Black Gold in Soho
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Black Gold in Soho
A short story about the cocktail of fructose, gluten, dairy and caffeine that combine to keep us from being who we truly are:
Recently on a fresh spring day, I was strolling around London, walking off the effects of a 22-hour flight. I had just crossed over Shaftesbury Avenue, Soho, adjacent to the Gielgud Theatre, when I came across one of those temporary street markets.
My body, tired from being cooped up for so long on the flight, already knew what it was looking for. There it was, prominently displayed in the last of these market stalls – a stack of “Ecuadorian Dark Chocolate Gluten Free Brownies”.
Until that moment I have never considered that Ecuador was a specialist cocoa producer. But now I know that in the lush province of Esmeralda, on Ecuador's northern border with Colombia, farmers are proud to say they produce "black gold". They are not talking about oil, Ecuador's main export, but cocoa beans.
Before I could clock it, £3 had moved across the counter and I was holding one of these generous sized slices of black goo on a small serviette in my palm. I moved to the sunny side of the street and blissed out for a couple of minutes whilst I consumed the brownie.
Many years prior I had given up alcohol. Giving up alcohol was the easy part. In truth, unwittingly, I had replaced alcohol with sugar. Initially any form of sugar, but then as I became more ‘educated’ about the perils of the sugar poison, I had ‘evolved’ to dark chocolate, thereby jettisoning one of Dr Amy Myers’s 'roots of evil', being dairy. By now gluten free, I had also eliminated the second (of three) roots of evil – gluten. This brownie was therefore somewhat legitimised as it was ‘dark’ – being dairy free – as well as ‘gluten free’. What a good boy was I. Amazing how we deceive ourselves.
This brownie was also turbocharged with the caffeine of the Ecuadorian sourced cocoa beans.
Here is the real key to this story: in buying this brownie I had already failed to read (assess) this situation a long time before I had reached Soho. That brownie (or the equivalent) was going to be purchased somehow, somewhere in London that day. Stumbling upon that market was no coincidence – my body’s antenna was like a homing pigeon, knowing exactly where to go and what it wanted.
My senses had been dulled by the long flight. I had failed to travel in a way that was sufficiently caring for myself. Having taken on board that flight my own healthy, home prepared food, as the journey wore on I had succumbed to some of the ill-prepared airline foods. I had not slept sufficiently. I had checked out watching one of the Oscar winning movies supplied by the airline. Somewhere at 30,000 feet over the Middle East, I had lost connection with self. At that point, still about seven hours flight away from Heathrow, I had, due to the energy I was now in from all of my choices up to this point, subconsciously already honed in on that Esmeralda brownie even though at that stage, I never knew such an offering existed.
Sugar, cocoa beans, dark chocolate ... a cocktail of fructose and caffeine designed to keep one seriously racy (revved up and overstimulated). In raciness one cannot read situations properly as the senses are no longer primed due to the energy that raciness exerts on the body.
Most people live their entire lives juiced up on food and beverages that keep them in raciness and hence out of rhythm and out of touch with themselves and the world around them. I had landed at Heathrow racy and, as my senses were down, I was intent on keeping myself racy.
Two days after this Soho experience I was at the Universal Medicine Retreat in Somerset listening to the teachings by Serge Benhayon. One of the cornerstones of Serge's five days of presentations was the teachings of ‘The Four Pillars of Evolution’:
- Awareness
- Connection
- Reading (situations)
- Transparency
The converse of these Four Pillars are respectively:
- Dullness
- Dampness
- Raciness
- Protection
Fructose sugar and caffeine keep the body in raciness, which is the opposite of being capable of reading situations.
Yet we are here on earth to evolve. Being racy is the opposite; it is de-volutionary. Raciness stops us from reading situations and therefore keeps us small.
On that Spring Day, some hours before reaching London, I had chosen to de-volve myself by insufficient care on that long flight. From that point on, I was toast. From that point, due to a combination of tiredness (self-inflicted), a less than optimal diet (self-chosen) and some investment (self-created, unnecessary worry) in what was to come from this three-week trip, I had lost the ability to read the situation and in so doing, I chose instead to be racy. And that is how I came to be standing on a street corner in Soho eating that Ecuadorian, dark chocolate, gluten free brownie and in doing so, making matters worse by choosing to keep myself in that same raciness.
But now that I have written this – now that I have understood what really happened high over the Middle East – my path of evolution has expanded.
It is not about the food itself; it is about The Four Pillars of Evolution from which a healthy diet evolves, or in this example, an unhealthy choice is determined. The choice is derived from the energy that sets up the original behaviour and not from the food offered by the street stalls.
Filed under
Alcohol, Sugar, Gluten free, Awareness, Connection, Evolution
