Can Food Hinder Spiritual Development?

In this conversation with Olya, I look at whether diet can affect not only the physical body but also a person’s state, perception and spiritual development, and why this subject cannot be reduced to a simple list of “healthy” and “unhealthy” foods.

How are diet, the body and the quality of perception connected? Why is it important to take into account air, water, daily routine, the state of the body and individual reactions? And how do you begin to notice real chains of cause and effect instead of blindly following other people’s restrictions?

Where to begin studying the effects of diet

– Is there a spiritual meaning in restrictions specifically on food? There are various sources that say, for example, that dairy reinforces certain childlike character traits, that there are foods that strengthen the ego more. And based on this understanding, people give up certain foods so as to work on themselves inwardly as well.

– I’ll put it this way: you really can look at how diet, food, affects spiritual development. But to do that, you first need to look at how diet affects your physical body, at least at a basic level, see all these patterns, and then gradually begin to see the effects and patterns in other systems and in other bodies. And that is an incredible, insane amount of work.

Take even the descriptions of how the physical body is influenced, of a broader influence on the physical body, a broader observation of health — for example, nutrition science; I don’t know whether it can be called a system or whether some other word applies. A broader, multifaceted observation of health. And if you ask these people about spiritual development, you will see that they act purely from physical considerations. When they say that stress, for example, affects the physical body and suggest going to meditation, they suggest it purely as an exercise related to hormones or to the physical body. Exclusively that. Without studying or considering the whole spectrum of what is happening in reality.

Several years ago I went very deeply into how diet affects my own health. By then I was already quite strict about a large number of foods. When a restaurant asks me, “Do you have any allergies or restrictions?” I always say, “No.” Because it’s pointless. I haven’t seen a single place that can handle the volume of my requirements. And why would I do that? It’s a waste of energy. People often ask this question as a formality; you can see that very clearly. Sometimes they can’t handle even one food item that you ask them to replace.

By the way, it’s very interesting: because of my way of life, I visit restaurants fairly often, and they often write there, “What restrictions or allergies do you have?” And very often the word “sugar” isn’t there. That’s amazing. It isn’t there. There are nuts, there is dairy, there is gluten, but no sugar. And why isn’t it there? Because they wouldn’t be able to make the menu work, wouldn’t be able to handle everything that goes on.

People don’t even know, at a basic level, how foods are made up in terms of composition. They don’t know that a jar of ketchup contains thirty or however many percent sugar. People simply don’t know this, and even when you tell them, they don’t want to know it, don’t want to accept it, don’t want to understand it. Of course, there are tomato pastes without sugar — not basic Heinz ketchup. We’re not talking about those.

But if people study health exclusively from the physical body, saying that stress affects the physical body, I went in a completely different direction.

I took up my health in order to improve my perception of the spiritual world, to broaden my perception in general. To see more clearly and better understand my whole spiritual being and all the spiritual systems — absolutely all the systems in terms of influence. Not in order to change some hormone parameter or some reading.

Because if you and I go in there, there is an incredible number of misconceptions. And most importantly, people there see cause and effect very narrowly. For example, why did a person ultimately die? Why did they ultimately develop an illness that shouldn’t have arisen? Or why can one person eat well right away, from the start? Or, for example, one person doesn’t smoke or doesn’t drink alcohol from the start — they have that kind of impulse — while another person drinks alcohol and can’t give it up? There is a whole spectrum of things happening there.

You can fight it as much as you like, but if you have an impulse to damage your body, you’ll get off one thing and switch to another.

Although, of course, all these are very useful things.

What affects the body even before food: air and water

Still, to move on to understanding how health affects the spiritual system, you do need at least to begin working on the basic things of health. Someone once told me something interesting. I asked, “How important is it to buy good-quality food?” He told me, “The first thing that affects a person in terms of nourishment is the air they breathe. You live in Moscow — so, on the whole, you can eat what you eat.”

If you listen carefully, it was actually a very sensible answer. Because if you live in a big city or in some system where the air is polluted — although, of course, it isn’t the most polluted city in the world — you are constantly feeding your body with it. He said, “The second is water. What water you drink, what water touches your body in the shower, if we’re talking about nourishing the body. And the third, of course, is the food you eat.” And honestly, that stuck with me.

He was simply a doctor — to me, of a fairly multifaceted profile, a person with a broad perception — but it gave me a very strong impression of understanding cause and effect. Because if you take the spiritual world and look within it at the causes of particular illnesses and of impulses to eat one thing or another — or whether you have the money to eat properly, the time to eat properly — all of that has an effect too.

We can talk as much as we like, but you may have the kind of job that won’t let you eat properly, for example. It just won’t, and that’s that. Or it restricts you so much that it becomes unrealistic. Or business trips and travel will restrict everything. For me, for example, eating in restaurants is generally very hard, so I take it calmly and often lower my requirements. Otherwise I won’t eat at all — the requirements in terms of diet would arise endlessly.

There are basic things a person needs to sort out. And you can see that people can’t sort out sugar, alcohol, a proper eating rhythm, snacks, sleep, timing — what you eat after sleep, before sleep and so on. They can’t hear what good water is. They will endlessly prove that tap water or filtered water is fine. And further on, people can’t sort out other things either. For example, that there is green lettuce grown under the sun and lettuce grown under electric lamps. Does a person understand this difference? How much do they understand it at all?

Further: in the modern world we have a huge variety of foods. What have these foods been treated with? I remember that since my youth I’ve always been bothered by the story when you arrive somewhere and people say, “We have our own borehole, we have good water,” or “well water.” But that’s absurd, because there is no such thing as a good borehole or good well water. There is water from your own borehole that has been tested — or not tested in terms of quality, composition, structure and so on. It has been tested or it hasn’t.

The fact that it’s well water doesn’t mean at all that it’s better than tap water in the city. City tap water has at least been tested somehow. But has this well water been tested?

Someone will say: back then there wasn’t such pollution. That’s not true, because you went five meters higher or lower, to the side or to the left, came across a certain incorrect, distorted structure of some minerals — and started contaminating your whole body. Bingo!

Or do people figure out what these foods were treated with, in which fields, what was actually used there? It always sounds great: this milk is from a granny, straight from the cow, from the village, or this honey is from my own plot. But if you look at the facts: if there’s a factory half a kilometer from your plot, you can’t eat your honey. If there’s a particular factory there, of course, or a road with cars. So, of course, this subject is so multifaceted. And this is an ordinary subject — everything I’m talking about now is ordinary material, social and physical processes.

The spiritual perception of food

And now let’s move on to spiritual processes. How well does a person understand the difference between the effects of beets and potatoes on the body, how differently do they perceive them? How well does a person understand what nourishes a person, and which structure of the person it nourishes, if they eat berries, if they eat the stem of a plant, if they eat the root of a plant? How ready is a person to dig deep into, for example, a description like this: the potato, by its structure, is not a root but a stem, a tuber?

And because of this structure — basically it is like a root, but in reality it isn’t — the potato closes off a person’s spiritual vision. There is an interesting description in Rudolf Steiner that the potato was brought into certain countries in order to close off people’s spiritual vision.

Olya, do you often hear of people not eating certain foods because it closes off their spiritual vision? If only they would ask such a question. But is this question asked abstractly or for real? How well can a modern person feel their physical body, feel what to eat and what not to eat? After all, we live in a world where people feed off anything and everything.

I recently talked with a man. He says, “I used to think you shouldn’t eat fatty meat. Now I think you should eat fatty meat.” At that moment — since he was talking about his beliefs very insistently, confidently, very confidently, without asking about the range of my perception of certain things — I thought: maybe in three months he’ll decide that you shouldn’t eat meat. That doesn’t mean a person’s opinion shouldn’t change — it can change.

In fact, if you look carefully, we know a huge number of cases of harm when people don’t eat meat, and a huge number of cases of benefit when people don’t eat meat.

The world is incredibly multifaceted. There are so many internal circumstances. To sort out ordinary nutrition at all in today’s world — even without going into the spiritual influence of that nutrition — you have to spend an incredible amount of time.

I once saw a video: Sadhguru was sitting with someone; they had bought strawberries or raspberries and put them out. And they say: one batch of raspberries is organic, the other isn’t. And Sadhguru started determining which was organic and which wasn’t. Such a funny video. But he said one interesting phrase: “Why do you buy a product if you know it isn’t organic? If it’s four times cheaper, eat four times less of the organic product. Eat not four apples but one. Share one apple among everyone, eat a piece — if you know it’s organic.”

Another point: for example, in the culture after the Soviet Union, in the culture of the countries of the former Soviet Union, there is no concept of organic at all. People there think organic is something invented, made up, without fully understanding which laws exist where. And it’s very important always to look at the laws.

Recently I was sitting here with a man — this is very interesting — who worked for a long time at the US border, where people enter the country. He was originally a Marine and later worked at the border. And he said a very interesting thing: if something is banned from import, don’t speculate about why it was banned — read about the causes and effects. That’s really cool. He said, “Go and read the causes and effects.”

For example, you can’t bring citrus fruit in from certain countries, because if an orange happens to carry a certain infection and you take it to California, it will end up where millions or billions of oranges are produced and pose a direct threat to that activity in the region. Obviously, it will be banned from import. It was banned not because someone begrudges it. And that’s why, for example, you can bring in honey. Go ahead, bring that honey, please. Tea? If you want, bring your tea. But this you can’t bring in. Or with certain foods, you can carry something inside if they’re liquid rather than dry. There are reasons for this everywhere. Everything has its reasons.

And if you look into foods, you can see that there are foods whose quality is regulated fairly well in different countries, for example. And there are foods that are regulated very loosely. Or these foods simply had no significance for people.

The spiritual approach: where to begin understanding diet

By the way, most of the people I observe describing health benefits — those who say decent things about whether particular foods are right or wrong, about the connection between certain readings, test results, hormones and so on — don’t describe the spiritual plane of a person at all. Not at all. They act according to a template, as much as possible according to a template. And what is a template? It’s a single system for everyone. It seems to them that they are saying, “Let’s study the individual body.” But in fact it is a template.

For example, I have a certain problem in my esophagus that they can’t find. They did a series of tests — all the readings improved, but one not so much. I send it to them and say, “But it’s at level B there.” They say, “We reviewed it — it’s level A after all,” and, “Since this has no effect, it’s most likely related to nerves.” And yesterday they send me, “Then you need to take antidepressants.” But that’s ridiculous.

They want to treat a problem of some neurological nature — some influence, some involvement of the nerves in the system of muscle tone near the esophagus — with antidepressants. How? What kind of logic is that? I have said many times that doctors should be put in prison. What on earth is it when a person starts taking antidepressants at forty-three? Many doctors — by no means all. There are a great many sound things, competent work and so on.

But basically, when we look at it this way, let’s bring responsibility into it and say, “And what are you proposing in terms of cause and effect? What side effects come with what this brings? How will it affect my interaction with my children and their upbringing, my interaction in society, my sensations, my inner state, my professional development? How will it affect all that over the next forty years or so?” Let’s not take sixty, let’s take forty. We can take twenty. How will it affect things?

And it’s interesting that before certain procedures they write, for example, “You can’t eat today, but you can drink Sprite — a white liquid.” So you are the very people who allow drinking Sprite and then, if a person has a problem in the esophagus, tell them to take antidepressants. What kind of nonsense is this?

Because these are standards: the World Health Organization, some world practices that someone prescribed for decades, or someone somewhere got a diploma, defended some dissertation, described something from their own angle, and then comes along and says, “Actually, that wasn’t true.” And now in politics there are so many different court cases over people’s actions during COVID. Wait: at first you allowed them to do something, and now you say they caused harm and want to put them in prison. But you yourselves allowed them to do it.

The first step in studying how diet affects spiritual perception

In that case, better not to get into the connections between food and the spiritual world at all, but to look at the basic aspects of nutrition, very simple ones:

• Eat on time.
• Don’t snack too much.
• A proper eating structure, the right balance of proteins, fats and carbohydrates.
• Don’t eat meat with certain foods.
• Eat certain foods at certain times.

And then you can add for yourself at least paying attention to which foods you buy. This story — someone says, “I bought it at the market, the food there is great.” Remove these assumptions from yourself, look at what this actually is. What is my impulse when I do this? Am I really studying it to the end — or am I just feeding off the question of whether it’s good quality or not, and then drinking cola the day after tomorrow? Then what was the point of fighting it? Why worry about it? If you constantly drink wine or beer and drink Coca-Cola, what is the point of worrying about other things at all?

But there is one solution here — to look more broadly at yourself, to look more broadly at other people. And you can see that the reasons why a person does certain negative things with regard to their diet have a structure, a whole chain. It is a huge, voluminous set of energy, of impulses in different interactions.

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