Maybe Not the Way to Long Life…
I can not say for sure whether the macrobiotic way of life is the optimum way to health and happiness for all people under all conditions. I can not even say for sure that the macrobiotic way of life guarantees me the longest, happiest life I could possibly have—given the body and nature I was born with it is conceivable that I might live longer on something other than well-chewed whole grains and vegetables.
But I do know that the macrobiotic way of life—most importantly the macrobiotic diet—is of indispensable usefulness to me in the pursuit of what is most important, and interesting to me.
And what is that? (you might ask…)
At 63 years, it is finally occurring to me that not everyone is just like me—that there is a rich variety of equally valid responses to the enigma of life.
I am part of what is, in America, termed the “boom baby” generation—that bunch of babies who were conceived by the wave of exultant soldiers returning to their girlfriends and wives full of the spirit of having won the war-to-end-all-wars.
It has been our blessing/curse to be especially interested in the more celebratory, and more yin side of life: art, music, spirituality, etc.
I am typical of this generation and at my best I have been part of putting a whole new foundation under the eternal quest of religions, rejuvenating music and the arts, and generally making the word god un-mysterious, practical, and real. At my worst I and my peers have a tendency to extreme self-indulgence to the point of ushering in ecological collapse on a global scale, epidemics of new diseases of wide destructive power, and a vast acceleration of meaninglessness. We have conceived of cyberspace, and we have filled it with porn.
2. It Will Not Last the Night…
Just previous to practicing mb I had been spending some time using drugs regularly. What kept me interested in drugs was that I could put something into my bloodstream which would then have dramatic effects on my thinking and feeling. Drugs seemed, for a while, to be powerful implements of control over happiness.
At some point, after the newness wore off, it became obvious that the drug high (which I could “choose”) was always followed by a low (which I didn’t seem to have any choice about). The experience of 3 steps forward was always followed by 4 steps back. It seemed that if there were (metaphorically) a gland in my body whose job it was to drop a drop of enthusiasm into each moment, that drugs were enabling me to squeeze an entire week’s supply into a couple of hours. (And what an amazing couple of hours that could be), but then I would be very dry, very empty of enthusiasm for some time…much longer than a couple of hours.
I burn my candle at both ends,
It will not last the night;
But Oh, my foes, and Oh, my friends
It gives a lovely light!
Edna St. Vincent Millay
The certainty that it must be possible to be always in touch with what is always true gradually caused me to lose interest in the strong on / off mechanism of drug-induced connectedness (which, paradoxically, always left me feeling ever more separate).
One undeniable fact remained from the drug years, however: what I put in my mouth can have profound effect on my thought and emotion. Yang matters.
I Am What I Am Looking For
Another positive consequence of some of my drug use was that many ideas I had encountered about the wholeness of life were made vividly real in a full-bodied, sensual way (albeit for short periods of time). For a kid like me, raised to be all up in his head, this was a “mind-blower”.
One idea that became obvious and real for me at that time was that a basic pattern underlying our experience is yin/yang. The way I have come to see that is the whole can not be experienced directly; being the “experience” and the “experience-er” all at once, it must be forever out of view. Only separated qualities can be experienced, and one at a time. But because of the underlying wholeness of life, always the opposite quality must then be experienced at a subsequent time and/or another space.
Time and space are the first dividing of the whole into yang-time and yin-space, setting a stage so that a parade of “separate” and “different” qualities that can be perceived one by one. What fun! (what bitter-sweet, tragic-comic fun.)
What Am I?
It has been my experience that awakening to a fresh answer to the question "what am I?" is most likely to happen to a nervous system that is very quieted down.
And mindfully chewing whole grains and vegetables is the best tool I have ever stumbled across to deeply quiet the nervous system. The way my system responds to just one meal of paying attention to whole grain & veggies is still, after 40 years, miraculous to me.
Hope for a solid foundation upon which to embrace life had long caused me to explore many, many thought systems from “the west down to the east.” I had found extraordinary and elegant truth in much of that—both old and new. Yet throughout this intellectual journey I had been constantly exasperated by an inability to make any of those “understandings” get the job done when emotional uncertainty struck. Until macrobiotics gave me the tools to bring the yang world—diet, environment, activity—into alignment with the broad new intellectual visions I was opening to, my life continued to be plagued by doubt, depression, fear, anger, self-abuse, and social and environmental recklessness.
From one perspective macrobiotics is nothing but a way to view life so that one can confidently eat and live in a way that allows the nervous system to quiet down.
There is a Zen parable that the moon and stars are only clearly reflected in calm water. I can vouch for the truth of that: what little capacity I have ever had to freshly envision how things really are is only released when I do what it takes to calm down—and for me that means calmly paying attention to the whole inside-outside event of eating, which, along with breathing, is a fundamental activity of all organic life.
Freedom (?)
Am I free? Not yet. Am I moving toward freedom? I don’t know.
I do know that making well-chewed grain and vegetables the center of my diet has altered my mental-emotional state such that it has become possible to drop many things, many habits, many attachments, behaviors, and relationships that had bound me up, and imprisoned me in a life that often felt alien and tortuous.
However, I have been released into a world, that, while being much more about what is interesting and compelling than what is fearful and depressing, requires consciousness, vigilance, and paying attention. Paradoxically, while a prisoner of hopelessness and unhappiness I was free internally to feel as alienated and victimized as I wished; while being released from depression and fear seems to require constant internal vigilance to which attitudes make for peace, and which lead to war.
But, hey, that’s what I have always wanted: to be able to constantly pay attention. The cost of being awake is “being awake”.
Paying attention to food has, for me, been a critical step on this journey. My experience has been that whenever I get the food piece in place, many other pieces fall right into place, seemingly on their own…And then I remember: I am what I am looking for. The infinite (god) is me, among other things. My eyes are looking for themselves. The peace of the infinite (god) is mine for the taking. The fearlessness of the infinite (god) is mine for the taking.
