Raw Vegan Forever - Storm's Blog

Storm's Web Log - Raw Vegan Forever

4/24/08

Thoughts on Future Cities and Green Materials

I first became aware of a new concept in how architecture could change our relationship to how we format our lifestyles in the seventies in Detroit. Four connecting skyscrapers went up in the downtown area. One of the towers contained condo-like living structures, another tower contained business offices, there were stores for shopping and a gym etc... Everything that anyone would need was contained in the four towers. There was also a mini sky-rail that traveled all through the downtown area.

With this concept I saw that the need for driving to work had been done away with; you could just awake up and go over to the next tower to go to work. You could do all of your shopping within the four towers as well as go to the movies, nightclubs and other forms of entertainment.

It was not until recently when I saw at what an alarming rate the fertile farm lands in the Ojai Valley were being changed into housing developments that I wondered - what if instead of sprawling out and gobbling up all of the farmland the houses were stacked so to speak on top of each other. Most of the time when you think of skyscrapers you think of urban cities. But what if a skyscraper was surrounded by fields producing food. Then you wouldn't need to truck the food in or drive to the store and the whole town of Ojai could be contained in about ten acres instead of sprawling through the whole valley with the resulting traffic congestion. For the most part it was just a daydream, or perhaps a glimpse of the future.

It now appears that I will be able to play a small part in creating an Eco Village in Ojai. We are now in the process of acquiring 117 acres that is one of the most beautiful properties in the Ojai Valley. It has a stream running right through the middle of it and huge amounts of water under it. It is in a protected little area that will create a micro-clime that will allow us to grow food all year round. I think that this property can support 20 to 30 people easily with food that can be grown directly on the land. It also incorporates the concept of living where you work so that you don't have to commute. By creating two businesses on the actual property and hooking up high speed internet it is totally possible to create a high tech village of the future with a much lower carbon footprint. The energy will come totally from the sun. We are close enough so that we can ride bikes to any place in Ojai.

I feel that this is one of the few places in North America that this type of project can flourish with its year round growing season and a lot of like minded people in the actual city of Ojai.

We are going through a huge revolution in architectural materials. Some people like the concept of building strawbale and cob houses. I like the look and feel of these houses but they are organic and they are in a state of decomposing and returning to the earth. Concrete is gaining a lot of credibility, but it has a heavy carbon footprint. Then there are a lot of recycled materials coming onto the market as well as hemp and bamboo being made into types of sustainable woods. There is also a new concept called eco friendly wood which is a term that sounds a little sketchy to me. Wood has to be treated to keep the insects from eating it. I love the warmth that natural wood brings to a structure but I feel that with creative designing in the actual architecture one can bring a lot of warmth using organic materials such as adobe, stone and glass. Right now I'm researching a material which is like concrete but instead of using actual concrete it uses ashes from coal burning plants. And it is actually stronger than concrete. I feel that by using this material in the walls with a form of polyfoam embedded in the center that one can create a structure that is totally insulated from either heat or cold and at the same time it is fireproof, earthquake proof and not being an organic material it does not need to be treated with chemicals which leach toxins into our living environment.

Blogdate 12/18/06

The Downside of the Raw Vegan Diet

I'm now about two weeks away from entering into my 58th journey around the sun. I have been doing the Raw Vegan Diet since 1972 and this is the first time that I am reaching what I would consider a crisis with the diet.

As we go deeper into the movement I'm starting to come into contact with long term raw vegans I always knew they must have existed. I read everything that I can find on the subject. One of the main inspirations for me was the work of Dr. Norman Walker who was also the longest lived raw vegan that I know of. Even though he had one cooked meal a day usually consisting of some form of rice dish; for me he is still a type of mentor, because he was the first to drive home the scientific principles of my current approach to the raw vegan diet.

But now after over thirty years I find myself besieged on all sides by intolerable food and drug cravings. I'm experiencing a level of agony that I never experienced up until now. When I first started I never experienced what is commonly known as detox. It did take a certain amount of discipline to change life long eating habits. But right from the start I was so excited by the incredible results until I was just swept away by the momentum of the discovery of a new frontier.

Of course I don't know for sure what is happening with me. We are all mysterious beings and modern medical science has not even scratched the surface layer of answering even the most basic questions of our existence. But even so most of the time I refer to a scientific language when I discourse within myself via internal dialogue.

I totally believe that we all have the capacity for infinite growth. I don't think that we ever bottom out and that we just reach a wall either physical or spiritual that says you just cannot go any further. I think that I realized early on in my journey that the energy levels one obtains from doing a well balanced raw vegan diet are astronomical. The only way that I was able to maintain a long term course was to transmute the energy. I think that if you don't find a way to transmute the energy then it turns on you.

Of course one of the advantages of being an old man is hindsight. I can look back over the years and they speak to me. The one thing that becomes obviously clear to me is that when we tap into the huge energy source that comes from raw food then we must also develop a means to transmute it. When I first started out I was too poor to afford a car so all I had was a bicycle and a thirty dollar juicer. I was riding over a hundred miles a day. When I went raw I instantly noticed that the bike went faster and further on less food. It was like the difference between a coal burning electric plant and two pounds of uranium in a nuclear energy plant. Even within the raw food realm I think that there is almost five times as much energy in a glass of orange juice than there is in a typical 3 course raw vegan meal. Simple and less is better.

This is a concept that has worked fine for me up until now. I feel that many facets of our existence are what you would call accumulative. Most of the time this works against us in the form of accumulating toxins in the form of un-eliminated waste. These toxins then actually clog all of the systems of the body so that over time we become numb and desensitized.

I think that with the raw vegan diet that just the reverse happens. I have had people tell me that they did the diet for 5 years and then stopped. I know of one well known raw fooder who did the diet for over twenty five years and then went back to eating meat. He got stomach cancer, which he then cured by going back to the raw vegan diet. And my question has always been how could someone do something that actually worked for them and then stop. I hear of people on almost a daily bases now saying that they feel so much better on the raw vegan diet and that they totally believe that it is the best way to eat, but they themselves are only doing 80 percent.

I think that what is happening is that the raw vegan diet is working for some people too well. You reach a level of energy that is totally uncomfortable and in order for the organism to protect itself from this excess energy you start eating food that will negate the flow of energy. I think that that is what is happening with me in my current crisis. For years after I went totally raw I only needed four to five hours of sleep. I think that when we sleep our bodies process the toxins, and as we eat the cleaner foods less time is needed to process the toxins. What is happening now is that I'm finding that I'm hardly sleeping at all. I am experiencing what I call states of waking dreams.

At first I was thrilled when I realized that this was happening to me. This is a state that people take major drugs to acquire. There are different states of sleep. Even when we sleep a full eight hours we only spend five or ten minutes in a deep delta state. I think that the delta state is a dreamless state or if we do dream in it we can't recall it.

I think that I first altered my sleep patterns in 1968 when I was in the army stationed in Korea. Sometimes I would pull guard duty when we were on alert and the combination of fear and fighting sleep would cause me to enter into altered states of sleep. I would doze off but at the same time my eyes were open and I was focused. I was not totally aware of what had happened to me until I went raw about four years later.

As I’m not sleeping at night and I’m driving a lot right now for both the food shopping and business matters – whenever I leave the house its at a least a two-hour drive to go anywhere as we live so far up in the mountains. So I’m kind of sleeping on the road, in a sort-of waking restful state.

One night I was driving with a group of friends on a freeway in LA and I fell totally asleep at the wheel while doing 80 miles a hour. I drove up an exit and down a side street and parked the car. When everyone asked me what we were doing there I told them that I fell asleep and that the last thing I remembered was driving down the freeway.

This was even more pronounced when I was solo sailing years ago. Sometimes in really bad storms I would have to stay up for three days at a time sailing the boat. I would have to deal with each single wave until the storm played out and then I would fall into a deep delta state of sleep. Or if I was in an anchorage and the wind changed from off shore to on shore then I would have to be sleeping lightly enough to pop up and deal with the boat.

But now as I enter into new levels of consciousness through the long term effects of the reversals of accumulated waste and toxins, I'm finding that my ability to manage my energy levels in relation to my energy levels are not in sync. I think that this will happen to every single person who attempts to do the raw vegan diet long term. Eventually you will be confronted by the wall.

And another reason even though I hate to admit it is that I have slowed down my workout levels. For years I was an extreme athlete. I loved solo rock climbing, scuba diving, hang gliding, sailing storms, etc... But after having so many children I felt that I could not take these type of chances so I slowed down the process of transmuting high energy levels through extreme danger, and as a result the energy is in effect turning on me in the form of intense cravings.

What happens when we reach the wall is that we give into a craving. Most people when they come off of doing a 100% raw vegan diet they break it with rice. I think that there are two types of raw vegans. The first type hates the thought of cooked food, can't stand the smell of it and it hurts him/her to be in the room with it. The other type - I include myself in this group - still loves the memory of everything they ever ate, still craves meat, and all manner of cooked foods and junk foods. The second type has the harder journey.

I wish I had more information. I think that because I started off with a really bad diet that maybe I didn't develop my nervous system to a level to be able to handle this increase in energy. I notice that all of my kids carry much higher charges of energy than both Jinjee and I. They are running circles around us. Their energy levels are also increasing at an almost unbelievable rate. It is almost uncomfortable to be around them sometimes. And they too are having to learn how to transmute their energy or it turns on them.

Adagio has been cranky lately – he’s two and a half – and we went to the track at City College one night. We were all racing on the grass and up the bleachers. Then Adagio just took off running around the track by himself. We thought he was trying to catch up with Shale and Jome who were racing on one side. But then we noticed him far off in the far curve still running around the track and realized he had actually decided to run around the track by himself. It was so amazing watching his little white running shoes just moving down that far stretch like the road-runner! All the other kids came over to us and we all just stood in disbelief. Jinjee and Raven wanted to go to him – he was so far away now – but I asked them not to. This was his own journey. As he jogged down the home stretch and started slowing down a bit we began to cheer him on – which made him speed back up with a big smile on his face.

But when I realized this little kid has the energy to run around a college track and then still want to go on running – I understood why he’s been cranky – the energy is stuck in his body and needs to get out. The energy otherwise courses through the body and drives you crazy. A cooked person would just eat some energy-draining foods and the immediate problem would be solved even though their health would eventually suffer of course. A raw person might fall of the wagon at this point and not even know why they did so.

When I get past the fact that I really feel uncomfortable with the release of this much energy coursing through my system all the time I have to admit that on the whole I feel great. I can run for miles without any pain. As of this writing I don't have any lines or wrinkles even though I spend a lot of time out in the sun in the high mountain desert which is very dry.

I have been trying to work with the concept of just skimming the alpha state of waking dreaming without actually losing consciousness and I'm now aware of the road at all times whereas before I was not. This has greatly reduced my level of stress and sometimes after a long drive I arrive feeling rested as if I had really had a deep sleep.

I feel that I'm coming up on a new frontier through the long term effects of the raw vegan diet if I can just find a way to handle the discomfort that the new energy levels are bringing me. Some of the other things that are happening to me are: I can't seem to come into alignment with time and space. No matter where I'm at I want to be someplace else. And no matter what I'm doing I feel that I should be doing something else. This causes me to move at breakneck speed across the planet without ever arriving at my destination. I'm thinking that if I had a huge task, something that I could just totally throw all my energies into that this might be one of the answers. I think another solution might be to somehow raise ones spiritual vibration. These are things I’m seeking right now.

One of the things that is really helping me to understand all this is that I get from 30 to 60 emails a day from people doing all stages of the raw diet and one recurring thing that I notice as a common thread is the fact that they are seeing different aspects of the raw vegan diet actually working, as a problem.

Basically I think that when we reach a certain level of energy that it becomes totally uncomfortable, and if we don't learn how to deal with this aspect of the raw vegan diet then our journey is over. I would love to hear others' experiences with this – please feel free to join in discussion of this topic in our Garden Diet forum.

Storm

December 2006


Storm's Web Log - Raw Vegan Forever 4/24/08 Thoughts on Future Cities and Green Materials I first became aware of a new concept in how architecture could change our relationship to how we format our lifestyles in the seventies in Detroit. Four connecting skyscrapers went up in the downtown area. One of the towers contained condo-like living structures, another tower contained business offices, there were stores for shopping and a gym etc... Everything that anyone would need was contained in the four towers. There was also a mini sky-rail that traveled all through the downtown area. With this concept I saw that the need for driving to work had been done away with; you could just awake up and go over to the next tower to go to work. You could do all of your shopping within the four towers as well as go to the movies, nightclubs and other forms of entertainment. It was not until recently when I saw at what an alarming rate the fertile farm lands in the Ojai Valley were being changed into housing developments that I wondered - what if instead of sprawling out and gobbling up all of the farmland the houses were stacked so to speak on top of each other. Most of the time when you think of skyscrapers you think of urban cities. But what if a skyscraper was surrounded by fields producing food. Then you wouldn't need to truck the food in or drive to the store and the whole town of Ojai could be contained in about ten acres instead of sprawling through the whole valley with the resulting traffic congestion. For the most part it was just a daydream, or perhaps a glimpse of the future. It now appears that I will be able to play a small part in creating an Eco Village in Ojai. We are now in the process of acquiring 117 acres that is one of the most beautiful properties in the Ojai Valley. It has a stream running right through the middle of it and huge amounts of water under it. It is in a protected little area that will create a micro-clime that will allow us to grow food all year round. I think that this property can support 20 to 30 people easily with food that can be grown directly on the land. It also incorporates the concept of living where you work so that you don't have to commute. By creating two businesses on the actual property and hooking up high speed internet it is totally possible to create a high tech village of the future with a much lower carbon footprint. The energy will come totally from the sun. We are close enough so that we can ride bikes to any place in Ojai. I feel that this is one of the few places in North America that this type of project can flourish with its year round growing season and a lot of like minded people in the actual city of Ojai. We are going through a huge revolution in architectural materials. Some people like the concept of building strawbale and cob houses. I like the look and feel of these houses but they are organic and they are in a state of decomposing and returning to the earth. Concrete is gaining a lot of credibility, but it has a heavy carbon footprint. Then there are a lot of recycled materials coming onto the market as well as hemp and bamboo being made into types of sustainable woods. There is also a new concept called eco friendly wood which is a term that sounds a little sketchy to me. Wood has to be treated to keep the insects from eating it. I love the warmth that natural wood brings to a structure but I feel that with creative designing in the actual architecture one can bring a lot of warmth using organic materials such as adobe, stone and glass. Right now I'm researching a material which is like concrete but instead of using actual concrete it uses ashes from coal burning plants. And it is actually stronger than concrete. I feel that by using this material in the walls with a form of polyfoam embedded in the center that one can create a structure that is totally insulated from either heat or cold and at the same time it is fireproof, earthquake proof and not being an organic material it does not need to be treated with chemicals which leach toxins into our living environment. Blogdate 12/18/06 The Downside of the Raw Vegan Diet I'm now about two weeks away from entering into my 58th journey around the sun. I have been doing the Raw Vegan Diet since 1972 and this is the first time that I am reaching what I would consider a crisis with the diet. As we go deeper into the movement I'm starting to come into contact with long term raw vegans I always knew they must have existed. I read everything that I can find on the subject. One of the main inspirations for me was the work of Dr. Norman Walker who was also the longest lived raw vegan that I know of. Even though he had one cooked meal a day usually consisting of some form of rice dish; for me he is still a type of mentor, because he was the first to drive home the scientific principles of my current approach to the raw vegan diet. But now after over thirty years I find myself besieged on all sides by intolerable food and drug cravings. I'm experiencing a level of agony that I never experienced up until now. When I first started I never experienced what is commonly known as detox. It did take a certain amount of discipline to change life long eating habits. But right from the start I was so excited by the incredible results until I was just swept away by the momentum of the discovery of a new frontier. Of course I don't know for sure what is happening with me. We are all mysterious beings and modern medical science has not even scratched the surface layer of answering even the most basic questions of our existence. But even so most of the time I refer to a scientific language when I discourse within myself via internal dialogue. I totally believe that we all have the capacity for infinite growth. I don't think that we ever bottom out and that we just reach a wall either physical or spiritual that says you just cannot go any further. I think that I realized early on in my journey that the energy levels one obtains from doing a well balanced raw vegan diet are astronomical. The only way that I was able to maintain a long term course was to transmute the energy. I think that if you don't find a way to transmute the energy then it turns on you. Of course one of the advantages of being an old man is hindsight. I can look back over the years and they speak to me. The one thing that becomes obviously clear to me is that when we tap into the huge energy source that comes from raw food then we must also develop a means to transmute it. When I first started out I was too poor to afford a car so all I had was a bicycle and a thirty dollar juicer. I was riding over a hundred miles a day. When I went raw I instantly noticed that the bike went faster and further on less food. It was like the difference between a coal burning electric plant and two pounds of uranium in a nuclear energy plant. Even within the raw food realm I think that there is almost five times as much energy in a glass of orange juice than there is in a typical 3 course raw vegan meal. Simple and less is better. This is a concept that has worked fine for me up until now. I feel that many facets of our existence are what you would call accumulative. Most of the time this works against us in the form of accumulating toxins in the form of un-eliminated waste. These toxins then actually clog all of the systems of the body so that over time we become numb and desensitized. I think that with the raw vegan diet that just the reverse happens. I have had people tell me that they did the diet for 5 years and then stopped. I know of one well known raw fooder who did the diet for over twenty five years and then went back to eating meat. He got stomach cancer, which he then cured by going back to the raw vegan diet. And my question has always been how could someone do something that actually worked for them and then stop. I hear of people on almost a daily bases now saying that they feel so much better on the raw vegan diet and that they totally believe that it is the best way to eat, but they themselves are only doing 80 percent. I think that what is happening is that the raw vegan diet is working for some people too well. You reach a level of energy that is totally uncomfortable and in order for the organism to protect itself from this excess energy you start eating food that will negate the flow of energy. I think that that is what is happening with me in my current crisis. For years after I went totally raw I only needed four to five hours of sleep. I think that when we sleep our bodies process the toxins, and as we eat the cleaner foods less time is needed to process the toxins. What is happening now is that I'm finding that I'm hardly sleeping at all. I am experiencing what I call states of waking dreams. At first I was thrilled when I realized that this was happening to me. This is a state that people take major drugs to acquire. There are different states of sleep. Even when we sleep a full eight hours we only spend five or ten minutes in a deep delta state. I think that the delta state is a dreamless state or if we do dream in it we can't recall it. I think that I first altered my sleep patterns in 1968 when I was in the army stationed in Korea. Sometimes I would pull guard duty when we were on alert and the combination of fear and fighting sleep would cause me to enter into altered states of sleep. I would doze off but at the same time my eyes were open and I was focused. I was not totally aware of what had happened to me until I went raw about four years later. As I’m not sleeping at night and I’m driving a lot right now for both the food shopping and business matters – whenever I leave the house its at a least a two-hour drive to go anywhere as we live so far up in the mountains. So I’m kind of sleeping on the road, in a sort-of waking restful state. One night I was driving with a group of friends on a freeway in LA and I fell totally asleep at the wheel while doing 80 miles a hour. I drove up an exit and down a side street and parked the car. When everyone asked me what we were doing there I told them that I fell asleep and that the last thing I remembered was driving down the freeway. This was even more pronounced when I was solo sailing years ago. Sometimes in really bad storms I would have to stay up for three days at a time sailing the boat. I would have to deal with each single wave until the storm played out and then I would fall into a deep delta state of sleep. Or if I was in an anchorage and the wind changed from off shore to on shore then I would have to be sleeping lightly enough to pop up and deal with the boat. But now as I enter into new levels of consciousness through the long term effects of the reversals of accumulated waste and toxins, I'm finding that my ability to manage my energy levels in relation to my energy levels are not in sync. I think that this will happen to every single person who attempts to do the raw vegan diet long term. Eventually you will be confronted by the wall. And another reason even though I hate to admit it is that I have slowed down my workout levels. For years I was an extreme athlete. I loved solo rock climbing, scuba diving, hang gliding, sailing storms, etc... But after having so many children I felt that I could not take these type of chances so I slowed down the process of transmuting high energy levels through extreme danger, and as a result the energy is in effect turning on me in the form of intense cravings. What happens when we reach the wall is that we give into a craving. Most people when they come off of doing a 100% raw vegan diet they break it with rice. I think that there are two types of raw vegans. The first type hates the thought of cooked food, can't stand the smell of it and it hurts him/her to be in the room with it. The other type - I include myself in this group - still loves the memory of everything they ever ate, still craves meat, and all manner of cooked foods and junk foods. The second type has the harder journey. I wish I had more information. I think that because I started off with a really bad diet that maybe I didn't develop my nervous system to a level to be able to handle this increase in energy. I notice that all of my kids carry much higher charges of energy than both Jinjee and I. They are running circles around us. Their energy levels are also increasing at an almost unbelievable rate. It is almost uncomfortable to be around them sometimes. And they too are having to learn how to transmute their energy or it turns on them. Adagio has been cranky lately – he’s two and a half – and we went to the track at City College one night. We were all racing on the grass and up the bleachers. Then Adagio just took off running around the track by himself. We thought he was trying to catch up with Shale and Jome who were racing on one side. But then we noticed him far off in the far curve still running around the track and realized he had actually decided to run around the track by himself. It was so amazing watching his little white running shoes just moving down that far stretch like the road-runner! All the other kids came over to us and we all just stood in disbelief. Jinjee and Raven wanted to go to him – he was so far away now – but I asked them not to. This was his own journey. As he jogged down the home stretch and started slowing down a bit we began to cheer him on – which made him speed back up with a big smile on his face. But when I realized this little kid has the energy to run around a college track and then still want to go on running – I understood why he’s been cranky – the energy is stuck in his body and needs to get out. The energy otherwise courses through the body and drives you crazy. A cooked person would just eat some energy-draining foods and the immediate problem would be solved even though their health would eventually suffer of course. A raw person might fall of the wagon at this point and not even know why they did so. When I get past the fact that I really feel uncomfortable with the release of this much energy coursing through my system all the time I have to admit that on the whole I feel great. I can run for miles without any pain. As of this writing I don't have any lines or wrinkles even though I spend a lot of time out in the sun in the high mountain desert which is very dry. I have been trying to work with the concept of just skimming the alpha state of waking dreaming without actually losing consciousness and I'm now aware of the road at all times whereas before I was not. This has greatly reduced my level of stress and sometimes after a long drive I arrive feeling rested as if I had really had a deep sleep. I feel that I'm coming up on a new frontier through the long term effects of the raw vegan diet if I can just find a way to handle the discomfort that the new energy levels are bringing me. Some of the other things that are happening to me are: I can't seem to come into alignment with time and space. No matter where I'm at I want to be someplace else. And no matter what I'm doing I feel that I should be doing something else. This causes me to move at breakneck speed across the planet without ever arriving at my destination. I'm thinking that if I had a huge task, something that I could just totally throw all my energies into that this might be one of the answers. I think another solution might be to somehow raise ones spiritual vibration. These are things I’m seeking right now. One of the things that is really helping me to understand all this is that I get from 30 to 60 emails a day from people doing all stages of the raw diet and one recurring thing that I notice as a common thread is the fact that they are seeing different aspects of the raw vegan diet actually working, as a problem. Basically I think that when we reach a certain level of energy that it becomes totally uncomfortable, and if we don't learn how to deal with this aspect of the raw vegan diet then our journey is over. I would love to hear others' experiences with this – please feel free to join in discussion of this topic in our Garden Diet forum. Storm December 2006 ... Comments to Storm’s blog can be emailed to storm@thegardendiet.com My Previous Blog Entries Blogdate 11-3-06 - Anti-Aging Workout Blogdate 7-21-06 - An epiphany about the raw diet and anti aging Blogdate 7-12-06 - Supplements and why I don't do them.... Blogdate 6-23-06 - Quantum Physics, Aging and the Art of War....Solar Energy..... Blogdate 4-3-06 - Who Am I ...Aging....Energy on Demand....Most Memorable Retreat.... Blogdate 12-10-05 - The future is bright... My Links Natural Paradigms Channel - online TV alternative in process The Raw Vegan Channel - online TV for raw vegans TheGardenDiet.com - Our family website, featuring our 10 eBooks TakeAFruitBreak.com - Our Nonprofit campaign to beat junk food advertising! TheGardenDiet.com/gallery - My Art BreakthroughTheDocumentary.com - Documentary about our family PearMagazine.com - The Online Magazine of Fresh Organic Lifestyles exploring the issues of raw vegan, eco-friendly, alternative, simple, organic, innovative living! Storm's Page - My body building photos Storm's Before and After Page - More on my anti-aging philosophy, with photos