A Strange Experience

[ecosophia]

Quite often on my weekly Magic Monday ask-me-anything posts, I get people asking about weird experiences they've had. Far more often than not, those are familiar enough to those of us who deal with the spooky side of reality on a daily basis, but every so often I get one that's right out of the ballpark. One of those came in late in yesterday's comment thread.  Here it is in its entirety: 

I ate one of those plant based burgers, and have had a very weird reaction: I'm now acutely aware of everyone's thoughts around me (I was able to speak someone's inner monologue as it happened).

1) Do you have any idea what's happening, or how long it should last?

2) It's really unpleasant. Do you know how to fix it?

That kind of mental sensitivity is a known thing in occult circles, of course, and diet can be involved in it. The basic rule is that eating meat attunes you to your material body (which is, after all, made of meat) and thus grounds you in the material plane, while a vegetarian or vegan diet makes you more sensitive to the planes where thoughts and feelings operate. Some occult schools recommend a vegetarian diet for the purpose of increasing sensitivity; others recommend a diet that includes meat, because being too sensitive when you're doing certain intensive workings can result in mental imbalance. (With the latter in mind, I encouraged the commenter to eat pork or beef, and he posted saying that it had helped.)

So it's not impossible that the new fake-meat burgers might contain compounds that, in at least some people, produce a drastically heightened sensitivity to other people's thoughts and feelings. If so, I'm wondering if that might be part of what's helping to drive the extraordinary waves of mass craziness we're seeing in the US and some other Western countries just now, especially among the social classes most likely to be eating meat-free burgers and the like. Being abnormally sensitive to thoughts, feelings, and the like can make it very hard to avoid being swept up in the mental and emotional storm of an angry mob, for example. 

So here are my questions:

First, if you've eaten any of the new plant-based fake-meat burgers, did you notice any odd effects on your thoughts and feelings afterwards?

Second, if you know people who've gone completely 'round the bend of late -- and quite a few people in yesterday's Magic Monday talked about people they know or live with who have recently gone through drastic personality changes and become impossible to be around -- do you happen to know if they eat any of the recently released fake-meat products? 

Comments

Burger joints always max the filler as much as they dare

[(Anonymous)]

And paying a few of today's lefties to say eating filler is our moral duty must have been pretty cheap. It would be wildly funny if their souls were corrupted or oversensitized as a result.
Engleberg.

Re: Burger joints always max the filler as much as they dare

[ecosophia]

Even quite modest amounts of actual meat will help get someone down from a state of oversensitivity, but yeah, the more the better. A bacon double cheeseburger and a milkshake is my usual prescription for excess psychic sensitivity: plenty of protein, fat, and carbs, so it gives the body a jolt of nutrients while closing down the inner senses to manageable levels.

telepathy from food

[deborah_bender]

My one experience with ingesting psilocybin mushrooms took place in the 1980s at a private gathering for the purpose of performing Aleister Crowley's series of Cabbalistic ritual theater pieces, The Rites of Eleusis. These were staged on the appropriate nights of the week, ending with the Rite of Luna. They were costumed, staged performances in a house set up for house parties. In between the acts, there were lengthy breaks for refreshment and socializing. Each night our hostess provided us with a drug of the correct planetary correspondence; partaking of it was optional.

I took some shrooms, and when they came on between acts, it seemed to me that I was hearing the thoughts and some of the conversations of many people in the other rooms. I went to a room where i could lie down and be alone to focus on what was happening inside my head. The experience was not frightening or unpleasant, but I was hearing thoughts from so many people at once that it was like listening to multiple radios tuned to different stations. I could not follow any particular sequence of thoughts. I wasn't feeling other people's emotions particularly. AFAIK, everyone was having a good time.

After the drug wore off, so did the mental telepathy, and I have never had that experience again.

A lot of the plant based pseudoburgers include mushrooms of some sort. The more recent trademarked ones are highly processed. Perhaps whatever the producers have done to make them more meatlike has accidentally created chemical compounds akin to the ones in magic mushrooms.

Re: telepathy from food

[ecosophia]

Hmm! That's entirely possible.

[(Anonymous)]

I've long noticed that vegetarians and vegans have a tendency to either have higher than normal emotional intelligence OR are emotional train wrecks (usually they're train wrecks). This is the first time I've heard of this connection, and it makes me more thoughtful about trying a vegetarian diet.

Would a interval diet provide a balance to prevent losing your head in the clouds? Like, vegetarian 5 days a week and meat 2, or even 30 days vegetarian and a day or week with meat?

As for your actual question, none of my friends have gone off the deep end, but most of the people likely to descend into this craziness cut me off around 2016/2017 for the sin of thinking Donald Trump wasn't that bad. Most of them ate alternative diets, either vegan, vegetarian, or keto. I would check out to see how crazy they've gotten but I cut out all my social media in 2017.

The last 4+ months have been a traumatic experience on the world. There has been a tremendous amount of fear, isolation, and uncertainty thrust upon the world in the wake of COVID. I know that at multiple points I felt like I was losing my mind in those emotions. I'm fortunate that I have a healthy spiritual life and would turn to the Bible and meditate on passages, perform a daily SOP, etc.

But many of the secular people don't have any outlets like that. Instead, they binged Netflix, 24 hour news, and social media, exposing themselves in their most vulnerable state to a never ending face full of cacomagic that only amplified those feelings.

And then, when given an opportunity to DO SOMETHING GOOD, they all just embraced the moment and allowed themselves to be consumed by it.

And to drive off into another tangent, this all reminds me of something I read in Eric Hoffer's True Believer. People who align themselves with movements such as BLM or Antifa or whatever are often middle to upper class people who have the time to commit but are tremendously flawed, and instead of fixing the failings in their lives they look outward to validate their existence by fixing other people instead, because ultimately, it's easier.

After billions of people were stuck at home, forced to face their life in the most stark terms, face to face with all their flaws and failures, faced with the very real fear of mortality and uncertainty they'd live through the year - suddenly they had a moment to once again join a movement that allows them to forget their own failings by attempting to fix the world instead. Even more, a lot of the current wokeness involving white guilt/white fragility going around manages to be both - a spiritual self-flagellation for not being perfect while simultaneously punishing everyone else around them for being even less perfect.

A people - a world - undergoing all this stress simultaneously seems like it could very much create a egregore or otherwise invite spirits that feed off of negative energy, creating a feedback loop.

And to your original hypothesis, if you're already extra sensitive due to your diet, then it seems like you'd be even more susceptible.

Anyway, sorry for my wall of text ramblings. I apologize if I derailed anything here.

[(Anonymous)]

"...exposing themselves in their most vulnerable state to a never ending face full of cacomagic that only amplified those feelings."

Thank you for stating this so clearly and succinctly. Great insight!

[(Anonymous)]

"The basic rule is that eating meat attunes you to your material body (which is, after all, made of meat) and thus grounds you in the material plane, while a vegetarian or vegan diet makes you more sensitive to the planes where thoughts and feelings operate."

What are the examples of this in carnivore and herbivore animal world?

[ecosophia]

That's irrelevant. We're talking about human beings specifically.

[mo_drui_mac_de]

1) Fascinating. I showed this to my wife, who as I've mentioned before tends towards unusually psychic as a matter of course, because she's recently taken up eating a lot of fake veggie meats after an encounter with Sekhmet, who instructed her to drastically cut down her meat intake and to cut out beef and pork entirely (these sorts of dietary restrictions seem to be tolerably common among the Sekhmet worshippers I've encountered). She reported that she hasn't noticed any increase of psychic activity or perceptivity, and while she's generally leftward-leaning and has been very much on board with the recent wave of (mostly incoherent) demands for police reform (she's been on the receiving end multiple times of police-induced trauma to the point of a PTSD diagnosis and holds grudges like nobody's business), she's also been remarkably put off by the insane groupthink and mob rule that marches through the streets these days, and we've had a lot of very productive conversations about it. She still eats some meat, but generally only once a week and in small amounts. Would her maintaining her usual or even an increased degree of independence from and weariness with the Hive Mind owe anything to generally being used to how psychism feels, and therefore knowing pretty well how to handle it, as opposed to being bowled over by it all at once?

2) I'm put in mind of Daniel, the magician-prophet who insisted on eating a bland vegetarian diet, rather than the rich, meat-heavy diet of the Babylonians, and was able to see more clearly and interpret more ably than any of the king's magicians. Of course, in the same book, his three friends who did the same thing were specifically noted for their resistance to group-think and insistence on nonconformity with the people around them. But then, that diet in the first place was stuck to by aligning themselves with their cultural temple law, which had a well-established egregore and was so in itself an example of group-think. Hmmm... something to meditate on...

[(Anonymous)]

I'm the one who inspired this, so I'll answer as well. I currently live with people who've lost their minds, and it does seem to have started at about the point one of us became a vegetarian. We all eat dinners together, and so the rest of them have started adding fake meats into their diets, in order to accommodate the vegetarian. I've repeatedly said no, since what's in them grosses me out, and I'd rather just have a vegetarian meal than fake meat anyway. Our resident vegetarian whole heatedly agrees, and is willing to make her own food if it's a problem.

So, everyone else here has started eating fake meats, and has seemed to have lost their minds. The level of insanity here is very intense, and they're crazy about a fear of Covid: I'm now wondering if this is because being around other people is too much for them to handle.

Anyway, Monday night our vegetarian was out, and so we had burgers. It wasn't my night to cook, and so I didn't see that they were the plant based fake meat versions: I noticed it tasted off, but the cook said it was the barbecue sauce.

Finding it edible and not wanting to make anything myself, I ate it. I have quite powerful psychic abilities innately, and respond very strongly to any mind-altering substance, so I'm not sure how strong the effects are on normal people, but for me they started quickly, but continued to build over time; by 9:00 when it reached the peak, I was able to tell what my grandmother on the other side of the country was thinking. I'm able to do it sometimes, but being able to do it in real time and at such distance was new. The effect lasted until I thought to post on Magic Monday to ask for help, at just before midnight.

When I saw the response I cooked a pair of sausages and about a half pound of bacon, and ate it. It didn't feel very good, but it worked at cutting into the strange psychic phenomena. It didn't fix it entirely, but it helped a lot.

Another observation as well: I didn't sleep well, and my housemates have reported sleep disturbances as well over the past few months: I have no idea if it is related to the fake meat or not, since although I slept horribly, it might have had more to do with a very heavy meal well after midnight.

It's been close to 24 hours, and my psychic abilities are still stronger than usual, despite eating a very meat heavy breakfast and lunch. It does seem to have died down a lot from last night though, but I'll be eating a lot of meat for at least the next few days to be safe.

I also now wonder if this might be part of the mass hysteria around Covid-19: if you've turned your psychic ability up to a crazy level, then being around people would feel horrible, and if you refuse to acknowledge the existence of things like psychic abilities exist, fear of a disease could be a manifestation. Do you think that's plausible?

Finally, I hope you don't mind if I ask another question: when I finished eating the first fake burger, I found myself even hungrier than when I started. Even after three I didn't feel full. I'm not sure why, but if that's a common occurrence, a lot of people probably feel hungry all the time, and thus quite cranky.

Do you know why the fake burgers were so unsatisfying? This runs well past anything I've experienced with processed foods before....

[pagantech]

Would you know the brand and version of that fake meat? I’d try it as an experiment, provided I can get hold of it.

[(Anonymous)]

I'd like to propose a possible cause, although I have no idea how to investigate it: given that meat grounds people, and the body's love of homeostasis, it would logically follow that the human body would react to meat by a psychic opening. Usually this is more than countered by the meat, but if what the body thinks is meat actually isn't, then you'd just get a psychic opening.

[ecosophia]

Hmm! That's worth exploring. The plant-based heme may be the culprit -- that may be the biochemical signal the body uses to recognize meat.

Vegetarian food

[ferngladefarm.com.au]

Hi John Michael,

It used to be a rare thing to see people going around the bend, and diet is most certainly part of that story, but so too is social isolation. And the fear button has been pushed very hard of late and is now in overdrive.

Mate, soils are in serious decline right around the world and most people’s diets are comprised of mineral deficient food. That's what ya get. You know your history well and as a suggestion it might not be a bad idea to read up on other times and places when people ate food from locales that were deficient in one or more minerals.

I've been a long term vegetarian, although when I'm off the farm I eat whatever and don't make a fuss about things. But on the other hand I am alert to other people’s emotional energy and it is very hard to shut that out. Thus my preference for living the life of an ascetic residing in a remote mountain hideout surrounded by tall trees. It gives my mind a break, although if required I can swamp it up in the city with the best of them. ;-)

There is also an odd observation about such foodstuffs as you wrote about which is worth mentioning. There is a strange preference to produce such foods so that they ape meat based products. That looks so weird to me and it kind of repulses me. Also given the cultural preference for protein, those suckers have to be filled with all manner of soya-beans and other protein rich legumes, and that diet has to mess with your hormone and/or internal chemical balance one way or another.

Also recently I read that the obsession with diets heavy in protein and other such self absorbed activities such as maintaining very muscular physiques came out of the gay men’s movement as a reaction to the AIDS/HIV disease and what that did to people.

Dunno, it is an interesting issue that you've raised, and as always balance is everything. From my perspective very few people consume any leafy greens because they have to be grown locally. I'm really not sure how the leafy greens being sold are preserved, but it can't be good. If I cut plants here out of the vegetable beds, then by the next day they're not looking good to eat. Best eaten fresh - and often.

Cheers

Chris

Alcohol and Covid panic

[(Anonymous)]

I want to add that all my friends who responded highly panicked to the Covid hysteria drink very regularly wine ( every day several glasses) and during a recent gathering all of them confessed ( half jokingly) that their consumption increased by a lot during lockdown. They're all liberals of course.
More so they spent hours complaining about the unmasked people at the store while planning the repeated trips to their second homes! Yep, the upper 10% germs are better too...

Re: Alcohol and Covid panic

[(Anonymous)]

Well, the line for the liquor store here has been over two dozen outside the store every time I've gone past it, so I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of people have dramatically increased how much they drink....

[(Anonymous)]

I had an Impossible Whopper tonight, inspired in part by this post. The main thing I've noticed is that my mind actually seems significantly quieter, both in terms of an inner monologue and emotional affect. I have had no meat since last night, but did have a bagel with cream cheese earlier today. I haven't noticed similar effects before, but I also wasn't paying attention for anything out of the ordinary.

One confounder is that the burger was preceded by the consumption of several mozzarella sticks, so this could as easily be an effect of a large amount of cheese. As I understand it, cheese stimulates the pleasure centers of the brain in a way not entirely different from a recreational drug (though obviously without less drastic side-effects or withdrawals).

Provided it's not just a cheese high, it could also be that I'm normally overly introverted and lost in my own head, and the "opening up" from the fake meat maybe counteracted that.

One other thing worth noting is that there are different types of fake meat. Impossible and Beyond are the two big ones of the new sort that chemically mimics beef, but the recipes are different and they taste different.

Thought you'd be interested in the data point.

[ecosophia]

Thanks for this.

Impossible meats

[candace_k]

I have had a few of the “Impossible whopping sandwiches”. I have not noticed any difference in my sensitivity. But I run toward the hyper sensitive (in both good and bad ways) in general. I’ve been a vegetarian for about 17 years. I do eat a great deal of dairy, particularly yogurt. So perhaps someone who usually eats meat would be more responsive?

I also had a conversation with my sisters the other day about the differences men and women experience in experiencing changes in temperament due to hormonal changes. The resulting thought that older women are less startled by such changes because we have had so much experience being a different person based on where we are in a hormonal cycle. All this to say, maybe I did experience more sensitivity but I just didn’t notice. I can say that my meat eating relatives and friends seem to be far more inclined to get caught up in the current frenzies.

Re: Impossible meats

[ecosophia]

Interesting. Thanks for the data points!

[(Anonymous)]

Hi JMG,

I have eaten a few "Beyond Meat" burgers and didn't notice anything like this in particular. I haven't tried the "Impossible Burger", but I have eaten a lot of fake meat substitutes over my lifetime and I have never felt anything like what you described.

I will say though that about 6 or more years ago I started to be more conscious of what I was eating and moved my diet away from processed foods and fat toward, also from vegetarian to vegan again, and something quite high in carbohydrates and I found that made me quite emotional. One of the people I was paying attention to with regards to that stuff had said that it had to do with the energy required for the body to process food, energy that was freed up to do other things like process emotions. This sounded reasonable because he used the commonly known example of people eating heavier, often fatty foods when they are depressed, he said they were unknowingly self medicating with this because the body was being forced to choose between digesting this food and feeling these emotions, and one was not optional. I don't claim to know the truth of those statements (that individual is not somebody I ever fully trusted, but at the same time they often had interesting things to think about), but there was a certain amount of sense they made.

Certainly for me this was a phase where my emotions became more intense and I think to some degree that has stayed with me. Things that I never used to experience, like getting goose bumps when something that seems beautiful or powerful was talked about or experienced, it's hard to come up with concrete examples, but this was my general feeling in many areas. It also directly preceded a time where I allowed myself to feel some real sadness that I realized I had been carrying around buried in me for a long time and I have never been sure which thing was the catalyst for opening up this heightened emotional state. I would say though that during this same time my feeling about the world and news etc has become less emotional. I used to get a bit angry about what seemed to me to be manipulations from news media (of the standard TDS variety) but I came to actually just be amused by it. It doesn't really bother me at all any more when people have TDS although typically the people I speak to who have it (maybe because I'm up here in Canada) are not incredibly angry like people I've seen on youtube (etc). They are more upset than they are about any other subject, but I just see it as a direct result of taking the news in uncritically.

I should say that I also do not subject myself to the news if I can help it, and when I do, I find my thinking like a salmon swimming upstream against their message. I see it as a deranged description of a possibly actual event and then try to see if I can construct a more reasonable version of the same story, or if it seems just completely unimportant (Russiagate struck me that way) I refuse to learn any of the details around it at all and just bask in pure ignorance, if I have to, thinking about other things while people angrily tell me about the intricacies.

Right now, people who listen to the news seem to think the US is completely falling apart. I tend to think it's just a loud moment of a very small minority. I should say too that I see myself as a leftist, I mean I vote for the most left leaning party up here as a rule. I have found though, over the past few years, certainly since Trump took office, that I seek out right leaning speakers and thinkers to help balance out my worldview on current events. At the very least, so I understand what the other sides have to offer and how they see things. Often times I feel like I agree with them on much or at the least that understanding their viewpoint makes me see the issue in a different light. It also means I can usually talk with people who have very different viewpoints than myself nowadays without getting into fights with them, which seems like a good thing generally. I'm getting better at walking the tightrope of not angering leftists these days too, although often that requires saying nothing. =)

Thanks,
Johnny

[brendhelm]

Because they're brands produced via different schemes, I wonder if it's possible the Impossible Burger triggers the effect but Beyond Meat doesn't...

[jruss]

All these comments make me wanna try the take meat and see the effects

[(Anonymous)]

If you're willing to experiment, I for one would love to hear the results!

[brendhelm]

I haven't eaten any plant-based burgers, just the normal kind that come from cows, but I have noticed that my creativity (i.e. psychism) seems to be higher earlier in the day, in the morning, BEFORE I have had any meat.

[ecosophia]

Interesting that you equate creativity and psychism. How do you see them as the same?

[(Anonymous)]

I tried an "Impossible Whopper" when they first came out. I was not impressed. It tasted like cardboard. I didn't notice any odd effects on my thoughts and feelings, other than "Yuck! Never again!"

Plant-based heme made via fermentation of genetically engineered yeast is used to create the "Impossible" fake meat.

https://impossiblefoods.com/heme/

"Heme is a key molecule for most living cells; it is the cofactor of several essential reactions involved in energy metabolism, detoxification of noxious compounds, and sensing of various environmental cues. The strong affinity of heme toward oxygen makes it possible for hemoglobin and myoglobin, two heme-containing proteins, to function as major oxygen transporters."

https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/immunology-and-microbiology/heme

That "sensing of various environmental cues" is intriguing in the context of your question.

[(Anonymous)]

For what it's worth, the last few Impossible burgers I've eaten have been much better than the first few. I think it took time for restaurants to figure out how to cook them.

Veganism and mental difficulties

[https://openid-provider.appspot.com/bryanlallen]

There’s quite a lot of medical literature that discusses the problems with being vegan. Vitamin B-12, for instance, is ONLY available from animal sources. From the Wikipedia entry on Veganism: “Vitamin B12 supplementation is especially important because its deficiency causes blood disorders and potentially irreversible neurological damage.”

I’ve known a couple of people who pursued the vegan path and who slowly, over the course of years, descended partway into insanity. Both cases were cured in short order by ‘falling off the wagon’ deliberately and abandoning vegan diets.

Even more perniciously, some (deluded/unscrupulous) people promote the consumption of B-12 analogues; these are chemicals identical to B-12 in structure but not in action. They actually block any remaining B-12 in your system! One of the popular sources of these analogues is Spirulina, a cyanobacterium also known as blue-green algae.

Yes, there are lots of “virtuous” folks out there who are becoming addled because of their inadvisable dietary choices. Yikes! I’m going to go have a beer and some sausage…

Re: Veganism and mental difficulties

[(Anonymous)]

Yes, Vitamin B12 deficiency is a big problem for even lacto-vegetarians (who eat dairy products). They have to take synthetic supplements because dairy and eggs have the lowest concentration of B12 out of all foods. But most have adjusted because they have been vegetarians for generations, and their bodies have the ability to utilize the limited supply efficiently. Most non-meat eaters in USA seem to be of the strict vegan type. Transitioning suddenly to a strict no-meat diet after a lifetime of eating foods rich in B12 would terribly upset the body, not to mention mind.

[(Anonymous)]

You are what you eat is clearly a thing...

After reading how the fake meat is done, I will avoid it like the bubonic plague! Wouldn't surprise me if the mushrooms were the culprits. /Tidlösa

[(Anonymous)]

It's not a direct answer to your question, but I'm a vegetarian and have been working with LRM for about 18 months. Before starting I read the about the risk of becoming too sensitive, but I haven't had anything like that, yet.

I'm in Europe and don't know the specific burgers you mention, but from time to time I eat 'plant' based burgers and I've never noticed any effects.

It's been so long since I've eaten meat that I have no idea if any of these burgers resemble meat in any way, but maybe there's a clue? For people who do know meat, it could be something like cognitive dissonance on a more physical level: expecting 'meatness' and getting something quite different..

Another thing might be that I didn't become a vegetarian based on emotional or political arguments. Over time, I simply realized that eating meat just didn't work for me. Maybe some people need meat while other people are better without it and if you are one of the 'meat people' and you become a vegetarian, strange things may happen..

LC.

[ecosophia]

Many thanks for this. It's certainly been my experience that some people thrive on a vegetarian diet and others don't -- and a vegetarian diet seems to be less difficult for many people than a vegan one. If it works for you, then it works for you.

Vegetarian vs. Vegan

[(Anonymous)]

As a vegetarian for nearly my whole life, I am far from being the best person to answer your question, JMG – but I will weigh in just the same. The increased psychic sensitivity of those who do not eat meat, as claimed by many occultists, jives with my observations of myself as well as my wife’s community (who have been strict vegetarians for millennia). The main thing that seems to deaden this sensitivity is having a huge ego (which is also quite common in my wife’s community) – perhaps it is a defence against such sensitivity and prevents one from too much herd-like behaviours.

Over the past several years, we have a had a few of these fake-meat burgers and we neither relish the taste nor the after-effects (which are strictly physiological). But now knowing about the heme thing, we will avoid them even more.

Regarding a possible link between diet and left-leaning insanity, I have noted that my vegetarian friends (who are the majority of my friends) seem to be on an even keel, while my few vegan friends are practically loopy. However, the political situation in the Great White North is not nearly as polarized and toxic (yet?) as our southern neighbour. I am wondering if milk products help one to become “grounded” (not as intense as meat, mind you, but more grounding than a purely plant-based diet). Certainly, mother’s milk helps infants to become grounded in the material plane, and I believe that this applies to cow’s milk as well, and most intensely in concentrated milk products such as cheese.

Happy Canada Day to all Canucks in the group!

Re: Vegetarian vs. Vegan

[ecosophia]

According to some occult dietetic theories, any food that comes from animal sources helps ground the body; milk and milk products do this less than, say, beef and pork, but then the same is true of fish and chicken. So that may well help.

Is your wife from a Jain family, by any chance?

[(Anonymous)]

What makes a 'new plant-based fake-meat burger' different from a commercially available veggie burger from 20 years ago, Shojin Ryori, Rastafarian Ital cuisine, or Seventh Day Adventist canned veggie dogs?

Is it the religious beliefs that go with the food? How could this difference, if any, be tested? I volunteer to eat food. Well, maybe not the canned veggie dogs.

[ecosophia]

You know, you could answer that question yourself by spending thirty seconds looking up the ingredients. The new fake-meat burgers are chemically very different from the ones available twenty years ago.

[(Anonymous)]

I've been vegetarian since 1991 and vegan since 2003. I eat faux meat occasionally, usually Boca or Gardein brands. I've had one Impossible Burger and one Beyond Beef burger, and my problem with them is that the texture is FAR too much like meat. I nearly became physically ill and couldn't finish, no matter how much I told myself it wasn't real meat.

Going veg did not make me emotionally hypersensitive, but it did raise my psychic sensitivity. That was actually a good thing, because previously I'd had roughly the psychic abilities of a brick. I'd never had any kind of paranormal experience before becoming vegetarian, and it was only after going vegan that I was able to hear the gods and to sense/manipulate energy in ritual. I have to assume that if you're highly strung to begin with the veg lifestyle may wind you too far, but if you're too solidly grounded like me, veg*ism can balance you out.

Also, none of the people I know who suffer from TDS are currently vegetarian, nor have been for years.

--Sister Crow

[ecosophia]

Many thanks for the data points!

"Healthy" meals as defined here

[(Anonymous)]

I can't add anything about fake meat, since I avoid fake food as much as possible; and I note my usually-vegan Albuquerque daughter's family tends heavily toward the beans-rice-veggies diet. Probably a fair amount of tofu thrown in. But I can speak to what's considered "healthy" these days.

When I order from the "healthy' menu, the meal is usually a salad of Romano lettuce, commercial dressing, lots of chicken, some fruit, and a tiny dish of carbs to serve as salad crunchies. But some do include carbs, and they're all the fashionable ones of couscous, quinoa, and rice - for some reason, rice is acceptable, and I'm grateful.

My local daughter's menus are a lot more varied, though they do include the fashonable grains etc. But she's raiaed her boys on 2% milk all their lives. The Goddess* forbid they should Get Fat!

And every once in a while they serve something with beans, rice, and corn, which purports to be Mexican or Southwestern and is really tasty, though I've had to buy salsa and diced green chilies at the supermarket to make them truly so.

For what it's worth. I'm going to email Sarah and mention that some people report strange reactions to fake meats. And also mention Vitamin B12, which I think she's well aware of; her husband and sister are both MDs.

Again, as I said on the other blog on another subject, for what it's worth.

*Gaia, the Great Mother, who likes Her bounty to be appreciated!

Maroon Crunchy Pangolin a.k.a The Grey Badger

[(Anonymous)]

One datum in the opposite direction, and one guinea pig: my husband has been eating both Impossible and Beyond meat substitutes for a couple of years and hasn’t seemed to experience what you’re describing. He doesn’t have the pre-existing tendency to psychism though. I’ve had the impossible burger once or twice before but like others I’d prefer just a vegetarian meal or the meat we occasionally have. I do have the psychic and empathic tendencies already, so tomorrow I’m off to have an experimental burger and will report back!

[ecosophia]

I'll look forward to your report!

Brains and sanity

[(Anonymous)]

Neptune's Dolphins

I have a traumatic brain injury, and was counseled by a self-taught self-righteous brain expert to give up meds and meat. Both she said was bad for the injured brain. This person was active in the brain recovery business selling her snake oil.

Yes, I do take meds but it was after multiple seizures each day.

Yes, I eat meat and other things. What I did notice was that sugar made the brain loogey. Also a lot of salt.

I did try the beyond burgers for a meal with my family. I am the cook. They shrugged it off as meh. I thought it was plain weird to have something that looked like hamburger not be hamburger. The vegie burgers that we have eaten looked like plants, not meat.

The hamburger/not hamburger stuff creeped me out. I avoid it like the plague. Maybe the idea of something being not that something is a factor in whether it is well received by magical sensitive people.

Back to snake oil person, she was of the cohort of AWFLs who liked to tell people how to live according to her. I have encountered many like her in the brain recovery business. They all do not like independent people who question them.

I think these people are upset and gone insane since they cannot force their will on others. Trump stands out as someone who says no to them and is an unmoveable object. What my very Republican husband has noted that these folks decry the evil Republican party of today, saying that it is not like the one of the past. He noticed that until the 1990s, the Democrats ran the show, and his party was the minority party. They had to give to get what they want. Now, the shoe is on the other foot, and they don't like it. Also, today's Republicans are not squishy or malleable. He believes that is what is making a lot of people insane.

I noticed it with the vegetarians I know - they need to force themselves onto others. They do not know how to compromise.

[(Anonymous)]

I don't know. I used to be an oversensitive mess as a meat-eater and it took going vegan to clear out a good chunk of that sensitivity, and I feel like regular practice of the Sphere of Protection finished the job. My husband is also vegan and unlike me, he cannot get enough of the fake-ola meat, dairy, and "eggs". I eat them maybe once or twice a week, and that's usually because they are convenient. They do taste good and I'm grateful for them, however, I think they're straight up junk food, like cookies or potato chips.

My thoughts are that one becomes hyper-sensitive from not eating enough FAT, whether that's plant or animal based, and not getting enough FIBER, which is solely plant based. For instance, my husband has high cholesterol because he eats a lot of fat. Plant-based diets don't have any cholesterol, but his body produces it. When I ate meat, I was still in my teens and my metabolism was so "You ate? I'm gonna burn this!" I would have low blood pressure upon standing up and I also had anemia. Back then, I needed to eat more often with more bulk, like the mixing-bowl sized salads I eat nowadays.

Digestion comprises near 70% of the immune system. The gut is a barrier between us and the outside world, and anything that makes it more permeable, like taking NSAIDS, messes up that barrier. I haven't thought much about it yet, but it might be worthwhile to meditate on the non-physical barriers the gut is erecting between us and the outside world.

As for vegans being the main consumers of Beyond and Impossible ersatz meats, they're not. We may have started the trend, but it would not have survived if it was only vegans eating meat analogs. Vegans are only 2-3% of the population at best and most people who go into Burger King for instance ordering the Impossible also eat meat. If anything, I think meat-eaters and vegans alike should try out a basic protection ritual like the Sphere of Protection or the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram.

Sticking my name on the above.

[kimberlysteele]

FYI I was raised eating meat then vegetarian since the age of 17 and then vegan at 37. I'll turn 47 in July.