There are 3 kinds of food: food, air, and impressions. The quality of these 3 kinds of food has a definite influence on the body’s health as well as its state of being.
Air is certainly a kind of food. We know that we need it but don’t call it food. Impression food is more elusive, more difficult to define, but people will go out of their way and spend much time and money to obtain it. Why do people spend money to go to expensive restaurants? Why do they go to concerts, films, amusement parks? Why do they travel to exotic places? Certainly, to obtain impression food. What is the main punishment of prison? Deprivation of impression food.
People do many of these things as a prelude to or in hopes of having good sex, which gives a clue that impression food perhaps more directly produces sex energy than the other foods.
Foods also contain “Life Energy” or “Life Force.” Older traditions call it Chi, Prana, Mana, Baraka, and so on. Wilhelm Reich re-discovered it and called it Orgone Energy. The Latin word Spiritus, derivation of the English word “spirit,” meant breath. Spirit is not simply breath, but that which “breathes the breath,” and by extension, the force which continues life.
This energy originates from the sun and, to a lesser extent, from the interior of the Earth. Plants and other organisms that can utilize sunlight directly, concentrate this energy. Animals, humans, fungi, and other parasitical organisms, absorb this energy through their food and breath. The energy gradually dissipates when the organism dies. To get more of it, eat fresher food and breathe fresher air.
The energy that we get from impressions may be different, but freshness also matters. Just as eating canned food and breathing the processed air of a closed building won’t give as much life energy, listening to recorded music or watching videos won’t give the energy of a live concert or performance. Freshness is important in all 3 kinds of food.
Digestion breaks down physical food into molecules which can pass through the walls of the gut. The body requires a range of molecules in definite proportions for rebuilding and making new cells, synthesizing hormones and various necessary molecules, and energy to power the muscles and nervous system. We call these molecules proteins or amino acids, fats, carbohydrates, minerals, vitamins, and so forth. Modern science knows quite a lot about these requirements. The amount and proportions of the different molecules is of course important, but too big a subject for this article. Knowing the basics of that as well as the principles of food energy will help to move your diet in the direction of better health.
The lungs extract oxygen from the air and the blood carries it to the cells.
Life energy is at its full level when the organism is alive and begins to decline as soon as it dies.
Everyone knows that leftovers don’t taste as good, right? When you pick fruit off a tree or bush and eat it right away it tastes better than when you pick and keep it, even for a day or two. Canned food is dead, depleted of the energy. Freezing might slow down the loss of the energy. Microwaving seems to affect this energy too; many people agree that microwaved food doesn’t taste as good. Science cannot yet quantify this energy but we can sense it to some extent.
Seeds such as whole grains and legumes retain the energy for long. A seed sprouts when wetted, so it is still alive though dormant. If you cook and then eat them, you get almost all the vital energy. Seeds are ideal food.
Living, growing sprouts teem with life energy as you eat them. In yogurt and other fermented foods such as sauerkraut the bacteria live and some go on living in your gut, helping digest the food.
Bread contains live yeast until baked. But white flour has neither the nutritious molecules nor the life energy, nor does white rice. Bread made from freshly ground whole wheat flour and eaten soon would have nutritious molecules and abundant life energy.
Sorry pasta lovers: white flour pasta has zilch: no good molecules and no energy – even worse if the sauce is made from canned tomatoes! Health-wise, about the worst thing you can eat. Better if the pasta is made from whole wheat, best if freshly ground, and a sauce made from fresh vegetables.
Some cuisines take this into account. In France many people harvest fresh vegetables and herbs from a kitchen garden or shop at a morning market for “dejeuner.” Chinese cuisine also values freshness highly. At some seafood restaurants you can choose your live fish for them to prepare.
You can’t see the difference between pure, oxygen rich air and polluted or oxygen depleted air, but you can sense it. Strangely, people often don’t understand that they need a continual supply of fresh air, they pay so little attention to their own breathing.
I recall nights in hostels where the occupants insisted on closing the window even though there were several people sleeping in the room and no other source of fresh air. In the morning the room stank from the exhalations. You wouldn’t eat food after it had passed through other people’s bodies, so why breathe used air?
Why do the residents of cities accept oil burning vehicles? Why don’t they insist that within the inner city all motor vehicles must be electric?
One winter I slept in a room in a squat where there had been a fire – no heating and only a sheet of plastic loosely covering the window – and often spent the whole day outdoors. I never got so much as a sniffle. People get sick in winter not because of the cold, but because they breathe so much bad air. They go from closed homes to closed vehicles to closed workplaces.
In malls and supermarkets I often start feeling sick and weak after a few minutes, then I remember it’s because of the environment and I start feeling better as soon as I get outside in the fresh air.
It’s quite annoying that modern trains and long distance buses (coaches) have no openable windows. You’re forced to breathe the processed air even if the air outside is a nice temperature.
Plants and algae process air using energy from the sun, adding oxygen and also life energy. Breathing air by the sea, in forests or meadows, makes you feel good. Air processed by machines, though it may contain oxygen, doesn’t give you that energy. House plants help with health and well-being.
“Fresh” impressions differ from “canned” impressions. Recorded music and videos, like canned food, don’t satisfy. Maybe that’s why they are addictive. As in eating white sugar, you crave more in a futile attempt to get that missing energy. I would much rather listen to mediocre live music than the best recorded music. Many people will pay a lot to attend their favorite musicians live despite sitting so far back they can only see them on video screens and hear them through loudspeakers. They understand this “feeds” them.
People will pay a lot and spend time to travel to special places like the Grand Canyon even though there are good videos available. But you don’t get the impression of being there.
Listening to prerecorded music and watching videos and films is just as unhealthy as eating canned food and breathing machine-processed air. Modern media-conditioned people run around taking photos of everything instead of “eating” the impressions. While standing outside a mosque in Turkey, a man asked me what I was doing. “I’m admiring the beautiful sunset.” He said, brusquely, “You can take a photo of it.” It is as if a miser, instead of eating and enjoying delicious fresh fruit, stored it away and then gloated, while it was rotting, over his “possessions.”
Here’s your modern city-dweller, sitting in a cafeteria under fluorescent lights, listening to recorded music, eating a sandwich made from white bread, processed meat, processed cheese, maybe some lettuce and tomatoes harvested who knows how long before with bagged fried potato chips (crisps), and breathing air forced by mechanical fans through synthetic filters and long sheet metal ducts. Is it any wonder that such a person has little vitality? How could she have any joie de vivre?
Of course, as with everything, there’s no need to be fanatic about it. Just keep in mind the general principles, and skew your life that way. Recorded media may be “better than nothing,” just as canned food can keep you alive if you don’t have fresh. Before modern transportation and refrigeration, people often subsisted through the winter mostly on preserved foods.
Real health is not simply the absence of disease; it is the optimum operation of the whole body-mind system.
Modern medical science is always trying to pin down to one thing the cause of diseases like cancer; but nothing is that simple. “…there’s no answer, Everything gives you cancer.” – Joe Jackson. Everything in the environment has an effect, but most important is the food you eat, the air you breathe, and your impressions.
Eat food as fresh as possible – vegetables and fruits as near as possible to being harvested, sprouts, fermented foods, freshly cooked whole grains, legumes, buckwheat, quinoa. Avoid processed food, canned food, leftovers, white flour, white rice and white sugar. Grow food if you can; even in a city you could have windowboxes or pots on a balcony. I always keep a sprout “garden” going.
Air may be more difficult but at least you can have house plants in your living space and maybe in your workplace. Keep a window open while you sleep. Vote for your city to have ICF (Internal Combustion Free) zones. Spend time in nature or at least in parks.
Prefer live entertainment to pre-recorded. Support local theatre! Learn to dance, sing, play an instrument, or act, and entertain your friends. Gaze at a fire instead of staring at the TV.
Think, feel, and act fresh!