Levels of Food
Transcript of a talk given in Arizona in the mid 1980s by Rhondell

Today we’re going to talk about food. We’ve said levels of food—we don’t mean by food necessarily the stuff we stuff in our mouth; however, we’re going to take that one, too. So we’ll take it first and then we’ll talk about the other.

Food that’s taken in, of course, does nothing to the body until it’s digested and assimilated, which seems to be done rather automatically within ourselves unless it is something that is not digestible, which I’ve had two calls already today about people who put something in there that didn’t digest. Today they’re very uncomfortable and want some immediate relief. So what we are interested in is that we understand that all things that come into us—first have to go through some process. For today’s purpose, we will call it digestion.

In the case of steak and potatoes, salad and bread and what have you, it is digested with a process which we won’t go into, but then it’s assimilated into the body and becomes a part of this being when it is assimilated. It may be used as energy. It may be used to repair, rebuild or what have you. But we are, of course, somewhat particular about what we put in here—at least some of us are. We don’t eat tainted things. We don’t eat things that don’t look good even, do we? Even at lovely places like the Sheraton, we don’t eat them if they don’t look good. We leave it or send it back.

And so we do know that something—the appearance of it has something to do with whether it is delightful to eat. I could imagine that if I went into a restaurant and ordered a filet and it came out dyed blue, it probably wouldn’t go down very well. And if it did, it wouldn’t set well—even though that dye was harmless. It’s just a blue steak is not our idea of things to eat—even kids peel their Easter eggs that have all kinds of color before they eat them. So appearance of things, the purity of it and etc., is accepted as valuable to all of us.

Now by the same token, we take in impressions of various kinds. Now if You’ve ever tried to exist without any impressions—you know they have a tank around that they go in and lie in warm water, and they call it sensory deprivation. Have any of you ever experimented with that situation? Well, they put salt water in a tank so that it’s as near your internal salt water level and the temperature is exactly your skin temperature so you can’t even feel it. You lay in this water that has enough salt in it that it floats you a little bit. Even a hard boiled egg will float—well a fresh egg will float in salt water, too. So we float a little bit and there is no sound, no light and no nothin’. It’s called sensory deprivation, and people can’t stand it very long. It’s been used as a therapeutic tool, but produced more havoc that it did therapy. So most people became unglued, simply put, when they were put in this sensory deprivation.

So we take in many sensory impressions through the day and usually we pay very little attention to what kind they are. We may go and expose ourselves to a movie that is full of violence and noise and etc., because we have become used to being stimulated, but all that material goes into the person and in many cases, it is not digested.

Now if you read a book, you digest it basically, is that right? You read an article in the newspaper, you digest it. Or you may listen to television and be doing something else and not digest it very well. And then we have dreams of various and sundry kinds that go on and we dream through the night. I’m talking about night dreams, not daydreams. Night dreams are basically based on undigested sensory impressions that you took into yourself which is a form of food.

People used to come to me and tell me they would like for me to interpret their dreams. So I’d listen very carefully to the dream. There’s nothing more boring to me than dreams, but I would listen to these dreams. Then I would try to reconstruct what that person had thought about or been exposed to in the last 48 hours. And you could usually come up with it almost perfectly that the dream came from this.

Now there’s a dreamer in there that works very much like the colon does in the body. It’s an elimination organ and so we eliminate by having dreams and nightmares in many cases, and a whole bunch of other things. Did you wake up with a great start in the middle of the night and didn’t know what it was about—jump up and all? All this is a form of elimination and be thankful for it.

If you would just as soon not have that kind of diarrhea, it would be a little interesting to see what kind of impressions you took in and paid attention to. Some of the more unnecessary impressions I think most of us could get along without—especially if we’re interested in evolving our status of consciousness.

Now if all you’re doing is muddling through and want to get as much stimuli as possible, why that’s all right, but I think that none of us here are working on that.

Now another form of food that we take in is what the conscious awareness mind or whatever you want to call it—all the Not-I’s carry on with about all the day. So shall we say what you’re habitually occupied with mentally is also a form of food that, again, has to be digested and assimilated or gotten rid of. I prefer to get rid of it, if it happens to come in the first place. I think it behooves us to pay attention somewhat to what kind of food that we take in. What our mental apparatus is occupied with most of the day. I’m not talking about every fleeting thought that comes by, but when we get occupied with something. Some people are occupied with revenge—might be occupied with that for weeks or months on end.

Some are occupied with showing people off—"Well, I’ll show those so-and-so’s that I don’t have to put up with this!!"

Many other kinds of people will have business transactions that we will say went sour. Somebody didn’t do what they were supposed to do or had agreed to do somewhere along the line and now then the person spends all their time occupied totally with how terrible they were treated. How they’ve been victimized and how they’re going to get even with that so-and-so that caused all this difficulty and trouble. Now that is a form of food, it is assimilated into the body and it is mighty toxic, and it requires considerable adaptation on the part of the body in order for it to continue to survive.

However, we can see that I can refuse to take that form of nutrient into the body. Now I don’t care how somebody treated me, that is his problem. If he caused me difficulty, it wasn’t to his advantage, and I don’t have to do anything to get even with him. Life will take care of that very nicely. I don’t have to do a thing about it.

So it can be said that here is a form of food or nutrient that comes into the body that even one look at it would be like eating toxic beef or soured potatoes and you wouldn’t hardly eat that, would you? You wouldn’t knowingly take that in.

One time I unknowingly ate a piece of pie that was tainted. Along with it I drank a cup of coffee. Before morning I had considerable difficulty, and that difficulty went on for many hours and after the acute stage was over, I couldn’t stand the smell of coffee. I could drive down the street and smell coffee in people’s homes. I’d never done such before, but I could do it. If I walked into a hotel, it was overpowering—the coffee from back there somewhere gave me horrible nausea. Another thing that went on while I was still in that state was that I was to take a state board exam in New Mexico and so I went to take the exam. I sat at the table and here’s the monitor of the exam—a lady with her coffee pot perking away on the front. I spent more time in the wash room than I did writing the exam. I did pass the exam, but at great agony, I will assure you, and frequent detours. You couldn’t leave until you handed in the paper, do I had by necessity increased. That paper was in in a hurry and correct—but with agony.

So finally one day I decided I didn’t want to live that way. I did like my coffee, so I sat with a cup of coffee and a little teaspoon, and I would take a half a teaspoon full of coffee and tell myself that now wasn’t then. It took three hours of that before I got any action to understand that now wasn’t then. Since then, I haven’t smelled coffee in people’s homes and so forth, but we wouldn’t knowingly take in a toxic substance for our ordinary everyday food, is that right? You wouldn’t knowingly do it. You wouldn’t eat tainted fish, and you wouldn’t eat beef that had been sitting around and turned green.

But now here we go and read all sorts of garbage—in newspapers and magazines and so forth. We read that with the greatest of ease. We listen to it on the radio. We listen to it on the television. In other words, we take in things that anybody knows is pretty tainted, is that right? Now what do you do with it? Do you digest it and assimilate it? If you do, it puts a whole different feeling in your inner state of being—a whole different situation of what you’re aware of. You’re no longer in charge of your total inner state of what you will do. You haven’t set up a guardian of the gate that’s going to watch it. You haven’t organized a state of being that says I will be in charge of a whole purpose. You haven’t set it up—you’re just being exposed to filth.

Most of us here, I don’t think, would go out and gather around the garbage pail up at Lankmark where John threw it out at noon today—if he didn’t want it, it’s bound to be bad. So we wouldn’t go in there and pick up items out of that to eat, would we? Now by the same token, you do you feel that it is harmless to take in violence and lewdness and what have you, just because it’s there? Do you think it has no effect on you? Do you see that it has about as much effect if not more so than the stuff we eat with literal food? One nice thing about it. If you eat a piece of tainted pie, X goes into a terrific effort to eliminate it—I’ll assure you that—knocked me out in the process, but went into a terrific effect to eliminate it.

Now nothing seems to go into a great effort with the garbage except a few dreams or what have you to eliminate all this unclean, unwholesome stimuli that we take in all the time. Nothing goes to work on that. So it seems to lodge very much like cholesterol or something. It hangs around and you’re totally unaware of it except that it acts up in many ways for it to eliminate.

Now another one would be activity is a form of food. It’s a stimuli that we’re all urged by some inner urge to take some activity every day. We can’t just stay out in the sack all day long, just barely breathing—that is anybody except Parry. But you ordinarily have an urge to get up and do something, is that right Parry, even you? No matter how much your wife says you’re lazy, you still get up sometimes through the day and do a little something because we are impelled to activity.

Now there are many kinds of activity that we all know are not very beneficial to us. If I wanted some activity and distraction, I can go down to the bar this afternoon and sit there all afternoon and sip away on marguerites and that will get your head buzzed before long. I could sit with the marguerites and I could talk all kinds of weird things to other people who had fuzzed their heads with some similar libation. We could do that, or we could go out and get involved in a whole bunch of other things that easily we could find to be involved in. We could go to the peep shows down the street—that’s a good activity. We can park the car back there and nobody sees you came except you. So you could indulge in that or you could read the latest Playboy.

So now if you have a suggestion given to you, it’s pretty apt to have some recurrence in your head, is that about right, Miss Linda? Somebody suggests something to you—it’s going to recur to keep on doing a little bit here and there. You don’t have to be the person doing the suggestion, it doesn’t have to be a professional hypnotist or even a parlor variety, they just make the suggestion, it’s going to recur and operate in your head a little bit unless you throw it out now. It is as if you got a bite of food that’s tainted, what could you do with it. Would you be very polite and go ahead and swallow it, or would you spit it out? I don’t care whose house you’re in. So by the same token, if one refuses to allow this kind of stuff in, one is beginning to build what we call a frame of reference or a new guardian of the gate.

The old guardian of the gate is merely the Not-I’s which take in about anything, but they argue over it and so forth. The new guardian of the gate would be a consciously chosen purpose that says, "This is my purpose in life, and when I run across all these things, any person who would run across this stuff that obviously has toxic functions coming from it, there will be toxic reactions happen from it." It would never pass the guardian of the gate, it’s rejected immediately. No matter what you’d come into, if somebody says what you really should do is get over your difficulty and feel really wonderful is to have a few snorts of coke, well, that’s going to be suggested to people, and they’re going to act on that suggestion and pretty soon they’re doing it. But the person with an adequate guardian of the gate—self-chosen—put in place—would say, "Not I!" You can get as high as you want, I can get high without it. And I can get myself there anytime I want to, but I don’t want that kind of a high. So then one could leave that alone.

But otherwise, we do know that suggestion that all these various and sundry chemicals that people call drugs and dope and what have you have a wide usage. Now it didn’t come because I had a craving for it before I got to it. It came because of a suggestion that implied that I was missing something very worthwhile if I didn’t use it; and that if I did use it, it would give me a great rewards.

So that’s the nature of all suggestions that anybody suggests. Something is implied in the suggestion. It doesn’t have to be said, but implied. That there is a penalty for not doing it and great reward for doing whatever it may be.

So the human race is involved in taking into themselves tremendous amounts of things that are demonstrably harmful to the person, some of which very few people maybe are aware of, but people who have studied these things are well aware of the harmful nature of many of the things that are taken in. Not only in the form of the physical food one has, but what the mind is totally occupied with, or occupied a great amount of the time with. With all the various impressions and sensory things that they take in, and the ideas that they subscribe to.

So it would be that if we’re going to be at least hygienic living, we would be first particular about the food that we eat for nourishment of the body. We would be extremely critical of what kind of nourishment we hand to the Inner Man, regardless of what it is. We would be extremely critical of it. And in that fact of being critical, we are at the same time building a frame of reference which is what we live by, and it’s what sometimes has been called a soul.

Man is considered in some esoteric teaching called the fourth way that man does not have a soul unless he builds one, and what he builds is a frame of reference, which consists of his purpose and his action upon that proposition, until it becomes, shall we say, second nature or first nature or it is spontaneous. One doesn’t have to stop and think it over every time it comes along—it’s just there.

So it’s referred to as the new guardian of the gate, and that is what is really the person. It possibly has extreme survival value, but we would say soul, and a synonym for it, would be a self-chosen purpose, which becomes the guardian of the gate.

Now nothing goes into the mind unless it agrees with that or is in purpose with it, because it sits there. Once it’s been chosen, it’s acted upon. Now that’s what you would call a complete transformation—it is a whole new person because what was just originally just allowed to be—the ordinary person hasn’t taken the time and effort to build a purpose and act upon it until it becomes nature, he just simply allowed everything to go through. So you could say that there is no interference between Not-I’s and the awareness function of man, which is mostly loaded with Not-I’s and X. It just goes "zip" through, and it always does the appropriate thing for the information it receives.

But if one has taken the activity to build a purpose and acted upon it, then you have a guardian between the sensory impressions that come in and X. Now unless they pass this, what’s been called by some people, soul—I don’t really like that word because it’s been bantered around, but we’ll use it.

Unless the guardian or frame of reference is there and in place, then things just go banging on through to X and it acts upon it. But as soon as this new barrier is there, the keeper of the gate is there, it doesn’t go through unless it agrees with that purpose. So then X doesn’t operate upon every thing that comes into the sensory world because it doesn’t go through. It gets stopped at this—maybe like the lymph system does in the human body. It stops toxic stuff from going through. The suggestions don’t agree with the purpose one has chosen.

If you wanted to use a common terminology today, you would say that the person has been reborn. They have a whole different way of dealing with all the stimuli that comes in from outside. Now mostly somebody comes up and makes you a suggestion. You will act upon it, if they’re good enough at their suggestion. If the guardian of the gate of this new thing which you have made as a purpose and acted upon until it’s second nature, comes in and something or someone offers you suggestion, it is a blank wall because the guardian says, "This one doesn’t go through."

Now then you have a barrier between all the things that come to us which we can’t keep all of them from happening, but we can eliminate the biggest pile of them—but we could then have a protection. If you don’t have that, you are a sitting duck for anything that comes around. You are like the person with a big hole in his skin. About every thing that comes down can move it—the skin’s a great barrier for bacteria and virus and all these many things, they’re covert, but they don’t get through.

Now the same thing, the mind could be protected by a form of a skin, you might say, which is this thing which we have consciously built of our own volition. I have said this is my purpose, and I’m going to carry it out, and I have acted upon it until it is an actuality.

Now there is a barrier between sensory impressions no matter where they come from, and X acting upon them. There is something that filters it and only lets through those which fit one’s purpose. It does not allow all this stuff through which goes on incessantly that creates the biggest part of the chaos in the world. Okay?

Let’s have little comments here, there and elsewhere. Somebody put me down or tell me to get out or do something over here with it. We’ve talked about what we take in. Jeffrey, come on. (J: When you speak of the word not wanting to use soul because it’s been bantered about…" ) Yeah, I said it’s used all the time, so I use something else. (So what would you say?) What would I use for "soul"? I would use "life" or "union with life." I could say it’s a barrier or a purpose—a conscious purpose. The only reason that I’m not particularly interested in using "soul" is because I don’t think it’s a terrible word—don’t get me wrong. It is because it’s been thrown around so much—it’s like the word love. Nobody knows what it means anymore, so I would rather have something that we could agree on somewhat of a definition. So if I were going to put the thing up somewhere, Jeffery, I’d say we have a Picture of Man like this. Here’s X, here’s Awareness, and ordinarily in the usual case, every impression from the environment goes banging in there. Now I would say in this we could have a new man. Okay? This person now gets impressions from the environment, but he has formed a purpose and has acted upon it until it is reality.

Now then, the impression goes there like into a lymph gland and then it is filtered out, and that’s what goes to X, AFTER it’s been looked over; and if it doesn’t fit, it doesn’t go. So now we say that we have a soul, if you want to use that term. Or I would say the guardian of the gate, or what have you. That the King doesn’t get a bunch of misinformation, okay? That help all right?

(Q: Could you compare that to the observer?) The observer is the awareness—this is a new thing. It is one that has chosen a purpose. You see most people have never chosen a purpose. They’re waiting for one to show up. Something they could be interested in and do and so forth. P., you ask a person "What are you interested in? What are you going to do?" "Well, I don’t know, I’m waiting for something to come along and grab me." Most often nothing comes along that grabs one, except escape and so forth and so on. Sometimes necessity grabs one.

If you get hungry enough, necessity grabs you and then you can do about anything you know. That help answer your question?

(Q:. Is the difference between the guardian of the gate and self-awareness consciously chosen?) Right. Consciously picked up and chosen by due consideration. What you might call meditation—another word I don’t use very much, meditation, which seems in my book to think about something, consider it from all aspects, where I understand in many cases it means get the head quiet and see what dreams go on in it. I’m not interested in that kind of meditation. So we generally don’t use that word because any word that has been publicized sufficiently has lost its meaning, because everybody has interpreted such that we try not to use for the simple reason that we’re no longer communicating when we use those words. But when a person has carefully, with some knowledge and a lot of information, come in and has considered it and used it, decides there must be some purpose for living, whether exactly it doesn’t matter, but they determine that some purpose for living had to come into being. [End of talk.]

For more talks by Rhondell, check out Marsha Summers' pages.

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