Blessing - and breaking - the very makeup of food

Tuesday, May 14, 2013 by: Michael A. Bedar, MA
Tags: blessings, food, prayer

(NaturalNews) People have been saying blessings, grace, or prayers of thanksgiving over food from time immemorial, as far back as the first human cultures. Food blessings matter a great deal to many spiritual people. Yet, today, it is possible that food blessings, how they work, and what they accomplish may be threatened by genetic modification and other commercial food processing.

How do food blessings work, and what is endangering them?

For many people, blessing food is an important part of the complete eating experience. Molecular and physiological evidence shows that blessing food, in addition to being a transcendent act, also causes physical effects. Blessing food can affect changes in people's physiological readiness for eating, and cause changes to the structure and energy state of the food itself. Indeed, the physical process by which blessing food works comes right out of physics and physiology textbooks.

As in any phenomena, if we know how the mechanism works, then we can know how to measure it, and we can also know how to break it (if anyone was so inclined). The critical concern in regards to the physical mechanism of blessing food is that GMO and chemical processing of food physically disrupt the effects of blessing food (in addition to compromising nutrition and increasing food's toxicity).

The role of blessing food is real and important for many people, creating a felt sense of rightness and sanctity about eating; thus the impact of interfering with blessing must not be underestimated.

Knowing blessing is real comes from a sense of intimacy with food

Anyone who has woken up before the dew evaporates at dawn to work with their hands and inhale the soily scents on an authentic organic garden or farm, would not underestimate the value of the sense of intimacy with food. In such a state of awareness, we can know when the state of food changes. The ability to bless and commune (which means "bring to oneness") with food is a palpable and sacred gift for humanity.

If the physical organism of foods is altered from its natural state, then food blessings as we've known them, as a communion with nature and its creator, lose their power.

When the energy loop involving the relationship between human beings and food from the natural world is broken, the sanctity of the system is bled out and food blessings can lose their power. We may wonder why anyone would want this to happen.

The question that must be answered "We know GMO 'foods' and chemically processed foods increase toxicity and reduce nutrient accessibility. Is it just as serious a violation of food to infringe upon its blessability? While the spiritual part of the power of blessing will always remain subjective, the physical aspect is the subject of continuing objective observation.

Measurable changes occur during food blessing

Through blessing food, there is evidence of measurable changes occurring in the person doing the blessing, and changes to the food itself. For various reasons, these changes may or may not occur, or occur as strongly, if the food being blessed is genetically or chemically altered.

First, changes are known to occur in a person making a food blessing.

Many cultures, including the Abrahamic, Vedic, Kamitic, earth-based European, the first Americans, and others all encourage the physical touching of food to the skin of the hands while making a blessing in order to increase the impact of the blessing. The physiological basis for touching food while blessing is that, anatomically, the human organism is known to be "a tube within a tube." Our skin is a contiguous lining of tissue from our outer surface, into our inner cheeks, all the way into and through our digestive tract. Therefore, our skin's physiochemical response to touching a food can electrochemically send signals to digestive tract as to the molecular makeup of the food being held and blessed.

Thus, whether seeing, smelling, inhaling, or, most strongly, touching the food, changes to the person that occur during blessing of natural food include:

• Salivation increases, as full attention is place on the natural food's unique, distinct aromas
• More digestive enzymes are secreted
• The circulatory system routes blood to the digestive tract's organs
• Hormones benefiting metabolism are released
• Breathing patterns shift from one best suited for working to one best suited for eating.
• Abdominal muscle contraction changes from a tightness that supports hard work into a different, more relaxed state, which relieves pressure around the digestive tract
• The brain becomes in a receptive mood ready to enjoy, experience sweet gratitude, and eagerly pay attention to the stomach's stretching sensors, to trigger the neurotransmitters which engage peristalsis
• The eye becomes aware of both the food's beauty, which enhances digestion, as well as alert to any danger signs in the food's appearance
• The senses of smell and taste, when focused and entrained on the food about to be eaten, becomes enhanced, increasing enjoyment and sharpening the ability to notice anything "off" or spoiled in the food.
  
• And finally, firing patterns of the enteric nervous system (the neurons lining the gut like a sheath) shift to better control the digestion and absorption of food. Technically known as the enteric nervous system, the second brain (as described by the Chair of Anatomy at Columbia University Medical Center) consists of "sheaths of neurons embedded in the walls of the long tube of our gut, or alimentary canal, which measures about nine meters end to end from the esophagus to the anus." There are 100 million neurons in the enteric nervous system, more than in the spinal cord, and more than in all the peripheral nervous system.

The evidence above suggests that the moment in which a food is blessed brings significant changes in the person's physiological readiness to eat, assimilate, and having a communing experience through the food to be eaten.

Senses like smell and skin touch are chemical senses, which means the cell-molecular makeup a food carries information that can change how blessing that food effects people.

Food's intracellular fluid solutions are also effected by blessing

What about the physical effect of blessing on the food itself?

Food cells contain complexes of molecules dissolved within intracellular fluid, which is about three-fourths or more composed of water; this is true in most live/raw foods, and in some cooked foods.

Marcel Vogel, a research scientist with IBM for 27 years, in the 1970's did pioneering work in man-plant communication experiments. This led him to the therapeutic study of crystals and to the investigation of the relationship between crystals and water. Vogel discovered that he could "structure water by spinning it around a crystal tuned for therapeutic usage...altering many of the characteristics of the water and converting it into an information storage system that could also store, amplify, convert, and cohere subtle energies."

NaturalNews has directly reviewed research on blessing, prayer, and thought effects on water's physical structure, as knowledge about this field has increased in the past decade.

Further, Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, in an article on this site, has described the effect of thought on the physical world directly as "quantum physics straight out of the textbooks being used to teach physics today."

In cells of organisms people eat, the intracellular fluid is comprised of water with a complex solutions of many thousands of different types of biomolecules dissolved within it. Many of these biomolecules which are known storage molecules for genetic information, including:

• DNA nucleic acids
• RNA nucleic acids
• Minerals
• Proteins
• Ligands, which are complexes around a biomolecule which serve a biological purpose, such as a signal triggering molecule, binding to sites and target proteins

Blessing the water in intracellular fluid, with complex physical information encoding molecules as DNA and RNA already dissolved with in it, by the logical reasoning of Vogel, Emoto, Stossel, Adams, and others has an effect on these fluids in food cells.

The machinery of how food blessing works can be disassembled

It has now been seen that food blessings have an impact on both the physicality of food and the person blessing the food impact (in addition to any non-physical impacts that may occur). "Mere mortals" can intentionally disrupt the physical ability of food to transmit information and receive blessings. The implications of this are shocking. Genetic and chemical manipulation may be redirecting the thoughts and spiritual blessings of people. This is why the machinery of blessing, and what breaking it does, is so important.

How might one dissemble the machinery of blessing? By changing the substances dissolved in the intracellular fluid of foods, substances including nucleic acids and the proteins and enzymes they transcribe. Changed patterns in these macromolecules result in changed information.

In DNA, these patterns, or codes, are called genes. This means DNA and other molecules in food's cells are carriers of memory.

A very long, ancient memory gives food its information and effects its blessability

Information requires a medium for it to exist in, which is called memory. This fact is very crucial to what genetic engineering and chemical food processing do to the physical biomolecules which carry food's information. Blessings interact with the memory of natural food, but we don't know if they will interact with the memory in genetically modified food.

The memories encoded in food's cells have been carried forward for at least on the order of 10,000 years, or as long as there have been cultivated food crops. Further, cultivated food crops came out of still more ancient genetic plant species information, which go back many millions of years...That's a lot of memories stored inside natural food's cells! It is those memories, and the information they carry, that are what we commune with when we bless foods.

This treasure trove is the one of the powerful aspects of authentic food's genetic memories, which are cut off and destroyed when food's genes are re-engineered.

Powerful, and also subtle. Consider that genetic science, young as it is, has advanced only enough to hack up a profitable, congress-buying, media-lying commercial product. Yet it is so un-advanced that it doesn't have a clue as to what 90% of the encoded DNA is for.

Codes in DNA not yet understood were once called "junk" DNA, but this arrogance has been fully disproved. Evolution News describes geneticists' pretend mastery over genetics as having been "faking it." It may take generations before we can understand the subtleties of the complete spectrum of genetic memories, and how essential these ancient codes are to live, health, and spiritual life such as blessing food.

Significant human traditions call on food's astounding memories when they bless it

In the biblical traditions, one major group of spiritual traditions who practice food blessings, Daniel the prophet is the only biblical character to describe the divine as "Ancient of Days," and is famous for refusing a king's refined food.

The name "Ancient of Days," as a unique relationship to the creator, bears some attention. "Ancient" suggests a long, long time of memories accumulated across the total span of the existence of the universe. "Days" suggests the basic growing cycle in agriculture: sunlight shines for photosynthesis during the daylight, and in the cooler darkness of night, plants perform cellular respiration.

According to wikipedia, the name "Ancient of Days" denotes "the Creator's aspect of eternity combined with perfection."

"Daniel," it is said, "resolved not to defile himself with the royal food and wine, and he asked the chief official for permission not to defile himself this way."

As a unique character who relates to his creator with as the aspects of "eternity and perfection," Daniel is remarkable in consciously opting to eat in a way that would not to "defile himself" with the monarch of Babylon's "refined and delicate" food.

Does this ring a bell in our lives? Whether thousands of years ago or in the present, the most exploitative rulers of the day, offer food unsuited to someone with a spiritual view of the creator as eternal and as the source of perfection. In this spiritual wisdom lies the grounds for refusing genetically and chemically tampered foods due to their felt sense a communion through blessing only natural food.

Who does your food blessing serve?

Bob Dylan said, "It might be the devil or it might be the Lord, but you're going to have to serve somebody."

To bless implies creating an energetic connection. Ultimately, all the connections we make are in service to our life purpose and direction.

This is why it is so important, when you bless food, to discover what your food blessing is in service to? For example, you might find yourself choosing between blessing food that is either, authentic to "the eternal Ancient of Days who created in perfection," or to the infantile, temporal, and lethal endeavor to conjure a quick profit known as GMOs.

The difference between the two kinds of foods that I could bless for my meals -- natural-whole-organic, or GMO -- was made earth-shatteringly clear today. Near noon, as I looked out from my porch while eating a dish grown in my small backyard garden, saw an ambulance arrive in front of the apartment building across the street, blaring sirens. I saw two EMT workers roll a stretcher out into the apartment building, and then back out. This was not the first time, Day after day, an ambulance comes, rolls out a stretcher, and carries out a resident from the building. The ambulance, it strikes me, is literally emptying my neighborhood.

The irony of watching ambulances come multiple times per week to the buildings on my block, while I sit here and eat food I grew myself on my porch, brings up the question: Who does my food blessing serve?

When we bless food, we are choosing which master we are serving. The choice is as stark as life or death.

• Mass produced GMOs, like GMO yellow corn, for example, which are processed into GMO high-fructose syrup found in many processed drinks and foods. These mortal products flood processed foods, and results in the death knoll of a parade of ambulances turning my neighborhood into a ghost town.
• Whereas using the little backyard behind my building for planting and harvesting my organic vegetables and herbs helps result in my household and friends' thriving bodies, clear minds, and functioning lives.

We are either blessing the eternal food chain, or breaking it. Natural and organic produce vs. GMO is now proven physically tantamount to "choosing which master" you are working for. I see the difference, right in my face, every day. I know who I work for.

• One master we can call on to bless at meal time gives life on this living planet, gives sovereignty and empowerment with living soil and living seeds.
• Another master, ready to receive us into service if we choose it, is the one that makes GMO corn-derived artificial foods found in the processed products that the West is becoming addicted to eating and drinking. It is killing us. Is this the master we choose to serve?

Noticing how blessing food makes a connection to the source behind the food makes it clear: in what we eat, we have a choice in who we serve.

Inner sense, science, and religion all agree

• Have you worked in an organic garden and sensed real nature-food communion in your bones, your gut, and the skin of your hands?
• Do you look forward to an age when genetics stops "faking it" and starts seeing the encoding of food's authentic information from antiquity as therapeutic and restorative?
• Do you see the divine as one who creates in eternal perfection?

From any or all of the points of view above, suffice it to say I do not detect any commendable reason to haphazardly delete and re-engineer the memory of food. Blessing food is an activity that is justified in the very physics of nature, which can be blessed and made sacred because of its memory, it's crystalline water in the intracellular fluid, and our blessing's relationship to that living information.

A word for spiritualists on blessing

Some people lean towards a spirituality that might say blessing is totally non-physical, or transcendent. They might say, on faith grounds, that focused blessing and intention can "transcend" any insult to our food's biology integrity. They might like to consider the following statement, heard during research for this article, from a Swami who wishes to remain anonymous: "Naturally encoded information instilled in food over eons is essential for giving the body-mind the opportunity and the energetic posture to experience the great light within the still of consciousness."

The call to measurable action, outside and in

The relationship between human beings and food is clearly seen in the time-honored practice of food blessing. Yet it is severed and disconnected by genetic engineering and chemical processing of food.

Increasingly, people are becoming sensitive to our ability to bless real food, and are knowing the loss of a subtle property in our relationship to food that has been genetically engineered, and you don't have to be a spiritualist or a barefoot gardener to notice it. All of us can become aware of the textbook physics which underline the effect of blessing intracellular fluid and the encoded molecular information suspended in it. This cellular information that came through the ages, and its blessability, are simply no longer whole and intact when it is genetically engineered.

Therefore, what is the call to action?

• Is this a call for further non-GMO awareness and activism? Yes!
  
  
• Is it a call for more home greenhouse gardening, permaculture, and local community organic, biodynamic, naturefarming, gardening for peace, and other such techniques to bring about whole, essential, and intact food cultivation? Yes, definitely.
  
  
• Does it end there? Actually, there is more.
  
  In addition, we might also simply experience, as deeply as we can, the act of blessing food.
  

Blessing food is a birthright technology belonging to humanity for experiencing communion with the divine intensified when taking into our bodies part of nature which we call food.

When we have experienced the aligning energetics of food blessing, we become more committed and resilient in the movement for natural food and natural health.

When we enjoy food blessings daily, as a connection to eternal being, then we can articulate the benefits and qualities of natural, organic, authentic, locally grown, and GMO-free food in the most penetrating, powerful, and subtle ways.

Sources used for this article include:

1. "Think Twice: How the Gut's 'Second Brain" Influences Thought and Well-Being" - http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=gut-second-brain
2. "The legacy of Marcel Vogel" - http://www.vogelcrystals.net/legacy_of_marcel_vogel.htm
3. "Water and positive thoughts - Increase the life-giving properties of this vital resource" - https://www.naturalnews.com/032604_water_structure.html
4. "Dr. Emoto requests assistance for the japan in the form of prayer and positive intentions" - https://www.naturalnews.com/031908_prayer_Japan.html
5. "Genetics Is Too Complex for Evolutionists to Fake It Anymore" - http://www.evolutionnews.org/2013/04/genetics_is_too071621.html

About the author:
Michael Bedar MA, BS, is a researcher, writer, and holistic wellness counselor. He is the associate producer with a founding role in the documentary, "Simply Raw: Reversing Diabetes in 30 Days" and is the writer-director of "EcoParque." He now distributes approximately 50 film, ebook, and audio titles through YoelMedia.com. He manages a holistic health practice, facilitates local and online natural wellness and spiritual growth programs, and juices regularly. He helps people live in healthy homes, support their natural fertility, encourage their optimal nutrition, and come into their full presence. He is the Co-Director of Tree of Life - Bay Area, and he has an MA in Live-Food and Spiritual Nutrition from the Cousens School of Holistic Wellness. Bedar's BS from UCSD is an interdisciplinary concentration of Environmental Chemistry, Law and Society, and Design Anthropology.