Dear
Steven,
Sorry
about the delay in answering your note. As I said, I took no offense and
I’ve been called a lot worse things. I’ve just been busy of late and also
figured this might require a bit of time and care to respond to.
Shit
fasting – an ancient and honored
tradition among dogs, cats, fish, cockroaches, ants, horses, flies, goats,
etc. – is poorly understood and little appreciated among humans. Among
our wiser brethren in the Natural Realm, besides keeping track of your
own business, they will also partake of the excrement of their loved ones.
In fact, even among humans, infants and small children are distinctly inclined to dip a finger until heavy parental conditioning teaches them that the magical stuff is taboo.
Again
among humans, in passionate love and sometimes in the expression of other
feelings altogether, cunnilingus and the consumption of excrement en
passant is commonplace – stick it in, take it out, lick it off sort
of thing – and anal intercourse is an overt expression in a related area.
Obviously there is more going on there than just random motion.
In the Indic tradition, this is a task that falls to the Brahmin caste for the most part according to an anthropologist friend who did her fieldwork in India.
Why
eat shit? It grounds our being. Humanity is a “black box” with existence
going in through the senses on one side and your own particular hashed-over
version coming out in your experience on the other. What goes on in the
box? Psychoanalysis will tell you something about it, but shit eating is
one of the ways to find out more directly. I can guarantee it will never
become an addiction for the pleasure it brings.
It
basically burns out thought by exposing it for a ludicrously oversimplified
way to relate to anything: there is really so much more going on in the
definition of every moment that thought is just astronomically too slow
to ever keep up with what’s actually going on. It also extinguishes the
personal sense of experience control connected with thinking and associating.
In addition, the shit-eater loses his personal feelings – before you had
undeniable emotional reactions to all kinds of idiotic trivia and your
life had some of the elements of a Hollywood tear-jerker; afterwards just
about nothing moves you, especially in the dark period immediately following
a fast. For a time you end up feeling like Jane Austen’s Mr. Darcy and
wondering if he had eccentric eating habits:
"I am perfectly convinced by it that Mr. Darcy has no defect. He owns it
himself without disguise."
"No"--said Darcy, "I have made no
such pretension. I have faults enough, but they are not, I hope, of understanding.
My temper I dare not vouch for. It is, I believe, too little yielding--certainly
too little for the convenience of the world. I cannot forget the follies
and vices of others so soon as I ought, nor their offenses against myself.
My feelings are not puffed about with every attempt to move them. My temper
would perhaps be called resentful.--My good opinion once lost, is lost
forever."
"That is a failing indeed!"--cried
Elizabeth. "Implacable resentment is a shade of character. But you have
chosen your fault well. I cannot laugh at it. You are safe with me."
"There is, I believe, in every disposition
a tendency to some particular evil--a natural defect, which not even the
best education can overcome."
"And your defect is a propensity
to hate everybody."
"And yours," he replied, with a smile, "is willfully to misunderstand
them." (Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, Grosset and Dunlap, New
York, pp. 53-54)
In a mechanical and physical sense, the fast is a way of expressing disgust with a world where deep feeling, love and justice are just so unworkable. In psychiatric terms, this act often appears in connection with unworkable situations of misuse or injustice or anger: when there is no other way, one naturally turns to this option (remember the joke about the “shit-eating grin”?).
Since
you have done urine fasting, you can’t be altogether unaware of the sorts
of things to expect. The two practices experientially overlap. You can
expect emotional swings for a time as you work your way out of the illusion
that feelings have to do with you more than with reality and, like Mr.
Darcy, your vision of others will darken and become more critical, hateful
and definitely less mercy-laden (whether you were inclined to or not in
this culture you are always making excuses for people). Pain exchange becomes
highlighted as being in fact the only issue in any relationship and in
the determination of justice (not exactly ‘an eye for an eye’ but definitely
non-Christian). Everything boils down to ‘value for value’ and while there
are phases you pass through, that never changes.
My
own experience with this practice began in 1980 when I got back from Java
and found that the environment I was now so much more sensitive to was
much more evil and infinitely more corrupt and convoluted than I had known.
One of the key elements of this “red alert” was my family situation which
I suggest you take a look at starting with
a letter to Sela Ward.
This first fast went on for four years until my experience quieted and I could stop. I started another in May 1992 that went on until December 1997: this one was a response to debacle involved in my affaire de coeur: I had gone in in good faith and it seemed the rules changed during the event. What had been totally proper was now subject to debasement in terms that didn’t even make sense to me so I went back to the source to sort it out. This one was long and awful. Nuff said.
The call to shit fasting is generally hate and despair based and you should be aware that your hate of humanity, of existence itself, is proper and there are a lot of us who feel the same way, just not very many are humans.
One global vision that arises is that “existence sucks”. Irreponsible scoundrels (witness my family) manifestly benefit from the self-absorption and lack of social proximity that allows them to sit contentedly contemplating their crimes. Without confrontation, there is no possibility of justice and everything just gets swept under the rug. In Java this would not be possible for them in that people keep track of one another much, much more carefully.
Another
observation is that, in fact, paranoia is too mild a vision of the evil
of being and you have to go much farther to get where we really are. I’d
suggest looking at Balinese beliefs as in the Rangda / Erlangga
legend which says a lot about the horrors that define us.
If
you do go this path, I’ll be here if you need me. Take it slow, and remember
that you aren’t trying to destroy yourself, you are just trying to expose
what is actually happening whether you are aware of it or not. You are
opening to the true horror and the beauty of existence and to those who
define it for what they are.
Best
wishes and “Don’t be hurried”,
David
Howe
Dear David,
Thank you for your thoughtful reply.Maybe because health issues bore you, you went directly to the deeper answers about the more profound reasons and effects of "shit fasting". Those answers are not wasted and I will mind them with due respect for the subtle effects of the practice. However, as I said in my letter', I wanted to begin with the more pedestrian answers about the safety of the consumption. It's a silly question of course like all questions before one is going to make a leap, knowing full well he still going to leap even if he doesn't get the answers he's expecting. And it's as silly as someone, seeing that I am a picture of health after practicing Urine fasting, whether the practice is safe. But ask you anyway, I will. As I said, I had an advantage with Urine practice in that it could be explained to me that Urine was sterile. I don't have that luxury with feces. I have a "survival block" because of hearing of people dying from E-Coli contamination. Isn't the source of E-Coli, feces? Also, with urine, there are no worms or parasites as there are in feces. Before discovering Urine Therapy, it was necessary to have a stool test at a Tropical Disease Specialist office to see if the bowel was clear of worms, parasites etc. So please indulge me and address these issues even if you are living proof of them being non-issues.
On another more fun subject: Have you seen the movie A BEAUTIFUL MIND? I was out of the country so only recently saw it. I was wondering what your reaction to it was. I found myself wanting his reality to be the "real" one because it was more beautiful. I even found myself thinking that the doctors were wrong and he was just experiencing things they just weren't aware of.
However when his wife discovered the unopened information packets he delivered secretly to the drop off box, I had to reevaluate. Still, because of the higher functioning capacity of his mind(witnessed by his original math ideas and most strikingly by his ability to so quickly locate patterns among the constellations!)I wanted it to be the case that the rest that went with that type of mind was not in fact a sickness but simply a reality that most are not sensitive to yet. Apologetics working overtime, I wanted to integrate his fantasy friends as what shamans might see as spirit guides. That, instead of these phenomenon being delusions that have to be lobotomized, medicated or shock therapy'd away, perhaps they are simply normal events when the Kundalini, or the equivalent opening, occurs. That the imbalance in his life was only due to not having enough people around him to share that reality. Perhaps I am only victim of Hollywood's glamorization of his life...perhaps if I actually knew him and didn't see him through the movie, I would feel different. Of course, though, it was only the movie that gave me a glimpse of what he might have been experiencing from inside, only the movie that made it possible to imagine his point of view.
I forgot to mention his paranoia, which I'm sure you can appreciate.His time period was the cold war period, so the paranoia he experienced may indeed have been the result of experiencing what was truly happening on the astral plane.
That's all for now,
Steven
Steven
As for the hygienic issues involved in shit-fasting, I have to admit that I am only an applied scatologist and have not concerned myself notably with the niceties of the medical treatment of the subject.
No I haven't seen A Beautiful Mind though it has been recommended highly by a psychiatrist friend and student who specializes in schizophrenia. When it comes out in video, hopefully I'll get around to it. If you find the issues there interesting, please have a look at
CULTURE AND SCHIZOPHRENIA: A Consideration of Ignorance and Information
Obviously, with my experience the idea that the mathematician had spirit guides of one sort or other doesn't cause much of a stretch of imagination. I personally don't have any “guides” as such but I work with a bevy of spirits and the Western denial of the existence of anything it can't control seems grotesque and pathetic to me.
Interesting to see how this subject keeps coming up nowadays in movies, TV series, etc. Gee, maybe we got it wrong along with everything else. This sort of beauty does indeed exist despite our frequent separation from it in our self-centered culs-de-sac. You might want to have a look at my letters to Loreena McKenitt and Sarah Brightman to get a more developed position on this.
As for
the paranoia he experienced may indeed have been the result of experiencing what was truly happening on the astral plane.
I’m not convinced you have to get as mystical as the astral plane to see the generalized paranoia of our Zeitgeist: just go and sit with the throng in the stands during a major sports championship (with all the hype and hoopla, the screams and the tears) and try to pretend you feel just as you always do. Good luck.
Yours,
David