Philosophy Of Fasting

"The Philosophy of Fasting" is a plea for human sincerity and a treatise on human wholeness. The first twenty-five years of my life I was anything but whole. Because I was anything but sincere. I did not dare be true to myself, or with my fellows. Civilization, classicism and orthodoxy had combined to make me appear what I was not and crucify what I was. Body, brain and soul, I was burdened with a mass of externals that weighed heavier and sunk deeper day by day, until the life was almost crushed out of me.

Born a weakling, I was a semi-invalid and chronic sufferer during most of my boyhood and youth. Some fifteen forms of constitutional disease took turns troubling me; until family. friends and physicians began to despair of the outcome. At one time I was taking six kinds of medicine, weighed 110 pounds instead of 150, spent most of the time beside the fire, or on the couch, and threatened to become useless to myself and everybody else. The ailments were chiefly nervous and digestive, and were caused by inequalities of make-up. Inheriting from my father a brain incessantly active, from my mother a soul supersensitive and a physique small and tremulous, from both an insatiable ambition; I seemed unable to balance myself at all. Wearing a man's hat at twelve, I had the body of a boy of eight, with a soul older than any I had ever met. Naturally no one understood me. And the greatest puzzle to me in the Universe was I to myself.

I could not ride in a carriage, sit in a hammock, or climb a tree without growing dizzy, sick and faint. The slightest physical jar or mental irritation brought on headaches that lasted for days. Public gatherings oppressed and stifled me--it was the poisonous insincerity of social usage, though I did not know it then.

The routine of existence was eternally maddening me--every clock, calendar and school-bell in town seemed to shriek the cruelty of law and order. The claim of senseless customs, the grasp of useless habits, the sway of rule and rote, the clutter of superfluous possessions, the onus of fictitious duties, the miasma of popular opinion, the rut of precedent, the chain of environment, the blindfold of superstition--from all these barriers to human progress I was struggling to be free. The doctors meanwhile declared with oracular accent they could find no physiological basis for disease--it must be all in my imagination!