A compulsion toward food, alcohol, drugs, sex—or anything at all—has its roots in pride and the terrible willfulness that pride encourages us to express as our due. After all, I’m worth it, we say, as we help ourselves to one after the other of our delicacies or forbidden delights. Then when we realize we’re hooked, we compound the problem of our addiction by reacting to our evolving symptoms as though they were the problem. Some of us become quite adept at dramatizing our helplessness against the awful things that are happening to us.We even get our friends (fiends, that is) and an occasional do-gooder to look on us as the poor, unfortunate victim rather than the author of our own sad plight.
Until we dare to cease our diversionary tactics and take an honest look at the real cause of our wrong relationship with the goodies (mostly “baddies,” really) of the world, we will be unable to bring about any meaningful changes in our life. First we must see that we have created the problem ourselves through our proud, egotistical willfulness. Then we must see that getting mad at the results and doing battle with them only compound the problem.
The frustration and despair that attend our efforts to free ourselves are simply the pitiful cries of our pride as it finds itself sinking in the quicksand of its own creation. It would be better if we simply gave up and did nothing. But, unwisely, we must attack our symptoms with renewed vigor, as though the sheer force of our anger could give us control over the enemy that has enslaved us.
Finally we must submit; before long we are wallowing hopelessly in our sick “pleasures” and seeking solace from the very people and vices that we once regarded as enemies. They are still our enemies, of course, but in our hopelessness, we do not see very clearly: in fact, we want neither to see clearly nor to have anything to do with anyone who does see clearly. Simply, no matter how much we wish to deny it, we can never completely escape the knowledge that we are not showing ourselves in the best light when we are trapped in a compulsion. Whether flailing about in protest or simply wallowing, we are not a pretty sight. All our hang-ups follow this pattern, whether they are with people, places, things, or whatever.
The ego doesn’t take any threat to its supremacy lightly. When it sees that it has been taken captive by a person or a vice, it seeks to turn the tables by consoling itself with whatever it can milk from the once-hated thing. Beware of the “love” that grows out of hatred or resentment!
Friday, September 23, 2011
Tuesday, August 16, 2011
Introduction: Back to the Garden
If you had been born, say, two thousand years ago, you wouldn’t need this book. You would be sustaining yourself naturally by eating all the right foods. But, alas, you were born in the twentieth century, as if in a cage, a bleak environment of steel and concrete and supermarket-processed food. Need I say more about the devitalized, bran-stripped junk you are eating?
So now it behooves you to thread your way back through the maze of food traumas and conditioning to discover what God intended you to do with the natural bounty he provided.
Food is to the intestines what truth is to the spirit. In both cases, we must keep a clean house.The problem is that a wrong person cannot possibly eat right food. You will see that the primary emphasis is on the spiritual weaknesses that led you into temptation in the first place. Bear in mind that you must get right to eat right.
Somehow we all know subconsciously that eating the right foods will inhibit the power of our willfulness. Holy men of ancient times fasted because they knew it was the only way to weaken their souls’ resistance to God’s will and power. Food abuse is the very elixir of pride, and to the present time is sustained by it. The same can be said of sex abuse.
Sex, the lower animal form of love, is awakened by the food sin, and as it is used to sustain the fallen ego, darker perversities appear as temptations to be indulged. From here to eternity, the egos of men ravage the earth, seeking to stroke themselves with pleasure, and they are ruined in the process. The abuse of food and the ravaging of women lead to the ruination of man in everything he does.
If it is true that wrong (forbidden) food was the basis of the ruination of man, and if it is true that the trauma of it awakened the dark side of his nature, then he ought to find empirical evidence of a food/sex connection in his continuing fall from grace. This is to say that if we could somehow be absolved, saved from our fallen state, we could then begin to eat sensible food, food that is good for us and compatible with our bright natures.We could begin to eschew the fancy concoctions that sustain our rebellion against God to be a god, and our gross sensuality should gradually diminish to the point where man, the dying, propagating beast, becomes the regenerating, eternally-living being, the being that God created in His own image.
Perhaps very, very subconsciously we human beings already know that our willful spirit needs food and sex excesses in order to survive as the god over all we survey; and that is why we are unable (unwilling) to give up our exotic egoanimal- sustaining indulgences. Can you see why anything stolen or forbidden is attractive and sexually stimulating? Junk food is a drug and an aphrodisiac.
If we could detect and free ourselves from the original trauma, we would thereby become enabled to make right choices. And if we then chose to eat of the tree of life, sensible, non-ego-reinforcing foods, we would then, once more, be evolving in accordance with our Creator’s will, incorporating His identity into ours, forever growing in Him and He in us. His spirit in our soul and His food in our body add up to life eternal.
The meditation exercise will bring you back, through repentance, to the original threshold of obedience to God’s plan, a state of innocence in which you will be saved and enabled to make right choices. Before, you were under a compulsion to sin, to eat willfully and wrongly, and to tempt and abuse one another sexually, to mutate and evolve a living hell on earth and in yourselves. Before, even though you had always known about the pitfalls of temptation, and you knew you should resist them, you could do nothing but give in, with full knowledge of the harm you were doing to yourself and to others. Don’t you see how the unregenerate ego sees food? It perceives food, as well as all forbidden immoral adventures, as the elixir of true life (that’s living, man!), a moral support, a savior and a comforter, through which man polarizes his attitude pridefully to sustain his separation from God to be god and purge himself of guilt.
Pride proclaims its rebellion continually in all its sinful relationships. The proud man can have nothing but a wrong relationship with everything, beginning with food and mother and ending in women, alcohol, and drugs.
The first symptom of his fall to original sin that a man notices is a gross thickening of the flesh and the awakening of puzzling and often embarrassing sexual lust. He becomes acutely aware of why mankind’s need to clothe itself started with the fig leaf. Having fallen first to the charms of forbidden food, he now falls under the spell of forbidden sexual experiences. They build up his pride to such a pitch that he loses all consciousness of what these sexual experiences are doing to him. He feels like a conquering hero as he goes from one conquest to another, totally unaware that in the process, he is becoming either a cowardly, angry wimp or a violent, woman-violating brute. He feels himself to be the monarch of all he surveys (pollutes), and the king can do no wrong.
The kind of man who hungers for such knowledge pressures a woman unmercifully to give herself up to his use of her. Prideful men feel that the only way they can “complete” themselves is by violating women for their ego gratification. The women who give in to their blandishments do so from a love/hate compulsion and get their revenge by making the men’s lives, and those of their children, a misery.
So you see, there is no future in food and sex abuse. It leads only to a downward transcendence of self, to endless pain and perversions. Each gratified perversion “saves” us from the pain of guilt and awakens new, stranger sensations that drive us to seek out kinkier partners for kinkier sex all the way to hell.
It simply does not pay to see food and sex as our “personal savior.” To do so sets into motion a devolution process, evidenced by our faulty relationships and the awakening of ever lower desires. It is the way the prideful soul, thinking itself to be good, evolves the body of the beast. The soul, descending through layer upon layer of fleshly self as it wakens to his lust, in and beyond the female form, cries out to the original spirit, the essence, the nectar of the serpent, whose appeal to his pride set him on this downward path.
But the father of all prideful beings is the devil himself. If we carry this process to its ultimate conclusion, we will never know God, but we may discover the truth of our having cohabited with Satan in the spirit if we dare to look in the mirror of reality, where we will see that we have been transformed in his image. Having spiritually cohabited with Satan, we have been made over in his imperfectly perfect image, and we are living in the “heaven” of his hell, having become “one” with the father of the netherworld. Here, at the end of our prideful progression, we are free only from the truth.
The ego of the carnal self, desperate to know itself as god, requires woman to add something of her own concoction to the food she offers him, and to allow him the unqualified right to debase and ravage her body. Through the abuse of each other and food, we try to sustain the illusion that we are the lords of the universe, masters of all we survey. The carnal man, to maintain his illusion of supremacy, seeks ever “better” food and “better” women; and all the while, he is altering and degrading their value and purposes through his sick uses of them on his downward journey toward self-destruction.
The more we deny God to be god (always right, never wrong), the more deeply we will involve ourselves with the people, places, pleasures, and intrigues that will surely kill us in the end.
But, luckily for us, we do not have to die to know hell. After sating ourselves on so many of these forbidden delights, we do make contact with that loathsome reality beyond the natural senses, even though, in our rebellious state, wrong always looks right to us and right, wrong. God has built into our internal guidance system provision for a change of course. Life is a journey up or down in terms of the values beyond the material realm. The soul stands between two dimensions and is allowed enough freedom of choice to “sin” itself into a corner, where it must repent and cry out,“God, what have I done?”
Fortunate are those who see the folly of taking the low road in the first place, those for whom each morning means a fresh commitment to good for goodness’ sake; but souls such as these are rare. Most of us fall in line behind the tempter and refuse to wake up until we can no longer avoid seeing the awful truth of our condition and must scream out in pain for deliverance.
Let us take another look at the role food plays in our human dilemma. Have you noticed how the very act of eating makes you more aware of yourself as a sexual being? Do you realize that with every bite you are unconsciously and compulsively killing yourself? Eating isn’t the only trauma that affects you this way. It is simply the most basic and apparently natural. But any trauma, whether it is getting caught in a lie, flying into a rage, playing hooky from responsibility—any trauma will awaken in you a troublesome sexual desire.
Now, if there is a sin/sex connection, and if the sin entered through the food, then it follows that the very act of eating to keep the body and soul alive could be doing double duty by sustaining the sin of pride and sexuality at the same time. Of pride, let me say that it is a sentence of death; and of sex, it is the evidence of the descent of our ego into mortal flesh, where it now perpetuates itself genitally, whereas in a more glorious past, it perpetuated itself by regeneration of the soul.
How then can we separate pride and death from sinning through food? We have to eat. There’s no question about that. But how can we eat without sin? How can we overcome pride and guilt without starving ourselves? Might we possibly eat our way back almost to paradise?
Before I answer that question, let’s explore the dynamics of the fall more deeply; perhaps the means of salvation will suggest itself to your innermost mind without words.
If I were the devil, wanting to control you by your addiction to sin, I would inject that sin into the manner of your carrying on some natural activity, and I would do it so subtly that you might not become aware that every time you engaged in that “natural” activity, you were being conditioned to sin again. And even if you caught onto the fact that you were being “had” in some way, you still wouldn’t know what to do about it. There would appear to be no way out of the dilemma.
If, on the other hand, I were God, I would certainly provide for the possibility of your falling into the devil’s trap by devising a punishment for your defection, as well as salvation from punishment, that would appear to be terribly complicated, almost unfathomable, despite its basic simplicity. I would require you to come home to simple reality and drop the heavy burden of pride.To the pure in heart, the way is always clear and uncomplicated. But for the prideful ones, the way is always fraught with complications and questions, an exercise in balancing this consideration against that until each cancels the other out and progress seems impossible.
To carry our inquiry another step further, if we believe in a Creator at all, might we not suppose that He had in mind for us some natural and proper way to handle sexual desire?
And might we not also assume that it was in man’s handling of the first sin, the food sin, that he put the reins of his earthly being in Satan’s hands and lost his way back to the natural way of relating to anything, especially to his sexuality? By eating the forbidden food, he elected to serve pride and death, and this service is the legacy that has come down to us from generation to generation.
So now it behooves you to thread your way back through the maze of food traumas and conditioning to discover what God intended you to do with the natural bounty he provided.
Food is to the intestines what truth is to the spirit. In both cases, we must keep a clean house.The problem is that a wrong person cannot possibly eat right food. You will see that the primary emphasis is on the spiritual weaknesses that led you into temptation in the first place. Bear in mind that you must get right to eat right.
Somehow we all know subconsciously that eating the right foods will inhibit the power of our willfulness. Holy men of ancient times fasted because they knew it was the only way to weaken their souls’ resistance to God’s will and power. Food abuse is the very elixir of pride, and to the present time is sustained by it. The same can be said of sex abuse.
Sex, the lower animal form of love, is awakened by the food sin, and as it is used to sustain the fallen ego, darker perversities appear as temptations to be indulged. From here to eternity, the egos of men ravage the earth, seeking to stroke themselves with pleasure, and they are ruined in the process. The abuse of food and the ravaging of women lead to the ruination of man in everything he does.
If it is true that wrong (forbidden) food was the basis of the ruination of man, and if it is true that the trauma of it awakened the dark side of his nature, then he ought to find empirical evidence of a food/sex connection in his continuing fall from grace. This is to say that if we could somehow be absolved, saved from our fallen state, we could then begin to eat sensible food, food that is good for us and compatible with our bright natures.We could begin to eschew the fancy concoctions that sustain our rebellion against God to be a god, and our gross sensuality should gradually diminish to the point where man, the dying, propagating beast, becomes the regenerating, eternally-living being, the being that God created in His own image.
Perhaps very, very subconsciously we human beings already know that our willful spirit needs food and sex excesses in order to survive as the god over all we survey; and that is why we are unable (unwilling) to give up our exotic egoanimal- sustaining indulgences. Can you see why anything stolen or forbidden is attractive and sexually stimulating? Junk food is a drug and an aphrodisiac.
If we could detect and free ourselves from the original trauma, we would thereby become enabled to make right choices. And if we then chose to eat of the tree of life, sensible, non-ego-reinforcing foods, we would then, once more, be evolving in accordance with our Creator’s will, incorporating His identity into ours, forever growing in Him and He in us. His spirit in our soul and His food in our body add up to life eternal.
The meditation exercise will bring you back, through repentance, to the original threshold of obedience to God’s plan, a state of innocence in which you will be saved and enabled to make right choices. Before, you were under a compulsion to sin, to eat willfully and wrongly, and to tempt and abuse one another sexually, to mutate and evolve a living hell on earth and in yourselves. Before, even though you had always known about the pitfalls of temptation, and you knew you should resist them, you could do nothing but give in, with full knowledge of the harm you were doing to yourself and to others. Don’t you see how the unregenerate ego sees food? It perceives food, as well as all forbidden immoral adventures, as the elixir of true life (that’s living, man!), a moral support, a savior and a comforter, through which man polarizes his attitude pridefully to sustain his separation from God to be god and purge himself of guilt.
Pride proclaims its rebellion continually in all its sinful relationships. The proud man can have nothing but a wrong relationship with everything, beginning with food and mother and ending in women, alcohol, and drugs.
The first symptom of his fall to original sin that a man notices is a gross thickening of the flesh and the awakening of puzzling and often embarrassing sexual lust. He becomes acutely aware of why mankind’s need to clothe itself started with the fig leaf. Having fallen first to the charms of forbidden food, he now falls under the spell of forbidden sexual experiences. They build up his pride to such a pitch that he loses all consciousness of what these sexual experiences are doing to him. He feels like a conquering hero as he goes from one conquest to another, totally unaware that in the process, he is becoming either a cowardly, angry wimp or a violent, woman-violating brute. He feels himself to be the monarch of all he surveys (pollutes), and the king can do no wrong.
The kind of man who hungers for such knowledge pressures a woman unmercifully to give herself up to his use of her. Prideful men feel that the only way they can “complete” themselves is by violating women for their ego gratification. The women who give in to their blandishments do so from a love/hate compulsion and get their revenge by making the men’s lives, and those of their children, a misery.
So you see, there is no future in food and sex abuse. It leads only to a downward transcendence of self, to endless pain and perversions. Each gratified perversion “saves” us from the pain of guilt and awakens new, stranger sensations that drive us to seek out kinkier partners for kinkier sex all the way to hell.
It simply does not pay to see food and sex as our “personal savior.” To do so sets into motion a devolution process, evidenced by our faulty relationships and the awakening of ever lower desires. It is the way the prideful soul, thinking itself to be good, evolves the body of the beast. The soul, descending through layer upon layer of fleshly self as it wakens to his lust, in and beyond the female form, cries out to the original spirit, the essence, the nectar of the serpent, whose appeal to his pride set him on this downward path.
But the father of all prideful beings is the devil himself. If we carry this process to its ultimate conclusion, we will never know God, but we may discover the truth of our having cohabited with Satan in the spirit if we dare to look in the mirror of reality, where we will see that we have been transformed in his image. Having spiritually cohabited with Satan, we have been made over in his imperfectly perfect image, and we are living in the “heaven” of his hell, having become “one” with the father of the netherworld. Here, at the end of our prideful progression, we are free only from the truth.
The ego of the carnal self, desperate to know itself as god, requires woman to add something of her own concoction to the food she offers him, and to allow him the unqualified right to debase and ravage her body. Through the abuse of each other and food, we try to sustain the illusion that we are the lords of the universe, masters of all we survey. The carnal man, to maintain his illusion of supremacy, seeks ever “better” food and “better” women; and all the while, he is altering and degrading their value and purposes through his sick uses of them on his downward journey toward self-destruction.
The more we deny God to be god (always right, never wrong), the more deeply we will involve ourselves with the people, places, pleasures, and intrigues that will surely kill us in the end.
But, luckily for us, we do not have to die to know hell. After sating ourselves on so many of these forbidden delights, we do make contact with that loathsome reality beyond the natural senses, even though, in our rebellious state, wrong always looks right to us and right, wrong. God has built into our internal guidance system provision for a change of course. Life is a journey up or down in terms of the values beyond the material realm. The soul stands between two dimensions and is allowed enough freedom of choice to “sin” itself into a corner, where it must repent and cry out,“God, what have I done?”
Fortunate are those who see the folly of taking the low road in the first place, those for whom each morning means a fresh commitment to good for goodness’ sake; but souls such as these are rare. Most of us fall in line behind the tempter and refuse to wake up until we can no longer avoid seeing the awful truth of our condition and must scream out in pain for deliverance.
Let us take another look at the role food plays in our human dilemma. Have you noticed how the very act of eating makes you more aware of yourself as a sexual being? Do you realize that with every bite you are unconsciously and compulsively killing yourself? Eating isn’t the only trauma that affects you this way. It is simply the most basic and apparently natural. But any trauma, whether it is getting caught in a lie, flying into a rage, playing hooky from responsibility—any trauma will awaken in you a troublesome sexual desire.
Now, if there is a sin/sex connection, and if the sin entered through the food, then it follows that the very act of eating to keep the body and soul alive could be doing double duty by sustaining the sin of pride and sexuality at the same time. Of pride, let me say that it is a sentence of death; and of sex, it is the evidence of the descent of our ego into mortal flesh, where it now perpetuates itself genitally, whereas in a more glorious past, it perpetuated itself by regeneration of the soul.
How then can we separate pride and death from sinning through food? We have to eat. There’s no question about that. But how can we eat without sin? How can we overcome pride and guilt without starving ourselves? Might we possibly eat our way back almost to paradise?
Before I answer that question, let’s explore the dynamics of the fall more deeply; perhaps the means of salvation will suggest itself to your innermost mind without words.
If I were the devil, wanting to control you by your addiction to sin, I would inject that sin into the manner of your carrying on some natural activity, and I would do it so subtly that you might not become aware that every time you engaged in that “natural” activity, you were being conditioned to sin again. And even if you caught onto the fact that you were being “had” in some way, you still wouldn’t know what to do about it. There would appear to be no way out of the dilemma.
If, on the other hand, I were God, I would certainly provide for the possibility of your falling into the devil’s trap by devising a punishment for your defection, as well as salvation from punishment, that would appear to be terribly complicated, almost unfathomable, despite its basic simplicity. I would require you to come home to simple reality and drop the heavy burden of pride.To the pure in heart, the way is always clear and uncomplicated. But for the prideful ones, the way is always fraught with complications and questions, an exercise in balancing this consideration against that until each cancels the other out and progress seems impossible.
To carry our inquiry another step further, if we believe in a Creator at all, might we not suppose that He had in mind for us some natural and proper way to handle sexual desire?
And might we not also assume that it was in man’s handling of the first sin, the food sin, that he put the reins of his earthly being in Satan’s hands and lost his way back to the natural way of relating to anything, especially to his sexuality? By eating the forbidden food, he elected to serve pride and death, and this service is the legacy that has come down to us from generation to generation.
Preface
In the classic movie “The Wizard of Oz,” Dorothy finally discovers—at the very end of her long and dangerous search for a way back to Kansas—that she has always possessed the means to return home. When she learns this truth, she is astonished, dumbstruck, that so mundane and ever-present a thing as her slippers could truly be the means for her finding her heart’s desire. Did she really always have, “right under her nose” as it were, what she couldn’t obtain from great witches and wizards?
The book Eat No Evil will leave you with much the same feeling Dorothy had when the good witch enlightened her—awestruck at the profound and unsuspected meaning and power of so ordinary a phenomenon as eating.
Indeed, food is the most familiar of all man’s activities, and the one he suspects least of harboring a great cosmic mystery.
Eat No Evil is reminiscent of a good murder mystery. The super sleuth solves the baffling case by fingering the butler, the familiar and seemingly innocent person least suspected by everyone else. So does author Roy Masters expose man’s relationship with his food as the unsuspected, ancient origin of man’s problems. He shows exactly how people’s hang-ups with food are directly connected to all
their other problems.
Roy Masters writes in a way that has become his hallmark — he allows the discerning reader to test and discover for himself the truth of what he says. For if what is written on these pages is true, then there will be a deep down recognition of that truth in the reader.
The average person walks through the supermarket in a semi-dreamlike state, mind floating merrily along with the ever present Muzak, cart bumping into those of other entranced shoppers. Unconscious suggestions carefully planted in the mind by television commercials now surface to do their work, controlling the shopper’s buying “decisions.”
Maybe you’re more aware than that. Perhaps you notice that the aisles of cakes, cookies, and sodas that once seemed so tempting to you now are unexciting, even repulsive. In fact, you probably notice as you stroll through the store looking for something decent to eat, that about 95 percent of what is sold as food today is not even fit to eat.
Yet, even if you are aware enough to know that it is important to “eat right,” and have read about every diet known to man, you are still less than halfway there. To eat right, says Masters, you must get right. And to help you attain to that end, no stone is left unturned in this book. Unlike all other books on diet, this one tells you, not what to eat, but exactly why you have always had problems with food. Once you resolve the underlying traumas, eating right is as easy as…pie.
The book Eat No Evil will leave you with much the same feeling Dorothy had when the good witch enlightened her—awestruck at the profound and unsuspected meaning and power of so ordinary a phenomenon as eating.
Indeed, food is the most familiar of all man’s activities, and the one he suspects least of harboring a great cosmic mystery.
Eat No Evil is reminiscent of a good murder mystery. The super sleuth solves the baffling case by fingering the butler, the familiar and seemingly innocent person least suspected by everyone else. So does author Roy Masters expose man’s relationship with his food as the unsuspected, ancient origin of man’s problems. He shows exactly how people’s hang-ups with food are directly connected to all
their other problems.
Roy Masters writes in a way that has become his hallmark — he allows the discerning reader to test and discover for himself the truth of what he says. For if what is written on these pages is true, then there will be a deep down recognition of that truth in the reader.
The average person walks through the supermarket in a semi-dreamlike state, mind floating merrily along with the ever present Muzak, cart bumping into those of other entranced shoppers. Unconscious suggestions carefully planted in the mind by television commercials now surface to do their work, controlling the shopper’s buying “decisions.”
Maybe you’re more aware than that. Perhaps you notice that the aisles of cakes, cookies, and sodas that once seemed so tempting to you now are unexciting, even repulsive. In fact, you probably notice as you stroll through the store looking for something decent to eat, that about 95 percent of what is sold as food today is not even fit to eat.
Yet, even if you are aware enough to know that it is important to “eat right,” and have read about every diet known to man, you are still less than halfway there. To eat right, says Masters, you must get right. And to help you attain to that end, no stone is left unturned in this book. Unlike all other books on diet, this one tells you, not what to eat, but exactly why you have always had problems with food. Once you resolve the underlying traumas, eating right is as easy as…pie.
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