[Oe List ...] Salmon: Fasting -- MAPPING THE INTERIOR

[William Salmon]

MAPPING THE INTERIOR:
A testimony to the power of fasting

Weekly Ritual --  April, 1986
(Revised: August 8, 2008)
W. E. Salmon
Presented at the weekly Common Meal for the Order Ecumenical at the Brussels House. 

	At the outset let it be said that this is not a witness, rather it is a personal testimony. A witness points the audience to the dynamics of relating to the significance and meaning of life; the witness is about that which all need. The witness points to The Word of God. A testimony describes the effect this Word has on one’s life. This is my testimony about, “Mapping the Interior: a testimony to the power of fasting,”
	Why fast? For me fasting in a key that unlocks the interior world, revealing a life direction that is characterized by self-containment, inner contentment, and a life in touch with its roots.
	It can be said that fasting is not denial; rather it is the shift from feeding the body to feeding the Soul. Joseph Needleman indicates in Lost Christianity that the Soul is not something one has but it that which is grown or develops. Neeldeman goes on to say that without the development of this soul there is no interface with God. Fasting, then, is not moral progress; it is the process of being put in touch with the significance and meaning of one’s Self. 
	Why fast? Briefly said, fasting has the dimensions of cleansing and healing. It is a method of attentionality, provides a spiritual resonator and centers a person in the significance and meaning of his/her existence. Let us consider these four dimensions:
	Cleansing/Healing: To stop eating allows the physical system to rest. The alimentary canal, as you know, is something that is constantly moving the food you eat through your system in order to absorb the nutrients you consume. By developing a time when it doesn’t have so much work to do allows this system to rest. This, in turn, enables the energy consumed to be focused in other helpful ways.
	Attentionality: As the world gets more frenetic and environmentally more crowded, the need develops for moving to the openness and freedom of interior space. While fasting is certainly not the only key that opens the doorway to this world, it is one that is more easily practiced than the disciplines of controlled breathing and body postures.
	Spiritual Attunement: Fasting energizes a spiritual resonance. The experience of this resonance is like standing on the edge of an immense bell, and as it is struck by life’s hammer-blows, instead of being thrown about there is an at-one-ness; a sense of wholeness.
	Centeredness: I find that the inward landscape can only be expressed with the word “quality.” It is the same word that philosophers use when they describe “The True;” what theologians use to point to “The Good;” or poets mean by “The Beautiful.” For me, Quality is the root—the unifying factor—out of which The Good, The True and The Beautiful are grown. Fasting is the experience of standing in equilibrium with the best that you are, not less than the best. It is to be in touch with your depth.

A PERSONAL HISTORY
	Fasting is something with which I experimented for fourteen years. It was foreign to my experience until I met the Order Ecumenical in Chicago in 1971. Later, in 1979, Marge Allen and I were traveling the province of Saskatchewan, Canada, developing a Rural Development Symposium. Marge was fasting every Monday, and it was easy to fall into a complementary rhythm. Since that time it has been my habit to engage in a thirty-hour fast from the evening of one day to the breakfast of the second morning. Usually once a week; however, most noon hours find me jogging rather than eating; and I’ll leave my personal testimony on jogging for another time. I intentionally use the fast during Lent and Holy Week, and at times when personal struggles beset me or big decisions must be made. The result is that I usually fast about sixty days a year.

MAPPING THE INTERIOR	
	All of the above has been prelude. The rest is the meat and potatoes (excuse the contrary metaphor) of this testimony on fasting. This testimony is about what fasting empowers, rather than on what fasting is. Fasting enables us to map the interior of what—for many of us—may be entirely another world; or, as Ken Wilber reports in his various-perspective tombs, to map the next level of one’s spiritual journey.
	The surveying equipment needed for mapping this inner topography are the markers of meditation, prayer, and contemplation used in combination with the sextant of holiness. 
	Fasting is spiritual meditation which maps the conscious of consciousness. The experience one has with this tool is that hunger becomes an aid to consciousness resulting in the experience of what some describe as attentionality; a standing at attention to that which is. The souvenir that is brought back from the meditative journey is a sense of personal peace and well-being. 
	Fasting is an act of prayer which marks identification with the essential and the spiritual rather than the worldly and the material. The experience one has with this marker is that hunger becomes the gentle reminder of those things one considers important. Fasting becomes an act of prayer that marks us with the stamp “A-1;” that says this is what one considers important and significant about living life. The souvenir resulting from this form of prayer is a more healthy body, rid of excess weight, and a renewed awareness of the role that diet plays in physical and mental health. 
	Fasting is the act of contemplation when it becomes a plumb-line used to measure the rightness of an angle upon which one’s spiritual construction depends. The plumb-line is a string and weight that is used to determine if a wall is perpendicular or straight up and down; something important so that the construction doesn’t fall down. Also, the plumb-line is used to sound the depth of a body of water. Fasting is the plumb-line which sounds the deeps on one’s life; the use of the term, “deeps” is one that I prefer. If that be the case, then fasting is the plumb-line that measures the ups, the outs, or the Ins. You’ll have to supply your own preposition. The experience one has is that of being measured and led by a spiritual Centaur or Guide. The souvenir of this experience is fear and fascination, for fasting is fooling around with the business of death and rebirth. 
	These three spiritual surveying tools are utilized though the sextant of holiness. This sextant, or focusing agent, is the spiritual eye-glass used to examine the whole landscape of the interior cosmos. It is the expense of the silent flight into another world and reveals its awesomeness. The souvenir that one brings back from such a flight is a sense of self-worth and self-satisfaction. 

GUIDELINES TO FASTING 
When to fast--
	How does one begin to develop an expertise with these wonderful tools? Well, you begin by beginning. The use of the instruments is immediately available to you according to your needs. Expertise comes after long application, but is not needed as you first enter the world of the interior. First, make fasting a habit. Actually, you only need to decide to fast once. say, “Monday is fast day,” and then when it’s Monday, you fast. It is that easy! Second, regular fasting is not done for its own sake—one does not fast in order to be fasting, but to map the life’s interior frame, a fascination with what is and one’s role and contribution to life, and a profound sense of self-satisfaction and self-worth. I have found these two guidelines helpful when applied to the habit of regular fasting. 
	Concerning the use of fasting during periods of special struggles or times of special decision-making, it is important that one determines before-hand what it is that one is fasting over and what one is fasting about. To remember the difference, one fasts over contradiction—the big picture—and about the particular. ON my fiftieth birthday my fast was over growing older and about turning in a half century of life. 

RELATING FASTING TO THE CORPORATE LIFE
	It is easy to lose the corporate significance of fasting since it is individuals who experience it; however, the Order has a history of corporate fasting. During an extended period, in fact until recently, every house around the world was assigned a time of fasting. This provided everyone an opportunity for fasting one day about every six to eight weeks and occasioned the powerful story that every day the Order practices this symbol of our solidarity. There have also been occasions when the Order has experimented with three-day and ten-day fasts.
	The importance of fasting, along with and among other spiritual disciplines, is of crucial importance to the peace and well-being of the corporate body just as it is to the individual body. In the book, Builders of the Dawn, it is written: 
Meditation helps to fuse the energies of the group on an inner level, so that outer conflicts are minimized. It can also be a source of nurturance and help for individuals in their own growth process. One community that I know of had daily group meditations for many years and was doing very well. But when attendance at the meditations started falling off, the community experienced a lot of internal conflicts and financial difficulty, and visitors felt a lessening of the spiritual vibration of the community.  (McLaughlin, Davidson, p. 207)
	Sounds kind of familiar to me. Does it to you?** It has been my privilege to have experienced the wonder and power of corporate and individual fasting. I believe that such spiritual disciplines are crucial to our corporate and individual futures.
	That is my testimony to the power of fasting. Now, I invite you to the Weekly Celebrative Meal and to feast with your lips and to feast with fasting on your mind. 

**This material was presented as a time when the Brussels House stopped having Daily Office. 
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