There are words that nourish.
There are meals that remember.
This is one such offering.
cinmayatve'vabhāsānāmantareva sthitih sadā.
All the appearances (ābhāsas) are essentially of the nature of consciousness,
so they always exist internally.
—Abhinavagupta
indriyāṇāṁ manaśh chāsmi bhūtānām asmi chetanā
Amongst the senses, I am the mind; amongst the living beings, I am consciousness.
—Sri Krishna
Food is consciousness, and consciousness is food.
Every moment is an opening to recognize the vibrant nature of phenomena that arise within. Through the intricacy of our senses, the world is not only known but is in perpetual expanse. A multitude of feelings, memories, attachments, and aversions together make up our inner experience, which can never be shared outside of its knower.
The uniqueness of experience, when met in freedom from the accumulative, from the defined, worded, and known, is the entrance not into another experience, but into a dimensional shift where words carry us no further.
Into the dissolution of knower and known, experiencer and experienced, two into none.
The way of Tantra is not to refrain from the senses, but to awaken to their underlying nature. Pratyāhāra (withdrawal of the senses) is given new light through the tantric approach, which does not condemn sensory experience, but teaches us to enliven awareness through the power of recognition.
The array of phenomena—balancing between good and bad, this or that—influences our mind-body-spirit and its well-being. The energy field manifesting in an individual is deeply shaped by our relationship with food, and by our ability to digest, purify, and receive.
In consciousness, all is food. And for the individual, every action brings a reaction. TV is food. Radio is food. Gossip is food. Philosophy is food. Anger is food. Joy is food.
“Your emotions, in their natural state, are nothing but pure creative energy. You can learn to use and direct this energy in a skillful way.”
—Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche
One of the most immediate ways to affect our well-being is through how we eat, prepare, and share the food that enters our body.
If we harbor negative emotions while preparing or eating food, we may carry that tension deeper into our field of being, unconsciously adding to ourselves without presence-awareness. Feelings greatly affect digestion and can easily deepen tension in both the subtle and physical body.
Dis-ease is always related to contraction or tension. Ease is the free flow of energy. For that health-giving flow to move within us, there must be an underlying emptiness, making us available to meet the moment fully.
Presence-awareness is not the addition of a new persona. It brings no new concept. Rather, it is the wholesome emergence of your inherent power, like the ocean that gathers and unifies streams into itself, where water rests not as streams, but simply as water.
Only when we are fully available for the moment can we be one with it.
Mindful nourishment does not begin at the mouth or end in the gut. It is an expression of balance, not only brought forth through healthy eating or doshic harmony, but flowing naturally from conscious presence. An agitated mind obscures the purification of sense-perception.
“Be Here Now”
—Ram Dass
“A man neither feels nor perceives exactly as a mosquito or a plant does.
A being other than human—a god, a demon, or any other form of life—does not perceive as we do.
The extent, gradation, strength, and nature of sensations and perceptions differ according to the constitution of the organ of contact for different beings.
It follows, therefore, that what is real—what exists, what produces effects for one—may not affect the other, and has no reality or existence for him.
Each sphere, each world, each order of beings possesses a Reality of its own, because it produces effects in that particular sphere, and for that order of beings.”
—Secret Oral Teachings of Tibetan Sects