# The Short Cut to Regeneration Through Fasting/Chapter 3

CHAPTER III
The Physical Fast
The Phvsical Fast is directed to the correction of all physical errors. The ordinary human has any number of faults in his physical body. Neglect in posture has given him errors of physical angles by throwing the bony skeleton out of its normal relationships. The shoulders are stooped, the backbone out of plumb, the chest sunken, the hip bones protruding or twisted from a parallel, the facial muscles are wrinkled and the eyes squinted out of all normal balance. Hardly one person in a hundred is true to the type nature intended him to be; not one in a hundred but might be the image and likeness of God if he had the spiritual backbone and knowledge enough to take himself in hand.
One meets real flesh-pots creeping along the human pathway. They have eaten themselves out of shape—filled full of fatty deposits, all harmony of flesh lost in the deformity of too much food and lack of purification of the flesh body.
The great flesh-pots who call themselves men and women are really not so at all, they are simply walking sanitary vats into which appetite and self-indulgence have poured too big a stream ​of waste materials. When one looks at the purple circulation, under-aerated, under-eliminated one cannot help but think "Ye suffer from yourselves, none others bind ye that ye bloat and die."
The hospitals and sanatoriums are full of this over-fed, unpurified lot. The doctors' and healers' offices are crowded with them. Their only desire is to be rid of the effects of their ignorance, not of the real ignorance itself. They really do want to be well and healthy, but most of them want more to be undisturbed in the old habits of thought, feeling and action that have made them what they are.
Try to knock out their little god of appetite and see how they will defend him; try to tell them that a certain line of thinking is poisoning their blood or a certain sickly emotional stimulus is weaking their circulation, and that they must fast, breathe and change their thinking and actions,—they will turn away with the question "Oh, can't you cure me without all that trouble on my part?"
I have offered for five years to take any woman from fifty to seventy years of age and if she will obey all the orders of a complete fast,—body, mind and spirit,—I will remodel her so that she will look, act, feel and be in the possession of the gifts of a girl of eighteen.
Why do you suppose my time is not all employed in the care of these people? Surely old age is a tragedy—not age, but old age. One hates to sit and see the years creep on with their evolutionary marks, loss of form, hair, and teeth, and ​then come slowly to the tottering edge of a grave which the spirit in us has no desire to welcome.
The answer to why they do not come is simple. First, they do not believe that it can be done, they have never seen it done and the old race teachers are wedded loyally to eating. They have made food their god instead of the God of energy in man himself. They are afraid, they think they will die if they do not eat, that man lives physically by food alone; while the whole truth is, he lives by the great burning electrons of his being and very little food is enough to make a carbon through which the passing currents can break into energy. "Man is not flesh he's fire: and at his undiscovered center is the flame from whence he came."
Then again, by the time old age comes on, they have have an old old age consciousness and they hug to themselves the cozy corners; they hate exercise; they are fond of all the little hypnotic creature comforts. They like the things which have made them what they are better than the things which will unmake them and give them a new lease on life and youth. They think the laws laid down for their regeneration will kill them, when the fact has always been that whatever any one thinks will kill him is exactly the thing he needs to cure him.
Again, those who need this new transmutation process the very worst are always surrounded by a bevy of old thought doctors who are signed, sealed and delivered to their old idea of food as a necessity; and these caution the patient ​seriously against fasting. Or they are just as completely bound by friends and relatives who will watch the green and yellow colors of the dying flesh,—which is bound to appear during the first few days of fasting—and they will worry and fret at every change in the lustre of the eve or the color of the skin. No matter how how near death they may be, even given up by their doctors and friends, they still hestitate to allow the fast test.
If I had a sanatorium today, with money enough behind it to make me free to do anything I wanted to do and registered medically in any tate, and I should go to the country infirmary or to the insane asylums and ask them to give me for experimentation the socalled hopelessly insane or incurably diseased, do you think I would be allowed the opportunity? No, indeed; no more than the insane wards will lend themselves today to an exorcist who knows insanity as astral hypnosis and treats it by the laws of obsession.
But there are individuals who are listening and lending themselves to the new psychology and using it as scientifically as a scientist works in a laboratory, and in a few more years the first and only cure for mental or physical diseases will be found in fasting and breathing.
The physical body is made up of two kinds of cells and these cells, by their intelligence, build and rebuild flesh. Every tissue, bone or muscle has its own particular intelligence and works under the master intelligence of its own kind. ​You could not make a bone cell build brain substance, nor a skin cell make a muscle. One must realize first the tremendous importance of his physical body. It is wonderfully made up by an army of skilled workmen, all of whom are under his own master mind. Left to themselves, the cells will obey the master cell consciousness, but when consciously linked with the mind of the individual, every master cell in the body will take the command of a higher thought.
One great army of intelligence is called the "permanent atom" electrons—mentoids—but psychologically and preferably, the "life cells"; these cells are embryonic and are first and last in the scheme of creation of the flesh. These know nothing of age or pain, decay or disease; they are life, nothing but life, expressed in unceasing construction and reconstruction.
The other cells are the food cells and these are the cells which proliferate, build and change. The food body is put off and on; it is only the insulator of the life body and the food cells change every thirty days. We are changed even to the marrow of our bones in something less than thirty days, and we can grow a new food body just as a lobster grows a new claw.
All old age, all disease, all abnormalities are in the food body and all change can be established through simply discontinuing the old food body. In disease the patient is walled in with a food body whose every cell intelligence is stamped with the belief in the disease. He may be a mass of corrupt food cells which refuse to break, and ​re-establish a normal insulation throughout the physical self.
There are those who are really dead in their shell of food cells; no matter what they eat or what they do, they cannot bring any effect to bear on their flesh. It is just as much a sign of error to have a body that never responds to food never puts on a pound of flesh, as to have one which calls for food continually and builds it all into excess flesh.
Our first step, then, in the physical fast, is just to stop eating long enough wholly to rearrange the food body. We must want to fast more than we want to eat and have spiritual discipline enough to set the law for our own cell calls. All appetite is in the food body and as it lives by the stimulation of food, it must die if it does not receive it.
There are several different degrees of vitality in the food cells. In the first day's fast, millions of soft cells will perish but there are others which will still persist. We must fast until, from every organ of the physical body, the food body has died out, leaving just the one natural layer which nature gave in the beginning as insulation of the life cells.
The thirst of the drunkard and the habit of the drug fiend is in his food body. It is the appetite of the cell that calls for its continual satisfaction, which keeps them both returning to the drink and the dope long after the mind has weakly determined that they will reform. The united call of the cell intelligence for their ​food is stronger than the will power which the mind sets up in opposition,—in spite of resolutions the cell hunger conquers them.
The first real aid to a degenerate of drink or drugs is to fast off his saturated food body and let him grow a new one under the vibrations of a new thought impluse; after a while his body has a new cell consciousness and it has become his helper instead of his destroyer.
All one needs to do in order to determine the truth of this statement is to look at the flesh body of the drunkard before fasting and after fasting. No will power on earth is strong enough to break the chains of a saturated, whiskey-sodden flesh desire unless it is linked with a method that helps conquer through a higher law.
All physical disease is due to abnormal tissue changes, beginning with function and ending with change of structure. All kidney trouble begins in change of tissue and all change of tissue is food-cell change. The kidneys break down through proliferation of the food cells giving soft walls, linings, etc.
All heart trouble is from the same cause. The wonderful walls of the heart, which must remain nearly perfect in life cells, become fatty in change and the softened valvular tissue sags and the walls are no longer taut and strong to do the occult work of regulating the circulation in harmony with the brain and breath, or they become too thin from lack of normal food cells
All nervous diseases are caused by some error ​in the food body. Back of all nervous diseases are food cell adhesions; adhesions are unknown in the life cells. If all paralytics and nervous patients were placed in a hospital under the care of psychologists and nurses, then fasted until they were skin and bone, then fed until they had put on a reasonable food body, then fasted again and yet again, the adhesions and malnutrition of their nervous systems would disappear and a new, strong readjustment of food-cells and life-cells would obtain. No fear that any patient will die of fasting—the starvation cure is the safest—and newest psychological discovery.
This new method cells for super-vision by those who are perfectly familiar with all the symptoms, changes in flesh, mind and emotion which a fast brings on. The new sanatorium for reconstruction of the patient will not be in the hands of a sleek, fat, indulgent group of men and women who never gave themselves a moment's real discipline.
No man or woman should be allowed to put a patient through a fast who has himself always yielded to the slightest weakness of his own mind and flesh, but the new psychology will be in the hands of Initiates who have themselves been over every step of the transmutation path. Then there will be a true understanding of a patient's needs and a true sympathy with his mental moods. The new sanatorium will no more accept the uninitiated, than will the new asylum for mental diseases accept, for managers and directors, those who have no knowledge of ​their own extended states of mind and those to whom clairvoyance, trance and transcendentalism are unknown.
No one who does not even know that he has an astral body—much less has ever seen it—will be acceptable in the new management. The only one acceptable will be the real, true modern mystic having all the extended states of mind found in the asylum, but who, instead of becoming insane, has correlated them all into a perfect relationship—in other words a supraman who is enabled by his own enlarged consciousness to understand the disorganized states of mind in the wards.
The new world will be in the hands of its higher masters who, with insight keen, will direct them over a larger path.
Fasting, directed and controlled, is the cure, and the only cure, of all the so-called incurable diseases on earth. Locomotor ataxia may be easily overcome by one who has the strength and purpose to cure himself by the simple method of reconstruction through fasting, breathing and thinking.
Epilepsy is a disease of obsession, and the obsessing entity can be permanently displaced through fasting. There will come a day, and soon, when men will learn that when they really have enough of anything, they can quit, and quit through establishing a conscious union with the finer laws of the flesh.
Just to fast or simply stop eating until body, mind and soul and spiritual consciousness have ​changed, then we have put off the old man of limitations and put on the new, through intelligent use of our finer forces.
Through fasting, the body becomes like a new glove which we can draw on over the real man within. After we have understood the changes which the physical body undergoes, in order to build it into a new and durable type of perfect harmony and strength and beauty, we must go on and study the man within. There is nothing in our earth (body) but thinking makes it so, and our next step is to think the right, creative, master thoughts. This naturally leads to states of mind within us, and those states consciously induced during our periods of self discipline.