I knew a guy who was a real sulfur. He went through a "you have to chew everything twenty-five times" diet phase. That's fierce. But it was good for him because he eventually died of cancer of the digestive system. So his doctor was right on telling him to chew his food like that. This guy could eat a whole chicken and then go for the Cheetos and beer. To him this was no prodigious feat. This was just what you do when you are hungry. If you went to dinner at his house they would bring out three chickens. One for him, one for his wife and one for the company. This is truly amazing. It wasn't a game hen, you know? It was like a real chicken. So that type of craving goes way beyond the biology of hunger. In Africa they dip the chicken in water enough so that the whole village gets the soup. So it's more in the direction that Linda was talking about: watching yourself do this thing and saying where is my satisfaction not happening for me? I'm focusing on food because it's a place where a person can really start to work on themselves. Over the years what I've learned in doing this work is that I would sit there on Wednesday afternoon during office hours talking to people about taking flower essences and homeopathic remedies and meditations and exercises and whatever and I finally realized that no amount of exercises or remedies can overcome poor eating habits. I would talk with people again and again about their soul dilemmas and what it would all boil down to was what they were eating. And it became crystal clear to me that that what a person is craving to eat is the place of the beginning of the work -- of what you put inside of you as food has a great deal to do with how you see yourself .

[Question:] What is the gift of sulfur?

[Dennis:] The gift of sulfur is that it gets things done. The gift of Mercury is that it can bring balance by uniting the extremes. The gift of salt is that it can really know. It takes a long while for a salt person to know something, but when they know it, they know it -- inside out, upside down, front and back. They really know it. They permeate it. Like salt permeates water. They permeate what they are working with. They just keep the problem cycling so long that it eventually dissolves into a solution. What was once a lot of different parts is now all one thing, one custard. This used to be an egg. This used to be a banana. that condition is salt in one extreme. If I just keep working with the water and the earth they both move towards each other and form a solution or a colloid. Then the egg and the banana are brought into a higher salt condition. Where what was once separated now has been brought into unity. Now it's custard. If the custard is just about to form and is still in a solution and I add table salt the custard will fall to the bottom of the bowl and the water will rise to the top of the bowl. This the salt as a manifestation.

The sulfur in this is the process by which we cook the original solution of eggs and milk and bananas. The cooking drives the salt parts of egg, milk and banana into a more unified state as we gradually add heat and stir. The stirring is the mercury. this rhythm enables the sulfur of the warmth of the cooking process to lift the separate components of the mixture into a more intimate state. If I let this happen gradually then the custard sets. If I shock the mixture by adding salt to the solution the custard falls out and it gets back to the original salt form. If the custard sets into a pudding the sulfur yields to a salt at a higher level. The salt like mixture has now become a colloid, a salt which resembles life, a living mineral. The sulfur brings things into a more intimate condition. Cooking is sulfur as is baking. The different constituents become integrated in a more intimate way. The gift of the sulfur is that when sulfur is applied to situations things get done they become more enhanced and integrated.

[Question:] What does Mercury like to eat?

[Dennis:] Mercury likes to eat sweet things, the higher refined the better. Mercury types want the buzz. Forget food! Food is for wimps! Food brings me down. Food makes me want to go lay down, if I'm a mercury, after I eat it. So, yeah. Just the buzz. Then mercury is hungry again in ten minutes. Everything to a mercury is Chinese food. It just goes right through, zoom, like that. So because it goes right through, stuff that takes a long time to break down in my digestion means I can't be in working on my computer with one hand and a Jolt Cola in the other. That's a mercury picture there. So what the mercury is struggling with is that it has a deep addiction to quick energy, which is highly processed grains, sugars and stuff that's just about to almost burst into air and light. Mercury loves substances which are almost not there, like sugar. So sugar in any form is a favorite mercury food. So what the mercury has to do is learn to find the same satisfaction that they get from sugar satisfaction , which is mostly in the mouth and in the blood. That's where the satisfaction is. Try to find other foods in the daily round which give that feeling of energy and vitality but in a much more integrated way, something like (I know you're going to laugh), but a parsnip. Ha ha ha, right? Ha ha ha, parsnip. Yeah, right, parsnip. She's going ugh! Parsnips?

[Comment:] What about parsnips baked in butter and brown sugar?

[Dennis:] Yeah, they will give you a mercury buzz. They're mercury power food.

[Comment:] Butter and brown sugar, ummm!

[Dennis:] She's been there. Skip the parsnips! Just eat the butter and the brown sugar! The parsnips are just filler. It's just bulk. Look, you're mercury you don't want bulk! So if you are a mercury honey bee see if you can get the sugar away from you and when at four o'clock your glucose tolerance says give me the sugar, eat something like an apple and a handful of blanched almonds. Wait until the glycemic index gets critical and then have your little safety blanket of your apple and almonds. Zzzt - hah! Okay. Blood sugar. I'm back again. Do that for a month and then go out and eat some sugar. What you find is that the sugar tastes very bitter. It tastes like some kind of metal. It tastes like you have a penny on your tongue.

[Question:] Is carbohydrate craving the same as sugar craving?

[Dennis:] That is the biggest question in nutrition that there can be.

[Question:] What does that mean?

[Dennis:] What does it mean? It is the trick question in nutrition because there are carbohydrates and then there are carbohydrates. So if your source of carbohydrate has been removed from life then the blood becomes mineralized and the ego has a rough time living in it. Too much refined sugar and the blood becomes very acid. We have to really watch the word sugar. Plastic as an oil by product is a cousin to sugar, sort of. It's kind of been rendered out of what once was a living form that had carbohydrates as the basis for the energetic life. Take a sugar cube in a spoon and put some brandy on it and set it on fire. You can kind of cook it so that it will turn into this black little carbon goop on a spoon. If you boil it and cook it down, it will form a carbon shell that looks like bakelite. Take coal and bake it until it melts, that's bakelite. Bakelite is what light switches used to be made of before there were plastics, it was made from coal tar. We could call it petrocaramel. I'm stretching things a bit, but just a bit. Sugar is a mineral.

The more complex the sugar, and the more natural the sugar, the more the sugars are integrated with enzymes and other things that help in the digestion and assimilation of the sugars and starches. That's how we find the sugars in fruit. They are imbedded in enzymes. The more simple the sugar, like a cane sugar the more it has been refined and refined and refined, until it is really a mineral. It's like a metal almost. If you take that, then the whole blood system goes whoa, way out somewhere. But if you take the sugar combined with enzymes and with other digestive things that are in the fruit itself, j and vitamins and whatever, then when that goes into the system it's not a simple sugar. It's a complex sugar and it has to take time to get broken down. Then it takes a long time for it to get in the blood and blah blah blah. Then you don't get the buzz. But maybe it's the buzz that will give you the satisfaction. That's a problem. So the sugar is a good way to get a buzz, because you only have to pay whatever for a candy bar and then you have an instant buzz in your pocket. Whereas if you ate a banana, well, huh, where's the buzz?.

So let's go to the next level. If we're talking about satisfaction and we're talking about food, the real satisfaction is that our food represents the will of somebody else. If we forget that, there is a tremendous component of satisfaction that is not available to us. It's just somewhere else in our consciousness where we cannot get to it. We can find ways of working with food to actually bring it somehow into consciousness that this food come Ss from somewhere, and it has a biography, and it means something beyond just satisfying a craving. It is very helpful to try and reinvest food with the idea that somebody did something to make this food happen. It does not appear by itself. We could also look for unsprayed or organic or bio dynamic food. All of that lines up, and increases the satisfaction element of the process of eating and getting nutrition. If we just analyze food for its daily requirement of nutrients, these things wouldn't show up as factors at all. And yet they are very important for the sense of satisfaction.

So at the next level there is what makes the food become less of a substance and more a process. Here it is useful that we build some type of inner relationship to the whole process of either growing, or preparing, or presenting the food. That the whole ambiance around the whole ritual of food has to do with a sense of gratitude to what this really is as a gift that's given to us fro the cosmos and the earth. If it simply becomes something that we put in the organism as a substitute for cravings, then it's no longer food as it is intended to be for us by the hierarchies . It no longer satisfies the whole being. It only satisfies the minimum daily requirements. That kind of thing is the ultimate basis for cravings. That's the problem in a way that goes even beyond the liver and the lungs and the kidney and the heart and the salt and the sulfur and the mercury.