David Rainoshek on Moving up the Diet Spectrum

This interview is an excerpt from Kevin Gianni's Rawkathon, which can be found at http://www.Rawkathon.com. In this excerpt, David Rainoshek shares on moving up the diet spectrum and the inspiration of Ken Wilbur. David Rainoshek is raw foodist and co-creator of juicefeasting.com.

Kevin: If you're maintaining yourself at one stage in spectrum and it becomes stressful, what’s your personal experience with that and what do you think is the best way to approach that?

David: Well, this is a non-violent process, which is great. It should be a lot of fun. So if you're really having trouble with the stage that you're at, then you need to be talking with other people that are at that stage and find out what it is that they're doing. Don’t try to move any higher than that, necessarily. Just try to figure out how to work it at that stage. Now you might intellectually look up the spectrum of diet a little bit and say, “OK, maybe it’s the wheat that I’m eating right now, maybe it’s the dairy.” Try to start accessing foods that are a higher level. But what you're doing is you’re actually finding that your center of gravity moves up. When that center of gravity moves up, you still may access something that’s a little bit lower and a little bit higher than where you’re at. When your center of gravity is falling, you kind of know where that’s at and you should move up.

Kevin: OK, great; I gotcha.

David: The last thing that I want to say about the spectrum of diet is that when you get to these upper levels, I think a mature way of viewing this--and a mature way of viewing it really for anybody is that we're not demonizing any level of the spectrum. I’m not even going to demonize fast food at this point, although we know the realities of it. We just honestly look at what’s working at that level and what’s not working at that level. It’s include and transcend all the way up, and jettison, actually. So you're going to include the good things at one level and then move up. And you're going to jettison the stuff that's not so good. When you're moving from fast-food to Standard American, there’s a lot of stuff that you're jettisoning [laughs] and there’s not much that you’re including. What you're hoping to include from fast-food is convenience, a little bit of convenience, because nobody wants to spend hours in the kitchen, at least most of us don’t. And the other thing you want to access is economy. So if you can do that moving into a Standard American Diet..

And with Standard American, what you're capturing is time with your family. Fast-food is really egocentric. You're going in there as, “I want Mexican. I want chicken; I want whatever...” You just go to that restaurant. And if you go into a fast-food restaurant, you'll see a lot of people eating by themselves. It’s a very solitary thing. When you move into Standard American, at least there’s a possibility that you're eating with your family, you're eating at home. You’re eating with more people so you're starting to recapture that.

From there, moving into whole foods, you're leaving behind all the processed stuff that’s in your diet and you want more whole foods. It still could be frozen, but maybe it’s frozen organic food from one of those producers that’s out there. You can get a lot of that kind of food now. And you're saying, “I want more that’s in my food and I want less stuff that’s allergenic.”

So it’s an include and transcend kind of thing with some jettisoning. You're jettisoning every level of the spectrum. But I’m not about demonizing any level of the spectrum anymore because every stage in Western society now is important. You've got to recognize the importance of every one of them and move up in a non-violent way where you're not beating yourself up, where it’s a really joyful, life-affirming process. So, what is this about? Is this about raw food or is it about health? It’s about health, health transforming up through this spiral development or this spectrum of diet- -however you want to look at it-- health at every level of the spectrum. That’s what this is about.

Kevin: Who’s Ken Wilbur and what kind of information can...?

David: Yeah. So Ken Wilbur’s developed something called the Integral Methodology, and runs the Integral Institute. Ken started writing back in the early 1970s; he wrote a book called “The Spectrum of Consciousness.” What Ken did is he bridged the gap between east and west. He said, “Well, depending on how dualistic we are, that will determine what kind of approach you need regarding my transformation.” So you've got somebody who is really dualistic and they think, “Well, only part of my mind is me and the part of me that I don’t like is not me. This body is certainly not me because I don’t understand what this thing is doing. The world is definitely not me either. So I draw the line between what I like about myself--that’s me--and what I don’t like about myself and everything else in the world--that’s not me.” So that person needs simple counseling..

Then you move from there down to a level, which is where, “OK, all my mind is me, but my body is not me.” Then from there--and that requires a certain level of like counseling or spiritual practice to be at that level.

Then you become less dualistic and you say, “My mind and my body are me, but you and the other reality out there is not me.” That requires a different set of practices to access that level or to stay at it.

From there, you want to move into what’s called unity consciousness. We've all heard about this if we've looked at eastern traditions, or now even like western traditions are talking about this-- actually, have talked about it the whole time. We can talk about that in a minute. But unity consciousness, “My mind is me, my body is me, the world is self also.” There’s no division between self and other, otherwise known as “big mind,” “state of Sumatti,” enlightenment, whatever you want to call that. There are practices that you do to access that type of awareness, completely open.

Freud is going to have you more up at the, “Well, part of me I like and part of me I don’t like.” The donta or some kind of mystic practice--mystic Judaism, mystic Christianity, mystic Buddhism--whatever it would be--is going to be more of that level of unity consciousness. So now it’s not Buddhism against Freud or anything like that, it’s where are you at on this spectrum of consciousness. That will determine the practices just like the spectrum of diet, which is why I actually titled this “The Spectrum of Diet,” based on Ken’s 1973 work “Spectrum of Consciousness.”

Ken said, “You know, we're really partial on a lot of things we're talking about out there.” You take modern medicine, for example, since we're talking about health. Modern medicine is not concerned about economics from your standpoint, not at all. Whatever it costs, you've got insurance; you'll have to pay for it. You'll have to mortgage your house or get rid of it or whatever you have to do. They’re not concerned about that. Modern medicine is generally not concerned with what’s going on in your mind, either. We're just going to treat the body. We don’t
care what your history is. We’ve got the knee problem here; we're not concerned with the diet you're eating with regards to your knee. We're not concerned with how you're treating yourself at home in regards to your knee, how you're running, whatever. We're just going to treat this knee and it looks like we need to go in there and cut this sucker open and take some stuff out and stitch some other stuff back together. So modern medicine is a very partial truth; it’s only looking at one part of reality.

Ken’s developed an integral model which we don’t have time talk about today but you can go to kenwilbur.com and you can learn all about it. Basically, if we talk very simply about it, you've got four quadrants. One quadrant is the inside of your own mind. What is my internal experience? Then you've got the outside of yourself, which would be considered the body. Now, if we take those two, for example, I can be deeply in love and you hook me up to a machine and you see all these endorphins and everything going on, all the neural transmitters and everything. And you're like, “This guy’s in love!” OK, so ask me, “Who am I in love with?” Scientists can’t tell you. That’s your internal reality. So you've got to take both into account; internal reality and external reality. That’s for the individual.

Then there’s the internal/external reality for the group. Internal reality for the group is culture, which we're sadly missing out on western society now. Our culture has become McDonald’s and going out to the movies and just a bunch of nonsense. That’s what gets us the Standard American and fast-food diet. So we've missed out on the culture aspect of things. Our culture, we’re kind of homogenizing, but not in a way that's really necessarily positive right now.

Then you've got social issues, so that’s another aspect of reality. How is your political system set up? What’s your ecological system? How do you run your cars? What’s the structure of society?

Now if all four of these things are not taken into account with regards to any subject, then it’s going to be a partial truth. You take someone like B. F. Skinner, for example. He was a psychologist and he said, “The only thing I can tell you is what we can observe, what I can see that person doing. Kevin just got up and walked across the room. That’s all I can tell you. I don’t know why he did it, but we can observe that he did it.” Well, that’s a really partial truth. There's not much to it. What about the cultural aspects? What about the economic aspects? Maybe he had to go downstairs and pay his hotel bill. Maybe he heard somebody crying outside or something like that. Skinner didn’t get into any of that stuff. So it’s a partial truth. You see people in psychology, economics, politics, medicine, business, you name it, who are only looking at one aspect of these four quadrants. That’s just one aspect of the Integral Methodology
that Ken’s talking about.

Most people think that whole-foods is the best it gets. “There’s a few crazy folks out there who eat vegetarian, but I mean, come on, you really can’t get all your nutrition from a vegetarian diet. Raw foods--I don’t even know who those people are; forget it.” Most people don’t even know about those upper levels of the spectrum. So to actually recount nutrition in terms of the spectrum of diet that there are these legitimate, healthy practices all the way up, that have benefits all the way through, and if it’s all possible, will really open up people’s minds. It gives a map of nutrition that we badly, badly need.

A lot of us have been talking about it and talking around it for a long time. So in a way, what I’m talking about is nothing new. But putting it together in a transformative methodology like this, called The Spectrum of Diet, is really going to help a lot of people, I think.