Beginning with fasting as a phenomenon that is common to most spiritual traditions, I will follow with some words about starvation and caveats about healthy fasting, leading into breatharianism as opposed to starvation and then present what seems to be known and proven and what is mere conjecture about breatharianism.  I will then come back around to a far less structured and far ranging discussion of my own experiences, in relation to the extant literature – taking care to separate that which is truly known from that which is more speculative and even including necessarily something about who I am and what motivates me – because you must, in these ill-defined borderline areas of human endeavor, take the measure of the teller as much as what is being said.

     Fasting is an integral part of nearly all wisdom teachings and figures prominently at indigenous initiations and vision quests.  It is a well-established discipline among anchorites and hermits within the many world religions and is central to nearly all monastic traditions. Even modern day Catholics will recall eating fish on Fridays in an admittedly minor symbolic mortification of the flesh by abstaining from ‘proper meat’ for one day in every week. Lent too, is a widely observed Christian tradition. Muslims fast as well - from dawn to dusk during the month of Ramadan. All across India the many Hindu sects espouse fasting and find substantive spiritual value and physical rewards in the practice, according great respect to those who do it consciously and with discipline. Several Chinese monasteries practice lengthy fasting that goes well into the range of breatharian practice in conjunction with rigorous programs of martial arts training. Fasting is thus clearly a promoted practice in modern-day religions, even for the common man and is an encoded recognition of the value in exercising temperance and even periodic abstinence.

    Extensive and disciplined fasting is a widely accepted practice among those seeking to periodically cleanse the body; shed redundant weight, sharpen the senses and attain to more subtle levels of consciousness. Done to excess, it can also lead to starvation through a well-documented concatenation of events that become continually more pathological as the body goes to greater lengths to husband its dwindling resources.  After enough time has elapsed, truly pathological weight loss will typically take place.  Strange metabolic pathways then predictably take over and dominate the physiology, which have their characteristic odors and tastes.  Listlessness sets in.  The starving person will eventually have neither redundant flesh left to metabolize nor energy resources to conserve for vital functions.  Organs will eventually begin to atrophy and successively shut down, until nothing functions properly and death inevitable follows – unless, one intends to wean one’s self of food and learn to take one’s sustenance from the primary – the original source.  Intent is key and it is demonstrably possible.

      Fasting has an obvious endpoint unless one intentionally makes the graceful quantum change to something less easily understood, but practiced by certain people throughout history. A fasting person can intend to take their energy and mineral needs from light, air, Prana, divine grace…elsewhere.  Words come up short and the mechanism of action is admittedly speculative, but it has been done by quite a few people before us and is well documented. 

      There appears to be another source of energy into which we can tap that supplants eating. Sun, air and water are the energetic and molecular building blocks of all life.  They are clearly available and sufficient for the needs of other organisms. In some cases, it is demonstrably so for human beings as well. If one person can access this primal source without eating, why should it not also apply to others?

    Most of us know deep within our gut that there is something far more primal than mere workaday life as Homo economicus that makes it all worthwhile. We know in our hearts that there is a benevolent something at play as an organizing principle behind all existence; God, of you like. Accessing that something else is what allows this transition from mere fasting and eventual starvation to take place.  Abstention from eating can become, at a certain point, something more than fasting – and indeed a quantum leap in capacities – a piece of one’s spiritual journey in the generally allotted three-score and ten years we typically spend upon this blessed green earth under the shining benevolent sun.  Like entering rarified calm states of meditation, when we manage to drop into something as different mentally as a shifting of gears, we can make a quantum change in our practice, as non-eating evolves into something else.  Some call this breatharianism.  Others prefer to call what they do living from light or pranarianism (Prana is the Hindu expression for the life force.)  Some even use the clinical sounding inedia (Greek for not eating). 

       What we call this phenomenon is not so important, but differentiating it from pathological psychologies such as anorexia, bulimia or even simple starvation is. This isn’t merely a matter of obfuscation or political correctness – renaming something problematic with a less negative sounding expression.  Naming something makes it yours and brings the discussion back into your own more sympathetic court – displacing adversarial and dogmatic argumentation with polite and thoughtful discourse. Words help us understand the world.  In the process of naming new phenomena or subsets of the familiar, we end up teasing apart shades of meaning as we look for ways to more accurately describe that which no longer fits comfortably into one single concept or expression. Contemplating breatharianism, we need to have some confidence that we’re engaging with clear-eyed reason in something potentially ennobling and taking a step forward in our development rather than just coquetting with plain old fasting – becoming in due course, starvation. People before us have confronted these issues and developed ways of thinking and speaking about them, which are based in experience and intelligent analyses.

     Fasting isn’t stepping off a cliff with irrevocable repercussions. You can simply take a step back, if that proves necessary, and simply begin eating again. There does however, come a point of no return in the physical degradation attending the starvation process and one needs to be aware of this.  One must use one’s God-given reason and be aware of what is taking place within his or her body. Still, the experience of those who’ve gone before helps allay one’s trepidations of how the process ought to be taking place. 

Until recently, western literature on inediates was limited to the occasional Catholic saints who’ve appeared sporadically over nearly two millennia.  They tended to live in isolation and often bore stigmata.  It has always been seen as a sign of Divine grace – a charisma and something special, to which one does not aspire. This gift only appears here and there, among those whom God has chosen.

     There have been other inediates from the more esoteric western traditions as well. They are the figures of legend, about whom little is known and even less is verifiable – typically said to have been long-lived, often with peculiar behavioral traits, who kept to themselves, who wouldn’t accept the shaking of hands, hugs, sex or the touch of others; rarely sleeping or accepting visitors – and especially avoiding those from the office of the Holy Inquisition.  Above all else, they were brilliant and quantum levels beyond the norm. Nicola Tesla comes to mind, as do Paracelsus, Nostradamus, Franz Bardon, John Dee, Hermes Trismegistus, Fulcanelli, St Germaine – the many masters of western hermetic teachings who inhabit a mist-shrouded and highly speculative alternative history. 

     There are yet far more records of inediates from among the saddhus of India as well as the mendicant monks, hermits, and purported immortals said to be living in the high Himalayas. Here it seems that extremes of longevity attract little attention – and long-term fasting, extensive entombment, and impossible-seeming physical feats don’t surprise people. Milarepa, the 11th century Tibetan saint and sorcerer is recorded as having subsisted on nothing more than tea made from stinging nettles in the decade he lived in a cave – leading his skin to turn green with a waxy covering and hence the greenish color he is often depicted as having, in paintings and sculpture. I do wonder sometimes, about the accuracy of details in an oral transmission chain that is nearly a millennium old.   Then again, many things from the ancient prophecies and writings of different cultures sound peculiar and a bit far-fetched, but do turn out to be real. 

   Those very Tibetans have, for instance, a tradition of saints and realized Bodhisattvas having within their anatomy ‘heart crystals’. When these extraordinary individuals die, they are cremated and their ashes carefully sifted in search of these crystals, which are among the signs that are taken to demonstrate that a monk was indeed of such high spiritual attainment. Collections of these crystals exist and occasionally go on tour. I have seen them all duly documented and labeled as to whom they were found in – where and when.  They are modest little stones in pinks and yellow – often even colorless, but not flashy or large as one might suspect if a fabricated public show were the point. Why would such a phenomenon occur only there and why are there no mentions of crystallized masses being found occasionally within the cardiac tissues of the deceased in the extensive annals of western medicine? I have no answer, much as I have no mechanism of action to offer for living without eating – just that it seems to be so. There are many things between heaven and earth for which we cannot account – mysterious and enticing. Thank God for the beauty of it all – for the mystery – for those indicators that it isn’t all just death and taxes.

The contemporary breatharian scene

    Breatharianism seems to be among the many unusual exotic phenomena of another world, with little more than an oral tradition to lean upon and a history of obscure saints somewhere far away as a lineage.  And yet today, there are many more individuals abstaining from eating than ever before. They are not from just the above categories of peculiar and distant saints living up to impossible standards of perfection.  They are clearly of this world and have learned to find their nourishment elsewhere than the dinner table. There are thousands of people, much like yourselves, who are breatharians and who carry on otherwise normal-appearing lives. 

     There are at this juncture, even workshops being taught on a regular basis – there to help any of us common working stiffs, who are hardly saints, who do not aspire to stigmata and who do not have servants or a monastery to fall back upon. Tens of thousands have purportedly gone through this training and some have subsequently stayed with the discipline for years. There are methods of changing over to extracting the necessary energy for sustaining life elsewhere than from food and they do indeed have their adherents and teachers with established track records.

      At this point there have even been healthy births among breatharians.  At least one such mother speaks openly of having conceived, gestated, given birth and nursed her children without eating. She had medical attention all throughout the process and her vital statistics were completely healthy at all times – substantially better than average, actually. Her children too, are healthy and said to be unattached to food – meaning they nibble at what tastes good, but get bored and soon stop. Eating just isn’t a normal part of their lives – a bother, more than anything else.

     I also know a child who doesn’t eat, but for different reasons. He was born with a dysfunction of the intestines, which simply do not absorb food and pass it through nearly unchanged. The child must be fed intravenously or starve. He can eat, but simply derives no value from it. He will nibble on food occasionally and things do taste good to him, but for the most part, he too, seems to find food and eating a bother. I wonder if such children could be forerunners of what shall some day become commonplace – perhaps the norm – as they go from an early death sentence to the travails of intravenous feeding today and some day perhaps, with proper guidance, to deriving their sustenance from the primal source directly. 

Living from Light – the experience of being Breatharian

     I’ve also read accusations (often quite vitriolic) from the same critics, that the teachers are criminals who should be held accountable for misleading people into dangerous practices – that some practitioners even die as a result of having undergone the 21-day course. These criticisms, however, appear to all be traceable to the same three deaths. No more than that in a population said to number in the tens of thousands.

    Any population of tens of thousands of people will contain unbalanced individuals who fail to act responsibly or who simply run into a spell of bad luck. Any population the size of a modest-sized town will have a describable age, sex, health and class distribution with a commensurate rate of births and deaths. We all die. The point must be to ascertain whether this dynamic among breatharians is significantly outside the usual demographic norms.  I see no such evidence being presented. 

     We all know that this practice is an exception to the norm and the point is not what Joe Six-pack thinks about that; but is it real? Can we believe these assertions? Are they based upon reasonably acceptable empirical evidence? I am writing here to testify that I too, have found it to be so.  I base that assertion in having entered into the most intimate of all experiments – under my own control upon my own physiology and over the course of a time period lengthy enough, that under normal circumstances, I should not have survived.

    The teachers of breatharianism appear to be otherwise normal and decorously behaving people, who publish rational sounding accounts of what they do. They do collect fees for their workshops, but not extraordinary amounts.  I see nobody getting rich or misleading anybody about what is taking place and thus see no reason to question their motives. These teachers now have a body of knowledge based in the experience of having collectively initiated something like 50,000 people to breatharianism. That is a number I see repeated – admittedly self-reported and without much documentation, but a potentially valuable database.

     Teachers of breatharianism are quite open about the low long-term success rate and seem to all be reporting a very high rate of recidivism. That too speaks against them being hucksters promoting a boondoggle. Those staying with the discipline appear to be only 10 – 20%. I find that believable, as the urge to eat is powerful. It is also curiously subtle, rather than overt.  In that way only, I would liken the return to eating to the backsliding of those with addictions to tobacco and alcohol. Hunger is itself soon mastered and falls away as a problem. I feel nothing like I once did after a hard day’s labor and wanting to chew off my own arm from the need to eat. Quite the opposite.  I feel seductively problem free – deluded into thinking myself a master, which I am decidedly not. Like the former addict who lulls himself into thinking that the taste of a nice Cabernet or cigarette could surely do him no harm, those seductive tastes of wondrous foods have that same potential to act as the wedge that takes us back to eating as much as ever.

  

   Active breatharians who actually live that life may be quite numerous on the basis of all those who have undergone the courses or there may simply be a significant population of those who’ve taken a workshop, learned the lessons, had an otherworldly experience and mostly gone back to life as usual. There may indeed be relatively few who have actually maintained the discipline for years.  Once the mutual support network of teachers and planned activities is withdrawn and people return to society, the rate of falling away is clearly large – perhaps overwhelming and inevitably so. But then again, that too can have been a valuable experience in one’s life.

     Still, there are self-proclaimed and well confirmed, long-term, breatharians.  Some of them are quite visible – maintaining blogs and publishing on their activities.  Some are even well-credentialed scientists and physicians.  Several of those have submitted to rigorous testing by western medicine.

     Purported inediates from among Catholic saints have been rigorously examined by church authorities, as have saddhu inediates by Indian medical authorities. Where this testing has been done, some at least, were found to be demonstrably subsisting on something other than food and water in ways that the examining scientists confirmed, but with caveats, that they could neither explain nor understand how it is possible. These studies also include those conducted by well credentialed practitioners of contemporary western medicine –in Germany, Switzerland, Israel and the Czech Republic. Several well-tested breatharians have been subjected to severely rigorous protocols – in complete isolation, without access to fresh air or sunshine. That regimen itself, should have caused insurmountable stress to most anybody trying to stay reasonable calm, psychologically composed and physiologically balanced - rather like having a gun pointed at you with the demand of demonstrating an erection for the assembled press corps and cameras  – now!  I don’t understand how these people could possibly have performed under those conditions and yet they were undeniably, expending significant energy without caloric intake obtained in any ordinary way.  Several of these advanced masters also required no water. 

     It seems counterintuitive and implausible, that this divergence from the human norm should be even remotely possible, but that is the way with what we’ve learned to take for granted - when things just plain and simply are what they have always been and always will be – biology. We don’t entertain the possibility of an exception to rules of life that seem self-evident. After all– ya gotta eat, right?

     There is, however, always that Black Swan view of things which one occasionally needs to assume, if discovering new truths and that which is more than mere confirmation of the already known, widely presumed or self-evident is of any interest. It only takes the discovery of the first Australian Black Swan to disprove the earlier supposition that all Swans are white.  We must at some point open our eyes – and when presented with adequate evidence, begin the process of opening our minds to the possibility that we really are seeing the exception that disproves our cherished rule.

My own experiences with the cessation of Eating

      I have been living from Prana for two years. By any ordinary medical model, I should long be dead.  Instead, I am doing fine and indulging in much the same activities as ever. I am hardly a saint living on a mountaintop. I am a self-employed, married artist and householder. I deal with the same travails of this world, as do any of you. Take heart and read on. 

     For me, the point is not to be a mere guinea pig for others defining my life and what is or isn’t up to their experimental standards or desires to test.  I am not here to prove much to others and therefore I do not present myself for examination.  I am also not rigorous enough with my practice to withstand the withering view and cross-examination of truly adversarial skeptics.  But, neither do I believe in hiding my light under a bushel basket. Valuable and potentially paradigm-breaking realizations are to be shared and if my testimony becomes one more modest contribution among many, it will have served to make the unacceptable seem less dangerous or extreme – maybe even palatable and eventually normal. 

     Before embarking on this journey myself, I scoured the web and libraries for any information I could find. Available literature turned out to be highly varied in its quality, but seductively fascinating and also frustratingly scant and elusive. I will do my best, for your benefit; to draw upon all I have read and filter it through my own experience of a two-year abstention from food. It will be a bit longish in my attempt to be comprehensive, but without the redundancy of repeating what others have written about the various available workshops and how teachers of the various 21-day processes and ten-day classes introduce others to the process.   You can read that elsewhere on the web.

How did all this happen and why would I do such a crazy thing?

    I’ve been fasting periodically and meditating for much of my adult life (I am 64 years old) and found myself extending those fasts to several weeks at a time – occasionally to as much as a month. I am rewarded for this activity by feeling in control of my body, shedding some of the excess fat that winter seems to deposit on my frame and enjoying the ensuing time period of heightened sensitivity. It really is not a pathological level of self-denial by which I am unnaturally suppressing my own human nature. Food still smells good and is clearly one of the blessings of human life on this beautiful green earth, but I am finding that it simply isn’t necessary.  I have progressed from an obligate dependency on food and eating to that being a choice from among the many sensual pleasures available to me.

     During the winter of 2015, I'd been reading some of the breatharian blogs and literature and felt due for a late-winter cleansing fast, when I was approached by students from Kalamazoo College to speak at a TEDx Talks event. The students had heard me lecture from time to time about art, bee keeping and environmental ethics and they seemed to find me inspirational or at least entertaining. I felt honored, but I wasn't sure I had anything to say that was a single pithy message worthy of TEDx Talks or of my spending the time to prepare an 18-minute presentation choreographed to that expected level of perfection– one which I’d be prepared to present without notes, gaps or running overtime. It seemed that I needed to break the mold and dare put myself on the line with a more chancy presentation.

      I stopped eating the day I accepted the invitation to speak at the TEDx Talks event; assuming that ten weeks later, I would have had adequate time to prove that I can or cannot withstand the rigors and would have things to say about the experience. It wasn't particularly difficult. Hunger itself is compelling for several days and naturally subsides soon after that initial stage. I sailed through the ten weeks and never went back to my old ways.  

      Like many of the publically visible people who have lasted as breatharians, I took no workshops, 21 day guidance classes or anything similar. I just stopped eating as a logical outgrowth of the way I'd been living and evolving up to that point and continued with my life much as ever. That does include many practices one might deign to call spiritual disciplines. I have been practicing shamanism for some decades and meditating far longer. I find my connection with the divine in nature and in my vocation as an artist, more than I do in a church or through scripture. These are all ways of living that aren't necessarily the norm, but hardly asocial or truly strange.  Most any monk would find me to be a kindred spirit involved more in the mystical aspect of religion, than in running the store. Not that much else has changed in a visible way and people typically do not know this about me. I have never met another breatharian. They seem to all be in Australia, India, Israel, Russia – or some place other than a mid-sized, mid-western town in Middle America.

     My TEDx Talk went well and was received to great applause and then censored.  All the other talks that day were published to You Tube and mine was not. No refusal. No communication. No answers to my inquiries.  I was just cast adrift with the feeling of being somehow inappropriate – an embarrassment.  I felt accused of some transgression, which everyone else understands to be unspeakably wrong and grossly misleading, which only I do not understand to be misinformed and dangerous to impressionable young minds. Therefore the inquiry and decisions were presumably conducted by ‘expert’ witnesses in a secret tribunal about me, while I was unable to face my accusers; unable to answer allegations that are not admitted to even exist. Strange, that it even bothers me, but it does – at least to the extent that a liberal arts college should be the very place where new and challenging ideas can be openly discussed.

Do I really – truly – not eat?

     I eat much as do Ray Maor or Michael Werner and the many others who are clearly legitimate practitioners and not reliant upon food – visible spokesmen and of course, lightning rods for this phenomenon.  That is to say; I do eat, but only occasionally – mostly when it is inconvenient to abstain.  If my mother invites me to Easter dinner, I eat. Typically it will be far less than I would have eaten in the past.  But this is important – when I do eat, I also digest and excrete normally.  My body has not atrophied from disuse.  It functions utterly normally, but is simply not being used for those normal functions most of the time.  Whether or not I eat, some level of excretion continues to take place because the body is always making new cells and eliminating old depleted tissue. Mucus flows continuously through us in a physiological house-cleaning process, eliminating dust and dirt being coughed up from the lungs and swallowed. One’s lymphatic system still functions to clean out invasive parasites or bacteria, exhausted lymphocytes and all else no longer useful. All these byproducts of our normal metabolic and physiological pathways are continuously being drained into the intestinal tract for elimination. I drink, sweat and take in moisture through the atmosphere and so I continue to eliminate urine. The process is the same as ever – just greatly reduced in volume.

    Friends still invite me over for a meal and I will generally take a small portion and make it last – then go back to my peculiar way of life, without a lot of troubling explanations. My wife has much diminished her own food consumption, but still cooks for herself and I will often have a spoonful of whatever she's having – to be a participant at least in some small way of that fulfilling aspect of family life. Watching a film at night, I sometimes split a grapefruit with her, thinking that it might be healthy to occasionally have at least some minimal peristalsis take place so that organs of elimination do not atrophy.  It’s the vestigial scientist in me - or perhaps the Doubting Thomas. 

     I detect no evidence of pathological atrophy.  I engage in strenuous physical activities on many days - like running a chain saw and splitting firewood. I keep bees, do much of my own construction and home repairs, indulge in long walks, kayaking, bicycling, table tennis and cross country skiing. I keep up with others - even set the pace at times. I certainly have no more than five percent of my prior caloric intake to account for my expenditure of energy – usually far less. I am satisfied on most days with about 4 hours of sleep - half of what it used to be.  I lost some weight and went from 175 lb (80Kg), to a low of 135 lb (68 Kg) and then went slowly back up to a plateau that hovers around 145 – 150 lb  (67 – 69 Kg).  I am 6 ft tall (183cm) and weigh the same today as I did at 25.  I fit into clothes from my early adulthood and definitely lost muscle mass. My vanity is mildly tested to look so skinny, but I am not hindered in my activities by that diminution of body mass. I’m healthy and active for my years, while my weight is what it was at the age when most are at their peak health.  

On inhabiting that middle ground – tasting occasionally, but not requiring food

    It’s interesting that I gained nearly half my weight loss back in a year’s time and yet I really do eat negligible amounts that correspond to no more than an occasional taste when compared to my earlier culinary practices. It corresponds to my earlier observations when backpacking and camping, that I seem to require far less food under these regimes of far greater physical demands. The emotional stress is of course absent in the woods and the regime of being in close contact with the earth, fresh air and sunshine would explain much, but energy demands are certainly not less. Similarly, I recall noticing on occasion that a handful of wild strawberries – raw living food - would keep me going for days in the woods and in quantities that would hardly have whetted my appetite back home.

     It seems that people who suffer weight problems always complain that they eat hardly anything at all or that they put the weight back on almost immediately after dieting.  I suspect that these complaints should be taken at face value. Perhaps we all take the vast majority of our nutrition and energy needs from our environment – but that some do so more efficiently than others. Those with more efficient digestive systems may actually need less food than they’ve been led to believe.  Restricting food intake by dieting may for these people be driving them inadvertently to becoming partial breatharians and deriving yet more of their energetic needs from the non-food sources in their immediate environment. That process would then logically make returning to their prior eating habits worse yet  – having even less need of redundant caloric intake which will be deposited at yet increasing rates in adipose tissue (fat).  Our accepted norms within a stressful social structure may be more at issue than all else. When life itself is actually satisfying, naturally balanced, non-threatening, stimulating and ultimately health-supporting, appetites may be more natural and extracting energy from actual food may be less important than it is to an organism undergoing unmitigated fight or flight responses that come of the insidiously debilitating anxiety that long-term social stress induces.

        Here it is instructive to bring up P.A. Straubinger’s documentary film entitled “Light – In the beginning there was Light” (http://www.lightdocumentary.com/). Throughout the film one of his major points is to examine the phenomenon of breatharians who all seem to eat on occasion and ask; ‘is this indeed legitimate or a fudge factor, to cover up inconsequential behavior among people who are essentially lying to themselves?’ His findings are in keeping with my own observations. It takes a certain number of very dedicated and consequential breatharians who really do eat absolutely nothing and live for years in that way to establish the unequivocal legitimacy of what is taking place, and do so under the most severe scrutiny of rigorous scientific protocols. But the truth of how we actually live is more nuanced. We are not all the same with identical aspirations, nor do we live in isolation. We mostly find highly personal – even idiosyncratic accommodation with food and social eating among friends and family that is a compromise.  Food is still a pleasure, as are social interactions that seem to mostly take place around eating and drinking – which very few of us really want to forgo completely.  We simply find it worthwhile to be free of eating as a driving physiological necessity.

           I enjoy the occasional taste of food – mostly beer and wine or tea and coffee.  I do still drink water, but far less.  Drinking seems to have become a substitute for eating and more a physical or social pleasure than a need. I’ve never been much of one for fruit juices, but I do occasionally crave a swallow of the loose, clear liquid component of yogurt or Saur Kraut juice.  I am unsure if my body needs an occasional shot of probiotics for maintaining optimal gut health or if it is the scientist in me that still cannot fully let go and thinks this would be wise prophylaxis – just in case.  I no longer seem to get colds or other common maladies.  When I have been exposed or tired and can feel the beginnings of a fever, it generally dissipates within a few hours. The nascent disease simply goes away in a day or two at most – and not the typical two weeks. It helps at this point to get more consequential about my breatharianism and not allow even a bit of sugar into my system. I tend to think this is about having an essentially alkaline physiology, which is not conducive to the survival of most human pathogens, but that is also conjecture on my part. 

    It is a curious thing, when asked, how to answer what I do in ways that are truthful and pre-empt the typical concerns of family and friends as well as skeptics. Many people hear me say that I don't really eat and close down. They don't want to hear more or they refuse to believe it – a-priori.  I must be faking it, grandstanding or just drawing attention to myself by trying to prove something absurd.  Some worry about me and what others have poured into my head – though that has mostly abated as the novelty wears off and months later, I seem to be otherwise normal. Others fish around for ways to catch me transgressing against what they think the point is (or ought to be) – setting up a straw-man argument. If they look long enough, they will indeed see me ‘transgress’ against what they think I should be doing and probably proclaim me a fraud.  Much the same happened to Jasmuheen, the first well-known teacher of breatharianism living in Australia.  Critics  ‘discovered’ food in her refrigerator.  Are her husband and guests also required to be food free?  The point for me is not to prove anything to those severe skeptics and humorless inquisitors looking to trip me up.  It is all about pushing myself into new experiences and expanding my consciousness – without causing harm to myself or having to continually prove myself to the idly curious, living with needless invasion of my privacy or suffering levels of anxiety aggravated by intrusive critics.

      My turning away from eating has been a lifelong process that includes periodic alterations in my own life-patterns and which has organically led me to a point of no longer being dependent upon food.  I was pretty thorough about my fasting for half a year, but have since then relaxed and become more kind with myself and easy on others about my discipline – especially in social situations.  Still, it is absolutely negligible what I eat and unlike shipwrecked castaways found adrift at sea or inmates of prison camps, I do not seem to be wasting away or need the food I once consumed in normal quantities.

    I have seen no evidence of atrophy beyond modestly reduced muscle mass - which tends to happen with age, even if disguised by layers of fat. My body is not in any obvious way shutting down the periphery, sleeping more or resting to husband its energies for vital functions – as happens to starving people. I have more and not less energy. When I do eat something, it goes through perfectly normal digestive processes. Meat, cheese and sardines still smell bad when defecating or passing gas. A grapefruit does not. People did mention twice early on, that I smelled bad, but it lasted very shortly and there has been no evidence of the ‘acetone’ smell or taste of ketosis, nor have people mentioned it in the last year. I just look thin and generate the normal smells of sweat after physical exertion.

Long-lived people and fasting

      Among the most interesting reports on longevity I have encountered, come from the curious observations of Hilton Hotema in which he traced anecdotal records of extremely long-lived people from obituaries published across the world. These came from all continents and span several centuries. He simply took these obituaries at face value and compiled the mounting evidence. There have apparently been hundreds of people recorded as having lived to ages upwards of 120 years and quite a few who survived for several centuries. Among that extremely limited portion of the general population, it is apparently not that unusual to grow third and fourth sets of teeth. These extremely long-lived people also tend to have a history of periodic fasting – often extensive and rigorous – though most of them simply appear to be anomalies, about which little is otherwise known.

    Other studies of long-lived populations were conducted by Soviet scientists soon after the Second World War.  They were finding significant pockets of extremely long-lived people in rural regions and wondering what might be learned. In the Caucasian Mountains there were quite a few of those, whose age was clearly extreme but also ill documented and difficult to confirm. Many births went unrecorded and young men often doctored what records did exist to avoid conscription in the Napoleonic wars – which by then had been nearly 150 years in the past (1812-1814).  The common denominator among those extremely long lived populations seems to be have been a hard life, lived in mountainous terrain with highly mineralized soils and water in a clean environment  – but they’d also typically endured long periods of privation.  They didn’t necessarily fast per se, but were subjected to suboptimal nutrient regimes that often lasted for years and thus may have inadvertently become something close to breatharians for lack of other alternatives.

     Leonard Orr has made a study of the purported immortals living in the Himalayas.  This is not something I feel competent to comment or question, but he does make claims for people who have been alive and active for centuries and even millennia and does a good review of the information available. He has even met and spoken with some of them. It is a portion of the literature that is rarely referenced and I find it fascinating enough that I’d be remiss in not mentioning it.  Some of these people are relatively well known (in certain limited circles, at least). Most are recluses. Some appear in public on a regular basis or have ashrams where they teach. Thus there are records of their existence that appear to go beyond taking the author at his word. These too, are people with no need of eating. They eat if they want and do not do so otherwise.

     I have read claims by breatharians for improved eyesight, increased acuity of hearing and dark hair regenerating in older age. I cannot claim to have had any unusual regenerative experiences myself in the short time I’ve abstained from eating, but then I have always been reasonably healthy.  The only minor exception I can call to mind is that several of darkly discolored areas on the backs of my hands (commonly called liver spots or age spots) have diminished in size while one has disappeared completely. Otherwise I have never required medications and I have ceased taking vitamins or supplements.  The obvious changes I have noticed in my life are that I require substantially less sleep, I don't get sick when colds and flues are going around – and my weight has stabilized at about the level it was as a young adult.

On breaking the mold and doing the seemingly impossible

    There are many practices among various societies that appear to be far-fetched and hard for a modern person living in the scientific and materialistic paradigms to accept. Indian mystics are buried for months and unearthed without damage. Others puncture themselves with skewers in various trancelike or transcendent states of mind without bleeding, creating scars or leaving a trace. Yet others talk to the dead or remember past lives in extreme detail that can indeed be confirmed. Many societies celebrate holidays with fire-walks. The list goes on and does make one question why they can do what we, ostensibly, cannot. I have myself, tried fire-walking and it is afterwards, still as inexplicable as beforehand – but undeniably real.

     I have indeed participated in several fire-walks with an experienced Cherokee guide – walking barefoot across a glowing-hot fire pit that could have melted beer bottles – slowly, back and forth over that searing bed of red-hot coals and suffering not so much as a blister. Others present on these occasions did so as well.  One person, who did not take it seriously enough, was, however, badly burned.  It’s not a joke and must be done with clear-eyed intent – in the right frame of mind. This was a life-altering experience for me, engendering the feeling of; " If I can do this, what can I not do?" This empowering activity, is the closest of all that I’ve ever done to my cessation of eating – breaking the mold and proving to myself, that doing the seemingly impossible, is actually possible. I‘ve taken control of my body in a worthy discipline for which I feel well rewarded.

Science looks at contemporary breatharianism

   Much like fire-walking, breatharianism is a practice people have often heard of and yet know little about.  Despite their incredulity, I find they are often extremely interested in hearing details. I too, still want to know more – see what is really known – enough to depend upon it. So I continue to listen to interviews and keep up with what is being written.  I am familiar with the usual cast of characters who present talks, publish and come out publicly as breatharians or eaters of light.  I am particularly interested in Henri Montfort, Ray Maor and Michael Werner. There are quite a few more in Russia, Poland, India and elsewhere who seem to write in a more personal, anecdotal fashion. There are those who make no assertions and just state the obvious fairly simply. Others are more speculative and make assertions that I find harder to confirm or reject. Mostly, I don’t doubt the stated experience of anybody, but I come from a science background and crave the more rigorous-sounding evidence.  

    I've had some exchanges with Ray Maor and Peter Straubinger. They’re both rational and have spoken to all sorts of practitioners themselves.  They aren’t mere navel-gazing lotus-eaters nor hair-brained whackos.  These are serious thinkers, well anchored in their time and place. The German breatharian, Dr. Michal Werner is much the same.  I recall mentions of Dr. Werner’s having undergone a second medical trial in a Prague hospital subsequent to the flawed clinical trial in Switzerland.  In the Swiss trial he was subjected to a clinical protocol so rigorous that he was also cut off from fresh air and sunshine, human companionship, love and those aspects of his life from which he probably draws much of the sustenance that allows him to get by without eating. The Prague study purportedly demonstrated him to indeed be 'the real thing', but that study has been suppressed.  I continue to look for mentions of this work and see no further references – even though I read Czech and look at those websites as well. It reminds me of my own experience with Ted-x Talks when those unwilling to confront uncomfortable material, found it more expedient to simply censor that, in which they do not believe. This is not honest, legitimate science nor open-minded intellectual inquiry. It simply won’t do.

    The level to which one is or is not living on light is clearly difficult to ascertain.   I understand the need for being accurate and not leaving much to the imagination, so that people do not end up feeling misled. One likes 100% solutions, which are indeed black and white and quite simply, either true or false. I was once a proper scientist and learned to think that way. It simplifies one's protocols and experimental design as well as the way one looks at the facts and comes to well-reasoned, defensible resolutions of unlikely seeming assertions. Life is, however, a bit more difficult and messy, if one is honest. If a study demonstrates that one who is kept rigorously separated from all food and water has survived that adversarial and unnatural regime far longer than others could, but has admittedly lost some minor but measurable amount of weight – we should, to be honest investigators, look less at winning the argument than parsing the truth of what is actually taking place. Those who have staked out radical or adversarial positions, generally like seeing clear results that entail winners and losers. Others from among us, however, are more interested in understanding what is actually taking place.

     I abandoned zoology for the life of an artist and did so for many positive reasons, but it was also in part a result of disillusionment with the frequently simplistic and straight-jacketed thinking among my colleagues.  As a would-be zoologist, one is furthermore typically looking at a lifetime of being co-opted to work against one’s own interests, which is often the lot of an academically trained scientist.  The forestry graduate comes to mind, employed by logging concerns to direct the destruction and not the protection of the rain forest – or the pharmacologist, who ends up promoting wholesale, promiscuous commerce in drugs which he knows should be very parsimoniously administered under highly competent professional care. They do, after all, have very real and potentially harmful side effects.

     As a graduate student, I accepted money from a nuclear power plant to run the avian aspect of their environmental impact monitoring. I did so for two years, until I looked more closely at the experimental design. Upon closer examination and reversing of the statistical protocols, I realized that the long-running baseline study, which I’d inherited and which had been designed by others long before me – the very experimental design – was profoundly flawed from the outset.  By reversing the statistical model much as one might-reverse engineer a captured enemy weapons technology, I found that the environmental impact study appeared to have been purposefully designed, so as not to generate statistically significant results. I could not keep taking their money and be party to this bad science. I was being used to justify their ongoing slipshod activities with all the radiation leaks and ongoing security breaches. That's a long story, but getting close to the source, one gains great respect for truly good science and loses respect for the many who assume postures of false and immodest skepsis by doubting everything that is inconvenient or problematic and thus simplifying their lives to a point that they also become trivial.

   The generally accepted view of science as a rigorously materialistic dogma with clear-eyed realists holding the line against weak-minded wishful thinking is becoming a bit shop-worn. Those popularly held views about rational materialism are falling left and right as modern physics enters unstable ground that looks more like philosophy than it does engineering. Biology too is proving itself to be as innovative and groundbreaking as any other discipline. Meanwhile industry-funded studies that prove what they were being paid to prove are losing credibility across a vast spectrum of fields as people realize that things are not so self-evident and that smart people can selectively present evidence to construct misleading arguments in a variety of ways for a variety of reasons. 

     Life and consciousness appear more and more to be universal attributes of all matter and non-localized phenomena.  Recall the paradigm-busting work compiled by Peter Tomkins in The Secret Life of Plants first published in 1973. Here he chronicled the research being done with consciousness in plants and even fertile eggs.  Polygraphs taken from plants being damaged or even merely threatened with damage recorded unmistakable reactions – essentially indistinguishable from those of human subjects. Plants in the lab were clearly communicating among themselves and appeared capable of reading the minds of researchers preparing the experimental protocols. 

     Other researchers report that human beings too, appear to have at least limited capacities for taking energy directly from sunshine through their skin.

      In an article entitled; Beyond mitochondria, what would be the energy source of the cell? (Published in CNS Agents in Medicinal Chemistry, 15:32-41, 2015), Herrera et al, report that; “… the chemical energy released through the dissociation of water molecules by melanin represents over 90% of cell energy requirements. Our finding about the unexpected intrinsic property of melanin to transform photon energy into chemical energy through the dissociation of the water molecule, a role performed supposedly only by chlorophyll in plants, seriously questions the sacrosanct role of glucose and thereby mitochondria as the primary source of energy and power for the cells.”  

     That is some strong stuff.

         From Xu et al in J Cell Sci. 2014 Jan 15; 127(Pt 2): 388-99. 2013 Nov 6.

    “… the ability to convert sunlight into biological energy in the form of ATP is thought to be limited to chlorophyll-containing chloroplasts in photosynthetic organisms. Here we show that mammalian mitochondria can also capture light and synthesize ATP when mixed with a light-capturing metabolite of chlorophyll. The same metabolite fed to the worm Caenorhabditis elegans leads to increase in ATP synthesis upon light exposure, along with an increase in life span. We further demonstrate the same potential to convert light into energy exists in mammals, as chlorophyll metabolites accumulate in mice, rats and swine when fed a chlorophyll-rich diet. Results suggest chlorophyll type molecules modulate mitochondrial ATP by catalyzing the reduction of coenzyme Q, a slow step in mitochondrial ATP synthesis. We propose that through consumption of plant chlorophyll pigments, animals, too, are able to derive energy directly from sunlight.” 

     Well now, that puts your granny into quite another light, telling you to eat your greens and clean the spinach off your plate, before there can be any talk of deserts – does it not?

    Gerald Pollack elaborating further on the basis of a newly described fourth state of water, writes; “ Clearly, humans exploit light. I've described a water-mediated mechanism by which light energy gets transformed to other kinds of energy. The process bears some resemblance to photosynthesis, or at least the initial step of photosynthesis, in which light splits water into positive and negative components. Subsequent steps are less clear, and that's why, on the question of human photosynthesis, I suggested a definite "maybe." Herrera and colleagues might be on a productive course.” 

      These are parsimonious and conservative word choices coming from clear-eyed scientists, making no unwarranted claims, to be sure.  But there is certainly also some tantalizingly suggestive ground being broken here.

     These studies look mostly at the capacity for Melanin to absorb energy as well as a molecular ordering potential of a fourth phase of water. This is all quite new and details will clearly soon be evolving, but why should this be surprising?  Did we not evolve under the sun, just as have green plants? And the big complex chlorophyll molecule that is central to photosynthesis? It is almost identical to the Hemoglobin molecule and the Hemocyan that sloshes around inside insects – but for a central atom of magnesium rather than iron.  As mere co-incidence, that really would strain credulity.

      And altruism is real.  People do self-sacrifice for the good of others.  It’s a human attribute with which every biologist grapples and finds himself examining with some doubts – all the convoluted kin-selection theories that just aren’t that convincing.  It's one of the classic troubling aspects of strict natural selection and Darwinian evolutionary models.  Altruism is moreover not just a uniquely human characteristic, but one shared by other mammals and social insects  – even trees. That’s right.  Trees have been shown to share resources, make room for their peers in the sunlight and to pass nutrients along to one another. Peter Wohlleben, a German forester near the ancient Carolingian city of Aachen, reports stumps in an old growth Beech forest still alive centuries after having been cut – because their siblings have been feeding them through their interconnected root systems over the course of all those intervening years. They appear to be conscious and caring. It may seem like science fiction, but the science is good and the evidence just keeps on piling up. Things aren’t as simple as we’ve been led to believe. Or perhaps they are, but at the level of love and caring in an essentially benign universe being universal attributes and not just limited to us.

     Civilization and human evolution too, are not so clearly a simple pathway from primitive to sophisticated that is by now well understood and requires only finding the ‘missing links’. We are clearly far more ancient than once thought if one begins to reflect on all the remains of a global megalithic civilization, on maps, writings and inexplicable technologies that have turned up in odd places from improbable-seeming time periods. 

     There are simply more and more Black Swans out there which one need not be able to account for, but which keep pushing the limits of credulity for a merely mechanistic or materialist world-view. Just how many human remains and artifacts found in strata that are millions of years old it will take to begin seriously questioning and reformulating our generally accepted thoughts on human evolution? There is even a growing interest among scholars in the Vedic view of civilization as a cyclically recurring phenomenon. Things appear to be less and less certain and not as we'd imagined them a hundred years ago, to be without mystery and thus mechanistically explicable, given enough time and information to fill in the remaining gaps.

    For those of you to whom this whole argument is too strange for words, I ask that you recall how often looking at something with new eyes reveals new information. When you lose your fear of outliers and facts that don’t quite fit an old paradigm, you begin to learn important things. The approach of coming to truth through competing adversarial argumentation, with proponents and detractors (or debunkers) taking turns making their cases is ultimately false.  This is merely an extension of a legal model and no way to arrive at any other truth than determining who is powerful, well funded and persuasive – and even determined or under-handed enough to successfully hide evidence and stack an argument in his favor or to bully a witness and confuse a jury.  It is an article of faith, for which I see little evidence, that the truth always prevails in a fight.  Sometimes there is quite another dynamic at play. If having top-flight (and very expensive) law firms in one’s own court played no significant role, because truth always wants out and will ultimately be recognized as opponents present its many aspects to a judge and jury, these law firms wouldn’t be in a position to command such astronomic fees.  Excellent law firms and their equivalent advocates in other fields of endeavor do quite well and it is precisely because their services get results.  There is the saying that, “ He who claims money can never buy happiness, never sat in a courtroom”.

        Attaining to the Truth (with an upper case T) is a more subtle procedure and places a higher onus of responsibility upon us.  I expect more from scientists in search of ‘Truth’, than I do from profit driven industries with explicit legal fiduciary obligations to investors, or from political spin-doctors and self-aggrandizing ego-driven debunkers.  There is a higher, noble and unselfish purpose at hand and central to that investigation is the experience of those who are the outliers – who appear to disrupt the paradigms, which most others have come to accept.

Beyond science and into my own speculations

     We learn a lot from the extremes of human behavior and adverse conditions.  Imagine what the residents of deserts and arctic tundra know about getting through conditions most of us would never stand a chance of surviving. The biggest advances in medicine tend to go hand in hand with the greatest need – when modern industrial warfare inflicts horrendous wounds that require new ways of working with the calamitously traumatized bodies and minds that ever more efficient weaponry causes. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder never got much of a hearing until recently. Traumatized soldiers don’t speak easily of this, because they encounter disinterest and even disbelief.  Quite reasonably, they fear being thought simpering, self-pitying whiners or even cowards. We get the information from those affected, as we are ready to accept that it might be real. 

      It is now becoming apparent that the many horrifying prison camps that are a hallmark of modern-day barbarity are also laboratories in which we have learned much about human psychology and physiology under extremes of duress. Many bits of information have only begun to come out, as the rest of us become ready to accept and digest them.  Among those facts just coming out lately, is that while most people were being worked to death in the gulag and other such camps which were ultimately intended to serve as one-way destinations for ‘undesirables’ – not all die so conveniently or predictably. Certain people continue to thrive on starvation rations. Camp guards and doctors know how long prisoners can typically be expected to survive on any calculated caloric intake. Yet certain individuals live on for years as cohort after cohort of normal inmates arrives and dies out, to be replaced by the next batch and the ones after that.  It’s an admitted outlier, but also real. Why?

       The longest-lived people in India have worked out methodologies that help them get by and they include fresh air and sunshine on their skin, lengthy fasting, sleeping with open fire, running water, sun-gazing and many other fairly simple practices available to most of us. There is much that can be recounted from the literature and everything seems to inter-relate, but where I am heading with all this is that, it seems we live in a universe that is not inimical to our needs. We are actually well adapted by nature to the place we inhabit and typically get most of our needs directly from sources we don’t even acknowledge or know about. It happens much as a potato gets the energy it needs from the sun to fix molecules within the atmosphere into sugars and proteins and all else it requires for survival.  We seem to do OK eating potatoes, digesting away the parts we don’t need and excreting the rest or conversely, for some at least, it appears possible to simply cut the potato out of the equation and not raise them, hoe them, water them, harvest, grade, package and distribute them and then gas up the car to drive to the store and purchase the potatoes, peel and boil them and eventually clear the table and wash the dishes – all as a way of creating expensive feces which must be flushed away in potable water, which must itself  be subsequently processed in a sewage treatment plant to make the water wholesome again and suitable for being returned to the river – clean enough not to kill the fish. Wow. With adequate opening up of consciousness, we may be capable of simply taking the sunshine in as does the potato and not bothering with all the rest.

     Perhaps we are not all equally constructed or conversely, we can all eventually learn to do better.  Perhaps it is stress or something else that forces us to extract an extra dose of energy from the body just to get by and that for this extreme way of living life in the typical modern pressure cooker we are mostly forced to inhabit, we do perhaps require at least some food. Perhaps living without sunshine requires greater caloric intake from other sources. Perhaps, perhaps…It does seem that intent and imagination come into play as well.  Those who live by materialistic doctrines, calories, money and the stuff you can weigh, measure, calibrate, count and for which you can charge interest  – they seem also to die by them. 

  The Austrian breatharian, Omsa Rohrmoser, claims he must go back to eating at least yogurt or drinking almond milk when coming into Vienna. The press of people stresses him out too much.  I have found that when I’ve had an argument with my wife – I too must eat. The shakes don’t easily go away after that level of emotional stress – for here we enter that unstable ground not just of conflict, but also of betrayal. I must get grounded – food, tobacco, alcohol, walking – something that brings me firmly back to planet earth. Apparently the military is among the few large governmental organizations interested in breatharians.  I’m not surprised they’d love to have soldiers who don’t require field kitchens and massive supply chains, but something tells me that killing and being killed is a lot more stressful than having to endure a passing face-off with my wife over something petty.  I’ll just bet you dollars to donuts, that the war department will always need to provide their embattled soldiers with beefsteaks and grog or face dispirited grunts ready to mutiny. 

      I am finding that food and eating are not such hard and fast things with obvious needs or rules attached to their use.  It seems that the human being is subject to development all throughout life that is quite variable from one person to the next. Mother’s milk is the appropriate food for an infant and we do all eventually move on to solid food, yet we are not all weaned at the same time or even with the same sense of finality. Children come at solid food with quite differing levels of interest. I sense that there come analogous levels of developmental change later in life as well. Moving on to yet another level of maturation and absorbing one’s nutrient and energy needs directly from the environment would not give the lie to food and eating anymore than does eating solid food give the lie to a need for mother’s milk earlier in life. Everything about human nutrition, vitamins, minerals, proteins, and essential amino acids, the various food pyramids and metabolic pathways is as true as it ever was, but like the infant moving on in life, your needs and ways of satisfying them are also continually changing.  

     I believe we are learning to negotiate a reality that is far subtler than one might imagine – one for which there isn’t much guidance beyond introductions. Life of course, happens after initiations, which are little more than symbolic pivot points – much like a wedding. The life we must learn to negotiate after taking a workshop and beginning to live on our own, as breatharians, is complex and inevitably includes psychological and social constraints. Some of us are strong enough to charge out of the gates and never look back. Mostly though, we will live under continual scrutiny from people around us inspecting us under magnifiers and delivering well meant, but hard to stomach judgments on how we are living our lives.

      In a stressful situation and on a rough day, you may, (like Omsa Rohrmoser), also be unable to extract all your needs from fresh air and sunshine, even after having thought that you’d made it past all of that cooking, chewing, swallowing and digestion. It may also be easier to live food-free in my modest-sized, human-scale, home-town of Kalamazoo and on my own schedule with a satisfying creative livelihood than going to a demanding nine-to-five job with an overbearing boss and co-workers whom you dislike, while dependent upon mass transit to cross a metropolitan area pursued by advertisers and beggars while keeping an eye peeled for muggers or con men. These are all things that will be coming out of the experiences of those who dare try this way of life and report back what their experiences have been – and we will know much more in a few years as others become capable of processing and even accepting this ‘new’ information. 

   So then back to eating or not eating. I am an artist and a lapsed scientist. Those are disciplines that attract spirited free thinkers daring to try on for size that which appears implausible or questionable to the normal citizen.  We are the guinea pigs who experiment on ourselves and expand the realm of that which might be possible.  There is that famous Maharishi effect, which I like to trot out on such occasions – that it takes only a small number of people, thinking congruently to change society and the way others think and behave.  The outliers of the Gaussian distribution or social bell curve are where it’s at and not those who are in that big bulge and who make the trains run on time.

     Maharishi Mahesh Yogi went from India to the west in the 1960’s to spread consciousness and evolved a mass following of those having learned and practiced his system of Transcendental Meditation. By the mid 1970s his followers were numerous enough to put this technology to a test. They concentrated enough master meditators in several major cities of the world, until they achieved a tipping point. One percent of the population of these cities was meditating during that time. The result was that crime statistics fell measurably and in statistically significant numbers. The relatively small number of people generating calmness or coherence of thought through Transcendental Meditation in those selected cities throughout the duration of the trial, constituted a calculated critical mass that somehow influenced enough others to stop beating, robbing, raping and killing their fellow citizens in adequate numbers, to have a measurable effect. 

    That is an amazing thing and it gives me hope for us all getting along some fine day. Yet think to yourself how often it seems that the tenor of a society is influenced by small numbers of people.  Just a few moral individuals can by their example turn a society around to one where you need not lock your house or conversely; a small group of gangsters and thugs can divert the mass of otherwise decent, normal people to becoming a similarly mistrustful and fearful, thieving, self-serving and tax-evading bunch of gluttonous, slothful, racist, avaricious, opportunistic louts filling their days with television, snacking, violence, snarky backbiting and gossiping.  I suspect most of us have had personal experiences of setting a higher standard at some enlightened moment in our lives and been amazed at how quickly others have followed suit.

    I recall once being lured into a ‘meditation’ group at college.  It was led by an East Indian guru making the rounds in the early 1970’s who had a following in several mid-western college towns. My first experience being led to the master’s lair was powerful.  He emanated an energy I could feel several city blocks away and I was excited to be a part of something so sophisticated, so much grander than dreary hum-drum hometown mid-America. Inside, there were no explanations – just the ‘activity’ of lying down for sessions of trancelike ‘meditation’. Hours passed like seconds and I can’t say I know what went on for those hours, but having no memory of what was taking pace inside me for that long became increasingly disturbing to me. I kept attending these sessions for some months and enjoyed the power that was in the air as a fly on the wall - anonymously. I was accustomed to being a studious, pencil-necked geek whom nobody much noticed and thought nothing of it.  People kept interacting with the guru and many were invited off to his place in the suburbs – especially the pretty girls. I just went to the trance sessions and then back to classes and labs. 

      After some months of regular attendance, the master did notice me and called me in for a personal session. That talk seemed far less about my spiritual development, than it was a thinly veiled examination of whom I know, what I own and what I might be good for. Things weren’t right and one day I just stopped going. No speeches. No grandstanding.  Anonymous me simply stopped appearing from one day to the next. Curiously enough, the others started dropping out very soon as well and stopped signing over their cars and wills and possessions. The pretty girls stopped servicing the sleaze-bag realtors, lawyers and salesmen whose favors the guru required. I saw for the first time in my life that by my example, I did indeed hold some real power of moral suasion. I later heard back from others that they’d always regarded me as a barometer  – one of those without a lot of flash, but just clearly possessing solid common sense capacities for discernment. When the last of that kind stopped attending, they too got the message and bailed.  The false guru was eventually brought to heel by authorities on charges of immigration violations and financial fraud. But what really brought him down was something much like the Maharishi effect. The power of one unimposing little bookish sort, responding to the internal disorder he was feeling and walking away from that which quite simply, didn’t pass the smell test.  Others too took the cue and had the courage to follow their own internal compass and everything shifted.

   But now back to fasting.  Long fasts have always been the norm for hermits, contemplatives, anchorites and saints, but this discipline has also traditionally required their being sequestered from society. As more and more people within ordinary social structures learn to go from fasting to taking their sustenance from light, this practice will increasingly enter into common public knowledge and become seen as just one of many things in that vast field of unrealized potential that does occasionally surface in time and three dimensions as a visible minority position in contemporary society. Rupert Sheldrake speaks of these fields of latent possibilities (which he calls morphogenic fields), becoming manifest as the world becomes conducive to their expression – as we become adequately conscious  – or indeed, worthy. There is evidence for that sort of thing.  That which was once impossible, becomes demonstrably possible and eventually the norm – when its time arrives. The hundred-monkey principal comes to mind and the, ‘oh so many’ other ways that change happens.  It has to start somehow and somewhere and then it is no longer implausible, because it simply, demonstrably, is. 

In closing

       In closing I find myself wanting to remind anybody still with me, of things our grandparents once taught us – of knowledge that was once commonplace: moderation in all things.  Eat and drink only to partial satiation. There was also the time-honored example of sitting down to home-cooked meals and making time for communion, prayer and digestion in a loving, forgiving and low-stress environment. These are hardly the ways of a fast food world that today just grabs something on the fly and wolfs down supersized portions of faux-food having a nearly eternal shelf life from being laced with a chemist’s shelf of abiotic compounds and composed mostly of genetically modified organisms, grown in depleted and demineralized soils with the promiscuous and nearly unregulated use of systemic and cumulative biocides.

      Then I want to remind you of what your own children can teach you - the things you once knew yourself.  I realize that I will here launch into that, which sounds a bit sappy. Sentimentality is, however, based in healthy emotional responses that are just difficult to bear; precisely because they are reflections of another, less jaded reality – one, which we achingly – wish were recoverable.  “Come on, get real”, is the very next phrase on your tongue, ready to let fly.  The pain of sentimentality is very real and it is of ideals betrayed.  Recovering what you can, of these values from back before you were even born, will have to be a second-order innocence, regained as an adult who has experienced fallibility.  It is, however, a completely appropriate desire.

      Think back to your childhood and speaking with kittens, perhaps even to invisible friends.  How unrelenting was the sadness being felt by that empathic childish heart beating within your breast, when confronted with a crushed bug trying to drag its broken remains painfully off to some quite place to die in peace?  It still has a pathos that can get to you – whoa - whoa, whoa…  Let’s put a stop to that, before anybody sees the moisture gathering in the corner of my eye.  As adults, we may have forgotten much, in our hurry to do what is expected of us, but it doesn't cease to be real. 

      The vegetarians I have known became that way when confronted with the pain of a slaughterhouse, hearing the doomed animals, being herded to their fate, pathetically bleating and crying over what they already know is to become of them. Fear not, I will release you from all this in a moment, but there comes a moment when you know. The sadness of it all is real and just too much.  You stop suppressing it and just admit that it’s getting to you.  I won’t be a part of this any longer. How am I so different from the sheep being led to the killing floor?  You’ll find your compromises with the real world, as we all must, but it’s all a more conscious choice from that point forward and must be done with eyes wide open – and of course, with love in your heart. 

     So then imagine with me instead, a world in which we need not kill our fellow creatures to eat - in which we need very little and end up living as do the Lilies of the Field, who think neither of the morrow nor what they shall eat or wear.  In a curious way I am here advocating for living a Christian life, as Christ himself addressed and lived it, though I am myself unwilling to reject other, non-Christian, wisdom teachings and think myself more an adherent of the perennial philosophy. 

     Breatharianism is not difficult, if you do not regard it as such. It cannot be accomplished as an arduous task of self-flagellation, involving just the denial of earthly pleasures. This must be a step forward into something alluring, mysterious and potentially life enhancing.  Dare to be the child enamored of the beauty of it all.  And the guardian angel you once believed in? What’s the harm?  Go ahead and ask for help from guiding spirits or ancestors - perhaps Jesus.  You may get answers from quarters you’d long given up on. I do. You need not be alone, nor advertise your sentimental notions to those cold-eyed skeptics who fear looking foolish.  Your world can expand to a far larger stage and be a more inclusive place and not merely an eternal competition defined by winners and losers.

      Be kind to yourself and those around you.  Cease resisting and instead learn to pass through this earthly incarnation, lightly, gracefully – as witness, as an observer – sampling and enjoying the variety of experience if has to offer without excessively consuming things in all the many ways we do that.  Enjoy being liberated from buying so many groceries, or from cooking as an onerous and unending, Sisyphean task. Savor a modest portion of a friend’s cooking with the same pleasure that you might have once devoured half a chicken and move on. Everybody stops eating at some point – when they are stuffed to immobility and hurting or somewhat earlier as a graceful act of volition. Think of life as gracefully moving in the flow, and that is what your experience of this too shall become – for now, for a while, maybe forever.  

Ladislav R. Hanka      February 3, 201

Click here for a link to P.A. Straubinger’s documentary film entitled “Light – In the beginning there was Light”

(http://www.lightdocumentary.com/)