Some of us look at “higher work” the way a child imagines picking up a violin for the first time.
We want to prance through Paganini, not bore ourselves with Hot Cross Buns.
Diet isn’t moral purity. It’s not aesthetic discipline. It’s not your personality. Diet is the operating conditions of the body, the only vessel that houses every thought you’ve ever had, every thought you will ever create.
So if you seek clarity, resilience, equanimity, prayerful attention, deep contemplation, or anything that smells like “spirit,” you should probably stop treating food like an afterthought. As though your body is one thing and the internal you is another.
Across traditions that disagree about many a thing, there is an oddly consistent concession: the mind cannot reliably outrun the body.
In the Christian Bible, Paul says it in the blunt language of stewardship: “Your bodies are temples… therefore honor God with your bodies,” (1 Cor 6:19-20)
The Qur’an says it as a constraint on excess: “Eat and drink, but do not waste,” (Surah Al-A’raf 31).
The Bhagavad Gita also mentions volume. “Those who eat too much or too little… cannot attain success in Yog,” (Sri Krishna 6:16). But we go further into right choices, not just amounts. “Persons in the mode of goodness prefer foods that promote life span, and increase virtue, strength, health, happiness, and satisfaction,” (Sri Krishna 17:8).
And Buddhism, famously uninterested in metaphysical persuasion, still drops this near the center of the Dhammapada: “Health is the greatest gift,” (v. 204).
Different metaphysical lenses. Same concession. The body is upstream.