[Dialogue] FASTING

[kroegerd@aol.com]

Fasting
JWM
Now I am going to fool in an area that is just a touch dangerous. At least I deem it so, you are aware, have been and are now, of physical state which has been created by this religious fast. I think you need to bear in mind it is not only the physical aspect that has manifest itself in certain bodily states. But I suspect, also that it is the spiritual aspect of the fast, if you can use that kind of language, that is effecting here also. Now your mind has also been affected. I'm just been wondering what kind of images. What kind of appearances have been present with you during this kind of fast. What kind of fancies have been in your mind, what kind of phantasms have been in your mind. What kind of illusions, in a very positive and creative sense of that word have been in your mind. Have you been aware of anything like this. Let's fool just a moment with those of us around the center table.

Have you been aware of what I am talking about? 
I've tasted many wide varieties of foods in the last several hours and 
1 - I've heard the wind very frequently and I've seen the mountain quite frequently.

JWM­He has been aware of tasting a variety of food, he's heard the wind, he's 
seen the mountain. 

JWM­What do you call those things that you put two cards into it and see one? 
A stereotoptigon.

2­ It was not so much the tasting of the food as the preparing of the food.

3­ It's a very old image, 1) like when you have been through a period of 
fever, first time you can feel fresh air actually touch your skin and the 
fantasy in that is walking in a rather stiff wind on top of a very 
high hill.

JWM­ What does phantasmagoria mean?

4­ A waterfall, something like Victoria Falls very long with high mist blowing 
back up. And the other one had to do with walking through cells, like if 
you take a molecule and divide it all up. I'm not in the picture but the 
cells are all there.

5­ I dreamed a lot at night, but I don't remember what they are when I wake up in the middle of the night. But the one I can remember that I had during the day when we a were talking about the holy of holys.

6­ I've been aware of being able to remember things that I didn't know that I could remember, poems, names. In the midst of that the picture that is coming is of a lean haggard St. Francis. I found myself seeing myself as that St. Francis 

7­ It has been a real effort for me to drive a car back and forth two images I have constantly with me when I have driven when I had to force myself to think about driving the car and at the same time had flashes in my mind of pictures of myself dead, wrecked ink the car.

JWM­ Forget the driving back and forth she had pictures of herself dead in a wrecked car.

8­ You won't believe this but that is exactly what I was gong to say. The other image I've had is the one that we use in RS­I about talking to the tree (I've never been able to use it or understand it)

JWM­ I'm not much interested in what she wanted to there ­ I'm interested in the fact that there were these flashes of her talking to a tree.

9­ Pictures of places I don't remember and odd places.

10­ I had the same pictures as Shirley Porter. I never dreamed that during the fast I would dream a lot but I cannot remember what it was. And 
then during the waking hours the image of Ghandi as come back again and 
again.

11­ I've been transported to places I've been and two of those are Mardi Gas celebrations. It's tot the food that I remember, although the food was a very important part. Then the other one I remember was that of the North Shore cadre meetings. And the other thing that has happened to me is that I can look down at my hands like this and it looks just like a dead hen

JWM­ What other illusions have to experienced. What hallucinations ­ if any. 
What have been the flashes the images.

12. Flashed back to last year and run up hamburgers for your colleagues The fantasy is doing it over again.

13­ It's been a large mountain, very rugged with caves in it And I see myself walking up the path to one of these caves and then just standing there but down below the mountain is a very large city. And I'm just sitting there over the city. The other one has been there is a grocery stow in Cape Elizabeth Maine but I always go there first. I've always wondered, I just see myself walking to that grocery store. Beginning to get a sense after the arena in which a spirit journey now goes on. I see myself walking.

14­ I've had images of what I am going to call Anthony, alone and tormented out in the wilderness. Of myself delirious with fever and also images of Siddhartha watching, waiting, and praying. But I guess I see more of a man walking. 

JWM­The images of man walking that seemed like Siddhartha to you. Have any of you people been aware of the fact, Now you have known Charles for a long time, Charles Moore. Have you been aware that from time to time that he takes his hand and raises it like that. Have you ever seen him do that. His hand laying on the table and he takes it and raises it like that. What he is doing only he has never quite decided to do it. But that hand he is causing that table over there to float, well let's say the one in the middle here. There are times in which he get it up and then has the table float over there and then he puts it down again. Have you ever seen that, have you ever seen him do that? There is another guy in this room, I won't mention his name, but you have known him for some time. Who ever so often in a meeting rises up himself and then he turns himself on the prone and he floats around there and comes and then rights himself and then comes down and sits. You can sort of watching him and watches the moves he makes you can watch him in that process. Jesus went out into the desert to fast, forty days. 

That was the same number of days he was resurrected. I like to believe 
that this wasn't a modified fast but it was for forty days. I don't know 
how long we've been there, how many days of the fast had past before 
he began to develop a hallucination. He had fantasies, he was sitting there 
looking at a rock and he began to think of himself turning that rock 
into loaf of bread. There must have been Charles with the table. Then he 
began to feel himself up in very high places even saw himself upon on top 
of the temple, wasn't he. Got to thinking "I'll just jump off and before all 
of those people, and I'll not so much as break my wrist." And then he began 
to picture the whole world gathered about him. And he sitting on the Caesar's 
throne. The power, the power, the power. And then the devil left him until 
he could find another _____, until he could find another _____. And Jesus said 
"I am it". Remember the in the next paragraph. I am it, this day before your very eyes, while I was reading this that prophesy was fulfilled in me.

JWM­ Now, anyone here, images in your mind, any.

15­ I keep recalling St. Francis and how he kept calling out "Come see the new 
madness and dance in the street". Something like that. I felt something 
Dancing in the midst of a fast or him turning his own physical matter into 
spirit.

16­ In the last three days I have "Little Big Man and that wife. I've just talked to her and walked around with her. 
JWM­Shame on you.

1B­ Blanknesses and I've titled the blanknesses to get back to what I have 
just written on the paper or something. And I'm not quite sure how long they have lasted but in my walking, not in my room, but in my walking up and down the hall; I have kept consciousness of people over my shoulder. They may be walking beside me.

18­ A tunnel going down to the earth and then after a little while there was 
this sort of side tunnel to it. Sort of a similar one stair case going 
down, it was like it was going into a cellar, cellar type staircase.

JWM­ Now I'm not going to do this but you do it for yourself. Your going to have to use these images to do it. You see if you are not aware, in these few days aware of spirit struggle, as one fellow put it in Hong Kong. That fasting flushes the devil out in the open. That fasting flushes the devil out in the open. That was his image. The man who invented the devil, I repeat the man who invented the devil was a genius. For what that does is to take all of your struggles and focus them on where they belong, before the Lord. Always struggling about this problem and that problem, this issue and that issue with this person and that person and, and just dissipating your whole life When you become a man of the spirit you only have one enemy that you fight with and that is satan. And satan is all of these struggle you have focused where they belong before God. It is like misplaced guilt. Guilt only belongs before the Lord and he forgives it. And you spend most of your time being guilty - being - guilty before this one and that one and the other. You spend most of your time being guilty over the wrong things. Your guilty over this and you are guilty over that and there is only one thing to be guilty for. And that were you pull it all together and guilty over your dis-relationship to God. Oh my, and so it is with struggle. Misplaced struggle you have but one to struggle with and that is God. Or when you put it in terms of the struggle that is Satan. What you are out after is the spiritual meaning in the deeps of your being of fasting. You've got to think about this, you've got to reflect upon this. Secondly, everybody has been using the word contingency and another word for contingency is death. Death gets flushed out into the open in fasting. Where and this is so clear, forty days of it. You know that you could go from this day on for forty days and you , it would be nothing. The only thing that finally bothers you, like we are being bothered now. We are use to three times a day going through this motion. That is the only, fasting affects your time. That's what is so jarring about it. You ain't got no sense of time. You don't even know what time of day it is. If you didn't happen to have a watch on for usually you wouldn't have to have a watch because a certain thing happens, take that away and you don't know what time it is. You don't know what time it is, You don't know what time it is. It was like that frightening experience I had with the Panchayat the other night we went down to that Como Inn. And it is up there in, we always seem to get that windowless room. Oh it is a frightening room to me, bleak, you couldn't get inspired in that room if you tried. That's where we took the Fifth City people when we wanted to, what was it we wanted to do to them, I forget. Then went in, they have a great big scene of a city. And there are lights up in that gluing. And here we sit in that windowless room, it must have been 10:00 at night. And I kept being aware that it was daylight. A sense of time is gone. This time and this death they are not to far apart. Flushes out death, no man ever lives who has not first comes to terms with his death, fasting flushes out. I want to stop. But pull out one other little thing, and mark you you've got to remember that I next to nothing about what Some of you put it in gorgeous language. Precisely because death strikes out and Satan is flushed out. Have you noticed that there has been a quite sense of awe that you have been in. I'm not sure when it started. I remember very clearly when we were talking about whether we would do this. And you knew that the deck was stacked, of course that was obvious to anyone. But that doesn't mean that it couldn't have been stopped. So there was freedom here or what I am going to say very likely would not have taken place. I was aware even talking about going on a fast. Awe was beginning to build up.

For any one of you. But I'm not sure where, there comes a time that you become conscious that you are on a religious fast, as you were not when you made the decision to be on a religious fast, and it is at that time I believe that you begin to experience yourself in awe. And from that time to the end I would suspect that you are not for one second out of it. Which is to say that in flushing out the death and the devil. Use your own poetry, you experience the Mystery which is seeing that for a sustained period of time you are consciously before the Lord, for a sustained period of time you are presence to the Mystery is unbroken. Now reflect on this. If it flushes out death, and the devil. And I keep thinking there is one other thing. And one day it is going to come to me. I'm trying to avoid what I think will be there and you know what that is. The world, but I don't know about it. But now when you return from the fast now I'm not talking about the feast, when you return from the fast and get back into the routine of time. The life , don't want to say that. You get back into the routine, what is now, what is life like then, that it would not have been if you had not fasted. In the spiritual deeps and mark you I wanted you, I thought this was a bit dangerous. We were dealing with the spiritual dimension of life and not the psychological, so when you get back in the world I'm not interested in the psychological, I'm not even interested in the psychological I won't even care much if they tell me Charles had to go to the hospital. And I certainly won't be interested in his psychological oration. The spiritual. And don't forget this ­ it would very very simple for you to go on for seven days, you have to have that in your mind, or for forty days. Don't ever lose that, again I say don't do that, I say break it, when you said you were going to. But I am looking forward to the time when we, I mean those of us in this room could once again participate in a fast. One day, or we are off the track, this is going to be a crucial part of your Odyssey, the corporateness is the crucial part of it. And that means we have got to get, I'm being a pedagogue now, our lecturettes down, our exercises down to real clarity. And know what we are doing, as well as pushing through deeper and ever deeper understanding of it. Now tonight we come to the feast, we have been participating in the dread emphases in awe and tonight we participate in the fascinating dimension of the awe. Though I repeat you have been aware of fantastic fascination in this, no matter how reluctant anyone in the room was to go along with it. You have been fascinated in the midst of being dread filled. And so in the fascination of the feast. Pierce and I have never been the same since we read that thing in Kierkegaard about the party. He was a scintillating being and then wanted to go out and blow his brains out. You also feast about and feast over now the over is gloriously clear in the book of Hebrew. Since we finished the book of Hebrew before that it was a little fussy. But it couldn't ever again be fussy. Now what are we going to feast about tonight. 

 
Dick Kroeger
 
 
-----Original Message-----
From: David & Lin Zahrt <ch.bnb at longlines.com>
To: Dialogue at wedgeblade.net
Sent: Mon, 11 Apr 2005 09:52:20 -0500
Subject: [Dialogue] FASTING


I'm anticipating doing some fasting. I have intuitions about why I want to do it and what I'm doing. I would like to find as much background information as possible so that I can better interpret to those who inquire about what I'm doing and why I'm doing it. 
 
I will be doing a search for written info/background. This is part of the search! 
 
Can anyone refer me to resource info on the practices and purposes of fasting? Perhaps we even have some Order material. If so I have long since lost track of it. 
 
David 
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