The Magellan's Log Diet
Few people realize that catch-phrase came from one of the founding fathers (emphasis on "fathers"--we're talking serious patriarachy here) of Modern Materialism, that fine movement of patriarchal fecal matter which has given us everything from the trivial (Yugo's, network TV, Rush Limbaugh, and the Bic lighter) to the terrible (you choose your own examples from the late, unlamented 20th century's various bloodbaths). Ludwig Feuerbach was a mid-19th century German philosopher who not only coined the phrase (in German, it reads: "Man ist, was er isst"--which at least has the benefit of a modest little pun), but who practiced what he preached. As a kind of primitivist precursor of the vegans, he felt that if he could just get everyone in the world onto a diet of English peas, the millennium would be at hand ("Peas for peace"?). The degree of Feuerbach's victory (hollow though it may have been) can be judged by a click-stroll through the self-help and health pages of amazon.com. Diet books by the hundred, yea, verily, by the thousand. The idea seems to be that if we can just get thin enough and if we can get our misbehaving cholesterol (along with other rowdy blood contaminants) tamed, things'll be OK. Linked pages just a click away from the diet shelves confirm the materialist approach to well-being. There lie page after page of exercise books, volumes guaranteeing if not enlightenment then at least contented good health on the magic carpet of endorphin production through intensive body-work. All hail the power of endless reps and countless laps. Which is all well and good. The body, which for reasons still not entirely clear, we are stuck with for lo these three score and ten (soon to be four, five, six score and many), obviously needs tending to. And it does respond well to whatever TLC we throw its way, even when the Tender Loving Care edges over into Tough Loving Care on the old Stairmaster. But. (You were waiting for the "but", yes?). Older and wiser heads than those of Herr Feuerbach and his materialist progeny (do you really want to put your life and future well-being in the hands of somebody who became rich and famous by toning and shaping the bodies of Beverly Hills?) long ago came up with a different catch-phrase: You are what you think. The lineage for this view goes back to the oldest books (the Tao Te Ching, the I Ching, the Bagavad Gita, the Dhammapada). And, to be fair, this anti-materialist view has produced its own flood of New Age garbage, ranging from music so vacuous that it makes you appreciate Muzak to books ("I Found the Faces of Angels in My Bowel Movements") so ill-thought-out that they make Pat Robertson seem tolerant by comparison. The fact is, if you're going to diet, you're wasting your time if you don't double-diet. Sure. Do the body diet. But without a simultaneous mind diet, you are getting, every precisely, nowhere. How Ignorant Are We? Consider us. When it comes to mind nutrition, all we know is this: If you think in this way (our present, reductive, linear, rationalist mode), you produce this kind of culture. We've now honed, refined, and focused the rational mode so well that we've forgotten that we may in fact be starving in the midst of our materialist affluence. So confident are we in our mechanical success that we've consigned ancient dieting tips and nutritional guidelines to sect books, rote primers for political primitivists and the desperately aged. In both cases, these ancient, metaphysical Pritikens are transformed in to alleged keys for the Gates of Paradise. Which is rather like mistaking the instructional manual of a car for the car itself. So if we ask "Are you hungry?", the only honest answer is, "I don't know." We are so accustomed to our voluminous, daily intake of socially approved and rewarded words that we deeply and easily believe we're not hungry, much less starving. Occasionally, in a time of stress, loss, grief, we may briefly perceive a certain hunger, a lack. But unless it becomes chronic (we become mentally "ill"), we generally do nothing to assuage this hunger-that- doesn't exist. Let's take a look at your present mind intake and find out exactly what you're putting in your head these days. Back to Magellan's Log 12 |
