Spiritual Nutrition and the Raw Food Diet

My interest in the raw food diet was multipurpose. For one thing, I wanted to experience the radiant health, energy and vitality I'd read about. I also wanted to lose weight and return to my original slender shape. When I was younger, I was the same height I am now - 5'7" - and weighed 118 to 125 lbs. From my late twenties into my forties, my weight was usually in the 150 to 170 range. I had difficulty losing weight no matter what I tried, but my intuition told me weight loss would be easy with the raw food diet. But there was another reason I was interested in raw foods. As I moved further along my spiritual path, I began to receive increasing guidance that eating a raw food diet would help me progress at a more rapid rate. It made sense to me that freeing energy that would otherwise be spent digesting heavy food would give me more energy for spiritual pursuits. It also made sense that eating foods of high vibration raises your vibration. As I began to study raw food preparation and focus on changing my diet, some of my spiritual friends expressed the opinion I was wasting my time learning about raw foods. What's the point of depriving yourself of eating cooked foods you enjoy when our real nourishment is Divine energy, which we need only reach up and connect with, they argued. So I began doing some reading and research to attempt to answer this question for myself. The following summarizes what I found ...

There has been some debate about where our physical health and well-being comes from. Some maintain Divine, cosmic energy is the real source of our sustenance and to place importance on the nature of the foods we consume is to buy into yet another illusion of the denser realities. To me, this argument reduces the source of health to a black-and-white issue when in fact it is a luminous rainbow inclusive of all variations.

Gabriel Cousens, M.D. goes into great detail in his book, Spiritual Nutrition and the Rainbow Diet, describing the system through which he believes cosmic energy feeds and nourishes the physical body. This system begins with the potential energy that fills the cosmos prior to the materialization of an object. The first "stepping down" of this virtual energy is into something called a tachyon field space, which can be thought of as the virtual state trying to become a particle. This tachyon field energy is next stepped down as vortical forms of energy which exist near the speed of light as a particle of matter called a photon. This continues to be stepped down into what Cousens refers to as Subtle Organizing Energy Fields (SOEFs), which create the template form of living systems. These SOEFS resonate with and energize the mind and body. The belief is that a perfectly organized SOEF can transfer by resonance from the level of purely cosmic energy to the biological level without a loss of energy. The SOEFs work in conjunction with the chakras and a series of subtle energy fields that regulate the flow of energy into the different parts of the body.

Cousens says that the functioning of the SOEFs is impacted by the foods we eat: "When we eat in a healthy, harmonious way, our ability to attune and commune with the Divine is enhanced." When we eat foods of high vibration that are raw, organic and living, and when we live an energizing, harmonious lifestyle, the energy of the SOEFs is enhanced. When energized, the SOEFs develop a more structured, defined organization that better maintains the form and function of the human system. This optimal function can reverse entropy or aging. On the other hand, when SOEFs are depleted through eating low energy foods and living energy-depleting lifestyles, they become less organized and the body ages.

This is why the true source of abundance is the ability to receive this unlimited cosmic energy free flowing into the SOEFs and the physical body. As our mind and body become better conductors, we're able to store and transmit greater and greater amounts of higher energy. This explains how miracles have occurred in the presence of spiritual masters.

David Wolfe in his book, Eating for Beauty, offers a simpler explanation for the value of eating a raw food diet: "Enlightenment is just that -- making yourself lighter."

Wolfe says raw plant foods, laughter, joy, bliss and unconditional love all exist on the same frequency. He says tuning into this frequency raises the overall vibration of your energy field, causing anything that is vibrating at a lower frequency, such as fear, pain, doubt, cancer, ugliness, depression and toxins to eventually percolate out to be ejected from the body. This is detoxification. Wolfe also says that eating raw plant foods triggers a transformative process that allows you to rebuild yourself at a deep level.

Paul Nison in Raw Knowledge says in order to reach the soul, you can't be weighed down with food. Those eating the Standard American Diet (SAD) spend most of their energy digesting food. Nison says it's important to have a spiritual context when you set out to live the raw food lifestyle. Otherwise, "this newfound energy does not feel grounded to the average person," he says. "Once we clean our minds and bodies, we are able to live with the lightness that less eating and a clean body will produce and we will be able ready to get in touch with a much higher place."

My conclusion is that it's true that spirit is the body's fuel. The body derives its nourishment from pranic energy, but when the body is dirty, it's hard for it to use pranic energy. When people eat cooked food and put things into their bodies that don't belong there, this toxic build up keeps the third eye shut. As people start to eat cleaner, more healthful foods, the third eye starts to open and we are able to see the signs that passed us by when the third eye was closed. All of us have this eye. We just have to open it to see the unseen. There are signs everywhere once this eye is open.

I recommend that anyone who wants to learn more about spiritual nutrition read Cousens' book, Spiritual Nutrition and the Rainbow Diet, which I understand will soon be released in a revised and updated edition. Until its release, the original edition published in 1986 will do just as well. I leave you with a quote by Cousens from Spiritual Nutrition that for me sums it up. "For proper nutrition to be of maximum benefit, it needs to be integrated into a harmonious balance of right life, good fellowship, wisdom, meditation, prayer and love."

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