of them addressed the importance of swallowing food and taking time to eat thoroughly. These studies also point out the foods that need mastication the most like green vegetables, while raw fruit is easier to digest than cooked.
I also would not recommend eating raw unless you have spiritual exploits. Primarily, when I started eating raw, I had more energy then I knew what to do with. Consequently, I began gaining abilities that I wasn’t ready for, and most of these were physical. The first instance of this was running across the street, one that I had been pretty familiar with. Where I sued to live, Kedzie was a pretty wide street, about 30-40ft wide at least. I began to run, and 3 steps later, I found myself nearly kissing the brick of the Internet cafe across the street from my origin point. I almost threw up out of disorientation, because I was not prepared, or even close to thinking that I could not only traverse the street, but the wide of this sidewalk, which was also wide (8+ feet) in only 3 steps. It happened way too fast, and I couldn’t speak because my brain was trying to process what the hell just happened.
However, since I have trained spiritually, it almost seems like having a cheat code entered before practice. If you are doing spiritual work, there is a good chance that you can experience success, sensitivity, and command that may not be there without it. This is not exclusively my experience, as my brothers have the same reaction, as well as people I have met who tried it out. I don’t have to tell anyone here the importance of practice, but this is something that is important to point out with eating this way.
With this said, it may seem like a great idea to at least sample. However, keep in mind that eating in this manner can be quite shock for those who don’t eat very many fresh, unprocessed foods. I have been a vegetarian my whole life, I was born that way. Even though I wasn’t very good with it (I idolized cheese), many of the adverse reactions people have to raw vegan diets were complete absent from my experience. But it does happen at least somewhat frequently, and it is often termed a “detox” reaction because many fruits and vegetables contain properties that are healing and conducive to proper body function. Again, that’s not really the topic here, so we’ll leave it at that. Most people who bear through it feel great afterward, but this “cleansing reaction (just a mad generic term for what happens)” is a staple in starting this diet.
If you do decide to do it, starting off slow and simple is the best course of action. Many books on the subject will be chock full of recipes, dehydration methods, and a whole slew of shit that makes this diet tie-consuming and difficult. Rather, if you keep it simple, it can be way less time consuming than a normal diet, So the idea is to pick foods you can eat by themselves or “as is”, and then give a few foods you may not fancy too much a shot. The latter is usually greens, since folks will call them flavorless normally. However, I found that things like Kale have a quality that can be considered salty, in that you taste saltiness when eating it. You can make little dressings and sauces for foods, but keep it simple and you won’t find yourself taking too much time, nor will you actually need to eat that much.
So this is the basic gist of it, the post is already quite long as it is, but it gives at least some reason as to why it is a possible route for boosting spiritual advancement. These things become even more applicable when you grow your own food, to a point where you can program food from birth to have certain qualities and functions that it would not have without your spiritual input. So feel free to ask whatever you may, and I hope y’all gained something from this post.
