Date:   2/26/2006 9:27:42 AM ( 18 y ago)
Popularity:   message viewed 1605 times
URL:   http://curezone.com/blogs/c/fm.asp?i=993803

There's nothing ego trip about this fast. The reason I set 120 days was to prepare myself for the very real eventuality that it might take that long for me to even be at a point where I could try to live a regular day of health and physical/mental activity, yet I calculated that I haven't the fat reserves to go longer. Frankly, it might take more time, but one doesn't hear of many people who need to take that long for their health, except in the case of severe obesity. If it takes only 49 days, no-one will be as overjoyed as me and my ego and my spirit. But when it comes to someone who habitually relies on eating attempting to live for some time without that aspect of life, it is essential to give him/her an honest time-frame of how long it might take to make the fast meaningful and worthwhile and efficacious - that is the only spiritual thing to do, is to have the love and integrity to be realistic. Better to overestimate how long the process might take, than to underestimate and feel bewildered and terrible. One sees many people believing they can Master Cleanse away their past, problems, sins and toxins in 10 days. The truth I've found is that that can't be done, unless perhaps you are a very clean healthy person to begin with. I believe sometimes fasting one-up-personship is mentioned in books, where people get fastier-than-thou about how long they've fasted, perhaps not to others but at least themselves. That could not have less to do with me or this particular fast - I couldn't care less how few days it takes to completion, as long as completion occurs. As I've made abundantly clear, my concern couldn't be less one of how-many-days, but is, almost annoyingly to all of us, one of will-this-work-at-all. I think you can have not the faintest conception of desperate straits to talk this way. It's a matter of utmost insignificant moment to me whether I must do this for 28 days or 200, I just want to live and have a chance for happiness. I also think I've made it abundantly clear that whilst I'd fight for fasting against doctors/drugs any day, any time, I'm not a big fasting-worshipper and don't consider myself egoically identified with "fast culture", which would be a pre-requisite, I should think, for getting all ego-trip about the length one is doing or going for.

As for fasting being spiritual, in this culture there is definitely something we cast as "spiritual" about "nature", about letting the body do its work and be in control, about giving up our unspiritual material cultural addiction(s) to food(s) and eating, even for a few days! About listening to the body and to some extent putting the linear, verbal, "left-brainy", egoic, controlling, very unGestalt, un-Now, programmed mind in the background - or even hibernation. That alone in this culture may be comparatively a spiritual act. However, the "spirituality" of fasting beyond that has yet to manifest in this fast of mine or any previous, and perhaps it is a couple of weeks too early for that, so I cannot of my own knowledge accept the party-line on that right now. In addition, it is reductionist to reduce fasting to a spiritual activity. There are some who say that whatever you are fasting for, even weight loss, fasting is a spiritual activity _as well_ and it is a shame not to make the most of that when we do fast for other exigencies. There are many here who do fasts that are cosmetic or physical or psychological, and are not focusing on or even aware of the spirituality aspect - perhaps they can't, just needing to do it the way they need to do it - that in itself is "spiritual" in its way. I don't know that I can, or do, judge people (here there are many) or interfere with people who are doing fasts that are not in intention spiritual, and don't even seek directly to embrace spirituality. I've made it clear that I think any process like cleansing or healing or constructive (including interpersonal or psychological or aesthetic/creative) might be conceived of as spiritual. I've made it clear that in spite of very brief twinges now and then about wanting to eat vegan junk food at least post-fast if not _right now!_, I can't conceive of having one's body pull one throuh a fast safely and successfully, and then have a profane attitude of willful abuse towards it, certainly not towards cows and birds and pigs and so on. But I would not state point-blank that fasting is universally a spiritual experience to the exclusion of specifically physical, psychological, cognitive, creative, cosmetive, sensory interests. Of course, the dominant society is so debased that people call even choosing to fast rather than paying some doctor to kill you and drug company to torture cats and dogs for their sugar-pills "being spiritual" (or crazy - in Western sociey for centuries it's amounted to the same thing), but I think that's a pretty unhelpful conception of the transcendent.
 

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