Why Do Mystics Fast?

“There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream, 
The earth, and every common sight 
To me did seem 
Apparelled in celestial light, 
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
It is not now as it hath been of yore; — 
Turn wheresoe’er I may, 
By night or by day, 
The things which I have seen I now can see no more…”

— William Wordsworth

Some occult secrets can be a burden. You might devote yourself to a serious mystical discipline for a number of years and transform your life, eventually obtaining a front-row seat to Heaven on Earth. And yet, for all your accomplishments, you will find yourself powerless to communicate your experiences to others. No one will believe you! Or no one will believe that there really is a mystical state of consciousness that mankind has lost.

This article is about one such secret — one of those life-hacking methods that’s available to everyone, yet hidden in plain sight. It reveals a cure to mankind’s needless suffering, a cure to the curse of fear and greed that hangs so heavily upon our “unsustainable” way of life today — for there really is such a curse on our civilization, believe it or not, and it began a long time ago.

Why do mystics fast? Perhaps they know that there’s something wrong with the food we eat. And perhaps they know at least one dietary regimen that can lift the evil curse and restore our consciousness to its original, “pre-civilized” state. Indeed, some people have found that fasting transforms their minds and bodies and completely reformulates their notions of who they are and what they can do. I would even say that it brings us right back to the state of consciousness we once enjoyed before the curse of civilization began.

Yes, it’s true: I am saying that our current model of civilization is cursed, built upon a doomed foundation, unsustainable, etc. This is nothing new, but what if I told you that there’s a way for us to break that curse — that there’s a single critical error in our lifestyle that we can correct? A single variable that you can tweak to exempt yourself from the miserable, abusive mindset that is currently destroying the Planet? What if I told you that it is possible to alter your brain chemistry without drugs? To alter your way of seeing the world and reclaim that long-lost mystical Paradise mentioned in the Bible? To enter the Garden of Eden once more? And not only could you enter that mystical consciousness again — in which “God” and the “Soul of the World” become visible to your waking eyes — but you could sustain that mindset indefinitely?

Too good to be true? It would appear I have some explaining to do…

What is Fasting?

In Biblical myth, Jesus spends a period of forty days fasting in the desert, which evidently produces a psychic vision in which he is tempted by the Devil and comforted by angels. Mary Magdaline, in some myths, spends her later life as a mystic too, also fasting and praying in the desert. The prophet Daniel fasts for three weeks, abstaining from meat, wine, and leavened bread. John the Baptist sustains himself in the wilderness on a strict diet of locusts and wild honey. What are all these mystics trying to accomplish? Where do they get these peculiar diets?

The Buddha supposedly fasted, taking no more than a grain of rice per day. It didn’t really work for him, though. As the story goes, he achieved perfect enlightenment, but only after falling back upon a conventional diet that restored his rotund Buddha-belly back to health. Some Buddhists today still employ the occasional fast when they go on a Nyungne retreat. During that time, they meditate often and take in nothing but water for one or more days.

Fasting, done effectively, is really more of a science than an art.

The Crow Indians of North America also went on retreats. They fasted when they embarked on their legendary vision quests. If they carried out their magical formula of solitude, diet restriction, and ritual correctly, an animal spirit would appear to them and grant them a new purpose in life — not to mention the magical power they needed to fulfill it.

Vision quests and animal spirits aren’t just the purview of Native American shamanism. European sorcerers during the Renaissance also used fasting, solitude, and ritual as part of their magical techniques. They would fast and pray…and draw chalk circles around themselves to conjure forth spirits that would appear as part-animal, part-human apparitions (for example, as winged angels or horned demons). One grimoire (a book of magic) from medieval times prescribes both fasting and abstaining from human contact for several weeks before attempting to invoke the “Holy Guardian Angel.” Fasting in Christian Europe would sometimes involve taking in only water, but sometimes it involved a diet of both bread and water. Some of these medieval instruction manuals are very strict, but some go easier on the magician, recommending lighter versions of fasting like those of the Catholics during Lent or Muslims during Ramadan.

The Christian bread-and-water formula for fasting doesn’t really work so well. Water-only fasts are more effective. Bread interferes with the body’s ability to enter the fasted state, as we will see. Fasting, done effectively, is really more of a science than an art.

When you look at the stories of famous mystics of the past, there’s a pattern discernible, a simple formula for effective fasting:

1. Withdraw from the civilized world.
2. Restrict your diet and perform rituals, prayers, or meditations.
3. Experience a psychic vision (or perhaps a wholly different way of looking at the world).
4. Finish the retreat and embark upon a new, re-invented life.

I know of one modern-day magician who prescribes juice fasting for people who have difficulty with the more commonly known water-only fasts. It doesn’t work, but you can’t knock him for trying. The amount of sugar you have to ingest when you drink juices (even vegetable juice) is way too high, and a juice fast will only serve to keep you stuck in ordinary civilized consciousness.

There are methods of fasting that work, and there are methods that don’t. Modern day mystics are just doing the best they can as they try to reconstruct a forgotten science. The practice of fasting is as old as civilization itself — so old that most of us have forgotten why there’s even a need to do it in the first place. We no longer know what went wrong with our diet at the dawn of civilization. If we knew that, we would know how to fast again, and we would always get it right.

Many people conclude that fasting is simply a way of denying oneself the pleasure of eating, that it’s a way of drawing a line against the “evil appetites of the flesh.” They appear to assume that weakening the flesh will cause the spirit to emerge, as though flesh is at war with spirit and flesh must be curtailed. This imagined division between the spirit and the flesh, I believe, is actually a symptom of our civilization’s curse, not a cure for it. It therefore undermines the real purpose of abstaining from food. Even the most devoted heretics during the Spanish Inquistion (alchemists and magicians) tried to practice fasting in this harsh, “pious” way, as a kind of Christ-like self-denial. They would deny themselves not only the luxury of food but also the pleasures of sex. They might even inflict pain on themselves (“mortification of the flesh”), as though performing an especially cruel ritual upon the body might produce a sort of spiritual—or at least “anti-material” — experience. True — intense pain and strain can sometimes cause the body to release endorphins and give you a bit of a buzz, but a harsh, suffering-oriented attitude toward fasting still misses the mark.

Why do some fasting methods appear to work while others do not? I believe we need to look very deep into the past to find an answer. Deeper even than recorded history.

“The greatest tragedy of human existence is the illusion of separateness.”

— Albert Einstein

Fasting very likely is a long-lost secret that our shaman ancestors maintained from as far back as our hunter-gatherer days, from well over ten thousand years ago. Something terrible happened to us back then. We abandoned the old hunter-gatherer ways. As we took the turn toward civilization, we experienced a drastic shift in consciousness, and that shift cut us off from nature. And as we lost touch with nature, we also lost touch with our robust health and the deeper aspects of consciousness that we once shared with plants, animals, and the spirits of the Earth.

Shamans apparently saw this change coming over us, and they knew why it was happening. They developed and maintained a secret discipline that could “break the spell of evil.” They taught their students how to restore their minds back to nature. They also taught them how to invoke the hidden powers within nature. This discipline we know of today as magic, and since it turned into a kind of lesson plan passed down from master to student, it became a magical tradition. Eventually, a secret tradition.

The eons passed, and the disciplines of shamanistic magic evolved, becoming ever more nuanced, varied, and sophisticated. However, some practitioners lost site of the techniques that actually work, and their craft began to degenerate into empty ritual and superstition. For example, today’s practice of baptism very likely started out as a breath-hold exercise in which a person’s immersion in water triggered the human body’s natural dive reflex. The mammalian dive reflex can have some astonishing affects on the body, opening up awareness between “inner”and “outer” worlds.

Despite mankind’s loss of the mystical practices that actually work, the lore of these shamanistic traditions was still quite effective at stirring the soul. It still conveyed a deep sense of mystery and at least suggested that mankind is connected to the divine, even though we had long since lost any feeling of that connection. The ancient lore of our magical traditions still contained myths that linked us to our paradasiacal past, and it made our isolation in the artificiality of civilization bearable.

Some traditions became increasingly esoteric, developing into serious curriculums of occult study, complete with secret rites of initiation. We know of them today as the mystery traditions. These were often rigorous ascetic disciplines and programs of self-development that had a good amount of science mixed in with their artfulness. Some of it worked, and some of it didn’t. Students engaged not only in lore and storytelling but also in mind-altering physical practices: solitary retreat, dietary restrictions, rituals, breath-hold exercises, Yoga, visualization, study, prayer, mind-altering drugs, and of course, meditation. Fasting, it would appear, remained an important element of almost all these secret traditions, even though people often lost site of the original principles and got the methodology wrong.

How Mankind Lost Paradise: Explanation #1

The Fall of Man. Original Sin. The Garden of Eden. What is this curse of civilization? What does Paradise represent in the myth of Genesis? Or what’s the meaning of the fateful apple from the Tree of Knowledge? Hold on to your seat, because the explanation I’m about to provide might come as a shock. For many people, what I say will appear ludicrous. For others — those who are ready — it could be the beginning of a new life.

You know the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden, right? God creates the world and all the plants and animals in it. He creates a man named Adam, and then he pulls Eve from Adam’s side, thus creating two different biological sexes. Some would say that the story of sin in the Garden of Eden is actually the human psyche’s way of coping with a dark truth about sex. And a dark truth about death. Yes, the human psyche uses myth to come to terms with disturbing insights about the human condition. In this case, it uses a symbolic story to tell us about a bleak consequence of sex: our mortality.

What? Sex causes death?

You will recall from high-school Biology that asexual beings can reproduce by cell division, and they can do so forever. Because single-celled organisms reproduce by simply dividing in two, they are essentially immortal (unless something comes along and squashes them or eats them). Sexual creatures, on the other hand, reproduce by mating, and they eventually die, each one falling by evolution’s wayside as its offsprings take its place. Salmon, for example, swim up stream to mate, struggling against roaring rapids, and beating themselves bloody and senseless in pursuit of their spawning grounds, only to die promptly after a climactic orgy. These fish do not appear to think about the fact that they are swimming upstream to die. They aren’t worried about death because they apparently have no knowledge of their mortality. When we humans eat of the Tree of Knowledge, however, we learn about our immanent death. We know we are doing to die.

On some level, this kind of forbidden knowledge shows us that sex is what makes our existence finite. In the evolution of life, the appearance of sex heralds the appearance of death. It brings the curse of mortality. Indeed, the god of sex in many religions is also the god of death. Hence the commonly known — and rather prudish — interpretation of Genesis: God punishes Adam and Eve — He throws them out of the Garden for having sex. Humans could have been immortal if we had only remained single-celled organisms that reproduce through mitosis. But no! We had to have sex, and that ushers in our doom! Well, that’s the conventional, biological interpretation of the tale, anyway, and it’s one way of looking at the Bible’s myth of Original Sin.

How Mankind Lost Paradise: Explanation #2

But there is another secret version of the tale. It reveals a more insidious kind of evil. And you may be happy to know that the evil in this tale is not sex.

Consider instead that Adam and Eve represent our hunter-gatherer ancestors. Specifically, Eve stays near camp with other females and takes care of the home fires. She gathers roots, herbs, and berries close to home, and she takes care of her baby. Adam is the hunter, and he tends to go away with other men a lot so that he can kill gazelles, mammoths, or wild boars. Like any dutiful father, he “goes to work,” and he “brings home the bacon.”

…that sweet, delicious apple that tempted Adam away from his hunting excursion was actually cursed. Like the apple in other fairy tales, it was poisoned.

This arrangement does not sit well with Eve. She misses Adam and wants him closer to home so that he can protect the camp and make love to her more often. She forms a plan. From her daily chores as a gatherer, she has discovered something that she believes will convince Adam to stay with her all the time. While foraging she has found some especially sweet-tasting roots, berries, and…apples. Sugar! She offers Adam an apple.

Delicious!

Together, the two of them discover that they can cultivate these heavenly delights in a garden. They develop the first primitive farming methods. Now Adam can stay at home near the camp, which now becomes a more permanent settlement for Adam and Eve’s tribe. Their cultural values shift from hunting and gathering to farming, and this ushers in an entirely new age of agriculture. The modern, civilized world we live in today begins to gestate and grow from that day forward.

Sounds great, right? Well, as we will see, that sweet, delicious apple that tempted Adam away from his hunting excursion was actually cursed. Like the apple in other fairy tales, it was poisoned.

Yes, sugar is actually poison. The body can only tolerate about one teaspoon of it in the blood before sugar begins wreaking havoc on human metabolism. The addition of sugar to our diet has effectively destroyed the robust health of our entire species. Not only that, but it has also deadened our sense of connection to the spiritual dimensions of the natural world.

But it tastes so good! It gives us so much energy!

Humanity was immediately hooked. Eventually, men and women worked together to develop ever more sophisticated ways of cultivating sugar. They bred fruits to be sweeter and sweeter (the sweetness of apples in our supermarkets today bears almost no resemblance to wild apples). However, these sweeter and sweeter fruits gave us greater and greater doses of the poison. The dose eventually became large enough to produce some insidious effects on human metabolism, and some odd mood swings were becoming apparent. Cain ends up murdering Abel. Oops…

But for the most part, aside from their drastic increase in sugar consumption, humans were still eating enough fat and protein to stay healthy and at least somewhat sane. They had found ways to also cultivate livestock, so they were still eating plenty of fatty meats and non-starchy vegetables. Very healthy.

But then, after a few thousand years, farmers began to cultivate the ultimate source of sugar: grain. In the ancient Orient, this new staple came in the form of rice. In the Americas, it was corn. And in the Middle East, it was the most poisonous grain of all: wheat. Grains — when baked, stewed, or fermented — were quite nourishing in one respect because they provided tons of caloric energy. But there was a terrible problem with grains. They weren’t very nutritious. Almost all their caloric energy came from sugar. You see, grains turn into glucose almost immediately after we eat them, and glucose, in anything but miniscule quantities, doesn’t sit so well with human metabolism. And when large doses of sugar are consumed over long periods of time, they wreak havoc on the brain, essentially driving humans mad.

Sugar Madness

You think I’m exaggerating? Ever since agriculture started, there has been misery. The fossil record clearly shows that our hunter-gatherer ancestors were robustly healthy, just like other animals in the wild. The remains of humans who lived in agricultural times, however, show that they were often sick in comparison. Their teeth would fall out as they got older, their bones showed signs of cancer and malnutrition, and their bodies were six inches shorter than their hunter-gatherer forebearers. With the advent of agriculture, chronic disease became mankind’s new reality. Indeed, Chronic diseases are known today as the “diseases of civilization.” Not only did agriculture make us sick, but it also brought all the other extraordinary ills of civilization: warfare, oppression, slavery, misogyny, greed, and religion.

“Give us this day our daily bread.”

Yes, religion. From the perspective of the shamans who were witnessing mankind’s waning powers, religion was a blight. For some reason, this new, agricultural way of life was producing a different kind of human: a miserable creature who could no longer hear spirits in the trees at night or speak to the ghosts of the ancestors.

Yes, sugar damages our brains and destroys our natural psychic ability.

In the place of a truly sacred connection to the land, humans adopted dogmatic religion. In the place of direct psychic experience, they adopted blind faith and moral conviction. After all, the larger and larger settlements that agriculture made possible had a greater and greater need for a code and law. As greater numbers of people lived together in packed communities, behavioral control became important. This trend eventually led to an empty form of spirituality based not upon direct experience of the spirit world but upon the management needs of community leaders. Morality replaced spirituality. Religion was born.

Mankind no longer enjoyed a direct communion with nature. No longer had a life of ease, living in the moment, flitting in small groups from one stretch of land to the next, following the herds, reading the signs of the seasons and taking advantage of the migration habits of birds and insects. He was now a slave to the land, and he had to work in the field “by the sweat of his brow” to make the soil produce wheat for his village’s religious overlord.

The excessive sugar in his diet made mankind not only ill but also violent. Men beat their wives and fought with their neighbors. Parents treated their children like slaves, forcing them to work long hours in the fields. People lived in almost constant fear — because sugar feeds fear. And sugar, even as it slowly destroys the body with chronic diseases, also shuts down a human being’s higher brain functions, essentially killing mankind’s ability to see the world as a spiritual place.

Paradise was lost.

The Blessing that Became a Curse

Oddly enough, your body is in love with sugar. It appears to prefer sugar over other forms of fuel. But why!

Well, we evolved that way, thanks to Eve, who gathered pomegranates, berries, and apples at the end of each summer. In nature, wild fruit would ripen for only about six weeks out of the year. During that time, humans would switch from hunting mode to gathering mode, and they’d gorge themselves on fruits.

Fruits, back in our hunter-gatherer days, were not nearly as sweet as they are today, but they still had enough sugar to make our bodies produce significant amounts of insulin. Insulin is anabolic. What does that mean? It makes your body grow. Mostly, it makes you convert sugar into blubber.

This great sugar rush at the end of every summer was like a blessing from Mother Nature. We would use it to increase our store of the most efficient form of fuel available to human metabolsim: fat. The sugar we ate at the end of summer would help us build a small layer of belly fat, which would then sustain us through the lean times of winter that lay ahead.

Yes, living off your body fat is possible. Fat is a very steady and reliable kind of fuel — much more efficient than sugar. And just a little bit lasts a long time.

Winter would then come, and we’d have little to eat. Pickings would be slim, but meat was sometimes available, and we would eat whatever Adam could kill. We would eat not only the muscle but also the fatty parts of the animal: the bone marrow, the organs, the eyes, and tongue.

You see, our metabolism was adapted to survive primarily on fat, not sugar. Most of the lifespan of each of our hunter-gatherer ancestors was spent in a fat-burning state. But once per year, at the end of summer, sugar would become available. We could then fatten ourselves up with berries and apples. So, you can see how we evolved into sugar-lovers. We evolved to always be ready for that blessed time of the year, the time of sweetness. Our bodies were always eager to switch from fat-burning mode to sugar-burning mode — at the drop of a spear.

The most important thing for you to realize from this strange tale is that our bodies still work this way. And that’s a problem because agriculture has made sugar available to us all year round. This means that our bodies are continuously inundated with sugar, and they don’t have the chance to shift back to their normal, healthier mode of energy metabolism. Our bodies are prevented from entering their natural fat-burning state. Currently, very few people understand just how disastrous this has been for our species. Doctors least of all!

What Happens When You Eat Carbohydrates?

A single bagel contains six times the amount of potential sugar that the body can handle. What happens when you eat one and then wash it down with some lovely, sweet orange juice? Remember: too much sugar is poisonous, so your body is forced to go into an emergency response!

1. The Insulin Response: In ingesting a simple meal of a bagel and orange juice, the amount of glucose entering your bloodstream is easily enough to kill you. Not to worry, though. Your pancreas produces insulin, which rapidly binds with the glucose, allowing the body to eventually convert it to glycogen and fat.
2. Free Radicals and Oxidative Stress: Your body proceeds to absorb and burn the glucose that’s in your blood. However, the metabolism of sugar in this way produces a lot of free radicals (molecules with missing electrons), which allow oxygen to damage your veins and arteries. Nutritionists today claim that oxidative damage, combined with glycation from sugar metabolism, is the leading cause of aging.
3. AGEs: When your body burns glucose for fuel, it produces a sticky glue-like substance very much like caramel. This gunk is made up of what nutritionists call advanced glycation end-products (AGEs). AGEs are über-difficult for the body to dispose of. They irritate the immune system and lead to widespread inflammation as the body tries to clean them out. They also warp and distort the shape of your cells as they’re being removed — which is one reason why old people become crinkly and misshapen.
4. Low-Grade Inflammation: Inflammation from glucose metabolism permeates the entire body, and though you may be young and strong, it produces a barely noticeable level of irritation. This keeps your body continuously agitated, kind of like being in wounded-animal mode all the time. When the body is inflamed, the sympathetic nervous system stays active, which shuts down higher brain function and keeps you in a continuous state of threat and unease. This discomfort can be noticeable at times, mostly as a subtle “crabby” feeling, as though “nothing is ever good enough.” Today, it passes for normal. In Buddhism this unease (or dis-ease) is called dukkha.
5. Brain Damage: AGEs are particularly harmful to the brain. The inflammation they produce in your cerebrum can lead to crippling migraines when you are young, and brain degenerative conditions such as dementia and Alzheimer’s disease when you are old.
6. Joint Pain: The widespread inflammation in the body eventually damages joints beyond repair. Knees become creaky and elbows develop tendonitis. Osteoarthritis develops.
7. Mitochondrial Damage: Our cells are capable of burning glucose, yes, but that is not their preferred fuel. The mitochondria in our cells — the actual energy factories there — are much better at burning fat. They become sick from the sticky waste products they are continuously forced to produce from sugar. The number of mitochondria begins to diminish. Our overall energy and vitality declines.
8. Cancer: When the mitochondria in cells become weak, the cells themselves become sick and sometimes resort to a weird kind of fermentation to produce energy. This damages cell nuclei and the basic building blocks of life housed there. When the DNA in a cell’s nucleus is damaged, the chance of it becoming cancerous is hugely increased. Yes, cancer is primarily a metabolic disorder, not a genetic disorder.
9. The Blood-Sugar Roller Coaster: The glucose that’s in your blood burns quickly, and it burns very hot. It produces bursts of hyperactivity. And then, when insulin has done its job, your sugar level crashes. You feel tired, and you reach for another bagel to begin another round of your body’s emergency-response, which produces yet more anxiety and damage throughout the body. This constant up and down in sugar levels is referred to as “blood-sugar disregulation.”
10. Obesity: Since insulin is anabolic, it tells your body to become fat, and since we eat sugar (in the form of carbs) all year round, we are constantly manufacturing insulin, which tells our bodies to “Grow, grow, grow!” Hence the epidemic of obesity associated with our affluent agricultural civilization. Are you beginning to see how sugar is a curse?
11. Chronic Anxiety: Being fat and sick all the time is not the worst of it. Since insulin makes the body grow, the body responds by trying to maintain balance (homeostasis). When there’s too much of an anabolic hormone (insulin), the body attempts to balance that out by secreting catabolic hormones. These catabolic substances, unfortunately, are stress hormones: cortisol and adrenaline. Cortisol and adrenaline flood the body, putting it into fight-or-flight mode and telling it to break itself down. In other words, eating sugar all year round keeps the body continually stressed out. As I mentioned in a previous article, the fight-or-flight response utterly destroys your ability to see the world as it truly is. It is essentially the viewpoint of a panicked, wounded animal. And even when the fight-or-fight response is minor, your outlook on life becomes severely limited. Your lower brain centers take over, and everything in your environment gets painted as either an enemy or an ally. Continuous sugar consumption produces a near-constant feeling of emptiness, victimhood, fear, and worry.
12. Suppressed Immunity: Since our endless sugar consumption is continuously pushing our bodies into fight-or-flight mode, our energy resources are constantly diverted away from vital function like digestion, healing, and immunity. The energy goes instead toward the muscles so that we can run away from a predator or perhaps fight off an enemy. In other words, our crucial functions of immunity are almost always down-regulated, and that’s why civilized humans are so sickly compared to animals in the wild. We catch cold and flu viruses easily, not to mention the many other opportune infections that sometimes irritate our skin, intestines, and other organs.
13. Rotting Teeth: This suppression of immunity also applies to the mouth. Yes, sugar rots your teeth, but not in the manner we have been taught. It does so by stressing you out and lowering your body’s defenses. One of the side-effects of stress is dry-mouth. Yes, the powerful enzymes in your mouth, when they flow freely, are normally enough to keep your teeth healthy (proper breathing — nose only — also has a lot to do with this). Brushing and flossing have only become necessary because of our overall weakened condition.
14. Premature Aging: When you are young, the body can repair all this damage rather quickly (It can even repair its own tooth cavities). But over time, scar tissue builds up and damage becomes too severe. Signs of aging begin to appear. And the more sugar you pass through your system, the more AGEs your body produces and the more oxidation damage it consequently experiences. Sugar is what makes getting older into a miserable experience. Before civilization’s curse, aging was no big deal.
15. Gluconeogenesis: Sugar gets stored in the liver in the form of glycogen. However, the liver can only store so much glycogen. If you were to run a marathon, granted that you could keep up the prolonged pace necessary, you would run out of energy in about two hours. But no matter: your body will simply destroy its own muscle and skin to get energy. Our bodies are so addicted to sugar that they will refuse to switch over to fat as a fuel. The body will plunder its own tissues for sugar when none is immediately available from the diet. It will fire up a process called gluconeogenesis. Gluconeogenesis is pretty gross, and it makes you look pretty gross too. It is a process by which the body digests its own muscle tissue and skin to manufacture more glucose. Ever wonder why old people develop that flap of skin under their chins? Or why their lips shrink with age, their muscles become stringy, and their cheeks become sunken? These are signs of aging, yes, but they result from a heavily sugar-based metabolism. When a sugar-addicted body gets low on energy, it will destroy its own muscles and skin to create fuel. Just try Googling images of marathon runners right now, and you will see how stringy, dried up, and prematurely aged they look.

How Many Carbs Do You Need in Your Diet?

Zero! Carbohydrates are not essential to the human diet. This may sound strange since we know that it’s dangerous when our blood sugar dips too low (hypoglycemia). Yes, it’s true: Your body cannot live without a little bit of glucose in the blood. A small amount is necessary for your red blood cells and brain to function. However, if there are no carbohydrates available from your diet, your liver will manufacture the small amount of glucose you need.

This is both good and bad. It means that no matter how much you avoid sugar and carbs, your body will always manufacture the small amount you need. That tiny bit of glucose will, very slowly, contribute to the glycation and oxydative damage that ages you. The good news, of course, is that a diet of virtually no sugar or carbs can keep the ravages of aging to a minimum.

This may be the reason why the mythical Adam and Eve were thought to have lived so long. It is, of course, highly doubtful that our distant ancestors ever lived 900 years, but they probably stayed healthy until nearly the end of their lives. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors were mortal, of course, but the chronic diseases of aging barely touched them until very late in life. They were more likely to die in a hunting accident than from an “age-related” illness.

This is not to say that hunter-gatherers were magically immune to chronic conditions. Some evidence of cancer has been found in the Paleolithic fossil record, but cancer and other chronic conditions were nearly impossible for them to acquire. Compare that to the latest predictions for our civilization— that one out of every two people is expected to be diagnosed with cancer some time in the future. This is unacceptable. And of course, highly preventable.

What Happens When You Fast?

Suppose you were to embark on a water-only fast. How will this restore you to primal health and primal consciousness?

• Day 1: You begin abstaining from all food, and you only drink spring water. For the first few hours, your body is fine. It continues to create glucose from the food in the digestive tract.
• Day 2: By now, your body has run out of fuel from the intestines. You feel intensely hungry, and your stomach rumbles. Your blood sugar is low, and you very likely start to feel crabby — especially if you are highly addicted to sugar. Your body now turns to the liver for help, and the liver begins to release glycogen. Glycogen is the way sugar is stored in the liver, but the liver only stores about a day’s worth (or less).
• Day 3: Glycogen is gone, and now you start to feel tired. Worse yet, your thinking is foggy. The brain is starving for glucose! Your body enters into the mild panic of the starvation stress response. Fight-or-flight fires up, and you are easily irritated. The world becomes ugly. Everything in the environment feels like an affront (except for food!). It’s in day 3, most likely, that wide-scale gluconeogenesis takes over. The stress response makes the body catabolic, and it begins to break down its own muscle tissue, converting it to glucose for the brain. Hopefully you’ve been drinking plenty of fresh spring water. Many people get an intense headache at this point of their fast because the body’s electrolyte balance is temporarily disturbed. The spring water should supply some minerals, but supplementing with magnesium and potassium can also help. If your body is young and healthy, it will probably stop gluconeogenesis by the fourth day. However, in people who have metabolic damage (thyroid issues, diabetes, cancer, leaky gut, etc.), the stress response and gluconeogenesis will continue for some time, and some serious wasting and other symptoms can result, especially in regard to electrolyte balance.
• Day 4: If your body is young and healthy, day 4 will likely herald a breakthrough. The intense hunger vanishes! The body enters the protein-sparing phase, no longer destroying muscle for fuel. Since anabolic insulin has been so low for so long now, the body has no need to produce catabolic stress hormones, so a profound sense of peace descends upon you. The liver begins to oxydize fatty acids, and the body switches over from a sugar-based to a fat-based metabolism. The brain switches from its primary glucose-burning mode and begins burning keytones — special, water-soluble fat molecules that are capable of passing through the blood-brain barrier and nourishing the brain.
• Day 5 and beyond: If all has gone smoothly, the body has now returned to its primal state. The sympathetic nervous system quiets down, and the parasympathetic nervous system dominates. The body is in a calm “rest and repair” mode. The immune system is highly active, making miraculous healing (spontaneous remission) possible. Sugar damage in the brain begins to clear out, and the hippocampus flairs to life. Higher brain functions open up, and the world takes on an astonishing beauty. The brain shuts down many of its defensive filters, and reality shines before you not as your fearful survival-oriented mammalian brain has always seen it. Colors seem alive. Space seems tangible. The wind in the trees sings with spiritual music, and your soul feels buoyed up by the riot of sensations around you. If you are performing rituals, prayers, or meditation, spirits and gods may actually come forth and speak to you. Your sleep is serene. Meaning abounds in everything. The concept of destiny no longer feels like an abstraction, but like a driving passion that embraces you lovingly in every sight, sound, and sensation.

Is the Fasted State Really Paradise?

Do you think I’m exaggerating? Well, actually I am…and I am not. The experience you get will depend upon the amount of spiritual progress you’ve already made — upon the degree to which you have learned to see through the fear-based worldview of our world’s cursed, civilized cultures.

It should become clear by now that I’m not insisting that abstaining from food is going to open a sci fi gate to another dimension. Not literally, anyway. The paradise that we glorify in myth, you are probably beginning to see, is actually a state of restored health, not a hyperspace portal to Jesus. Many of the glorious symptoms of this good health that I describe are not always that obvious. In fact, they might be only slightly noticeable to people who explore fasting but who don’t employ any other mystical techniques (such as ritual, breath work, and meditation).

Additionally, your brain and gut can take a long time to heal since they have been continuously inundated with sugar for almost your entire life. Anger, fear, and stress are still possible in the fasted state, after all. Many of your old, ignorant reactions to the world will still flair to life while you’re abstaining from food. These reactions are habitual, and they may keep you barred from paradise, even though you are performing rituals, praying and meditating, and doing your fast correctly. However, the longer you stay fasted, the less these habitual reactions — created by a lifetime of living in a paranoid, sugar-addicted culture — will arise. The longer you stay fasted, the deeper you will be able to enter into the paradisiacal consciousness of our distant ancestors.

Remember what I said in the previous article — that enlightenment is an experience that often escapes us because we fail to notice it. Fasting is simply a technique that makes getting there ten times easier. It makes ritual and meditation super effective because it enlivens the brain, restoring it to full power and waking it from the curse of civilization — our death-like, “Snow White” slumber started by that poison apple so long ago.

But wait! I can’t fast forever. I’m going to have to eat eventually, right? And then all the benefits of fasting will be lost as I start to ingest carbs again…

Well, as you may have inferred by now, there is a way of eating that can keep you in the fasted state all the time. Permanently! There are people who are alive and well who have been eating that way for years, and they have been getting deeper and deeper into something they call nutritional ketosis. In the next article, I will explore this kind of diet.

Stay tuned!