There is a very normal and typical progress for each person’s fatal illness.  Their ultimate disease starts out in childhood or adolescence as acute inflammations of skin-like organs, viral or bacterial infections of the same.  Then, as vital force weakens, secondary eliminations are shifted to more vital organs.  Allergies or colds stop happening so frequently; the person becomes rheumatic, arthritic or experience weakness in joints, tendons, ligaments, or to have back pains, or to have digestive upsets.  These new symptoms are more constant but usually less acute.  Ultimately, vital organs begin to malfunction, and serious disease develop.  But a hygienist sees the beginning of fatal diseases such as cancer in adolescent infections and allergies.

Retracing is generally seen only on water fasts, not on extended cleansing diets.  The body begins to repair itself by healing conditions in the reverse order to that which they occurred originally.  This means that the body would first direct healing toward the lungs if the most recently serious illness was an attack of pneumonia six months previously.  In this case you would expect to quickly and intensely experience a mini-case of pneumonia while the body eliminates residues in the lungs that were not completely discharged at the time.  Next the body might take you through a period of depression that you had experienced five years in the past.  The faster may be profoundly depressed for a few days and come out of it feeling much better.  You could then reexperience sensation-states like those caused by recreational drugs you had playfully experimented with ten years previously along with the “trippiness” if it were a hallucinogen, speediness if it was “speed” or the dopiness if it was heroin.  Retracing further, the faster might then experience something similar to a raging attack of tonsillitis which you vaguely remember having when you were five years old, but fortunately this time it passes in three days (or maybe six hours), instead of three weeks.  This is retracing.

Please do not be surprised or alarmed if it happens to you on a fast, and immediately throw out the baby with the bath water thinking that you are doing the wrong thing because all those old illnesses are coming back to haunt you.  It is the body’s magnificent healing effort working on your behalf, and for doing it your body deserves lots of “well done”, “good body” thoughts rather than gnashing of teeth and thinking what did I do to deserve this.  The body won’t tell you what you did to deserve this, but it knows and is trying its darndest to undo it.

The Unrelenting Boredom Of Fasting