Chapter L – The Secret of Spiritual Eating
Why is Neo set free by a pill he swallows?
"The type of food, the manner of eating, the amount eaten and the reason for eating all have a tremendous spiritual influence."
The subject of eating appears in the film several times, in different forms:
- Morpheus's red / blue pill
- The Oracle's candies / cookies
- Cypher's steak / the Merovingian's restaurant
- The porridge of the fighters of Zion
Through these examples of eating, the film tries to convey several ideas connected with the spiritual essence of food. The guideline running through all of them is: the type of food, the manner of eating, the amount eaten and the reason for eating all have a tremendous spiritual influence. The Hebrew word for food, Ma'aChaL, serves as an acronym: Ma (what), Eich (how), Kama (how much), Lama (why).
Morpheus's red pill
The creators of the film deliberately chose to build Neo's turning point – his choice and liberation – around eating the red pill. Morpheus sets before Neo the choice between the blue pill, which means going back to bed in "normal" life, asleep inside the world of illusion, believing whatever he wants to believe (the "each one lives by his own faith" of Smith and the existentialists), and the red pill, which will allow him to stay in Wonderland (pele, wonder, is the letters of aleph in reverse order – looking from the letter Bet, with which the world was created, toward the Aleph, which was before creation, the "Master of the world") and to go down to the very depths of existence.
This first scene teaches that eating has a deep influence on a person's state of consciousness and on the direction of his spiritual progress. Physical eating is really a coarse expression of spiritual "eating" (thinking and learning). Just as the physical digestive system breaks down physical food and builds the physical body from its components, so the spiritual digestive system "breaks down" the world, digests it, and builds the personality from it. The systems are connected to each other; they are really the same system in different octaves. That is why students who exhaust their mental digestion through intensive study also exhaust their physical digestive system and the organs connected to it. That is why babies, busy with the physical and mental-spiritual digestion of the new existence into which they were born, suffer mainly from digestive problems and gas. That is why young people who travel to the Far East and go through experiences there that shake the spiritual center around which they built their lives often come home with various digestive disorders. An army marches on its stomach. A person's mental outlook is a mirror image of his culinary activity and behavior.
That famous scene in which Morpheus offers Neo the choice between the two pills symbolizes, more than anything, the duality in man's relationship with the world. In everything a person touches there is a double possibility hiding: either connection with, or disconnection from, the world of truth beyond the illusion. Every contact with the world can either help us free ourselves from the mental prison or thicken the screen covering our eyes. Eating, in this context, is much more than touching. Eating is a merging between the eater and the eaten – as someone said, "you are what you eat." Every such merging takes place between two entities with different levels of awareness. The way and form of the eating, the merging, will determine which of the entities will be dominant: whether the lower level will rise to the higher one, or whether the higher will sink down to a narrower, more disconnected awareness. Put simply: will the cucumber become a human being, or will the human being become a cucumber!
The scene of eating the cake at the Merovingian's comes to show us that in every food there hides a "program" that acts on the person who eats it, in a way determined by the circuit printed in it. Inside the physical food there is a spiritual essence – a kind of inner consciousness that connects with and influences the person who eats it. The Sages call this inner consciousness sparks of awareness – sparks of holiness. The Me'or Einayim explains the verse "Man does not live by bread alone, but by everything that comes out of the mouth of the Lord": the physical body is indeed nourished by physical food, but the soul is nourished by the spiritual dimension ("what comes out of the mouth of the Lord") hiding between the atoms and molecules. The Baal Shem Tov further expands and explains that those sparks of awareness hidden in foods are parts connected with the soul of the person who eats them, and all the hunger and thirst for a particular food comes from the soul's longing to reunite with its parts. He bases this on the verse from Psalms: "Hungry and thirsty, their soul is wrapped within them." The craving for a particular food comes from the soul's inner sensing of its own parts, wrapped in that physical food.
We know very well what happened to Neo after he ate the red pill. We all know that there are substances in the world that are able to change the degree of opacity of our reality filter, called the "brain." (We will discuss the spiritual essence of the brain in the chapter on Da'at.) There are entities (plants, substances) whose merging (eating) causes this filter to open, bringing in stimuli and information in an amount that can burn the hardware of someone who is not prepared for it. But even someone who withstands this experience of opening the reality filter receives an "illumination" (lights) that does not stay with him, because he has not yet built the vessels able to contain this illumination over time. This experience can bring him to one of two options: either he understands that he received a glimpse of the world beyond and that he must now build the vessels and the framework that can contain these lights in a lasting way; or he becomes lazy and enters a destructive cycle of pirate glimpses into a world that is not his – illumination and fall, illumination and fall – until all the vessels he has are broken and he loses the ability to build them: an addict.
By contrast, there are calmer substances and plants, the right merging with which can allow several things:
- The food gives physical strength that allows the existence of the body and the dwelling of the soul within it, and spiritual motivation to cope and fight against the enemies from within and without.
- A controlled and balanced opening of the mental filters.
- The creation of situations of work (tests). (Inside the food there also hide sparks of Smith, which enter the person who eats them and fight him by arousing in him cravings for the world of illusion – see chametz / Passover.) And we have already learned that we came into the world in order to work, to fight. Lechem (bread) shares its root letters with milchamah (war).
For the sources of this page, click here >>
What (Ma)
Right eating is eating components in which the spiritual energy is "permitted" (mutar, literally "untied") and available for use in a controlled and balanced connection to the spiritual world. Unfit eating is eating components in which the spiritual energy is "forbidden" (asur, literally "bound," as in handcuffs) and unavailable for use, and so it creates spiritual opacity (tum'ah = atimut, opacity), which screens off the spiritual world and creates a bubble that disconnects a person from the Source. The availability of the spiritual energy hidden in the various foods depends on the basic nature of the plant and on a range of further spiritual actions performed on it to prepare it for the merging and to release the sparks of awareness hidden within it (tithes, offerings, blessings and more). (Today, following the research of a Japanese doctor, the physical influence of directed thoughts and words on physical objects has been demonstrated – hado.)
Within this framework there of course also enters the "marginal" requirement that the food be healthy, nourishing and strengthening. There are plants in which the spiritual energy is "permitted," and they are permitted to be eaten, but in practice, despite their pleasant taste, they have a harmful effect on the body. The rule is that the sparks are elevated to the extent that they help a person in his spiritual work. If they do not help, if they are not partners in his elevation – and certainly if they disturb him in this elevation – they have no ascent. Such food, which does not help or even harms health, lowers and weakens a person and disconnects him from himself, from his source and from his path. Eating like this – for pleasure but harmful to the body – is forbidden to the fighters of Zion! Besides destroying the vessel given to him to carry out his mission in the world, he also shows by this harmful way of eating that he is drawn, like Cypher, after the imaginary pleasure of the illusion, instead of concentrating on his spiritual path of rising above the bubble of virtual reality. The fighters of Zion are careful to eat food that is first of all nourishing and healthy, even if it is seemingly less tasty.
For the sources of this page, click here >>
How (Eich)
After we have clarified the "what" (fit – available – permitted), in order for the act of eating to become a lever for connecting with the Source we must look at the "how." Even fit foods can become a spiritual poison if the act of eating is done in an unrepaired and unwatched way.
In the minds of the Sages, the act of eating is seen as the launching of sparks of life (awareness) toward the Source. The table is called shulchan because it functions as the launch pad from which those sparks are sent (nishlachim) on their way back home – shulchan, after the One who sends and the mission (shlichut). There are precise instructions regarding the various types of food, the preparation for launching them (blessings), the possibility of changing location while launching them (eating on the move), and closing the launch file (after-blessings). Even a superficial study shows that the higher the level of the food, the more complex the launch process, and the more it demands attention, alertness and stillness (sitting) for the duration of the sending. Sometimes, if the file was not closed at the launch site, the launcher even has to return to the place of eating in order to close it, so that all his work will not be thrown away.
The quality most needed in the one who directs the mission is, first of all, awareness of his action and its importance. Whoever is confused and mistakenly thinks he came here to enjoy (Cypher) the physical, animal layer alone will most likely fail in this important work, and his eating, instead of raising and strengthening him, will lower and weaken him. Even someone who wants and tries to eat consciously, because of the very physical character of this work, usually forgets its higher layers with the first bite. That is why the framework within which it is done is so important – the "how." The framework, with its various components, is meant to help the fighter of Zion to pay attention, to be aware: to use the force of physical pleasure to connect with the One who sent him and to remember his mission. This is the purpose of the blessings and the actions that come before eating. On the one hand, a framework; on the other, the work of transforming the energy of physical pleasure into a spiritual act of remembering and of strengthening the feeling of mission. "I eat so that I will have strength to carry out my destiny on earth." I have raised eating from a temporary animal act to an eternal spiritual act. The work is to remember the destiny at least at the beginning and the end of the process of eating (if not throughout), in order to give the right address to all the sparks of awareness released during the act.
Another "how" concerns the pleasure produced in the process of eating. In the previous chapters we learned that the world is built as a hierarchical structure, cascading down from the unified Source to the world of phenomena. Every object in the world of phenomena has an angel, a "program," in the world above it that sustains it ("strikes it and says to it: grow!"), and every such angel or program has another angel or program in a higher world that creates and sustains it, and so on until one reaches the Source. It follows from this structure that everything in the world cascades down from the Source and passes through all the worlds until it reaches the world of phenomena. We see only the branches in the world of phenomena, but the true picture is that all phenomena are connected at their hidden root to the Source, in the form of a giant tree – the Tree of Life. The main screen hiding the Source is the feeling of every detail in existence that it has an essence of its own, a separate meaning. Therefore the removal of this screen depends on self-nullification and the recognition that I am part of the great Tree of Life. In the same way, the thought that the taste I taste in the apple comes from the apple itself is part of the imaginary screen of the illusion of separate existence. The good taste, the beauty, everything, cascades down from above, from the Source. The good taste comes from the spiritual root. The one who raises this thought in the film is Mouse. He teaches Neo to notice that the taste of foods inside the Matrix is determined by the program that set the tastes. In the film this raises the question of how the program knew what taste to give each food, but for us it comes to teach a way of working with eating: to enjoy the taste – but not to think that it comes from the steak itself, but rather to feel that the taste cascades down from the Source. In this way we truly connect the physical pleasure (the sparks) with its spiritual root. (And so with every pleasure.)
In a basic and simple way, one can distinguish between positive eating that awakens and advances – like the Oracle's candies and cookies, whose purpose is spiritual – and eating that lowers, disconnects and puts to sleep – like Cypher's steak and drink, whose purpose is only physical, or even a kind of attempt to escape one's destiny.
How much (Kama)
One of the interesting phenomena of our society, expressed in the field of health, is that despite the great abundance, most illnesses stem from problems of deficiency. Anyone who deals a little with complementary medicine knows these concepts well. One can say in general that despite – and perhaps because of – the large quantities of food the average person eats, the amount of food that is finally absorbed and assimilated in the body is small and limited. The problem begins already on the supermarket shelves. Industrial food production, driven by economic considerations alone, focuses on "important" parameters such as shelf life, taste, low price and outward appearance, and less on parameters such as the quality of the food and its nutritional components. There is a great deal of food on the shelves that is mostly empty and lacking. The average person eats a lot of food that has little in it beyond color. The stomach is flooded with quantities of digestive work that is mostly inert and without substance, which exhausts it and harms its efficiency and its ability to absorb the small amount of quality food that does manage to get in. As we saw above, the picture is a copy of the intellectual reality in our society. A person is bombarded with quantities of information in every possible form of media – quantities of material that he has no chance of digesting and getting to the bottom of in a true and comprehensive way. Out of this sincere and unconscious mental helplessness, a person becomes superficial and shallow, since there is not one field out of all this information in which he finds the time to dig deep. What is the solution? A little, of good quality, and in a deep and thorough way – in both fields together.
The Sages hint at this when they say: "The righteous one eats to satisfy his soul" – and not to satisfy his body! Maimonides teaches that what a person leaves on the plate is more important than what he puts into his mouth. One must not fill the stomach until it bursts, because then it is impossible to digest! But to leave the last bite – that is already the work of character traits. On this battlefield is measured the one who becomes coarse in eating and lowers himself to the food, as against the one who uplifts and raises the food up to himself. One of the tests Gideon gave his soldiers, to choose those who would go out to war, was to send them to drink water from the river. He chose those who did not bend down to the water, but raised the water to their mouths. These are the true fighters who will win the physical war as well.
Why (Lama)
In the book called Siduro shel Shabbat there is a parable about a king who asked his subjects to find him beautiful stones to set in his crown. He asked them for stones from all over his kingdom, so that the full extent of his great kingdom would be shown to all. All his subjects went out to look for beautiful and precious stones from across the kingdom, but one of the subjects came up with a unique idea. He thought to himself that the kingdom of his beloved king extends beyond the dry land and reaches the depths of the sea as well; and to show this to everyone, he dived with self-sacrifice, at great risk, into the depths of the sea to bring up a beautiful stone for his king. When he brought this stone to the king, the king rejoiced in it greatly. He told all his subjects that although the other stones are very beautiful, this stone – though not as beautiful to look at as the others – is the most precious to him, and he will place it at the top of his crown, because it shows that his kingdom reaches the most distant regions, even the depths of the sea. This parable, the author says, is a parable for the different paths of spiritual work. There is work connected with the spiritual worlds, such as study or prayer. But there is work connected with the physical world in which we live. When a person learns how to turn even his physical life into spiritual work, he raises the sparks and parts of souls that fell into the most distant regions and brings them close to the King, and causes, as it were, great joy in the upper worlds. This is really Neo's work after his awakening, together with the enlightened fighters of Zion: to go down again and again into the depths of the Matrix in order to free more souls from the captivity of the agents and of the "shells" (klipot, screens) of the world of illusion. The importance of this work comes from the unity it achieves throughout the kingdom, created by joining components that are opposite in their essence – matter and spirit. One of the main components of this work is, of course, the act of eating. This act, if done correctly, can release powers of spiritual light hidden between the molecular bonds and atoms that make up the food. That is why many people do not like to be watched while they eat: deep inside they are aware that the work they are supposed to do is not being done properly. Among the fighters of Zion, by contrast, it is customary that whoever has reached this level of awareness in eating – at every meal hundreds and even thousands join him at the table to see how he eats! Yes – to see how he eats! Out of the recognition that in this eating he is doing one of the most important works that exist, as it is written: the eating of the righteous is as great as receiving the Divine Presence!
The same book continues and says that a person should not say "who am I, and what am I, and how do I belong to such work?" – rather, each one, in his own state, can achieve something in this great repair (tikkun) carried out through the act of eating. But the forces of "crime and wickedness" – the agents – also know this, and so they lie in wait for the spiritual fighter, to make him coarse in his physical actions and to take away his spiritual composure, so that he will not be able to use the spiritual power hidden in that act; and in this way they steal that spiritual light for themselves. That is why bread is called lechem, after the war (milchamah) that arises while it is eaten, in the person who wants to remain aware.
The rule for winning this war begins already at the stage of clean hands, in the process by which the bread reaches the eater: a livelihood clean of theft. If it is tainted with various kinds of deceit or misleading – and certainly with stealing money – that food is already controlled by the forces of impurity, and the chance of winning the war there is very slim. After that the process passes through the "what," through the "how," and of course ends with the "why" – which we have discussed here.
For the sources of this page, click here >>
Translated from the Hebrew chapter "סוד האכילה הרוחנית" by Roni Ayalon-Hirsch.