If we follow along, we started out with stuff like carbon, and now we're getting up here into soul territory and attitude and perception and what Marga said the other day, the attitude of gratitude. It's the inner attitude of being grateful that is the biggest source of satisfaction. But it's the hardest thing to get to, because everything in the whole culture is steering us in the other direction of simply the faster the food is prepared the better it is. That's the picture. It's an image that's reinforced again and again. I had an experience of flying at the Dulles International not too long ago, and I had put something to eat in my bag, but the airline food looked like something from some other planet, so I ate what I was saving for later before I got to Dulles. When I got into the airport, I had a two hour layover, and then I had another two hour flight to get to my destination, so I was stranded in strange-food-ville. I walked up and down that whole airport. Nothing! There was nothing I could eat in there and be able to function when I got to my destination. It reminded me of experiencing I had when I first found I had food allergies of walking through a grocery store with a cart. No I can't eat that. I can't eat that. I can't eat that. I got to the end of the grocery store and I had the strange experience that whole place was filled with poison. It was awesome!

[Comment:] Now you know why they call it Safeway food and drug.

[Comment:] The same thing happens to me going on planes . . . There is very little that I can eat except watermelon.

[Dennis:] So I guess we eat the watermelon. So now when we get to the question of whether or not it has to be organic to give us satisfaction, now we have to look at our constitution. Human beings can go all the way out there and say, it has to be totally organic from 2,000 feet on Maui and then I'll eat it. We can go that way. We could, but let's not. I recently heard a story about an American guy traveling in Africa. He dropped a jar of peach jam in the mud of a bus stop out in the country. An old African woman was there. The jar shattered. The American and the African both looked down at the shattered jar. The woman looked at the man and bent down and picked up the shattered jar of jam and scooped out the jam with her fingers. She spit out the shards of glass as if they were fish bones. The man felt very American.

So somewhere in this all is this principle that I've been trying to drive at all along, and this is we have to find out for each individual what will give us satisfaction, but what gives us satisfaction may not actually make us happy; because life is not arranged so that everything will be happy for us. If life not being happy means that we are paralyzed, then the adversaries are succeeding in taking a sense of satisfaction away from humans. In this condition humans feel that she challenge is so big that nothing can be done by beating on things in the world. If we are working on ourselves and we run into the wall of our powerlessness to control the world our practice will lead us back to changing ourselves on the inside. However, to do this is a lot bigger than just changing our diet. So I don't want give the picture that we can eat our way into heaven, because that's not what I'm talking about. But changing what we eat so that we can get some satisfaction is a fundamental of the healing experience.

The truly difficult part in this is that we are all satisfied by different things. This fact points past the basic urge of hunger when seeking solutions. What is satisfying for me might be that I'm okay eating just watermelon, because maybe I've been in so many situations where I couldn't eat anything at all due to sickness that it is fine that the watermelon I'm eating as a fast is not organic. I eat it and I am satisfied. Or maybe I haven't eaten for two days, so I can spit out the mud and the glass shards from the broken jam jar and I am satisfied. There's an old saying, I complained about having no shoes until I met a man who didn't have any feet. The modern version is "I've been down so long it looks like up to me."

We in this culture live at a time where, if we don't like the way the produce looks in one place, we can go across town in our car ten miles and get produce in another place. But if we don't have a car or the nearest produce is in the next state then that is a problem. Go to a small town grocery in Kansas and look for produce. Try it sometime. You'll learn a lot. What they sell for broccoli in Kansas is just something else. Or ask for an avocado. An ava- what? Or, do you have any quinoa? Can you spell that? And you spell it and they go I never heard of that. Well, we have quinoa spelt flakes in Wild Oats and even at Raleys. And it's great! But having these abilities to do this might just make satisfaction a little harder to get.

[Question:] I'm curious what the role of sensation and digestion . . . If I'm just living my mundane life, there are no bounds in my appetite yet if I get away from this environment and I'm physically active, my appetite goes down. My satisfaction is up and my craving is down.

[Dennis:] Yes! Yes! So let's go up now to the next level, up into sensation. We're just moving octaves now. Rudolf Steiner gives the picture that there is a cosmic nutrition source as well as a physical nutrition source. The cosmic nutrition source has all of the same type of patterns that are present in the earthly nutrition source with its colors and textures and flavors. The cosmic nutrition source is the forces of the sensory experiences we have in a day. The colors and movements and soul moods which food stimulates in us has a counterpart to the colors and movements and moods which our sense environment stimulates in us. With both the cosmic nutrition and the earthly nutrition we have exactly the same problem. The problem is can I find in an environment like Fair Oaks a place where I can go to get some sensory satisfaction, some good cosmic nutrition. So there's the river and the coast and the Sierras. But what about in my life locally? In one's life there can be those little places consciously placed to offer good cosmic nutrition. A healing place could be a little shrine with a little waterfall on your window sill. When you come out in the morning and you hear that sound there is cosmic nutrition. Or there could be something like a bird feeder outside the window. It doesn't have to be Yosemite, sometimes a little birdfeeder outside the window is a little better than fighting the crowds at Yosemite. Good art on the walls or flower arrangements can be a great source of cosmic nutrition.

[Comment:] I was the housing coordinator for Rudolf Steiner College for a while and had the opportunity to visit homes. What I discovered was people's homes are their sanctuaries. They were very beautiful. I was very impressed.

[Dennis:] Yes. The point is even with bad food we can bless it and love it and this transforms our satisfaction in eating it. Maybe we have to buy produce or meat in Raley's in plastic, but we can put love into it in the preparation and presentation and the mood of the place where we eat it. Maybe we have to see the billboards on the freeway, but we can be a loving person in the context of those billboards on the freeway, and that begins to form a tincture in the environment around us that starts to transform things. The art is satisfaction hinges on the ability of humans to transform things. It is essentially an alchemical transformation of the corpse into gold.

The highest form of this work is to be able to access the inner experience that no one is really to blame for all of this junk. This is the viewpoint of the dead. They see that there are adversarial forces that are in the world that are at work to keep the human being subject to the fear of not being in control. And when another person is struggling with something fearful, and we have a particular constitutional fear of something which goes against their particular constitutional fear of something, That's when the blaming starts. When this happens the dead see that we are no longer humans but that Lucifer and Ahriman are dividing the corpse. In these situations it is alchemically possible to be able to find the place where we can go to the spot where we are getting some satisfaction. Maybe we can go to the mountains in our imagination and let that imagination influence our fearful soul mood. Through our inner practice we can bring the cosmic nutritional mood of the mountains to the situation, and the atmosphere will change. This is a great soul alchemy of transformation.

It once was the cast that people would organize over some issue and one tribe would go over the hill and say to the tribe over there, this is the way it's going to be. Do this as we say or there will be trouble. Even though this is the way the world still is, it is important to note that it is not working. This is party politics, and it's just a joke anymore. So now, instead of tribes going over the hill we have another party on the hill saying that the last political party on the hill really was the source of all the trouble since Moses. That party will get into power and then ten years from now the other party will take over the hill and say the same thing, and they'll have proof to prove it. Is this the answer?

So it looks like it's not what party you're connected to that matters. It's not what organization you're connected to. The Anthroposophical Society is going through the same types of problems and the same struggle of members saying that they like what's happening but they don't want to be part of a club. They are very suspect of party affiliations. This is what Rudolf Steiner calls the war of each against all. Clubs are not cool anymore at a certain level, and it's getting to the spot where everyone is against everyone else because everyone has their own agenda. When this becomes exponential, that's the war that Rudolf Steiner calls the war of each against all.

But it's not that that's entirely bad. It's a wake up call to the fact that we consciously have to build bridges to become the other, and that involves turning the soul, finding some balance in sensation, finding some balance and satisfaction in the cosmic nutrition in the soul, finding for ourselves what works and what doesn't in terms of diet and intake of sensation, so that in a given social context we are an aware part of the solution rather than unconsciously provoking the problem. Turning the soul allows us to simply offer an open consciousness to the situation and be present in case someone asks us to do something. It's a very different way than we've been trained to work, but it is the Rosicrucian stream of preparing, preparing, preparing, preparing and then waiting, and at the proper moment ask the question. Don't make a statement, but ask a question. And if we prepare and wait, the situation will come where the question needs to be asked, and we'll ask it and it will do it's effect, but we won't have the feeling like it was us that did it. To do this alchemy requires a store of satisfaction in the moods of the soul. But when it can be done it is a healing through the experience of deep satisfaction of the craving to get more satisfaction. It simply gives us an exponential satisfaction. The alchemy of satisfaction is another level of satisfaction that was originally the root of the political will to serve others. But politicians have a hard time serving anymore. They may start that way but the power structure puts great pressure on that ideal. Politics provides the temptation to be self-serving under the guise of serving the party. Public service has gotten into weird places because of the adversaries.

[Question:] How do you know when to do something or not do something? Like writing a letter to someone or making a phone call to tell them about something I think should be changed, you know to be an activist? How do I know to write the letter or make the phone call or not, or go and meditate on it and someone else will make that phone call.

[Dennis:] If you really have an issue that is burning your soul, it is best to write the letter, address it to yourself and then you mail it to yourself, and then you open it up, and then you read it as if your enemy was sending it to you, and then you meditate on what would I do if I got this letter? Would I want to go fire bomb their car or what? If, after reading it you feel like you can still send that letter, send it. But guaranteed you'll probably change some of the phrasing. If you change the phrasing, send it to yourself again or put it in the back of the file for a week. By the fifth time you've probably taken out all the poison barbs and you've owned everything you can within the problem, which is often what you're trying to accuse them of. When you can own some of the stuff there will be things which will be left over that you can't own. This is what you are truly upset with. But by now, through the owning process you probably have the ability to turn the soul. When you soul has turned from the blaming and projection it is possible to approach them in a way which can frame the problem as a common concern. From this soul space we can ask them if we can work towards a solution. And then we send that one. Which one do you think is going to give you more of a response?

That's what I'm talking about in the idea of turning the soul, because then that letter will go into the other person's mailbox and they'll go, "boy this person really cares about this and they're not blaming me. I'm going to give them a call." We've just gotten their attention. Fundamentally their attention is what we want. But when we throw a depth bomb in that person's mail box, they either put it in the circular file or we get the same back, we suddenly feel slighted and attacked and ask where did that attack mode response come from? That's a big question. So every time we write a letter where we feel like John Wayne storming Iwo Jima try this out.

This tendency to lash out in righteousness is a great danger in writing e-mails. You write the ICBM response and then kick back and enjoy how cool your response to their email looks sitting there on you monitor and then CLICK. Thermoneuclear war. This is true. There have been studies done on this. Most dilemmas, most really bad stuff that happens, human resource type stuff that has happened in the last couple of years is a result of from the hip ballistic missle e-mails. An e-mail from your manager comes in that says. CLEAN YOUR DESK!!!!!!!!!!!!! What you read is, clean your desk...STUPID!!!!!!!!!!! The manager just thought that they would use all caps and add the little exclamation points because they are so much more graphically effective and they are so easy to make. You know, all I have to do is hold down my finger. Maybe the manager was an art major in college and they may even have the thought that the message kind of looked artistic, kind of like the message and the medium are having a happy marriage in this email. This is what was going on in the managers head in response to flack that they got from their boss that the big cheese was coming in the morning and was anally retentive about sloppy desks. So the manager just writes an e-mail, and adds the little creative graphic embellishments just to break up a bad day, and spams the department. So the worker gets the e-mail. What will be the response?... Oh Yeah? clean this, jerk! The employee fires up the internet connection, and there goes the guys job.

So anything you would like to put out towards another person, go and write it out and then send it to yourself and say what would I think of the person who sent this? And then you're getting balance. This alchemy of turning the soul is all about balance: salt, sulfur, mercury, whatever your constitution is, you have to get it to move to the other pole. If it's the one in the middle, you have to bring the two ends in to the middle to balance it. Satisfaction is nothing more than finding a sense of balance in your cravings and integrating your cravings into the general flow of moods in you soul in such a way that there's not the blame tape playing all of the time.

Finding something where everyday we can say to ourself this is my little treat, is very important. This is my treat. It could be a glass of almond milk, for God's sake. My wife and I kind of laugh at ourselves when we go wow, big night on the town! A glass of almond milk, cool! But I'll tell you there's a tremendous satisfaction in it. There's no hang over, there's no buzz, and in the morning I feel a lot younger than I did the night before. As I get older and I try to still do the things which get me going, what I'm finding is I'm having to substitute a lot of things that gave me satisfaction that were causing my energy to just go down and down and down. It's just as Peter says, the inner pictures that you feed yourself change your needs for nutrition. And it's as Arthur says, when you just pay attention inside and you don't pay attention to ambiance, and you don't make it a social consciousness of where your food comes from, you are depleting your energy.

Let's go get some nutrition. [laughter -- it's snack time.]