Reaching Into the Universe Dedicated to creating an enlightened world: spiritually fulfilling, physically healthy, socially just, and environmentally sustainable.

Who else wants to know about the fourth pillar of sustainability?

If you stick with me here, I'll take you from Greek theatre all the way to good nutrition, tying it all together through sustainability along the way. In the end you'll know about the fourth pillar of sustainability and why it's important for you and everybody else.

So to start, two of the Greek entertainment traditions that were held as muses in their own right, Comedy and Tragedy, could seem confusing. If Muses contribute to sustainability, how does Tragedy help us?

Aristotle saw the Tragedies as medicinal, as quoted in Wikipedia saying

Tragedy results in a catharsis (emotional cleansing) or healing for the audience through their experience of these emotions in response to the suffering of the characters in the drama.

And while some attempted "to link the medieval tradition of morality plays and farces to classical theater, ...others rejected this claim and elevated classical tragedy and comedy to a higher dignity."

Wow. "Morality plays and farces." Sounds like what we Americans consume. The rejections of the medieval tradition show it to contain other parallels to American patterns of consumption.

Of greater difficulty for the theorists was the incorporation of Aristotle's notion of "catharsis" or the purgation of emotions with Renaissance theater, which remained profoundly attached to both pleasing the audience and to the rhetorical aim of showing moral examples

American entertainment tends not to heal, but to harm, as it sugar coats propaganda with artificially-sweetened junk. Wow, really does sound like the food we consume, eh?

We know many find actual junk food pleasing, but what's the "moral example" of junk food? Fragmentation, loss of connection with wholeness, and with the earth that literally feeds us. Refined foods are made from whole foods that have been fragmented and scattered. Such foods support a culture of separation and dualist, black and white worldviews.

Junk food and even healthy-seeming foods that are refined, support:

• nihilism, in postmodern relativists (e.g. academics, atheists, New Agers)
• fundamentalism, in both
  • modern rationalists (e.g. atheists, agnostics, etc) and
  • premodern mythics (e.g. Southern Baptists, etc)

Our consumption patterns often represent a loss of connection with the body, including the extended body that is the environment. Refined foods weaken the body and the mind in the same way mindless entertainment can. Caring for the self, the community, and the planet therefore becomes easier or more difficult depending on the dietary intake, both the physical diet and the media diet.

This is why it is important to do a media diet when on an ayahuasca dieta, and why traveling to the jungles of Peru can be so helpful in working with that medicine.

This is why it's not enough for the green activists to say, for example at the Green Festival, that "Green means spiritually fulfilling, socially just, and environmentally sustainable."

Those are three pillars of sustainability, but there is a fourth pillar: physical health. All the organically grown, solar powered corn in the world will never make corn syrup healthy.

And corn syrup will never support a sustainable world, which we know because it doesn't sustainable health, and if health is compromised, then the sustainability of life becomes less stable, as one of the four pillars holding it up weakens.

What you eat matters. The sustainability of your communities and planet are interdependent on your physical health and personal sustainability.

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