Raw Guru (Holistic Healing With Raw and Living Foods)

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Raw Guru has been written to educate and awaken people to their true and intended realities through processes of unlearning and relearning the truth about food, nutrition and well-being. Most books on health and healing focus only on diet and physical well-being; Raw Guru takes holistic healing to another level by introducing the reader to food and its relationships with mind and soul. The concept of raw food and raw living, being new in today’s India, is interestingly packaged with easy-to-follow tips and truths about our everyday eating and cooking habits.

The author presents his unique 24-month detoxification, cleansing and raw food transitioning programme, which includes over sixty new raw food recipes developed in India over the past three years using locally available ingredients. The recipes include smoothies, juices, breads, crackers, dosas, soups, salads, main dishes and sweets, all of which are vegan and raw.

Imagine raw pastas, pizzas, Thai curries, cakes, cheeses, milks and even burgers! Raw and living is not just about salads.

Philip Clegg (1968-2011) was born in Hong Kong. He graduated in the UK as an environmental scientist, is a qualified nutritionist (UK, 2006) and an associate raw food chef and instructor (USA, 2005). He had been learning and practising yoga and meditation in India since 2006, and was continuing his studies in a range of natural health therapies. Philip took on his spiritual name, Anand Utsav, in 2009 at Osho Nisarga in the Himalayas. He passed away on 21 September2011 after a brief illness.

In the forty years that I have been preparing and teaching vegetarian cuisine and studying about nutrition, health and general well-being, I have had the privilege of working with hundreds of talented chefs and inspiring educators. I have read countless books on the topics of mind, body, and spiritual health and have authored or co-authored three books that focus on raw vegan food preparation, health, and spiritual connection. Even though I am a chef and director of a culinary institute, I am keenly aware of the fact that overall well-being is not achieved solely by what one eats. Yes, food is important — it should be both nourishing and nurturing; it needs to be health-promoting and, equally important, t should taste good and provide emotional satisfaction. But, there are many factors besides food that influence our health. What we eat, think, feel, and the actions we take are all important to the health of our physical and spiritual bodies.

As I read Philip Clegg’s book, Raw Guru, I was motivated to reflect on my own journey of physical and spiritual growth and was inspired to reconnect with my true nature. The book offers pathways :o transformation and self-discovery that can help one see the truth about the interconnectedness of life. This is not your ordinary recipe book — it is an extraordinary map for self-discovery, written to educate and awaken people to their true self by understanding their current habits and learning the truth about food, nutrition, and how to manifest mental, physical, and spiritual well-being. This book helps guide the reader to a higher state of consciousness through correct lifestyle choices and spiritual practices. Using the principles described in Raw Guru, you will be empowered to enhance the quality of your life through the detoxification of mind and body, to increase energy and vitality, raise spiritual and environmental awareness, and promote holistic healing.

Raw Guru will help those who are interested in creating a life of balance in all aspects. It contains a treasure trove of wonderful recipes and tips on how to make delicious, health-promoting, raw organic food. Philip encourages us to make lifestyle choices that will increase our energy, raise spiritual awareness, and help us make choices for a sustainable planet. Those are lofty goals for any raw food lifestyle and recipe book, but Raw Guru does not stop there. Within these pages, you will find enlightening information about how we came to be where we are now, and how we can make changes in order to evolve to where we want to be, and how to manifest what we want to achieve in this life. It is not a turn of fate that keeps us where we are — it is our lack of awareness that holds us in place and keeps us stuck on a treadmill that is neither satisfying nor gratifying. The good news is that we can change that. We can transform our lives and manifest a reality that serves both us and the greater good.

People of all ages and walks of life from over forty countries have travelled to our school in Fort Bragg, California, to learn how to make delicious, health-promoting meals for themselves and their families. Some come because they want to become chefs, while others make the trip because they know it will help them live a more productive, vital life and create a more sustainable lifestyle. Most of them also want to share with others what they have earned. Many have already experienced transformational healing and, often, dramatic weight loss as a result of changing their eating habits and adding more fresh raw fruits and vegetables to their diet. They come to the school to learn how to make it tasty. What they take away with them is far more than what they intended.

The raw food diet can help to provide a new awareness of self in a way that no other style of eating can achieve. A raw Plant-based diet lightens the spirit and frees the heart and mind f the darkness that can blind us from seeing the truth about our actions. Even though that truth may be hidden, the violence of a meat-centered diet does harm on many levels, and keeps us from experiencing true love and acceptance of ourselves and the world around us. We numb ourselves with our food choices and harm our physical beings, manifesting disease and bringing pain and suffering to ourselves in equal measure to the pain and suffering caused to animals and the environment. This also takes a toll on our spirit, often creating unhappiness, lethargy, depression, and self-loathing. It can create a bloated body, weighted down with a heaviness caused by overeating in an attempt to make ourselves happy — when eating denatured foods that require killing can never bring us the happiness or freedom we seek. The raw vegan diet, in contrast, is a natural way of living that promotes life, love, and self acceptance — and contrary to what one may think, raw foods, properly and lovingly prepared, do not lack in flavour, texture, or appearance. On the contrary, raw foods can be as delicious, if not more, as the foods you may be currently eating.

Philip Clegg, in addition to being an excellent spiritual teacher, is also certified by Living Light Culinary Institute as an associate aw culinary arts chef and instructor, who can guide the uninitiated through uncharted territory and make raw food preparation as easy and as fun a task as it is delicious. In Raw Guru, you will find over sixty wonderful, well-explained recipes from many different cultural traditions. There are a variety of smoothies, juices, breads, crackers, dosas, soups, salads, main dishes and sweets. Each recipe includes the amount of time it takes to make the dish, the health benefits one will achieve, and variations of, or alternate uses for, the recipe. I especially enjoyed the Indian-inspired dishes, which I found to have the true essence of cooked Indian food — complex, fragrant, and well spiced.

Philip also includes a unique 24-month detoxification programme, which includes comprehensive guidelines for raw food transition providing health seekers a gentle healing journey. If you are sick of being sick and tired of being tired, I highly recommend you embark on a new way of eating. The raw food diet is the ultimate in healthy living and conscious eating. It will support you as no other diet can and provide you with abundant energy, holistic health, and a sense of joy that can only come as a result of right action and living with integrity. It is a natural approach to eating that rivals all others. No matter what your present eating habits are, this book can help you ascend into greater consciousness and improved health. They go hand in hand.

Raw Guru is one of the many aspects of the guru that resides in each of us. It is an aspect of the truth and limitless knowledge that each of us has within us. I would like to take you on a journey of self-discovery. Along :is journey, one of my aims is to present an ancient food regimen for a new humanity. This is a diet for those aiming for a higher :ate of consciousness. It will supply the right energy and nutrition teed the awakening human, and it will be a key component in any‘ holistic lifestyle.

This book contains the truth. It is nothing new, nothing old. is timeless.

Raw Guru is designed to help educate and awaken people to their true and intended realities through processes of unlearning relearning the truth about food, nutrition and well-being.

By using the information in this book correctly, you can greatly enhance the quality of your life, learn how to cleanse your inner terrain, learn how to make delicious and healthy raw and organic food dishes using local, Indian ingredients, rebalance your body chemistry, raise your energy levels, and raise your level of consciousness.

There has been a surge of books written on raw and living foods over the past five years in the West, particularly the US, but I don’t know of one that has been written in India for the Indian reader and the Indian palate. I want to address this imbalance and share with you my experiences of being raw and vegan in India since 2006.

Most books on raw and living foods focus only on food and the physical aspect related to it. Row Guru takes food and its relationship with the body to another level by introducing the reader to food and its relationships with mind and soul, thereby presenting a more holistic approach to health and well-being.

I present my unique 24-month detoxification, cleansing and raw food transitioning programme, which includes over sixty new raw food recipes developed in India over the past three years using locally available ingredients. The recipes include smoothies, juices, breads, crackers, dosos, soups, salads, main dishes and sweets, all of which are vegan and raw.

You the Reader

You could be a health-conscious, spiritual seeker, into yoga and meditation, or perhaps you are just fed up and tired of being unhealthy and prone to illness. Perhaps you want to learn about the ultimate in healthy eating, the only diet that supports a truly holistic existence, and the diet to end all other diets and fads. Whoever you are and whatever your reason is, this book has something you will want to hear, in fact, something which goes beyond what you had imagined. That is a promise and a guarantee.

The Missing Link

From Buddha to Osho and Socrates to Krishnamurti, great masters throughout the ages have taught us that one of the most important goals in life is to know thyself, to be yourself, and therefore, to break the chains of human conditioning and suffering, to be free and natural. Only then can one attempt to go beyond the self.

There are many techniques we can use to find out who we really are, beneath the ever-pervasive ego, and ways in which we an connect to our true essence. Meditation and yoga are, of course, the most popular and well known. These will be helpful in eroding society’s deep conditioning on us. However, the process an be slow and incomplete for many, because human conditioning also comes in the form of the very food we eat.

Most of us grow up believing that cooking food is normal, that drinking pasteurised cow’s milk is good for us and that processed, sterilised food is safe to eat. The sad fact is that these foods are, at the very least, making us more moody, violent, aggressive and imbalanced, and at worst, responsible for most of the premature degeneration we see all around us, including cancer, diabetes, heart disease and more.

The only way to know our true self, our true nature, and be totally free, is to go raw — vegan raw. If we carry on eating our diets of cooked and processed foods, we will never be truly free from human conditioning, because these foods are unnatural, devoid of life and often very harmful.

The masters talk of non-resistance to emotions. Rather than supress anger or sadness, go deep into the emotion, watch it and become one with it. This is excellent advice, but there is more; what if you could reduce the frequency and depth of these unpleasant, negative feelings in a totally natural way?

Consciousness and matter are both forms of energy expressed in different ways. Energy needs to be fed, for how else can a seed blossom into a flower? It needs a higher vibrational energy. Raw and living foods contain the highest vibrational energies. They contain bioelectric energy, or, life-force, which can be transferred within and into you. Living things need living energy to flourish and function as intended. Nature has provided for every creature all that it needs to thrive, nothing else needs to be added and nothing needs to be taken away. All living creatures except one recognise this.

What we eat has an enormous bearing not only on the energy that ultimately manifests itself as what we are physically (matter), but also on what we are consciously or unconsciously, because what we eat also has energy manifested in its different forms, including conscious and unconscious energy. Well, it should in theory. This is where the human race has gone terribly askew. We suffer a huge and catastrophic energy deficiency, and I’m not talking about kilojoules or calories, I’m talking about energy in the form of information or consciousness. By cooking food, we destroy the food’s prana, or life-force, and much of the information the food is carrying.

Not only that, but energy manifested as matter is inextricably linked to higher forms of energy and the two will influence each other greatly in the delicate balance of life. Energy that manifests as matter and energy that manifests as consciousness are interchangeable. They both have the same Divine source. So the expression, ‘you are what you eat’ is, in fact, true on many different levels. This means, therefore, that we cannot really hope to know our true self if we e not eating our true diet, the one nature intended.

If we stop to think about it, practically everything about urban 1anity in the twenty-first century is false. There is almost no ‘ to our daily existence.

Do we know a raw diet is the one nature intended? The answer pain to see. You just have to look around you at the beauty and perfection in nature. Do you think if animals could talk and had hands like us, perhaps they would be cooking too?

Textbook Looks

Haven’t you ever noticed how wild animals all look the way they supposed to look, the way we imagine they should look, just like they do in textbook illustrations? How many of us can claim a: we look anything like our textbook equivalents? We really -: fit the bill, do we? We consider our illustrative ideals to be perfection rather than the norm. Why the huge difference? The answer is simple: wild animals are eating what their bodies are designed to eat and are, therefore, in balance with their natural environment. They don’t generally become overweight, or are out of shape like us. Perhaps clothes are a result of our embarrassment to the growing acceptance of what our new realities are, which in most cases is quite simply, ugly.

Victoria Boutenko, raw food chef, mother to an all-raw family and author of Green for Life, says,

Chimpanzees share an estimated 99.4% of genes with humans, but their diet is dramatically different from ours. The most glaring difference is that chimpanzees consume significantly more green leaves than humans.. .(45% compared to 3%).. .these animals possess an extremely strong natural immunity to AIDS, Hepatitis C, cancer and other fatal human diseases.

True human beauty, natural beauty, can only be achieved by getting in touch with our inner being through eating what our bodies are designed to eat — plenty of raw and alkalising fresh vegetables. The raw vegan lifestyle has many positive feedback loops, so that not only looks, but also hormone balance, mood stability, clarity of thought and a balance with surroundings are restored. I believe that all humans are inherently good, but only when in balance. If we eat food that is like garbage, then we become unbalanced and essentially become garbage ourselves. The wrong diet can influence whether or not we are going to be less honest, more aggressive or more unstable; whether we are going to be a boon or a hindrance to society.

Juliano, raw food chef, restaurateur and author of Raw: The Uncook Book, had the following to say on Go Vegan Texas! 22 July 2002,

Before there was fire, there was raw and we were here for millions of years on a raw diet, so obviously, it works. Suddenly, cooked food has come out and we’re all fat, unhealthy, dying, sick and about to wipe ourselves off the face of the earth with nuclear weapons, which are also cooked.

A laboratory experiment on mice was set up to observe the effects of eating cooked and processed foods over long periods of time. A group of normal, healthy mice were taken and fed a diet of only cooked and processed foods. Most of them gained weight, but otherwise, they remained reasonably healthy and were able to reproduce.

The second generation was fed the same diet. There was a lot of obesity in the population and most of the mice suffered premature degeneration with cancer, heart disease and diabetes being the major killers. Some did manage to reproduce.

The third generation was riddled with allergies from birth and degeneration set in very early in life. Most died very prematurely of a degenerative disease, such as cancer. There was no fourth generation. The whole population had become infertile.

Can you see any similarities with the human race? I would argue that we are at stage three of the mouse experiment. Look around you. I notice children all over the world riddled with allergies, far more than in previous generations. Obesity is widespread in countries where a large proportion of the population is living on cooked and processed foods. Over 30 per cent of the US population is clinically obese (nearly 70 per cent is overweight) and the numbers are rising sharply. Frightening, isn’t it? What about infertility? How do we compare with the mice at stage three? Well, how many people need fertility treatment today? A large number, and the figures are going up steeply. Without IVF and other treatments, few of us would be able to produce healthy offspring without defects, just like those laboratory mice. There are some who would argue that the recent rise in teenage pregnancies in some countries does not support this idea. However, I do not believe that the number of these correlates well with levels of human fertility. Teen pregnancies, I believe, are more closely linked to social factors rather than to fertility, and I am sure studies would show that numbers of ‘healthy’, non-deformed births amongst teens are declining.

There is more. Scientists repeated the experiment, but this time stopped feeding the mice cooked and processed foods at stage three (the third generation) and started feeding them raw, unprocessed and natural foods — the diet they would normally eat in the wild. Most still died prematurely of degeneration, but a few managed to reproduce and there was a fourth generation. They were healthier than their parents, but it still took a further three generations for the mouse population to get back to optimum health. Should this be a warning to us all?

We humans seem to have everything stacked against us for total annihilation. Not only are we destroying our inner sanctum, but also our outer world. What happens on the inside is always mirrored on the outside and vice versa. Just as we are destroying all flora and fauna on the planet and clogging up waterways with pollution, so are we destroying the flora and fauna that is found within us and also, clogging up and polluting all our arteries and passageways.

Temple Worship

Is your body a temple? How many of you would turn up in a shrine with an offering of some deep fried chicken or a packet of potato chips? Unthinkable, right? As long as people see the Divine as something separate from themselves, they will continue to abuse their own bodies and show no respect for the ultimate gift that nature has given them. The Supreme Consciousness is within all of us. Forget about doing puja in the temple, or confessions in a church.

Connect to oneness by feeding your body food that is fit for the gods. Treat your body as you would treat a god. Your body is the house of the eternal being. Filling it with trash, clogging it up with dead and processed rubbish, polluting it with smoke and poison, and starving it with low energy foods devoid of water and nutrients is, at the very least, utterly disrespectful to your own self.

A Prophecy Come True?

Our plates are full, yet we have nothing to eat. In the seventeenth century, native American Indians predicted that there would come a time when this would happen. They also predicted that the white man would annihilate himself, though not engaged in war. This self-destruction is happening right now across the globe. You only need to look around at the huge quantities of processed material that people are consuming, wrongly mistaking it for food. These consumers continue to be hungry because this so-called food doesn’t contain the correct information or nutrition the body needs.

Sadly, the world is now full of consumers as opposed to customers. A consumer’s needs are dictated by advertisers, whereas a customer knows his/her needs as well as how to fulfill them. Consumers will always remain unsatisfied and, therefore, unhappy. They try to fill the emptiness within through quick satisfaction and then become driven by their need for more. In short, they become addicts and slaves to the desires created by tie industry for profit.

As we face globalisation, let us not be led by the false sense of security we get from the accumulation of material things, most of which we don’t even need, but rather by the power of shared and correct information, the truth. We all know that we will leave this world empty handed, but how many of us are confident of leaving it with a higher state of consciousness?