A couple of posts I made on http://iheartfruit.com last week in response to newstance are worth collecting here I think:


Dear Maia,
 
It's so good to hear that my efforts are appreciated, isn't it wonderful how we can be inspired just by hearing about the things others are doing. I just happened to be thinking this morning about Anne, Jeff and Frey. Anne out there in front, having reached prodigious levels of purity through a long road of pure diet and fasts, is a real beacon to me. Jeff also, as another example of one who has mastered the problems of transition, come out on the other side as it were. Then Frey, I find his imaginative, rhapsodic approach to, and delight in, the experiment of living to be a real inspirer, regardless of his stage on the journey of building a new, purified body as temple for and to the spirit.

My own journey appears a strange one to me, after a radical experience of 12 years, to be cast back into a sort of limbo where I was happy enough, but asleep as it were to the great possiblities that I had known of. A limbo lasting from 1983 to 2011 - 28 years, for what? What was happening in those 28 years? Apparently nothing, but growth always goes on beneath the surface.

If you read my journal of 1971 then you see that my mind was entirely at the mercy of the winds. After that it got held to a direction for 9 years, then it fell asleep. Life is a great mystery!
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...continuing: but now, later, I seemed to have a new understanding after reading your new post. Before, I didn't think about the fact that I became vegetarian at age 35. I just saw it as more or less an immaterial accident. But your remark that it took you 18 years to become a vegetarian set me thinking.

I now understand that there was a process of development going on in me, from birth to age 35, that I was unaware of. Such developments, indeed all developments, take place in accord with the laws of the universe, of God if you prefer, to their own time schedule.

So after 35 years of development I was finally ready to give up meat. I thought I could do more, but I was wrong. My 9 years on raw were perhaps a phase I had to go through, but I really wasn't ready to become a vegan. One can say that, simply because I found it too much of a mental struggle. I think when one is ready to give something up, one does it much more easily.

So it becomes more understandable now that my next step, to become a vegan, could have required a preliminary development, AS VEGETARIAN, of another 40 years. (Because it was already obvious that I am a slow developer!).

What I find promising this time, is firstly that becoming more strictly vegan (99.7%) 15 months ago, was so easy as to be called just a natural event, so that there is no interest or craving for cheese (always my biggest temptation) left any more. (I won't deny, however, that I might find it enjoyable to eat if I did. Which I most certainly would not with meat. Does that mean I am fooling myself? Maybe, maybe not.)

As for my last step, giving up bread and legumes in January, that was not difficult at all, as I was actually getting tired of bread, for the first time in my life. And the curried legumes and potatoes were never much of an addiction, anyway. In these three months I have felt very little inclination to eat anything unraw, except for that one day only when I caught myself staring at the potato salad in the supermarket.
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