The Mandala of Mutual Nourishment: The Story of Bread and Its Relationship to Time and Language
This post fits in with the series on Hologram, Ecogram, and Mandala. When we consider the mandala principle with care, we rather quickly sense how everything arises as mandala. The hologram contains everything, and each thing contains the whole hologram.
But that can get overwhelming. So we can just think of this as a contemplation of some aspects of the story of bread, and how that story illuminates language and time in the dominant culture.
That might sound abstract. But we have in mind something incredibly concrete and intimate, something in our very bodies and minds. We can arrive at this concreteness by considering the story of bread as an illustration of the pattern of insanity that grips the dominant culture, and how bread reveals the delusions of the culture’s notion of “progress”.
This has to do with the ways our economic and political system directly conflict with our wellbeing, and why we need to return ourselves to sanity, to wholeness and sacredness.
But, again, let's make this concrete. Maggie Beidelman captures an aspect of the pattern of insanity very well in the following line that comes from an article that appeared on Alternet: “modern wheat flour is causing us to lose our ability to digest modern wheat flour.”[1] This is a crucial philosophical insight—and we must allow it to carry us much further than “bread”. It’s not wheat itself that makes trouble, but our idea of wheat, our way of knowing what wheat is and how to “use” “it” “efficiently”—in other words, “wheat” as bound up with our misunderstanding of time and our ignorance of interwovenness. Time, agenda, purpose, efficiency . . . the way of knowing of the Cartesian coordinate system, the fragmented ordering of a mechanistic universe.
All thinking is cosmological, but some thinking comes from a mechanistic universe, and some thinking presences as Cosmic Thinking. Any thinking caught up in a pattern of insanity, any way of knowing that is a pattern of insanity, will get pulled into furthering the pattern of insanity. Know-how will amount to knowing how to further that pattern of insanity—efficiently.
Let’s make that a little clearer by thinking through recent developments in the story of bread. There is a research project called Plant Resources in the Paleolithic. This collective of researchers have published interesting evidence about the diets of our ancestors.
For instance, Revedin et al. (2010 and 2015) describe evidence that humans have been grinding up plant matter, in the manner of making flour, for at least 30,000 years. The starches found on ancient mortar-and-pestle artifacts come from plant roots such as cattails, which store nutrients in rhizomes. Our ancestors would have pulled these from the earth, cleaned them up, and ground them. Then they would cook the “flour,” perhaps on hot stones, something like an ancient kind of flatbread. At some point, wheat must have been used, and at some point humans must have discovered what happens when the wheat flour or dough is allowed to ferment.
Maybe we should never have used wheat. Maybe that has more to do with our subsequent problems than any other single factor—if we want to try and isolate factors. But the real issue seems to be the style of consciousness that goes altogether with the development of a certain kind of agriculture and the centrality of bread. Wheat in some way came altogether with what we might call invasive agriculture and conquest consciousness.
Let us indulge the notion that agriculture per se does not seem problematic. But invasive agriculture (perhaps marked by such characteristics as the tilling of the soil, planting monocrops, and certainly the use of vast tracts of land relatively far outside of the main areas of communal living) and the associated consequences themselves illustrate the pattern of insanity. We are in some ways looking at a pattern within a pattern when we look at bread.
For millennia, bread was made with freshly milled grain. Anyone familiar with wheat germ oil knows why: wheat germ goes rancid quite quickly, so time becomes accentuated, and misunderstandings of time may eventually become amplified. The wheat kernel that gets milled has three major components: the bran, the endosperm, and the wheat germ. All three offer important nutrients to our bodies. Bread made with truly fresh, whole grain flour, especially when produced with sufficient fermentation, seems relatively easy to digest, at least for those of us who have adapted to eating bread.
We should keep in mind that bread might, in the end, be a pretty bad idea—already evidence of a pattern of insanity. It might not be anywhere as nourishing as freshly picked or freshly caught food. But let us also keep in mind that traditional breads might have offered far more nutrition than today’s common loaf, and some kind of bread (perhaps even non-wheat bread, or perhaps a whole grain fermented wheat bread) might have made for a decent supplementary component in a varied diet in places where less invasive agriculture could provide such supplements to hunting and gathering. There would be many differences between a more ideal bread and what we have today.
Among other things, traditional breads may have been left to rise for far longer than a few hours (we don’t have time for that), and the composition of microbes, and thus the composition of metabolites and micronutrients, would have been quite unique, and possibly nonexistent in industrialized production—not to mention the degraded soils we have today. We certainly took a hit when we went into invasive agriculture, but we did adapt and work out some of the kinks so that we could make relatively healthy and nourishing foods.
We might still be far better off with a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, but agriculture remains a workable solution as we try to sensibly balance the human population with the carrying capacity of Earth—something we may perhaps never, ever accomplish without significantly reducing global population (by ethical means, like intelligent family planning, and widespread ethical awareness that leads many couples to have no children, and leads almost all others to have only one child, until the population comes down and other factors get in balance).
But back to bread. As a consequence of the industrial revolution, food would inevitably become industrialized. We should perhaps consider this very notion a symptom of the pattern of insanity, bound up with time and, to say it again because it bears endless repeating, arising out of ignorance of interwovenness.
The industrialization of bread unfolded on many levels, including milling. Industrial milling grinds and sifts the bran and the germ out of the wheat, thus robbing it of vital nutrients—but, we may recall, also changing the flour’s temporal dimension, because the germ gets ground out and the resulting flour becomes more resistant to time. Industrial baking probably further robs bread of vital nutrients. And industrial farming has already robbed the wheat of vital nutrients, because of soil depletion. Thus, by the time it gets to us, bread is no longer food in the richest sense (we need a philosophical “rectification of names” here).
We use the same word for the stuff that gets to us, the stuff that often makes life convenient: we still call it “bread”. How quick and easy to pop some bread in the toaster to eat with coffee in the morning—coffee from a plastic machine, perhaps even a single-serving plastic pod. How simple to pack a sandwich for lunch (sealed in a plastic container to keep it fresh and protected), a welcome bit of nosh we can manage without utensils, while sitting at our plastic-finished desk, unable to take a proper lunch break. How medicating to eat good bread with dinner after a long, stressful day, sitting on vinyl or polyester seats that thankfully don’t stain (place mats too, perhaps).
We call that stuff we eat “bread,” but it doesn’t have the same meaning as it would have had for people living a few hundred years ago, and, as with many of our foods today, one wonders if our ancestors might bite into it and say, “You call this bread?” or, “You call this an apple?” or what have you. Here, too, we need to rectify names. Many people do not eat bread but instead eat “bread 2.0” or “Frankenbread” or at least “industrialized bread,” which goes altogether with industrialized agriculture (a Frankenstein’s monster if there ever was one), and thus we should rather expect that our systems might begin to get sensitive and send us signals to stop eating this stuff, stop growing and producing “food” as we now do.
Our “bread” is not really bread, and if we believe in the dictum that Food should be Medicine, then it isn’t Food either—nor is much of our other food, especially as we might discern from insight into interwovenness. Our food and our way of life is not truly nourishing.
The fact that we had, in some sense, killed bread became evident when malnutrition began to rise after the introduction of industrialized bread. Once human beings realized they had done something insane with bread, we might imagine they would respond something like this:
“Well, it looks like we shouldn’t do that. Maybe we need to take a great deal of care when we get the idea to industrialize something. This has taught us an important lesson. Let’s go back to the old way of making bread, and in general do some further contemplation.”
But the pattern of insanity held them securely, and instead people decided to add synthetic vitamins to bread.
It is essential to see how this works, and how well it works—from the standpoint of the pattern of insanity. Producing wheat flour that one can ship all over the world, without worrying that it will go rancid, means one can make a lot of money, and one can pull all the old-fashioned millers into new forms of industrialization. Moreover, this also opens up the possibility for chemical manufacturers to make more money by producing synthetic vitamins. It’s a win all around for the pattern of insanity: the pattern gets strengthened and also furthered along; we double down on its “progress,” and we make a heck of a lot of progress on economic, social, and even species inequality. One obviously sees this in the case of breakfast cereals too. When we look at the ingredients we find synthetic vitamins added to an otherwise starkly unnourishing “food”.
That pattern of insanity then continues. As more people develop gluten sensitivity or even full-on celiac disease, it might dawn on us that we need to fundamentally change our relationship with life, with food, with medicine. We might decide to see into the sacredness of the soul, which directs us away from what sickens and weakens us. But, instead, the pattern of insanity holds fast: We have an industrial revolution in gluten free “products,” and they flood the marketplace, not with food or medicine, but with more industrialized products and further “progress”.
It is not necessarily better nourishment to eat a cookie or any other product made with potato flour or pea protein in place of wheat (and often with higher levels of sugar). Soon we will have new ailments that arise from treating the potato or the pea as we have treated wheat, and treating ourselves and our world as the pattern of insanity dictates.
The example of bread doesn’t capture everything about the general pattern of insanity that has us in its grips, but once we get the feel for this sort of simplified example we can find it replicated in how we have developed industrialized agriculture in general and in various specific cases, how we have developed antibiotic use, how we have developed a vast array of technology, and so on. We can also find it in academia. It seems important for academic philosophers in particular to sense how this pattern of insanity gets perpetuated in university philosophy departments. The activity of these departments may seem rational. A department may want to model itself on how top departments in the field function.
A department may, for instance, have lower standing in the rankings of philosophy departments—already a strange concept. What is the solution? The department may seek to model itself on what other departments do, thus perpetuating philosophy as it is being done, without deep reflection on whether this is the best way to do things—because we often think we are trying to do things the best way possible. We say, “I don’t know any other way to do philosophy!” by which we mean we think we have it basically correct.
Instead of looking at the state of the world and humiliating ourselves enough to say, “Something may be seriously wrong with the way we do philosophy!” we evade such a humiliating experience, evade any suggestion that what is wrong with the world goes together with how we do philosophy (which can serve as a stand-in for just about any discipline, from physics and medicine to poetry and painting). This only furthers philosophy’s isolation and alienation from the larger culture and the World—it would have to be further isolated to not actively participate in the pattern of insanity, so goes the delusion—and thus, even though it seems insane to suggest that philosophy magically stands outside of the pattern of insanity, we behave as if this were so, and thus perpetuate the insanity.
Alternatively the department might embrace the spirit of education and philosophy, which includes a dimension of pattern transcendence, a willingness to question authority, a willingness to cultivate an ecology that thrives on the basis of diversity. A philosophy department might see its prime imperative as fundamentally including service to life, that its activity must further the conditions of life and the attunement of culture with Nature, and with wisdom, love, and beauty.
A philosophy department could thus grow by leaps and bounds (far more growth than the top-ranked programs demonstrate, caught as they are in the decline of humanities) if it opened itself up to what students are hungry for, if it opened itself up to the suffering of the World, recognizing that students at all levels in a university experience this suffering and want to heal it.
Who wants to suffer? No one. But philosophers offer nothing to heal the suffering. A philosophy department could be a place where people come to inquire into the nature of suffering and how to heal it. It could be a place where people want to come, to work with their lives and to deal with the problems of the World and the problems of their own soul.
Such a department would naturally encourage enrollment of students with rather different approaches to philosophizing—even though this seems scary, and we aren’t sure how to navigate a situation in which people philosophize in ways we don’t feel comfortable with and maybe don’t feel competent to evaluate. But our inquiry invites us to cultivate new competencies—including, essentially, the cultivation of ancient competencies in a new context, to practice-and-realize the ancient competencies of philosophy as a way of life, and to find out what a different way of knowing would mean—not to ask for a description of it, not to ask for a summary or explanation, but to engage with it, to experiment, to experience, precisely because we see we have gotten caught up in a pattern of insanity, that we are lived by powers we pretend to understand, and that they arrange our lives and our loves, our cravings, fears, self-doubts, and the degradation of our own souls and the soul of the World.
We could have such a revolution in any philosophy department. It would mean hiring different people, making a stand to say, “We don’t want the same old thing—no matter how new and cutting-edge it appears. We precisely do not want someone who might be poached by Harvard or Yale in two years’ time, because all that does is perpetuate the pattern of insanity and possibly destabilize the ecology here when they get poached.”
Instead, the department would become famous for doing things differently, in a radical, rebellious, revolutionary, paradigm shifting sense. This does not mean throwing everything away. It means genuinely opening to and cultivating ecological diversity, and seeking to cultivate the “major” by looking at where we are needed—to become responsive philosophers, to become responsive to the suffering of our own present student population and our own lived and living World (which means the local landscape as well as interwoven ecologies that may seem far away).
This is our most sacred responsibility right now because we philosophize (make art, do science, read novels, write histories) while the conditions of life fall apart all around us and in us. How else will we address this? If we continue to do the same basic thing, epistemically speaking (and ethically, aesthetically, metaphysically, onotlogically speaking), how will we get a different result? Is it not insanity to keep rationalizing this process?
Recall that, in the case of bread, humans industrialized it, and then signs of malnutrition appeared. In response to this, instead of thinking we needed to go back to the older way or somehow rethink the whole project, humans added synthetic vitamins to the bread. Similarly, at some point we began to change the practice of philosophy, altering it into something more academic and abstract, proliferating professors of philosophy rather than philosophers.
Signs and symptoms of malnutrition of the soul began to spread, soul scurvy set in, reflected in the conditions of life as well as in the humans and their now synthetic ecologies. Instead of rethinking the project, we supplement the product with more synthetic additives: more cars, more administrators, more laptops, more journals, more concepts, more conferences, more footnotes, more distinctions, more meetings, more professors in an industrialized philosophy. We in academia produce concepts and abstractions that can be shipped all over the world, and employed to colonize and control (even if we intend them to decolonize and liberate). We can sell books and articles all over the world. We can get on an airplane and fly thousands of miles across the planet, and make our living on the activity—make our living on the backs of countless sentient beings.
Meanwhile, none of this has to do with cultivating vitalizing ecologies we can live on, in, through, as. We cultivate ecologies of abstraction—the symbolic life in a pejorative sense—but fail to cultivate ecologies of mutual liberation and mutual nourishment (indeed, precisely the opposite). Because we produce all these journals and books, because we fly to conferences and then to faraway places to decompress, we need to take more oil out of the ground to power the servers, the printers, the laptops, the jets. It all goes together.
It’s not that we are alone as professional philosophers in degrading the culture. No, all of us do it together. But professional philosophers, anyone formally referring to themselves by the name “philosopher”—including those who probably should admit they effectively play the role of professional philosopher, and who maybe should admit they may not have sufficient training, experience, insight, and maturity to fulfill that role with sufficient wisdom, love, and beauty—all such people should hold themselves to a higher ethical conscience, and somehow we all must come together, in communion and community, and say, “This is the only problem we can work on right now.”
If the past 2500 years of philosophy in the dominant culture means anything, it should mean that we will not sleepwalk our way back to where Socrates found himself in Athens, but now on a global scale. Athenian culture was not monolithic, but a certain kind of monoculture spread, leading to the degradation of the culture, and the collapse of the civilization.
Similarly, the dominant culture as a whole is not monolithic. It’s a group of traditions, and not a matter of race, gender, or religion. But a dangerous altogetherness has arisen in it, one we may call conquest consciousness, and, because of the pervasiveness of the influence of the dominant culture, it has locked us all in a pattern of insanity. Will we continue to produce Frankenphilosophy, philosophy 2.0, industrialized philosophy, the monetized professing of “philosophy”? Or will we find better ways of knowing, informed by our own ancient traditions?
I am not villainizing all of philosophy, or even the whole of the dominant culture’s philosophy, or the whole of the self-help industry, or the whole of anything. I am not sure what is helpful and what isn’t. For all I know, the most important insight, the most life-saving insight of all time will come out of the current ways of knowing. I only raise the question that maybe there is something important we can know in another way of knowing, and that maybe there is something vital that could come from a different ecology, a more diverse and realistic ecology.
Moreover, it is essential to see that professors of philosophy, self-help gurus, and many entrepreneurs are good people with good hearts. This is no kind of patronizing remark. It is an admission that our intentions (as we tend to work with intentions) don’t always suffice: By trying to do the right thing, by trying to function sincerely, by simply living our lives, we may yet contribute to the degradation of the conditions of life.
Very intelligent and well-intentioned people may be caught by the pattern of insanity because our intentions, too, have a context, one both conscious and unconscious. That context includes our vision of life, and our capacity to sense the interwovenness of all things. Our intentions become increasingly skillful and realistic as they arise with a more sensitive, nuanced, discerning, wise, loving, and beautiful (and more beautifully embodied) feel for life. Wisdom is skillful interwovenness.
These contemplations about bread ultimately relate to our more general contemplations about time, and the cultural practices (including practices of language and thought) that go altogether with a misunderstanding of time and our ignorance of interwovenness (and perhaps it bears emphasis that “altogetherness” does not mean linear causality . . . we need to sense the interwovenness of our misunderstanding of self, world, time, nature, and more with the degraded condition of the natural world and the human soul).
Time is money in our culture. We get trained to see money as good, to feel a deep conscious and/or unconscious attraction to money. We get trained to think in time, to think about time, to time travel in our minds, rehashing the past over and over in guilt, regret, and anger, and spinning ourselves dizzy over the future, in widening gyres of hope, fear, anxiety, craving, confusion, hatred, and self-doubt—all manifesting by means of incredible amounts of doing.
Neurosis of various kinds comes altogether with leaving the moment and thinking about the past, present, and future (moment is a fourth time, beyond past, present, and future). This leaving the moment—endless attempts to escape from the fourth time, escape from Sophia, escape from wisdom, love, and beauty—actually makes life feel a bit disjointed. Perhaps paradoxically to conquest consciousness, the experience of time Dogen (as well as certain indigenous cultures) invites us into feels more continuous (further challenging our dualistic thinking). Some of the most sophisticated spiritual practices in the World come from the so-called tantric traditions of Hinduism and Buddhism.
The meaning of “tantra” carries various connotations. For one, it relates to thread weaving all the way through. In one connotation, it suggests a warp thread that serves as a frame for the weaving, the continuousness of a weaving process that patterns forth all our experience (it patterns forth life). Another connotation suggests the basic sense of an unbroken continuum of mind. Even if mind arises as moment, we can experience an unbroken continuum, and even if we experience delusion, fear, suffering, and so on, this mind is continuous with the Nature of Mind. In the tantric traditions, Nature of Mind has no beginning, and thus we can call it an unbroken, unborn continuum.
If escape is what you want,
Hide within Mind-Essence;
If you want to run away,
Flee to the place of Awakeness.
There is no other place of safe refuge.
Uprooting all confusion from your mind,
Stay with me here in rest and quiet.
~ Milarepa
When we divide up experience into set workdays, 22-minute sitcoms, 45-minute commutes, 30-minute yoga classes, 2 hour committee meetings, and so on, we can fall into a disjointed kind of experience that only feels continuous because of its incessant drain. We get little genuine rest. We feel a continuous barrage of stresses and strains from which we want to escape, but we do not have a sense of continuous clarity, ceaseless practice and realization. We have no true refuge.
This happens in large part because of our own mindlessness and the mindlessness of the anti-Culture and its conquest style of consciousness. We get pulled from one thing to the next in rather artificial ways—the ping of a text message, the receipt of an administrative email, the frustration of unexpected traffic, all the various manifestations of human agendas—not because of a dance with Nature or communion with sacredness.
Our news-and-entertainment holds to strict temporal patterns (e.g. the “sitcom code,” the standard pattern for many, many television shows, and the horrifying fact that so-called “news” essentially gets produced as entertainment, and so never has much chance of in-forming us on the basis of wisdom, love, and beauty) so that our attention can get harvested continuously, rather than cultivated and gifted to life.
In a spiritual setting, a rhythmic schedule allows practitioners to enter timelessness—the rupture of ordinary time. That can only happen if they forget themselves, which opens them to the sacred, liberating them into larger ecologies of mind. But the temporal structuring of the dominant culture only seeks to get us to lose ourselves, to keep us open to extraction—of all kinds, at all hours.
One could argue that every Culture, and every anti-Culture too, relies on trance, and the question comes to what kind of trances a Culture makes available. Trance, we could say, signifies entrainment, resonance, attunement. These notions carry some kind of synchronizing connotation (synchronistic in some way), but they do not necessarily happen in the manner the western mind tends to think, based on misunderstanding time. In any case, we can ask: With what do we attune? With what should we attune?
[1] https://www.alternet.org/2013/06/gluten-intolerance/