Part One: Sleep 

It's a little under five years ago that I attended this particular appointment with the homeopath. It was several months into the kundalini awakening, and my first visit since the energy initially woke up.

I had first turned to homeopathic treatment about three years previously. With a variety of classic modern maladies - migraines, intestinal problems, sinuses, the usual things - that orthodox medical practitioners seemed to only make worse, I felt there could be no harm in looking elsewhere. I was fortunate. The main homeopath in these parts seemed able to tune into my ailments, and considerable progress was made. It was a turning point, not just in terms of personal health care, but in terms of my view of 'the official view of life' in general.

Back in the treatment room, the homeopath was asking me questions about my current state of being. Though sympathetic, and to a degree empathetic, she generally gave little away; her face would remain largely impassive as we worked through feelings, symptoms, and different parts of the body.

"So, how's your sleeping?" she asked me halfway through the hour. I paused for a moment, considering. How exactly to phrase this? "Hmmm. I don't really do sleep" was what I plumped for. Her eyes ...... wide open; her jaw dropped, and she uttered a gasp. At that moment I realised that she had fallen for the 'eight hours a day or you're dead' fallacy.

I knew that it was a fallacy because it was true: for several weeks I had slept very little. A few minutes at three in the morning, maybe, a little nap around five. But sleep as normally understood had gone out of the window.

The thing was this: I felt fine, for most of the time anyway. I was suffering no obvious symptoms of sleep lack. It was simply that, with the onset of full-blown kundalini, all the old rules of how the body functions seemed to go out the window. The psycho-physical organism was purging, purifying, throwing out and bringing in. Reorganising, realigning, and it was all fine. What used to be 'normal' didn't necessarily apply any longer, and new ways of being were starting to emerge.

What is considered 'normal' may indeed be normal for most people most of the time. If they deviate from that norm, they might find themselves in trouble. It does not follow, however, that there are not other 'normals' that may come into being; or that not conforming to that normal will inevitably lead to harm or danger. It may be the opposite: a more optimal modus operandi might be coming on board.     

In 'Return to the Brain of Eden' Tony Wright and Graham Gynn describe the sleep-deprivation experiments undertaken by Tony over the period of a decade. Prime among them was a 1998 investigation at a university in Manchester, during which he stayed awake for five days and four nights while being monitored constantly. 

Some of the results were interesting. Rather than experience a decrease in co-ordination and other abilities, he found some faculties were enhanced as the sleepless days passed. Balance and dexterity improved. The professor overseeing the study was surprised: he was experienced in similar experiments in the military, but in that research these qualities declined with lack of sleep. Tony suggests that the difference may be that he had been following a mainly raw food diet which was rich in fruit for a number of years; but that is something of another story.

Other evidence is presented in this book of abilities that appeared during these experiments in sleeplessness. While deprived of snooze time, Tony discovered the ability to juggle, and could keep track of several balls simultaneously. Peripheral vision was enhanced. Recollection of childhood memories surfaced spontaneously. He was able to read entire blocks of text instantly, instead of one line at a time. And there is other stuff.

This is all reported within the wider context of 'waking up' (my words) the underused right hemisphere of the brain, and the positive effects that a fruit-based diet (which the authors claim was typical for long periods in human ancestry) can have physically and psychologically. Another story.....

A main take-away for me is how what is generally taken as 'normal' and 'necessary for health' is not always so. Even the basics of existence are more flexible than many people care, or dare, to imagine. And we live within a confined, self-imposed space of 'what is possible'; which is delusory.

Part Two: Food

Three meals a day; eat your five-a-day; this many calories for optimal health; saturated fat, unsaturated fat; protein, fibre. The list goes on.

The quantity of material out there about what to eat and what not to eat is staggering. Much of it is in disagreement with other material (all with 'scientific research' as back-up, of course), and it suffers greatly from fads and fashions (all of which also come with the rider that 'latest research now shows....'). Twenty years ago pasta was great; now all those carbs will turn you into a total wreck. At the turn of the century coconut oil was a big no-no, unless you wanted a saturated fat-induced early death. Today, coconut oil: wow, great; can't enough of the stuff.

Maybe we should give in, and concede that much of it is little more than bullshit. People need to make a buck somehow. 

Like sleep, food comes with its anomalies. Some of these are, once more, kundalini people. Mary Shutan writes about how, at one stage following her kundalini activation, she spent six months eating nothing but rice and avocados. The digestive system becomes so sensitive, not to say disrupted, with the arising of this purifying energy, that it can take very little. 

Even more astonishing is the experience of Parker Stafford, who runs the 'Waking the Infinite' website. For five months he didn't get hungry, and didn't feel like eating at all. Once a week he would eat a meal, because he decided it might be a good idea to eat some food. He would eat a meal of grains, principally oats/oatmeal, a kind of gruel or soup. And that was it.

The thing is that both of these excellent people live to tell the tale - in fact are in pretty good shape. Orthodox science will most likely tell you that this is not possible, especially maybe in the case of Parker: I have never met him, but he looks like quite a big, substantial guy.

And, to return to the return - to the Brain of Eden. Co-author Tony Wright had been frugivorous for a long time. It's not easy to find out a lot about him, as he appears to shun the limelight. At the other end of the spectrum, the closest you'll find to a fruitarian/raw vegan-type celebrity, is Freelee the Banana Girl. She's on Youtube and many other places besides. She is certainly 'interesting' but this doesn't come as a recommendation....

Beyond Freelee we arrive at the world of the breatharians. These are people who live, either partly or wholly, on non-physical sources for their survival. Prana, sunlight, this kind of stuff. Maybe the kundalinified, eating one meal a week, are able to live partly because of tapping into other sources of life-giving substance. I don't know. But the breatharians do seem to be a reality. Check them out for yourself.

Instinctively I am sympathetic to the notion of eating frugivorous. I have eaten vegetarian for fifty years ('Ah, now I see why he's so strange...') and this has included two bouts of eating veganic - the first a disaster, the second smooth and successful. My body has got beaten up too much over the years, however, and could not tolerate the volume and fibre necessary for a vegan diet.

Our 'limits' are created by our ideas and beliefs. Look outside, and what once seemed fixed may turn out to be more flexible than we ever would have imagined.         

Images: the book

              Tony Wright

              Big-brained bonobos