AVANT SOUL

Take the most intellectually gifted of men or women, highly educated, privy to nuance and privilege, and document on film all the items they place between their lips, how hastily they chew, and how often they swallow or gulp. Now speed up the footage, the film, and observe the degrees of serenity, or the vacuous sense of mindless grasping. Don't even need the sound track. Look at the energy. Now film our lovely volunteers a week later. Same scenes.

Patterns of chewing, of breathing, of neediness and of freedom, repeat daily, with constancy and devotion, throughout each person's life, regardless of education, or in spite of it. This genuine practice, unclouded by dogma or faith, reveals more about a human's innate sense of purpose and unaltered connection to Spirit, than all the Holy Books and nodding sermons.

It's clear that fervent eating takes even the most sophisticated and well-bred person to the issues of their emotions, their sense of momentary mirth, satisfaction, and contentment.

Beyond requirements to supply our girth with daily nutrients and our bodies' life support functions, constantly placing foods from hourly hands to willing mouths is the unanswered question. The question concerns why most of us eat the way we do – why our relationships with food are more reverent than our relationship with God. Shall we do a quick tally?

OK – within the past 48 hours, how many times did you either think about food, eat food, or journey to the restroom? Be brutally honest - - how many times were you present as you ate?

In the same 48 hours, how often did you reach for Spirit's divine presence, pray or ask for “a far more noble” guidance, or connect with the Creator for direction and blessings in your life?

At its most basic and animalistic, that which can be eaten is equated with emotional worth. We don't want to LOOK at this; we'd rather discuss motivation and career; love and property; honesty and lies. Then the next meal approaches and we repeat - - most of us do, anyway - - the same old patterns. Few things are as revealing to the resolution, or deficit, of purpose within individuals' lives as How They Eat and What They Are Putting In Their Bodies.

What is eaten, contained, consumed, or engulfed is no different for the person who is emotionally hungry as it is for the person who builds empires to acquire more things and belongings than can possibly be utilized or employed.

Yes, many of us know that food is tasty and that wealth can be addictive, yet the most basic issues here - - beyond required nutrients - - are existential hungers which in themselves can never be filled.

Physical weight and worldly power are enticing outer mechanisms which seek to resolve inner dilemmas. If food or money solved the problems, it would be very obvious.

Granted, food is delicious, and spending countless moments during each day placing prongs in your mouth can be a substitute for sex, a replacement for longing.

There's also no argument that going shopping -- or taking other individuals' money -- often compensates for a reasonable lack for having much purpose with existence, especially during times of darkness.

It doesn't mean that consumption is -- by itself -- the root of all evil. What it truly indicates is that consumption has become the REPLACEMENT for unimpeded connection to other living things, to God, to the Creator, to the Eternal.

Eating and acquisition expand your size to the rest of the world; they do not make you more connected to the world.

The more you have or possess cannot automatically equate to a "quid pro quo" of that which you are able to share. Possession doesn't equate to inner expansion/awareness.

It reminds one of preschoolers or kindergartners on the playground who reach into the sandbox to contentedly place dubious objects into their mouths. While their mothers scream, "Don't put that in your mouth!", the toddlers glance up, surprised at the commotion, with a "why not?" look on their faces.

Funny thing, that attitude isn't that altered from one which is placed into practice by grown-ups:

"I was merely going to bring this into my life and invest in it strictly for me, so why advise me to share with total strangers? It's my sandbox."

More often than not, the more you acquire, the more you gain, the more you've got to lug around, and the more you are motivated it to keep it to yourself. There ARE exceptions, yet they're rare. Two gross stereotypes almost inevitably apply:

1) Wealthy people do not share fairly, or cleanly, which is why they're wealthy - -

2) Wealthy people have the worst vacuum cleaners (most poorly maintained equipment) for their hired help. Even their hand brooms have taken a beating.

For every Paul Newman who donates all profits from his popular food brands to charity, there are untold billionaire “hoarders,” the mega-multi-millionaire covetous “greed-bastards” who do absolutely nothing to improve global conditions, in fact, just the opposite: They are the Idi Amin's, the Kim Jong II's of our times, who pillage the resources of their countries.

We cannot expose the unbelievable corruption here, the hundreds of thousands of Ugandan and Korean citizens who perform forced labor in prison camps, in China, in Zimbabwe, in Saudi Arabia - - the list is numbing - - and yet corrupt economies are often feted by US oil companies.

One might even look at the corruption by oil in California's inequitable gas pump prices. The long list of global dictators might shock too few of us, and includes more than mere handfuls of American Republicans.

At the base of the world's inequality is an unrelenting and not fillable hunger, a starvation to EAT and to ACQUIRE that which cannot be quenched. It's the clearest definition we have of modern evil - - gluttons who devour the resources and the lives of others, for unrepentant appetites.

Be it food or be it wealth, there is no difference at the level where "being stuffed with more than one needs" has replaced divinity; it's the Satanic substitute for GOD.

Just as you can't logically explain to a two-year old why placing an unsanitary object in the mouth is dangerous, so too it isn't logic which governs landscapes of emotional humans.

Nor can logic or sanity apply to the stunted, the warped, or the twisted childish royalty of countless generations of despots and dictators. What history teaches us is that covetousness, personal hunger and unhealthy relationships -- to food and imbibing – create all suffering.

Appetite is the root of all evil. And not just any appetite -- unrestrained appetite will do it.

Consider history. We indulge our emotions like children. Key to understanding emotional illness -- key to understanding genocide, IF THAT IS POSSIBLE - - is that the NEED to be filled and to steal more than anyone's share - - cannot ever resolved by the loyal, good subjects of logic, or reason.

Otherwise we would, logically, not choose the relationships which are out-and-out wrong for us. As in our relationship to food. Or our relationships to sharing resources and coveting wealth.Or, our global relationship to violence which cannot be logical, and which is an unfilled need for immediate, senseless gratification.

Because the historical hunger for violence is - - at its essence - - meaningless and pointless, it escalates to increasing meaninglessness and pointlessness. Just think: with all the violence throughout History, were it truly gratifying, we would have resolved it by now. Or consider international relationships, where a world's terribly childish leaders wage ravenous wars.

Profitability by arms merchants and warfare industries is enough of an incentive to invest in destruction, and provided distractions from carefully implemented changes at home. We support global pollution by leaders who acquiesce to market manipulations by utilities, and the tyranny of oil as the gluttonous fuel for a world-based economy.

Logic wouldn't support the hunger of nation against nation. Since hunger & fear are irrational, 'government by committee' manipulates its small-minded citizens, inflating patriotic appetites, feeding flames of separatism. The endemic greed by conglomerate industries is a bulimia. It is destructive and vomits all over us.

Our sharing of resources is also bulimic. There's no logic which encourages mayhem in the marketplace to pit each man against his neighbor, region against region, local employees against outsourcing families overseas, industry against consumptive industry...

And, were logic King & Queen of our regularly emptied conscience, we would not partner with the sheer quantities of "stimulus intake" in such unrestrained ways.

As in sheer quantities of food.

Or vast quantities of possessions.

As in sex...

Or "escape me" media.

Nor can logic be sufficient reason to suffer or die prematurely from inactivity, Juvenile Diabetes, stroke, heart attack, obesity, loneliness, or contentiousness in Iraq. Or Afghanistan. Or Washington.

What can a devout person logically convey in an attempt to explain human hungers, especially drastic and unreasonable hungers, of wanting to be filled - - or wanting to take possession?

What priest or rabbi, what elder or caring counselor, can possibly explain the bastard child of hunger mating with insanity? ...

What is war, or bloodshed, or gluttony, except some sort of mad possession? The madness is to try to fill that which cannot be filled, and to take over and dominate that which cannot be dominated.

Logically, then, so very logically, war and the fashions of modern terrorism have become the ultimate necrophilia.

And so it is logically written that the modern STOMACH has now become our IMMORTAL GOD and KING.

There is the hunger of despair and frustration .... There's the rootless hunger of escape.

It is the hunger which occurs without a spiritual connection to hope, the hunger of shiny surfaces and journalistic cynicism, as individuals feel powerless in this world of unending struggles, of escalating violence.

And within almost every state of powerlessness, food is a universal drug, the cross-cultural opiate momentarily filling an emptiness whenever an individual feels as if life has lost that meaningful contribution, that substantive difference, or a reason for mattering. . .

It never matters whether the person's life makes a substantive difference or not -- if he or she is feeling a hunger of powerlessness, food is the retreat. Praise and pass the plate.

There is the hunger of struggle. The hunger of not being heard.

Feed me. There is the hunger of real -- or imagined -- states of insignificance.

Feed me. Food is a drug. The domain of governments or the voting booths cannot soothe our clotted wounds, or ease the mocking train wrecks of a Spaniard's agonies.

Feed me. A person in pain is often aware that they're self-absorbed. It does not necessarily lessen the sensations of exquisite pain.

Feed me. You can't necessarily convince a wounded person that he or she is significant in this world. Most tellingly, the feelings of loss exacerbate and magnify an individual's open wounds of hunger.

Therefore, the most revealing statement, as Time magazine reports, is that obesity is currently our undisputed champion for early death, and that our relationship to food is one of erotic sadomasochism. We don't need a dominatrix. We have a complicity active fork and our knife.

Tell me, Lord God, how to better serve you - - but first - - let's kneel at thy altar and say rosaries at thy Church of the Divine Refrigerator. Praise the slower-moving arteries of thy bread, thy wine, and thy tombstone pizza. Never mind. Let's eat out, and go to a drive-in, the drive-in CHURCH.

You know, God's a good thing, correct? But people who are starved aren't often fed in the current moment.

Now we've become an appetite-crazed society where the stomach has replaced our daily God.

When hunger for not being seen, not being heard, not being recognized, or not being loved makes many feel empty, citizens in their respective "global villages" continue to move towards their stomachs. It's a proven direction which moves from one opening and empties out to another.

Each of us is a citizen of Higher Power. In times of chaos, disillusionment, lack of continuity, and outright boondoggery, citizens return to the basic animal needs of a wailing child:

What if GOD appears to have abandoned your Creation? Your needs to be fed can then become more poignant, more vital, than the serenity and abiding timelessness of your Creator.

Yet - - IMAGINE - -

If people initiated dialogue with God or Spirit as often as they ate. - -Hey God!- -

(No, not you, candy bar.)

"And the Word was made flesh."

(What if we became the desired state of being, instead of feeding the emotional hunger?)

"And dwelt among us."

Once you realize - - once and for all, that what matters most is the infinite loving connection you develop with LIFE itself.

You are the film, the negative, and the photographic development of this picture.

And you will no longer need to be stressed and starved for meaning -- or belonging -- in quite the same way.

Because you are filled with a more lasting relationship with purpose -- and not futility, with connection -- and not disconnect, with heartfelt melody, not cries of other people's wars.