Telos Journal Edition Three October 2013

E d i ti o n T h r e e O c t o b er 2013



CONTENTS Tao of Eating: Classic Guidance for Lasting Dietary Wellness page 5 Nutritional Health: Chinese civilization is the oldest on Earth. Traditional Chinese agriculture and eating habits are thus rubrics for which the rest of humanity can benefit. Their natural traditions are reflected by their ancient philosophies, and the most prevalent is Lao Tzu’s Tao Teh Ching which focuses on man’s connection to nature. By combining Tzu’s Taoist wisdom with eating lifestyle, the impotent diet industry is undercut and replaced with mindful nutritional practices. Tao of Exercise: Timeless Advice for Sustainable Fitness page 10 Fitness Health: When reflections of the Tao Teh Ching are put in motion, connections between agents and their environments are intimately enhanced, and the body as a result becomes fitter for its surroundings. Learn the healthful basics of movement lifestyle and kindle the inspiration you need to keep your body fresh, elastic, and tough enough to deal with even spontaneous moments…for the rest of your days. Mr. Ben and the Farm Game page 15 Economic Talk: Mr. Ben is a good man who sometimes feels painfully ordinary. Is his life an economical game, a kind of transactional automation of repetitive movements primarily meant to fill his gut with ‘food’? Mr. Ben and his students speed up time and show us what may (or may not) be taken seriously as the virtual version of the evolution and devolution of money-orientated farming.

Photo credit: Australian Natural Health, April-May 2013 issue

Tao of Eating Classic Guidance for Lasting Dietary Wellness Lao Tzu’s Tao Teh Ching is one of the most ancient and perhaps the most confident sources of literature available to us. Whereas Confucius’s wisdom tutors the connection of man to man and advises them to labor exhaustively for the welfare and nobility of each other, Lao Tzu’s wisdom goes beyond comparative behavior and seeks to synchronize man to eternal nature in an intimate journey. Excessive social distractions and the mundane automations of everyday life are thus left behind. At first strange to Western understanding, the Tao often works mysteriously with the unbothered truth that lies between contradictions. Tzu is known to say things like: “Difficult and easy complement each other,” and Johnny Cash doubtless thought of the Tao when he wrote: “Where the rain never falls, the sun never shines.” We ought to use Tzu’s insight to gain deeper realizations of ourselves and our world. When Tzu says: “Big things can only be achieved by attending to their small beginnings,” we can doubly apply the wisdom. We can understand logically that in order to achieve goals B and C we must first achieve the prerequisite goal A. Secondly, we can relate the maxim to our present situation and streamline focus, which will afford us the power to intrepidly pilot our creative actions. The Tao of Eating and Tao of Exercise graft these logical and existential lessons onto today’s multi-national diet and fitness problems. Applying Taoist knowledge to diet and exercise can provide us with lifelong considerations that can eventually be forged into permanent abilities. Our present and future health depend on these abilities, and incessant reliance on external sources for dietetic and fitness knowledge and services only delays that knowledge from becoming our own. With Taoist training, we will learn to effectively select healthy food, maximize our work-outs, and appreciate our physical uniqueness without diagnoses and prescriptions. Proposition One: Listen to your body, before and after you eat. There—you sitting in front of your plate, nothing can separate you from it, your thoughts are correspondingly affected, and once you ingest your meal, it becomes mutually organized and fused with the workings of your organs. Simply become conscious of this intimacy. Physiologically, the food that you take-in immediately begins the process of cell reparation via the absorption of ‘transit models’ while balancing your body’s mass. Psychologically and spiritually, knowing what ingredients compose your food, how your moods and range of activities are affected, and how much you genuinely appreciate

what you are eating boosts and bolsters a closer understanding of yourself within your world of consumption. The ability to listen to your body’s nutritional needs before and after eating will critically enhance your knowledge and power of self-possessing your eating choices. Ask yourself how you physically and mentally feel before consumption, and how you want to feel following your meal, taking into consideration what your daily routine entails and any additional activities you plan on pursuing in the day and the ones that follow. Proposition Two: Minimize the things that you eat in packages. Foods that are synthetically produced take longer for your body to process. The farther your food is away from its natural state, its ingredients being adulterated in labs by preservatives and ‘flavor enhancers’, the farther it is from the circle of life's continuous natural recurrence. Since the diminishing of the traditional and vital farmer’s markets, where tasteful chefs and slow-foodies still graze, the supermarket has risen on weedy and expansive roots. Since management and product sources are highly centralized at these megastores, the product diversity is reduced compared to that of the traditional market. This mechanized reduction of sustainable food diversity technically draws crops from increasingly larger farms which often substitute nitrogen fertilizers, herbicides, pesticides, and genetically modified seeds (GMOs) for the profound nurturing that human labor has provided the land and livestock since the dawn of horticulture. Sources of health epidemics around the globe, these chemical practices initiate job reduction and compromise the ecosystems in and out of our bodies. Michael Pollen, author of In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto and other true-food-security works, tells us that “farming has changed more in the last fifty years than it has in the last 10,000.” Comparatively, food that has been chemically adulterated lacks 40% of the nutritive value than organic food produced over that 50 year span. To lessen your reliance and augment your understanding of processed foods, be wary of the items that generally sit in the centers of supermarkets, where most processed foods linger and are preserved from behaving like the perishable goods that some claim to be. It’s unlikely that Cap’n Crunch and the Green Giant would admit their stuff is less than natural. Proposition Three: Endeavor to understand the ingredients that compose your food. If you will be eating packaged food, the simplest yet most surefire way of knowing whether it is truly natural or not is whether you can pronounce the ingredient. Anything lab-made will leave residues within your body, especially if it is a preservative.