Can Food Hinder Spiritual Development? | How Diet Affects Perception

OLOlya

Is there a spiritual meaning to restrictions specifically on food? Different sources say, for example, that dairy reinforces certain childlike character traits, or that some foods strengthen the ego. Based on that understanding, people give up certain foods as part of their inner work on themselves.

AVAlexander Volchek

I would put it this way: you can certainly examine how diet and food affect spiritual development. But first you need to look at their effects on your physical body, at least at a basic level, see those patterns, and then gradually begin to see their effects and patterns in other systems and other bodies. That takes an incredible amount of work. Even take descriptions of how the physical body is affected, a broader view of those effects and of health—for example, nutritional science. I do not know whether to call it a system or whether another word would fit.

A broader view of health, a multifaceted observation of it. If you ask the people involved about spiritual development, you will see that they act purely from physical considerations. When they say stress affects the physical body and suggest meditation, they offer it purely as an exercise related to hormones or the physical body. Exclusively that, without studying or considering the full range of what is actually happening.

Several years ago, I went very deeply into how diet affects my own health. By then, I already had fairly strict standards about many foods. When a restaurant asks whether I have any allergies or restrictions, I always say no, because it is pointless. I have not seen a single place capable of meeting the full range of my requirements. Why should I do that? It is a waste of energy. People often ask the question as a formality; you can see it very clearly. Sometimes they cannot even accommodate one food that you ask them to replace.

It is interesting: because of my way of life, I visit restaurants fairly often, and their forms ask, “What restrictions or allergies do you have?” Very often, for example, the word “sugar” is missing. It is remarkable. They list nuts, dairy, gluten, but not sugar. Why? Because they cannot make their menu or everything they do meet that requirement. People do not even know the basic composition of foods. They do not know that a jar of ketchup contains thirty percent sugar, or whatever the percentage is. They simply do not know, and even when you tell them, they do not want to know, accept it, or understand it. Of course, there are products without sugar, such as tomato paste rather than ordinary Heinz ketchup. We are not talking about those.

People study health exclusively in terms of the physical body and say that stress affects it, but I went in a completely different direction. I worked on my health to improve my perception of the spiritual world, to expand my perception in general, see more clearly, and better understand my entire spiritual being and all my spiritual systems—absolutely all the systems and the influences on them. Not to change a hormone level or get some measurement right. If we go into that area, there is an incredible number of misconceptions. Most importantly, people see cause and effect very narrowly there.

Why did a person ultimately die? Why did they develop an illness that should not have developed? Why can one person eat well from the outset? Why does one person not smoke or not drink alcohol from the beginning, with that impulse already present, while another drinks and cannot give it up? There is a whole spectrum of things happening. You can fight it as much as you like, but if you have an impulse to damage your body, you will get off one thing and switch to another. Of course, all these efforts are very useful. Still, to understand how health affects the spiritual system, you need at least to begin working on the basics of health. Someone once said something interesting to me. I had asked, “How important is it to buy good-quality food?”

He told me, “The first thing that nourishes and affects a person is the air they breathe. You live in Moscow, so, in general, you might as well eat what you eat.” If you listen carefully, that was actually a very sensible answer. If you live in a big city or somewhere with polluted air—obviously, it is not the most polluted city in the world—you are constantly feeding your body with that. Second is water. He said, “The second thing is water: what water you drink, what water touches your body in the shower, in terms of nourishing the body. Third, of course, is the food you eat.” Honestly, that stayed with me.

He was simply a doctor, but with quite a broad range of expertise, or a broad way of seeing things. It made a strong impression on my understanding of cause and effect. If we look at the spiritual world, at the causes of particular illnesses and impulses to eat one thing or another, or at whether you have the money or time to eat properly, all of that matters too. We can talk endlessly, but you may have a kind of job that simply does not allow you to eat properly, or restricts it so much that it becomes unrealistic. Or the number of business trips and journeys limits everything.

For example, eating in restaurants is generally very difficult for me, so I take it calmly and often lower my requirements. Otherwise I would not eat at all. There would be endless dietary requirements. There are basic things a person needs to understand. Yet people cannot sort out sugar, alcohol, a proper eating rhythm, snacks, sleep, timing, what they eat after waking or before sleep, and so on. They cannot hear what good water means. They will endlessly argue that tap water or filtered water is fine. They also cannot make sense of other things: leafy greens grown in sunlight versus greens grown under electric lamps, for example.

Do people understand the difference? How much do they understand it? We have such a variety of foods in the modern world. What have they been treated with? Ever since I was young, it bothered me when you arrived somewhere and people said, “We have our own drilled well, good water,” or, “Water from a well.” That is absurd. It is not about a good drilled well or well water; it is about whether the water from your own source has been tested for quality, composition, structure, and so on. Tested or untested. Coming from a well does not make it better than city tap water. City tap water has at least been tested somehow. Has this well water been tested? Someone will say there was not that kind of pollution back then.

That is not true. Go five meters higher, lower, or to one side, and you may encounter an unsuitable structure, a distorted composition of minerals, and start contaminating your whole body. Bingo! Do people understand what their food was treated with, which fields it came from, and what was actually used there? It always sounds wonderful: “This milk comes from an old woman in the village, straight from a cow,” or, “This honey is from my own land.” But look at the facts: if there is a factory half a kilometer from your land, you cannot consume that honey.

If there is a factory there, of course, or a road with cars nearby. This is such a multifaceted subject, even as an ordinary subject. Everything I have described so far concerns ordinary material, social, and physical processes. Now let us turn to spiritual processes. How well does a person understand the different effects of beets and potatoes on the body? How differently do they perceive them? How well do they understand what nourishes a person, and which structure it nourishes, when they eat berries, a plant's stem, or its root? How willing are they to look deeply into something like the description that a potato is not a root but a stem, a tuber—a stem in terms of its structure?

Accordingly, because of that structure—it is basically like a root but is not actually one—a potato closes off a person's spiritual vision. Rudolf Steiner has an interesting description of potatoes being brought into certain countries in order to close off people's spiritual vision. Olya, do you often hear people say they avoid certain foods because those foods close off their spiritual vision? At least ask the question. But is it asked abstractly or in earnest? How well can a modern person feel their physical body, feel what to eat and what not to eat? We live in a world where people feed off anything and everything. I recently spoke with someone who said, “I used to think you should not eat fatty meat. Now I think you should.”

At that moment, because he was so insistent about his beliefs, so confident without asking how I perceived any of these things, I thought: perhaps in three months he will decide that you should not eat meat. That does not mean a person's opinion should not change. It can. If we look carefully, we know of a great deal of harm when people do not eat meat, and a great deal of benefit, many cases of benefit, when people do not eat meat. The world is extraordinarily multifaceted. There are so many internal circumstances that even understanding ordinary nutrition in today's world, without getting into its spiritual effects, takes an incredible amount of time.

I once saw a video in which Sadhguru was sitting with someone. They had bought strawberries or raspberries, something like that, and put them out. One batch of raspberries was organic and the other was not, and Sadhguru began identifying which was organic. A funny video. But he said something interesting: “Why buy a product when you know it is not organic? If it costs four times less, eat four times less of the organic product. Instead of four apples, eat one. Share one apple among everyone; eat a piece if you know it is organic.” Another point is that in the post-Soviet culture, in the countries of the former Soviet Union, there is no real concept of organic food. Some people think it is invented, made up, without fully understanding which laws exist where. It is always important to look at the laws.

Recently I was sitting here with someone who had worked for a long time at the U.S. border, where people enter the country. He was originally in the Marines and later worked at the border. He said something interesting: if something is banned from being brought into the country, do not speculate about why. Read about the reasons and consequences. That is a great point. He said, “Go and read the reasons and consequences.” For example, you cannot bring citrus fruit from certain countries because if an orange carries some infection and you bring it into California, it could reach places producing millions or billions of oranges and threaten that activity in the region.

Obviously, they will ban it from being brought in. It was not banned because someone is being stingy. Honey, for example, can be brought in: go ahead, bring your honey. Tea? Bring your tea if you want. But this other thing cannot be brought in. Or certain foods can carry something inside them if they are liquid rather than dry. There are reasons for all of it. Everything has a reason. If you study foods, you can see that some are fairly well regulated for quality in different countries, while others are regulated much more loosely. Or those foods simply had no significance for people. But when we talk about food's effect on spiritual development, the first question a person should ask is whether they actually live with an understanding that the world is spiritual, or whether it is just some fantasy to them.

Is it just something amusing while they live entirely in the social world? Incidentally, most of the people I see describing health benefits, who say useful things about which foods are right or wrong, measurements, test results, hormones, and so on, say absolutely nothing about the spiritual dimension of a person. Nothing. They operate by a template, as much as possible. What is a template? One system for everyone. They think they are saying, “Let us study the individual body.” But in practice, it is a template. For example, I have a particular problem in my esophagus that they cannot identify. They did a series of tests here, and all the readings improved.

One had not improved much. I wrote to them, “But that one is at grade B.” They said, “We reviewed it; it is grade A after all. Since that does not affect it, it is most likely related to the nerves.” Yesterday they sent me, “Then you need to take antidepressants.” But that is ridiculous. They want to treat a problem of some neurological kind, some influence or activation of nerves in a muscular system, some muscle tone near the esophagus—I do not know—with antidepressants. How? What kind of logic is that? I have said many times that doctors should be put in prison. What does it mean when someone starts taking antidepressants at forty-three? What is that? Many doctors, I mean. When I say doctors should be put in prison, I mean many of them, certainly not all.

There are many sound things, competent actions, and so on. But if we look at it this way, let us bring responsibility into it and ask, “What are you proposing in terms of cause and effect? What side effects does this bring? How will it affect my interaction with my children and their upbringing, my social interactions, my feelings, my inner state, and my professional development? What will its effects be over the next forty years? Let us not take sixty; let us take forty. Or twenty. How will it affect all of that?” Interestingly, for certain procedures, they write, “You cannot eat today, but you can drink Sprite, a white liquid.”

You are the people who allow Sprite and then, if someone has a problem in their esophagus, tell them to take antidepressants. What kind of nonsense is that? It comes from standards: the World Health Organization, international practices that someone has prescribed for decades, or someone who got a diploma, defended a dissertation, described something from their own perspective, then later says, “Actually, that was not true.” Now, in politics, look how many court cases are being brought over people's actions during COVID. Wait a minute: you first allowed them to do something, and now you say they caused harm and want to put them in prison. You were the ones who gave them permission.

If a person wants to approach this subject in a truly sound way, they need to begin studying the spiritual world as a whole. Without studying it, without at least a partial perception that life is fundamentally spiritual rather than material, that the material is part of the spiritual world, this will be no more than a slight brush with the subject. In that case, it is better not to get into the connections between food and the spiritual world at all. Look instead at the very simple basics of nutrition: eating on time, not snacking too much, a proper eating pattern, the right balance of proteins, fats, and carbohydrates, not eating meat with certain foods, and eating different foods at particular times.

You can go further and at least pay attention to the foods you buy. Someone says, “I bought it at the market; the food there is excellent.” Let go of those assumptions and look at what it actually is. What is my impulse when I do this? Am I really studying it fully, or merely throwing around claims about whether it is good-quality or not, only to drink cola the day after tomorrow? What was the point of fighting over it or worrying about it? If you constantly drink wine or beer and Coca-Cola, what is the point of worrying about other things? There is one approach here: look at yourself more broadly, and look more broadly at other people.

You can see that the reasons a person takes particular negative actions regarding their diet have a structure, an entire chain. There is a huge, extensive array of energies and impulses in different interactions. An incredible amount…