When Fasting Is Indicated

Persons of sanguine, vital temperament, with the animal qualities strongly developed, enslaved by bad habits and evil passions, will be greatly benefited by occasional short fasts.  In such cases, the experience affords a fine drill in self-discipline, strengthening of self-control and conquest of the lower appetites.

Vigorous, fleshy people, positive physically and mentally, especially those who do not take sufficient physical exercise, should take frequent fasts of one, two, or three days’ duration for the reduction of superfluous flesh and fat and for the elimination of systemic waste and other morbid materials.  Such people should never eat more than two meals a day, and many get along best on one meal.

However, different temperaments and constitutions require different treatment and management.  People of a nervous, emotional temperament, especially those who are below normal in weight and physically and mentally negative, may be seriously and permanently injured by fasting.  They should never fast except in acute diseases and during eliminative healing crises, when Nature calls for the fast as a means of cure.

People of this type are usually thin, with weak and flabby muscles.  Their vital activities are at a low ebb and their magnetic envelopes (aura) are wasted and attenuated like their physical bodies.  The red aura, which is created by the action of the purely animal functions and forces, is more or less deficient or entirely lacking.  Such people have the tendency to become abnormally sensitive to conditions in the magnetic field (the astral plane).

Next to the hypnotic or mediumistic process, there is nothing that induces abnormal psychism so quickly as fasting.  During a prolonged fast, the purely animal functions of digestion, assimilation and elimination are almost completely at a standstill.  This depression of the physical functions arouses and increases the psychic functions and may produce intense emotionalism and abnormal activity of the senses of the spiritual-material body, the individual thus becoming abnormally clairvoyant, clairaudient and otherwise sensitive to conditions on the spiritual planes of life.

This explains the spiritual exaltation and the visions of heavenly scenes and beings or the fights with demons which are frequently, indeed uniformly, reported by hermits, ascetics, saints, yogi, fakirs and dervishes.

Fasting facilitates hypnotic control of the sensitive by positive intelligences either on the physical or on the spiritual plane of being.  In the one case we speak of hypnotism, in the other of mediumship, obsession or possession.  These conditions are usually diagnosed by the regular practitioner as nervousness, nervous prostration, hysteria, paranoia, delusional insanity, double personality, mania, etc.

The destructive effects of fasting are intensified by solitude, grief, worry, introspection, religious exaltation or any other form of depressive or destructive mental and emotional activity.