Living from Light

I stopped eating on March 3rd, 2015.

That’s now been over four years.

For many, that may be hard to swallow, but what I am doing is also less radical than you might think. I still have nutritional and energetic needs, but I meet those needs otherwise than by eating. Sunshine and fresh air help, as do meditation and contact with both earth and water, but it is ultimately the very life force itself, suffusing everything – beyond time and place – which sustains me.   

And that, my friends, is the point of this exercise – turning away from food long enough to allow the body to make its transition to the primal source of life and thus moving past my limitations into a more open and generous way of living.

In these two intervening years, during which I’ve learned to live from Light (or Prana) rather than food, I lost some weight, but that has stabilized. I weigh the same now as I did at 25 years of age (41 years ago) and that has not fluctuated up or down by more than five pounds (2,5 Kg.) in the last few years. I am otherwise healthy. I experience no hunger. I sleep half as much. And I engage in much the same activities as I did beforehand.

Introductory Remarks

This peculiar matter of my not eating, leads inevitably to many questions and discussions that require my continually repeating myself. Addressing those well-meaning questions in this long and comprehensive format, is my gift to the many people who’d like to understand why I do this and what it means – if it is safe or even possible. I have by now, had something over four years of experience experimenting on my own flesh in this matter and have things to say about that – and – I am by nature a scholar, who looks at things thoroughly.  I am also an experimenter who needs to know rather than just take another at their word and believe. That happens up close and by actual experience on one’s own flesh and sensory apparatus. I am aware of my penchant for exhaustive treatment of materials that interest me and so you’ll also find a wealth of visual breaks (often my own artwork) interspersed throughout to keep it graphically interesting and conceptually broken up into discrete sections and digestible bites. I don’t wish to inundate you with a daunting ‘text desert’ and little more than extensive theoretical discourses. You have before you a manuscript whose volume is the equivalent of a small book (65 pages) and you’ll be excused if you skip ahead to what interests you and return to the rest later.  Mostly I hope you will find the time you spent with my thoughts on breatharianism (or living from Prana) to be discerning & informative as actual testimony from one who has entered that territory and who knows where-of he speaks and therefore ultimately rewarding.

Table of Contents

Foreword

My Purpose in Stepping forward as Breatharian and My Intended Readership

A brief historical overview of the Origins of Breatharianism –Saints, Saddhus & esoterics

My own experiences with the cessation of Eating

How did all this happen? Why on earth would I do such a thing?

Do I really – truly – not eat?

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

Results of the Experiment  – the Nitty Gritty

Discussion – my experience placed in the context of Contemporary Breatharianism

Long-lived people and fasting –from immortals in the high Himalyas to ancient draft dodgers from the Napoleonic invasion of Russia

On breaking the mold and doing the seemingly impossible – (firewalking)

Science looks at contemporary breatharianism – (as well as epigenetics, what the human soul weighs, human photosynthesis, starvation, weight problems, evolution and much more )

Beyond science and into my own speculations –  Goya, the disasters of war, 

False Gurus and the Maharishi effect

In closing – what your grandparents and children can teach you – and the Quantum Field

Benediction – message in a bottle

What in the world would motivate me to do such a strange thing as to stop eating? It’s a fair question. My wife asks me that very thing from time to time. It’s also not easy to formulate a fully satisfying answer for what is still an evolving way of life. I suppose the answer is severalfold, in much the same way that we are all complex beings who appear to be different people to the many friends and family members – for whom we fulfill the variety of roles that one is called to serve in life. You can approach most anything from many perspectives, much as does the Indian parable of the seven blind men describing an elephant. One who has been handling its trunk describes an elephant as very serpent-like, while the blindman handling his leg describes an elephant as treelike and so it goes. With enough viewpoints, you’ll pass through the confusion and arrive at a picture that is complete enough to be at least somewhat satisfying.

The simple way to begin is that I am approaching a time in life when one no longer relies upon parents to be the carriers of history and culture, while the grim reaper is increasingly harvesting souls from among one’s own peers. Years of meditation and some modest successes in the professional and material realms of existence have led to my also wanting more from life – to glean a richer harvest of meaning from my remaining days – before I too, join the deceased. The desire to live more spiritually and lightly on this earth has assumed a place of prominence in my thinking as has the desire to give less of my time over to the banal aspects of life. Of course I also hope to leave this world a little better for my having passed this way. It has all been leading me to question much of what I do.

I wanted to shake things up and discover the limits – even push them back a bit. Years of doing the right thing and conscientiously building my home, family, career and place in society have resulted in my also living in a certain social lock-step which can lead one to losing hope and the sense of each day being a gift of unending possibilities or conversely, that the sense of plodding, deadening sameness can lead instead to losing one’s fears. What, after all, have you left to lose? Your indentured servitude to stuff – to money? So often one just goes with the program and it’s not an awful life. It’s actually been quite good and I have much for which to be grateful. But then one fine day, you do something unspeakably spontaneous, which breaks the pattern and can find no reasons to regret having done that. We are so much more than we appear to be and what we limit ourselves to being. Breaking with the social norm of eating has been one of the ways in which I’ve demonstrated this to myself.

There are people to whom you drop casual mentions of Shamanism, Re-incarnation, Megalithic Cultures or Crop Circles and their eyes quickly glaze over. ‘Oh God, spare me that mumbo-jumbo. What’s next - little green men from Mars?’ And then there are those of us in whom such talk awakens hope, that there is something left to believe in and get excited about – that it’s not all just death and taxes. And that is me and my relationship to food and fasting. I‘d been aware of breatharians existing for perhaps three decades and the mere mention of such things has long elicited an immediate feeling of anticipatory excitement. Just the potential of that level of liberation from the ordinary way of life raised my heart rate a notch. I sensed that I too, would do that some day - though the practitioners I’d ever heard of, were nowhere near at hand or easily accessible.

Many experiences that are meaningful have that kind of purposeful measure, seemingly built right in. You meet your future partner in life and there is something so juicy about that fortuitous introduction that stays with you until it can indeed come to fruition. One takes in the information, rather than suppressing it and it stays with you as a living thing, until eventually, there comes a moment to take action. Maybe it’ll be a Saturn Transit or perhaps a mid-life crisis – perhaps a disappointment too many – but there comes a day to just do something (anything at all) and you throw the switch, sending your life careening off in some new direction. If you’ll forgive me, an apt old American folk idiom tells us that;  ‘it’s time to shit, or get off the pot’.

The world so often seems to be a conspiracy of mediocrity – everybody holding mirrors up to one another and re-enforcing the many self-limiting assumptions that life can never be much more than a race to decrepitude and death. No surprises. No mystery. No empty places left on the maps. No territory left to be explored. It’s all mapped out, predetermined and dead as a tax ledger. From the day you’re born, you’re led to expect life to be an eternal treading of water, earning of degrees, competing for jobs and mates, honors and approbation – making money to meet our obligations and pay for the health insurance we will require when the stress of this way of life brings the inevitable heart attacks, depression or cancer. We all keep each other on track, reminding one another of what disease aught to be next, of who is looking shabby or frayed at the edges and making sure nobody escapes the sentence.  Eventually we all become exhausted and succumb to the hopeless flood of useless stuff that rules our lives. And yet – if you pull the curtain aside for but a moment, and look for some sign of leadership, there doesn’t appear to be anybody at the controls. Everything, appears to be running on auto-pilot. I see little reason to follow that parade of lemmings off the cliff and into the sea. Do you?

Instead, I find far greater joy in my own forays off into the unknown – when I break through the walls of my own limitations and realize that what I had once assumed is not necessarily all there is. There is nothing quite like having one’s own adventures. Though they may appear to be little more than a Quixotic tipping at windmills to anybody else, they are your own experiences and far more meaningful than those that stem from mere common knowledge and the meeting of social obligations.

It is in this very spirit of curiosity and exploration that I have taken the deliberate step of moving past occasional fasting and into something far deeper as an organic evolution within my own spiritual journey – one that has been decades in the making.

I choose furthermore to write about it as a gesture of inclusion to those of you who might also wish to enter this territory – and thus to contribute what I know to a field in which precious little is available from those who have already gone this way before us and who actually know where-of they speak. I suppose there’s the danger of speaking prematurely – on the principle that those who speak, do not know and those who know, do not speak. But if we always hold our tongues, we will also be ceding the floor to those who are merely speculating or criticizing what they hardly understand – allowing the current level of ignorance to prevail unchecked.

As I slowly introduce you to what this is all about, please bear in mind that the easiest thing to which to attach one’s self here, is the simply insane-appearing act of renouncing eating – while neglecting to understand that far more is at stake. It is becoming increasingly clear that sugars metabolized by mitochondria through the ATP cycle are not the whole story of where we meet our energy needs, nor do only green plants derive energy from the sun. Chlorophyl is not the only known means for fixing the potential energy arriving with sunlight and transmitting it to the body’s cells as metabolically available energy. There are blessedly vast gaps in our current knowledge – and not just about airy-fairy matters of the spirit and soul or the moving targets, such as art and politics, but even the more hardened and stable-appearing targets of thermodynamics, vertebrate physiology and biochemistry. The gaps in knowledge are monstrously large.

Even knowledge as fundamental as understanding the human energy budget and what we need to eat to be fully vital & functional is still barely in its infancy. New discoveries will inevitably keep coming. Then again, consulting with past masters from the Vedic traditions and gracefully accepting their language, that it’s all from God, Prana or the eternal life source may be no less satisfying an answer to matters of food, energy and eating than is more mumbo jumbo in the form of convoluted and nearly incomprehensible equations. These equations rarely balance without major stretches of imagination and establishing of arbitrary parameters that exclude the more interesting questions. These equations will inevitably have to be revisited, tweaked and redefined by experts for the next few decades and at some point, probably once again dumped as unworkable. The important thing to carry with you throughout this whole discourse and to continually keep in the back of your mind, as I continue to introduce new observations is the following:

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.

I too have experienced that transition (though I am by no means an old master) and I can assure you that it is much like the caterpillar entering a cocoon and eventually coming out as quite another creature, no longer needing to eat. You know a lot more looking back upon the process (as a butterfly), than you do, looking forward (as a caterpillar) to an unsure future and wondering instead, where this could all be going. One should remember that being reborn as a butterfly requires having first died as a caterpillar. A bit daunting - perhaps even dicey, but ever-so-enticing – and perhaps inevitable.

Some call this practice breatharianism, which today feels a bit dated, but is at least relatively established as a concept. It has the disadvantage of being for many, devilishly hard to pronounce and is also generally misunderstood. Most practitioners themselves think they actually live less from breath, sunshine or anything so concrete and mechanistic (or easily described and quickly understood), and prefer to call what they do, living from Light or Prana (Hindu, for the life force.) Some even use the neutral and clinical-sounding inedia (Greek for not eating). I tend to keep it simple when asked and just say; “I don’t really eat”. That covers not eating, but also the odd exception – and that what I do, is really also about something else. Not eating is not, in and of itself, a big convoluted belief system with a doctrine. This is just an aspect of that much larger life’s journey. It isn’t an ‘ism” that takes place around not eating – an esoteric cult with secret handshakes, club-houses, hierarchies of well-established masters, teachers and novices, nor something tidily defined for us by an on-line committee of self-appointed web-masters at Wikipedia. Nothing at all like that. I just – don’t really eat.

There is an extent literature and published research, conducted by reputable medical scientists on those who have been living from Prana and consequently not requiring actual solid food. These are people following their inner guidance on a spiritual path, who survive in excellent health, without eating for years — even decades — each for their own reasons. This is by now, a reasonably well-documented contemporary practice with an extensive historical record, though admittedly well beyond the reach of popular mass culture and any but the most broad-minded and daring within the community of contemporary science. 

All else is a long discussion that shall unfold in due course over the following pages. I shall tell you about it all in great detail, with plenty of side trips and anecdote, and provide you with bibliographic references to pertinent research how this has all come to pass and why. I hope you’ll stay with me and that you’ll find it worthwhile.

My Purpose in Stepping forward as Breatharian and my Intended Readership

The primary purpose in making myself known in this way is to share information with those of you interested in deepening your own experiences of fasting and perhaps taking that next step. I am not interested in a mass audience of debunkers and talk show enthusiasts, nor in teaching courses or taking anybody’s money or even making converts and presuming to become anybody’s guru – but in testifying about my own experience of having gone further yet, than mere fasting. I am publishing this tract simply as testimony and freely sharing my own experience and thoughts on this way of living – one which I believe to be part of a significant evolutionary change in consciousness taking place today.