It won’t be a requirement for people to live on prana (life force energy), rather than food,  here at Wellspring Community.  However, I do want people to be willing to explore seriously this way of life because it might be the only way we will survive. And thrive!

This link leads to a free book I just read. I highly recommend reading this book. So many of his words articulate what I have been feeling. Here are some excerpts which particularly moved me:

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“There is mounting evidence that we all appear to live primarily from Light or Prana and derive most of our energy from that direct source – whether we fast or not. Eating is more a supplemental matter of taking extra energy from the system for ourselves and having more to work with – which for the vast majority, still appears to be a necessity. By being very consequential in their diet, though, some individuals have proven that they don’t actually require food at all – that being able to access Prana, (the very life force itself) is all they ever need. For them, eating ceases to be a driving physiological necessity in life and that tends to be a great relief. Their discipline is rewarded by improved health, better energy and heightened sensitivity. If even one person can do this, it changes the paradigm.  This is a phenomenon which is indeed  very real.”

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Most of us know deep within our gut that there is something far more primal and satisfying at the core of life than is our mere workaday world as Homo economicus – something spiritual, which 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, if you like. Accessing that something else (which is freely available to each of us, if we only choose to accept it) 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. It can become a piece of one’s spiritual journey upon this blessed green earth and under the benevolent sun – all leading us to living more lightly upon the earth, consuming less and being less in competition with one another and all other life. Just think how much of the earth is by now, subsumed into the making of our food – what used to be woods and meadowlands, rain-forest or estuary  – all supporting pollinators, herbs, fish and all else that once included a far larger and richly inter-twined web of divinely ordained life.

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We inediates typically do not eat, but not much else unites us and of course, there are exceptions to all rules. The point here is nothing like a doctrine or an established practice governed by rules., trade groups,  boards and by-laws. It‘s a private matter and highly individual. Speaking for myself; I have entered this new and unstable ground in the desire to kick my way of living up a notch to one which does not require my killing living beings to eat, but by obtaining my energy and nutrient needs more directly from my immediate environment – from the very source of all life. Thus my intent is to live more subtly, more aware and to create less collateral damage by the way I choose to live. What I do is part of a larger spiritual practice in which I am just now finding my way and not following anybody else’s prescription. This is indeed terra incognita and unstable ground at that. One cannot eat one’s way to heaven by going organic, vegan or anything else. Neither can one fast one’s way to enlightenment.  This practice is but one of many ways to open the gates a crack, but in and of itself, not the ultimate goal.

    That said, I do not believe in hiding one’s 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.

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I still see value in the culinary arts as I do in anything cultural, taken to a level of subtlety and aesthetic appreciation. Table culture – the love of communion and breaking of bread, sharing of a meal taken among kindred spirits. What could be better? These are all among the things that lift us from the status of brutes to a culture. These things do not come into question by assuming a position of finding ones needs being met by Prana. We may, however, wish to re-examine just how desirable it really is to be supporting agricultural monocultures that are kept limping along by vast amounts of subsidized biocides for the purposes of making fast foods, which only do damage to the consumer and demean the employees, for little more benefit than increasing the profits of a needless and ultimately parasitic faux-food industry.

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I suffer fools and foolishness less gladly now than when I was still eating – though I try not to make that painfully evident. That seems to be a part of the territory of age and the onset of wisdom – realizing that there is an endpoint to this life and a limit to the amount of time one wishes to devote to the trivial. One should be evolving and arriving at some form of wisdom, before the grim reaper comes calling and there is only time left for regrets. So, with that punctuation point of having no patience for fools , let us move on from me and this discussion of my own experiences and place that into context within the contemporary breatharian scene.

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At this point there have even been healthy births among breatharians.  At least one such mother in Ecuador 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. 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. A link to an interview with the parents follows:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5p5ewQ9Z-7g

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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.

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For those interested in looking up some teachers, here are three of the better known teachers running workshops.  Start at these websites and you’ll find a great deal of worthwhile information which will quickly lead you to other sources:

http://www.jasmuheen.com/

http://raymaor.com/

http://nourriture.pranique.free.fr/english_index.html

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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 – whether one stays with the discipline over the long term or chooses to move on to other life experiences.

     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.

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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 had often doctored what records did exist, to avoid conscription in the Napoleonic wars. Those wars were by then, 130 years in the past (1812-1814), making any potential conscripts, by that point, at least 145 years old. Much like the Hunza people of nearby Central Asia with great numbers of centenarians, they found that the common denominator among those extremely long lived people in the Caucasus seems to be have been a hard life, lived in mountainous terrain with highly mineralized soils and water in a clean environment – but that 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.

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I’ve participated in two fire-walks with an experienced Cherokee guide. How I gathered the courage to take that first barefoot step into searing hot coals that could have melted beer bottles, I will never really know. At a certain point though, I faced the fire. Instead of turning away and continuing to circle, drum and dance, something shifted deep within and I felt it in the pit of my stomach. It wasn’t really mental. I was calm at a gut level and no longer worried about looking foolish by backing down nor of getting burned. From that newfound sense of profound calm deep within, I knew that I could do this. I stepped off into the fire and felt no more heat until I stepped out again. I walked slowly, purposefully, back and forth. The bright red, burning coals, crunching underfoot and coming up around my ankles and between my toes felt much as it does to be walking on a fall day through dried leaves. I suffered not so much as a blister. Once I was out of the coals though, several tiny sparks caught between my toes, too small to leave marks – smarted like little diabolic reminders of what I’d just done. But the intense inferno that should have made cinders of my feet –  left not a mark. I suppose my expectations were at play. I was impervious to the intense heat while in the fire pit, but once I stepped out of that designated, sacred space, the usual rules of time and space once again applied. One person did not take the ceremony or preparatory exercises seriously and was badly burned. It’s real and must be taken seriously. I did so and this experience  of fire-walking comes the closest of all else I’ve ever done, to the cessation of eating.  In both cases, I experienced doing the seemingly impossible.

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Fortunately there have been two very legitimate tests conducted publicly by modern medical science that have seen the light of day and which incontrovertibly prove that the two test subjects are legitimate breatharians – that this is indeed a real physical phenomenon and scientifically verifiable. The highly respected Indian yogi Prahad Jani had already been an inediate for seventy years and beyond reproach, when he was asked to submit to medical testing. The renowned yogi readily agreed and was subjected to thorough scrutiny on two occasions at the  modern Indian Sterling (military) Hospital under the strict watch of dozens of medical experts and permanent closed circuit TV. He had no problems doing this and sailed through unequivocally. He was even demonstrated to be resorbing his own urine during the process. Some people were bothered by the hospital being a third-world Indian facility, but nobody has pointed out any deficiencies of protocol or technical shortcomings. The experiment was clearly an unqualified success.

The Israeli breatharian, Ray Maor has also seen fit to have himself placed under observation by a physician who was the head Cardiologist at the central Tel Aviv Hospital. The senior MD was also a decent man and cared deeply about Ray – enough so that he treated this  ‘test subject’ fairly throughout this procedure and allowed his integrity to remain intact, whatever the outcome. They conducted the complete proceedings under closed circuit television cameras, recording every second of the experiment at a location paid for by a popular television program with their own public reputation on the line. It didn’t hurt that there was also the public spectacle of a one hundred-thousand dollar bet riding on the outcome. An Israeli real estate tycoon didn’t believe it possible to fast completely without food and water for eight days and not lose weight, so he urged Ray to, ‘put up or shut up’ – and simply show that he can do it and earn his money or publicly prove himself a fraud. The businessman was also practical enough in his outlook, that he thought that if this is possible, the public should know about it. Now they do and we have incontrovertible publicly available evidence that a healthy young man in the prime of life stopped eating and drinking for eight days under extreme scrutiny and didn’t lose any weight, have any questionable blood chemistry or look any worse for the experience. Ray Maor has published a book about this experience entitled: A Year Without Food: Proven Energetic Nourishment . A film about the process is also posted to You Tube at several locations on the web, including Ray Maor’s own website at http://raymaor.com/.

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Working for the NASA space program in the 1960s, Dr. Paul Webb developed a full suit calorimeter, allowing fellow-scientists to evaluate the energy expenditures and requirements of their astronauts with accurate measurements much more thoroughly than had ever been possible before. That led eventually to his questioning the universal validity of Calorie Theory as a basis of human metabolism.

    Dr. Webb’s revolutionary findings were eventually published in 1980 in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, and point to a crucial discrepancy between the theoretical amount of energy produced by metabolism (the results of indirect calorimetry measuring the consumption of oxygen and production of carbon dioxide) and the actual amount of energy produced by the body (measured by direct calorimetry). This discrepancy was up to 23 percent, (the so called “unmeasured energy”), meaning that in some cases nearly a quarter of the energy produced in the test persons could not be accounted for – no explanation. 23%t is hardly a negligible error of measurement or a mere outlier.

     It doesn’t end there though – “The greater the food deficit, the larger was the unmeasured energy”.

That sounds suspiciously like saying that we are capable of pulling from other sources – as we need it.

So then – 23% most of the time and a lot more in a pinch, maybe everything. My own free associations take me to tales of mothers moving impossibly heavy objects to save children or soldiers under fire achieving extraordinary feats of physical strength – under ambush and escaping sure death – feats which they can’t later replicate for their buddies – and not even come close. We seem to be so much more than meets the eye. When the chips are down and the need is there, we somehow get from here to there, without necessarily knowing how that might have been done.

You’ll find some more discussion of these very matters in Peter Straubinger’s website & blog:

http://www.lightdocumentary.com/scientific-proof.html

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There are always those vexing shades of grey and more appropriate ways of phrasing the question –  novel ways of looking at the unsolved conundrum. 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 industry representatives with explicit, legally defined, 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.  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.

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There are always those vexing shades of grey and more appropriate ways of phrasing the question –  novel ways of looking at the unsolved conundrum. 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 industry representatives with explicit, legally defined, 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.  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.

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     I believe we are learning to negotiate a reality that is far subtler than one might imagine – one for which there isn’t yet much guidance beyond introductions or initiations. We are much like caterpillars looking at the life of a butterfly with trepidation and precious little understanding. Henri Monfort aptly compares the process of becoming a breatharian to a butterfly’s metamorphosis. Once you formally establish in your mind that by a certain date you will begin the process and that by another date you firmly intend to emerge and be taking your needs from Prana and not food, you will indeed come out of the cocoon a completely new creature with a physiology very unlike the earlier form of yourself.

Think back to what happens in the chrysalis as the internal organs and all else inside the pupating larva essentially dissolve and assume a liquid-like and nearly formless, gelatinous state for several days. The ensuing configurations of body parts are radically different and even include genetic changes. You will not immediately understand what is taking place in your own body, so do not expect the people around you to do any better. What is here taking place is no less than an evolutionary leap and an alteration of basic paradigms. Of course others will be concerned and even hostile about having their basic beliefs challenged.

    Go easy on yourself and those around you. Do not think the process to be one of suffering through denying yourself the all-important foods you have, until now, enjoyed and relied upon. You’ll taste them again if that still seems important, but it really doesn’t matter in the big picture how many torts you eat over the years, cigarettes you smoke and shots of Cognac you drank in life. The experience itself is more important than is its reptition. Rather, when you begin, do so with the expectation that you are stepping forward into the embrace of a benevolent universe, where you’ll be in the midst of plenty, as Prana becomes your preferred source of divine nourishment – always there and eternally available. This is an amazing piece of freedom that is being offered – available for the taking. Like the butterfly emerging from its pupa, you’ll need to spread those new wings gently to dry and harden in the sun of Prana. You will from thence forward, be navigating and exploring a very new and exciting world – a terra incognita.  And if you fall short of your own expectations, backslide here and again,  relax about that and any other imagined shorcomings — for once you know how it’s done, it’s there encoded within your soul, much like riding a bicycle.

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Many of us yearn for a more organic life – one which finds a gentler accommodation with the other creatures of this world and the dream-world beyond.

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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.

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