biophotons | Deep Agroecology – The Call of the Land

“Nutrition as it is today does not supply the strength necessary for manifesting the spirit in physical life. A bridge can no longer be built from thinking to will and action. Food plants no longer contain the forces people need for this.” – Rudolf Steiner

Although of immense interest to millions of people – inspired in part by the continent-wide community food movement – the vitamins, minerals, calories, protein and carbohydrates of our sustenance are but material factors. Libraries of books have been dedicated to these material aspects. Mostly overlooked are the forces at work upon the land, the plants, and the animals that yield the food upon which we feed. Yet these forces – the energetic spiritual aspect of our victuals – are key elements of a true power diet.

The UN’s global food bureaucracy, Codex Alimentarius, has a horde of committees, commissions, and task forces to evaluate and to proclaim stipulations upon everything from agrochemicals and GMOs to spices, microbes and meat. But Codex – heavily biased toward industrial agriculture – has nothing whatsoever to reckon with the light forces (biophotons) embodied in and conveyed by food. Apparently, forces are considered too esoteric a factor, and possess no directly exploitable connection to profit.

This abstruse reality came into focus for me again this week as I paged through Farmer John’s Cookbook: the Real Dirt on Vegetables (2006). It’s a marvelously motley buffet of insights, essays, observations, illuminations and recipes from the famed Angelic Organics CSA in north central Illinois. Farmer John’s book does not confine itself to food in isolation, but also – of necessity – explores farms as living organisms, the foundation upon which civilization rests. It also embraces the reality of the forces at work on farms, and in the food that comes from farms.

Author John Peterson, accorded agrarian celebrity in the film The Real Dirt on Farmer John, takes farms and food to a rarefied level of discussion. He transcends materialist, reductionist attitudes towards food, approaches that often lead to fetishistic obsession on physical properties such as vitamins, minerals and calories. Peterson offers instead a banquet for the soul of people who recognize that the way we produce our food, fiber and ethanol fuel is perhaps the greatest destructive force extant upon our wobbly planet, and paradoxically also the most effective pathway to heal the damage.

“As a natural extension of our use of Biodynamic farming practices,” Peterson writes, “we have come to see our vegetables and herbs not only as ingredients to be washed and chopped and tossed into stir-fries but also as plants with life forces that can enhance health on many levels.”

“Food is more,” Farmer John posits. “Food is a potential carrier for the forces that build up our thinking feeling, and willing…Food imbued with these forces can contribute immensely to the task of bringing healthy social impulses to humanity.

Farmer John’s Cookbook endorses no particular food regimen or discipline: neither omnivore, vegan, low-cal, low-fat, Mediterranean, Paleo, Flexitarian, nor any of the other myriad of dietary permutations and possibilities. Rather, it presents information and encourages readers – growers, cooks and consumers – to make their own informed decisions out of their own intelligence and free will. In that sense, the cookbook represents what one of the book’s essayists, Dr. Thomas Cowan, identifies as a “middle way.”

A lifelong farmer, Peterson understands that the farm is not just a local production unit for food, not just an economic engine, and that there is soul-deadening danger in regarding them in that mechanical, materialistic fashion.

Farms are, rather, organisms at the very center of earthly existence for every human being. Farms stand between heaven and earth, distinct, particular force-mediating organisms with biological and spiritual qualities that – for better or worse – impact the essential quality our existence and transfer to us forces of varying quantities and qualities when we consume the food they yield. This Mystery is one of the unacknowledged benefits of authentic Community Supported Agriculture (CSA), which has the potential to bring human beings into direct conscious support with the farm organisms which make life in the modern world possible.

Plant and animal life is intimately bound up with the life of the soil. The more light force a food is able to access and store, the greater the vitality, clarity and will force it conveys to the consumer. Farmer John’s Cookbook conveys a feast of understandings about this spiritual energetic dimension, and also a wealth of practical and delectable recipes that can help bring the understandings (and the forces) together on the end of a fork – a genuine power diet.

What would you like for breakfast: a bowl of fresh, clean organic food naturally radiating the golden goodness of the Sun (aka biophotons), or a crock bulging with lab-engineered, genetically-modified, profit-patented, corporately-owned, food product (aka “novel life forms”)?

Unbidden, this queer question came to the forefront for me last week when two stories arrived all but simultaneously in my email in-box. One story was about novel genetically engineered life forms, and the other was about biophotons. I found the distinctions starkly dismaying.

First I read news from The Cornucopia Institute that Monsanto and DSM Nutritional Products are soon likely to be constructing even more “novel life forms” such as genetically engineered algae, processed with synthetic petrochemical-based solvents, then incorporating these substances, more or less surreptitiously, into “food products.”

If they follow what has so far been their standard corporate operating procedure, these concocted substances will be disseminated without labels or any other way for people to understand what they are ingesting.

In this unsettling, unknowable manner is the industrial food chain being relentlessly infiltrated with “novel life forms” generated in laboratories away from the light of the sun, and owned not by nature, but by corporations. For this I have no appetite.

Then I read about biophotons. Turns out that’s a word for describing the smallest known units of light. Biophotons are sparks of life within biological systems, and best explained by quantum mechanics: subatomic phenomena that exhibit properties of both waves and particles.

Biophotons are used by and stored in all organisms, including the food we eat, the water we drink, and our bodies. When our food is vibrant with high-quality life energy (biophotons), that energy – not just the material substance of vitamins and minerals — is absorbed into our bodies.

The existence and the importance of this basic life force has been known for centuries in China where it is spoken of as chi, in Japan where it is known as ki, in India where the ancient Sanskrit term is prana, and by various terms among many of the native peoples of the Americas.

In recent decades, the reality of the animating life force has been increasingly recognized in Western science. Physicist Fritz-Albert Popp, Ph.D., of Marburg University, researched and named this phenomenon as biophotons – particles of light that infuse life.

Dr. Popp was among the first Western investigators to indicate that this light must come, at least in part, from the foods we eat. The more light a food is able to store, the more nutritious it is.

Naturally grown fresh fruits and vegetables, for example, are rich in biophotons. It’s obvious. You need not be a mystic who can see auras to understand. The reality of light waves, or biophoton energy, is obvious to any receptive and discerning eye.

Biophotons elevate the organism – such as your physical body – to a higher oscillation. As I read that, basically, if you eat fresh, clean food grown on healthy natural land, you support your body at a higher, healthier vibe.

Our bodies are made up not just of organs, tissue, and blood vessels, but are also composed of light. Biophotons enliven, order and regulate living organisms.

The greater your supply of light force from fresh, clean foods, the greater the vitality of your overall electromagnetic field (aura), and consequently the more energy available for maintaining optimal health. In matters biophotonic, quality as much as quantity is key.

Physicist Popp theorizes that the biophoton light emissions of healthy people follow biological rhythms, and that those rhythms are connected to the measureable biorhythms of the earth. There is a direct correlation and an active resonance amidst land, food, and people.

Clean, healthy land tended organically or Biodynamically gives rise to clean healthy food rich in biophotons (chi, ki, prana, life energy). It’s that simple. Starkly simple.