This is the first step towards sharing in blog form the evolution of my passion for the aesthetics of food and my growing experience of how this is related to consciousness. Recently I started to see more clearly just how important this connection is to developing a third tier culture. I would like to use this blog to explore this more fully and invite anyone who is interested to email me at kmiller@enlightennext.org.

I have also begun to see how my experience growing up has influenced the drive to make sense of this fundamental dimension of being alive. I love eating, and preparing, food. The Eastern European side of the family has a reverance for food that borders on the sacred - eating traditional fare together is what bonds us together, physically and emotionally, and also historically, to our unknown and distant ancestors. I was given the impression that if we stuck to this simple, salt of the earth, true food, it would keep us on the right path and even insure that we made it to heaven! My deep admirarion for cabbage comes from this side of the family.

We also fished, hunted, and raised animals to put meat on the table and I became concerned with the ethics of eating at an early age. Sometime around the age of 4 or 5 something flipped in my kid consciousness. I went from being curious about what happened when I pulled the legs off spiders, to crying over every accidently squashed bug. This developed until, much to the confusion and bewilderment of my folks, I became a vegetarian at 15.

But not eating meat doesn't necessarily mean eating well. After years of various indulgences I found my physical and mental health slip sliding away. It was at this point that I discovered macrobiotics. Also known as macroneurotics in some circles, :), it was the first time I sytematically tried to understand food and it's effects. It had an immediate and recognizable effect on my health and well being. It also taught me a whole slew of techniques and principles for food preparation and cooking that have helped me to push a creative and exploratory edge for the last 25 years.

To be continued :)

My education in macrobiotics gave me my first insight into the deeper aesthetics of food. Instead of taste being the primary target I learned how taste, texture, color, presentation and preparation, when combined along the principles of yin and yang, produced a kind of alchemy in the meal prepared – it now held the power to transform you on a physical and mental level. I experienced these changes myself and always wondered why more people didn’t flock to this kind of diet when it held so much promise for curing illness, disease, and even neurosis. I even tried to cure my mother of MS, and succeeded in getting her into remission for 9 months, but she hated not being able to eat the food she was familiar with and went back to her old ways. After awhile it became clear that for most people the sacrifices they would have to make to follow such a diet were too extreme, and even for those of us that were willing and experienced profound change, our fundamental relationship to life stayed the same. The confidence, vitality, security and happiness that macrobiotics was meant to deliver never appeared.

Even so I continued to delve into the nuances of macrobiotics, inviting friends over for long dinners, or elaborate, gourmet picnics on the beach. I also cooked for pregnant and nursing mothers, and for yoga retreats. Often I would prepare meals made from plants and herbs I had foraged in the Boston Arboretum, whilst carrying my young daughter on my back. People started telling me I should open up a restaurant so I was definitely getting better. (The very first macrobiotic dinner I cooked in the study house I was living in was so bad that I was advised to either study up or refrain from cooking again)

After about 5 years of this I met my first spiritual teacher, Amachi. I wasn’t in the market for a guru, it wasn’t my trip, so it took me awhile to realize the relationship had occurred in spite of me. The turning point was my first experience of prasad. I was sitting in a garage in New Hampshire, the floor covered with rugs and the walls plastered with images of Krishna and Ganesh, about 30 of us blissed out in the presence of Ama. An Indian family arrived carrying a big pot of something very hot and handed it to Ama, who smiled with delight. She immediately took the lid off, plunged her hand into the steaming sticky mess and before we knew it big whacks of the impossibly hot, exotically spicy, and incredibly sticky pudding were slapped into our palms with Amachi laughing uproariously and urging us to eat, eat. It was an exalted experience of that alchemy, food, prepared by the devotee, transformed by the divine mother, received from the hand of God, eaten in a field of love, devotion and surrender to the guru. I had no idea what it all meant – only that something beyond the known had happened, I had received the sustenance and the blessing of the divine, through a pudding! on some level that my grosser, materialisitc self could not get a handle on.

To be continued J

Looking back over my first two blogs on food and consciousness I can see it isn’t just a jog down memory lane. There are many different dimensions to a conscious/unconscious relationship to food and I hit on quite a few of them:

Culture – one of the biggest influences on our food identity

Social responsibility – which includes a huge array of ethical questions all directly connected (whether we like it or not) to the consequences of the foods we choose to eat

The rational, scientific, material orientation – eat it because it’s good for you, or because it’s fuel

Or, the gourmet/gourmand sensory reference point, eat it because it has to be the most wonderful thing you have ever tasted…

And finally the mysterious, unknowable, sacred dimension of food, the transmission of life force and the divine, the fact that we depend on the consumption of other life forms for our own lives.

And I am sure there is more, but even the word food is so underneath the radar of our conscious selves, it’s more a sound, pre-thought and primal…that sound is desire, need, survival….food enters us, becomes us, assuages our unspoken fears, fills the scary emptiness of our insecurities….receiving food is probably our very first experience of love, pleasure and happiness. You can’t think about and be objective about something that close, that intimate, something that basic to our very being, that strips us of our supremacy and individualism, makes us just one more component of a very living system, dependent on every other component for that system to exist. You can’t be objective about something this intimate, unless you get very conscious.

One of the biggest no man’s land – you can’t touch this – each to his own – sacred personal territories in our post modern lives is the area of food preferences. We like what we like. And we feel entitled to what we like, food is our reward for having to endure the stresses of being, alive and present. It’s the great escape into comfort and pleasure, and when you combine it with TV or a party and a few drinks, you can achieve a powerfully sedative and sedentary affect on consciousness. The last thing we want to do is to have to think about it, or to eat in ways that don’t jive with our emotional or psychological pleasure patterns. And if we do start to think about it, maybe because we get too sick or too fat, or are starting to age, we often go to the other extreme, eating whatever we are told is good for us, with no attempt to consciously connect mind body and soul and intuit what it needs to be truly nourished, or woken up!

We have gazillions of preferences, all based on the things I listed in my last blog entry, but rarely do we question them or doubt their validity. This is one of the core domains of the separate individual, our belief that we are isolated and distinct from the universe we live in, that we have a separate private life, and can choose to be connected or not. If you walk around a grocery store there is no way you would know from looking at the products on the shelves, that they come from living, growing organisms. There is no way you could feel something in common with them, as other living things that once grew or walked on the same earth that we do and that have contributed their lives for us to live. When do we ever think about that, as our hand moves from plate to mouth?

Even choosing to become vegan, which is refusing to participate in the killing and slavery of animals, birds, fish and insects, by not eating or using them, and an honorable endeavor with a high ideal, can be a profoundly arrogant stand. If it is taken in ignorance, with no gratitude or humility borne out of our dependence on livings things in order to be, whether that be a carrot or a cow, where will it lead?

So how do we dig into these preferences and become conscious, even just a little? Sometimes it seems to happen by accident, but I think it’s a matter of where we choose to put our attention. In my twenties, I was a beer drinker, loved to work out hard at the dojo and then have a few pints. Also loved to eat, and would almost always overeat. Then an interesting thing happened – I started doing yoga more intensely and experienced a lightness of being and clarity that I had never encountered before. In a short time I developed a distaste for the grogginess and stupor that accompanied the above habits and before I knew it I had quit drinking and stopped overeating without skipping a beat. That always amazed me – but now I can see that going to a relatively higher level of consciousness brought with it higher preferences, which I chose to pay attention to and align myself with.

The thing is, most of us have these higher preferences in us. We just haven’t learned to pay attention to them, to be interested in our experience and find out how to act on them.

This is what I hope to awaken in us through this blog.

The Great Comfort