Happy New Year to everyone! I was intending to publish this post in the morning but spent the day at the beach instead!
Anyway, here is a short clip from the previously-published video of my conversation with Lindsay Foreman, a conversation you may have already heard in full, but which contains this short analogy (highlighted in the above clip) between:
a) the replacement of traditional dietary practices with the "western modern diet" and
b) the destruction of the world's ancient wisdom contained in the myths and sacred traditions given to every culture on our planet and their replacement with what amounts to "spiritual junk food" (because literalism necessarily externalizes the message and inverts key components of the ancient wisdom, thus robbing us of "essential nutrients" vital to our overall well-being, much as the western diet may keep us from being hungry while at the same time lacking certain essential vitamins necessary for our health).
I thought it was appropriate for New Year's because we often start the year with resolutions regarding what we eat, and I would certainly recommend checking out the arguments presented by Dr. Steven Lin (whose work I reference in my introduction of the above analogy) in his 2018 book The Dental Diet: The Surprising Link Between Your Teeth, Real Food, and Life-Changing Natural Health, in which Dr. Lin provides abundant evidence (following on the work of other doctors and dentists before him) which demonstrate that, in his words:
traditional cultures [. . .] all seemed to have diets rich in fat-soluble vitamins. [. . .] A little known fat-soluble vitamin that works in conjunction with vitamins D and A, K2 helps the body to place mineral into bones and teeth. It's crucial in the process of jaw growth and is fundamental to mineral balance in organs throughout the body. [. . .] Traditional diets had, over centuries if not millennia, structured their diets around the very foods that had the nutrients I was looking for. 24 - 27.
The modern western diet, however, is typically deficient in those exact fat-soluble vitamins which traditional diets, no matter their latitude or climatic environment, were so careful to include. Those three important fat-soluble vitamins, discussed in detail in Dr. Lin's book, are vitamins A, D, and K2.
I would highly recommend considering the information in The Dental Diet, which provides a number of sources of these essential vitamins, and discusses what they do for us (and why our modern diet is typically lacking in them).
And I would suggest, without implying that Dr. Lin agrees with me or my assertions in any way, that the situation he is describing provides us with a powerful analogy for the loss of the ancient wisdom preserved in each cultures myths and traditional stories.
Just as he finds that traditional cultures around the world seemed to have found ways to ensure that their diets included those essential fat-soluble vitamins in quantities sufficient to promote good health, while the western diet which replaced those traditional diets was dangerously deficient in the exact same essential fat-soluble vitamins, even so and in much the same way, every culture on our planet appears to have preserved a set of "original instructions" in the form of their ancient myths, scriptures, or sacred traditions (I am indebted to scholar and author Peter Kingsley for the term "original instructions," which I find to be an excellent description; for his use of that term, see his lecture series entitled The Elders, available on his website here, and see also my discussion in a 2015 blog post here).
Catastrophically, those original instructions in the form of the ancient wisdom preserved in the myths and sacred traditions have been deliberately overturned in one culture after another -- probably starting during the time of the Roman Empire and continuing through the march of literalist Christianity throughout the Mediterranean and then into the regions of western Europe and later northern Europe, and from there into other cultures and continents as well, usually accompanied by violence and exploitation.
While using ancient stories and texts, the literalist misinterpretation of these ancient stories robs them of their original meaning -- while at the same time arguing that their interpretation constitutes the only truth and that the sacred traditions of all other cultures are wrong and worthy of being ruthlessly eliminated.
The tragic irony of that mistake is revealed when we see the overwhelming evidence which demonstrates that the very same ancient system of celestial metaphor forms the foundations for the ancient myths and sacred stories of virtually all the world's cultures, as well as for the stories and characters in the Bible.
However, just as the modern western diet lacks sufficient sources of the vitally-important fat-soluble vitamins A, D, and K2, the literalist misinterpretation of the ancient stories in the Bible strips out vital components of the intended message, with the end result being a system which, instead of having as a central feature the prevention of trauma, and the repair and resolution of trauma where and when it arises, actually promotes and inflicts trauma upon men and women.
As we look forward to a new year, I highly recommend looking into the role of the important vitamins A, D, and K2, and finding sources of those vitamins which are most amenable to whatever diet you choose to follow. And, on a wider level, I hope that we can work to address the terrible effects of malnourishment, certainly physical malnourishment around the world but also spiritual malnourishment caused by deficiency of the beneficial elements contained in the world's ancient wisdom given to every culture, which have been deliberately suppressed for centuries, but which are still present and waiting for us, in all of the ancient myths and stories (including those preserved in the Bible), if we turn to them and listen to them in the language that they are actually speaking, which is a metaphorical language, an esoteric language, and a celestial language.
