by Dave Asprey
When you experience a lack of oxygen in the brain, like the state of hypoxia you enter with holotropic breathing, you become suddenly, often psychedelically, aware of all that lower-level activity. Your brain cells selectively and elegantly start trimming the least urgent jobs on their to-do list. All through the body, your mitochondria will note the lack of oxygen for making energy from food, and your cells will cut back on the nonurgent tasks of digestion and detoxification. You’re still not aware of the specific changes going on, but you sure can feel the effects. You relax, because your body is cutting back on its internal work. A lot of the conserved energy is directed to the brain, to make sure you survive. You feel fewer distractions, and you are able to access altered states more easily. Basically, your brain doesn’t have enough energy to maintain some of the illusions you believe in.
Now you have the basic tools and the basic understanding to do a spiritual fast. Control your food, control your sex, control your breathing, and do it all from a place of wonder and ecstasy, not from a place of fear and suffering. To that end, remember: these things take time. If you’re a brand-new faster, you’re going to have a hard time pushing through the hunger, just as I had a hard time in that cave. Your little monkey mind is going to be running around going, “I’m going to die. I’m going to die. What’s for lunch? What’s for lunch?”
Do a few intermittent fasts before you go on a spiritual fast. You will feel triumphant when you put your monkey mind in its place. Then when you’re ready to do a longer, spiritual fast, you will have the training you need for a more profound experience. All the life energy that was going into digesting your food is now yours to direct to a higher purpose.
MAKE ME ONE WITH EVERYTHING
I don’t practice a specific religion, but I’ve done a lot of spiritual exploring. I’ve meditated. I’ve participated in many different religious ceremonies. I’ve done basic shamanic training with Alberto Villoldo, the founder of the Four Winds Society in California. Now I have young kids, so I’ve incorporated spirituality into our family rituals: all of us have a daily meditation practice and a daily gratitude practice for food. There’s zero doubt in my mind that if you fast for a day or two, you’ll have more spiritual experiences than you would if you spent the same time eating peanut butter sandwiches. You may also gain a more vivid experience of the world, possibly more vivid than you’ve ever known. Remember the story of my friend Chris, the army guy who said he could smell a hamburger from two miles away when he was deprived of food? I know that’s not an exaggeration, because I experienced something very close to that in the cave and on other fasts since then.
Go for a walk in the forest when you are immersed in a fast, and observe the woods around you. Everything is a different color than you remember it being. The leaves on the trees are vibrantly green. Your senses are wide open. Most of the time we sit with our senses partially closed off, because we don’t need all of the information they have to offer. We already have more food than we need and more information—more distractions—than we need. When you do a spiritual fast and you spend some time in nature, the whole world’s a different place.
It reminds me of a story about a group of explorers who traveled into the remote wilds of Tibet, to the valley where the legendary Shangri-La is supposed to be located. Only a few Westerners have ever been allowed to go there. The explorers made many trips before the local guides would agree to show them where to go. But there was one doubter in the group—an asshole, to be blunt. When they finally arrived at the sacred location, that one looked around and snorted, “This is just a mountaintop. I don’t see anything here.” The local Tibetan lama who had guided them just smiled and responded, “Yes, you wouldn’t.” Meanwhile, the other explorers had a transcendent experience. You can choose to make fasting a slog to suffer through or a gateway to something bigger.
Fasting changes your perception of the world. That’s why it has a place in almost every spiritual practice and religion. In the Muslim tradition, fasting is one of the Five Pillars of Islam. The celebration of Ramadan each year is a spiritual milestone, with fasting as a cornerstone. During this month of spiritual reflection and devotion, the daily fast goes from dawn to sunset. Muslims perform a dry fast, meaning they do not even drink water, in the belief that it cleanses the soul from impurities and encourages greater self-discipline and sacrifice. Each morning before dawn during Ramadan, they consume a small meal. More than a few Muslims have told me that Bulletproof Coffee is a big part of that meal. Then each evening, the fast is traditionally broken by eating dates, followed by a larger meal.
In Zen Buddhism, fasting is historically a requirement to reach some of the altered states that occur during advanced meditation, such as Samadhi. Because my 40 Years of Zen company offers advanced meditation with neurofeedback, I have had the opportunity to combine neurofeedback with fasting and reached a state where I became one with everything, for lack of better words. It sounds goofy, right? Like the old joke where the Zen master walks up to the hot dog vendor and says, “Make me one with everything.” But I lived that experience.
During a particularly arduous two-hour session of pushing my brain to align its brain waves, I was getting exhausted. Suddenly my arms disappeared. I don’t mean they went numb, they were just . . . gone. Not in a scary way, not painful, just curious. Then the feeling spread from my arms to my torso and my legs, and suddenly I realized I had no body at all. What I had thought was my body had dissolved. To this day, I remember what it felt like when my physical self was smeared across all of space. Now, about 80 percent of people who use the technology have a transcendent experience, according to internal research at 40 Years of Zen, but we give them C8 MCT oil instead of having them fast so they can do more.
Would my early beta-testing experience have been even more profound if I had some MCTs in my body at the time? Probably, to be honest. There is always a higher state to seek. But I don’t think I’d have had the experience if my gut had been full of pizza.
Hinduism features a practice known as vratas, which involves complete and partial fasting. Different deities have different fasting days. For instance, Shiva requires a Monday fast, while Vishnu’s fast is celebrated on Thursdays. According to the Jewish and Christian traditions, meanwhile, Moses fasted for forty days, according to the Book of Deuteronomy in the Bible. In the Book of Samuel, King David fasted to beg God to save the life of a child. Fasts were proclaimed during times of calamity and injustice, as noted in the Old Testament books of Jeremiah and Joel. Very often this was done throughout a particular kingdom as a means of drawing attention to an outrage, so that the voice of the people might be heard. In Psalm 35, King David declared that “I humble myself through fasting.”
Biblical fasts were of two natures. One was known as an “absolute” fast, three days of no food or water. The other was the “supernatural absolute” fast, which was forty days without food or water. (No modern human has been recorded going without any food or drink at all for forty days, which is what makes it definitively supernatural.) Moses undertook two such fasts, one of which resulted in his leaving the Israelites to be closer to God at the top of Mount Sinai. He returned with the Ten Commandments, which were inscribed on two stone tablets. “Moses was there with the Lord forty days and forty nights without eating bread or drinking water. And he wrote on the tablets the words of the covenant,” reads the Book of Exodus.
The Bible also speaks of a partial style of fasting, the Daniel fast. This involved abstaining from certain foods for a certain length of time. The New Testament’s Book of Daniel tells of how he once fasted three weeks on vegetables alone, eschewing juices, meats, wine, and even body lotion. At the end of the fast, which coincided with a period of mourning, he witnessed a vision of a man with a “face like lightning, his eyes like flaming torches, his arms and legs like the gleam of burnished bronze, and his voice like the sound of the multitude.” Daniel was with a group of men at the time, standing on the banks of the Tigris River in what is
now Iraq. No one else could see his vision. When the flaming man spoke, he told Daniel that his fast had allowed him to “gain understanding and to humble yourself before God.” No matter how you interpret the vision by the Tigris, it’s clear that fasting and revelation have gone hand in hand for thousands of years.
Today, Jews still fast annually on Yom Kippur, a day of spiritual and physical cleansing when people ask forgiveness, grant forgiveness, and make plans for self-improvement in the coming year. Fasting is part of the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox traditions during the annual celebration of Lent. In modern practice, people observing Lent abstain from meat on Fridays and reduce the size of their other meals. The Lenten fast used to be a lot more intense, however. The “black fast,” which continued the entire forty days and nights of Lent, once consisted of just one meal a day, eaten only after sunset. Meat, dairy products, eggs, and alcohol were completely forbidden. During the last week of Lent, the fast was even more strict, with salt, bread, herbs, and water the only foods allowed.
Hildegard von Bingen, the renowned twelfth-century Benedictine abbess, composer, philosopher, and mystic, created a beautiful spiritual elaboration of the Church’s medieval fasts. Her fasts often lasted six to twelve days, beginning with a period of controlled breathing and meditation, and were intended to foster a sense of unity and balance. Her spiritual fasts were built around rest, meditation, a regular daily time to explore spirituality through prayer and journaling, intervals of solitude, and time spent in nature. She was an acute observer of nature, writing influential books on the properties of plants, animals, and the local geology. She was quite far ahead of her time!
One quibble: Hildegard allowed bone broth during some of her fasts. I would avoid that because the broth contains protein that will disrupt your fast. But this was more than eight hundred years ago, so let’s cut her a break.
The stern version of Lent began to change in the fourteenth century as the Catholic Church loosened its rules on fasting, and religious fasting practices continue to evolve to this day. The importance of fasting for proper observance remains a constant, however. Many modern Catholics still maintain a black fast on Good Friday and Ash Wednesday, which is basically OMAD combined with a protein fast. If anything, the practice of fasting for spiritual growth is gaining popularity among mainstream religious groups. The Saddleback megachurch in southern California, one of the United States’ largest Christian congregations, has created the Daniel Plan, a set of dietary guidelines based on the food choices made by the biblical figure Daniel. Spiritual fasting is a key component of the plan. I have a special fondness for this approach: Dr. Mark Hyman, a specialist in chronic illness and longtime friend, played a key role in the development of the Daniel Plan.
THE GREATEST FAST OF ALL
Spiritual fasting can take you to some terrifically unusual and unexpected places. I mean, Daniel in the Bible saw a guy with flaming eyes. Hildegard of Bingen had a vision of a woman with a scaly monster sticking out of her belly.3 I had a hallucination of murderous mountain lions. But I have had other ethereal and inspiring experiences when fasting that connected me to realms for which there are no words. I left them with more resilience, more certainty, and a greater sense of my purpose. Who knows where you will go with your fasts? Just know that fasts, especially longer than forty-eight hours, may take you to some new places if you let them. You are also perfectly capable of going to work and living normally while fasting for the same period of time.
The more you can move your life obstacles out of the way, the richer your spiritual experience will be. Sometimes a spiritual fast does not involve abstaining from food but instead a separation from the distractions of the material world. Normally when you’re fasting for meditative purposes, you intentionally schedule your fast for a time when you won’t be superbusy. You slow down and deliberately go without distractions. You’re really adding another layer of going without: you’re doing a moderate version of a dopamine fast, the stimulus reduction plan described by my friend Cameron Sepah at the University of California San Francisco.
For thousands of years, traditional religions have understood the value of abstaining from things other than food. During Yom Kippur, for instance, Jews are forbidden to wear leather or perfume, bathe, and have sex. Lent and Ramadan likewise are times when observant people turn away from material goods and easy pleasures. The Sabbath embodies many of the same ideas on a weekly basis; it is the reason that liquor stores are not open on Sundays in some places.
This type of fast is sometimes known as “fasting from indulgence,” and it is an attempt to deepen a spiritual connection, with or without an accompanying fast from food. It might include spending less time shopping and doing work or spending time in nature instead of staring at your phone. Such acts of going without are the essence of a spiritual fast: they unburden you from worldly distractions and open the possibility of greater understanding, a greater connection with a higher power, and a fresh perspective on where we stand in relation to the universe.
We’ve now looked at quite a number of different forms of going without. But really the most challenging type of fast that you’ll ever do is the one that I’m still working on today. I’ve managed to stick to this fast sometimes, but not all the time. It’s fasting from hate.
Try spending a day without thinking hateful thoughts about anyone or anything. It’s far, far harder than spending a day without unconsciously eating something in the middle of a fast. Remember the four F-words that drive all life? The first one is fear. Hate is what we do when we can’t run away from, hide from, or kill something that our primitive animal mind believes is a threat. Hate is the source of so many current troubles in the world. It is what divides us into tribes at voting booths and on social media. It is the mind killer that makes you think in absolutes. It is at the root of gaping inequalities in economic opportunity, health care, education, and justice. Hate tears apart families and friendships. When you decide to fast from hate for a day, you will see the disturbing truth that it is everywhere. Social media memorializes our hate when we have a momentary emotional outburst and makes it easy to hate other people online. Whether you decide to put down your fork for a day or to forgo hate for a day, you have stepped onto the path of liberation, self-improvement, and self-realization.
The point is, all of the different forms of fasting support one another. If you can succeed in fasting from hate, you’ll find you have more compassion for yourself even if you do end up eating the cookie that you promised yourself you wouldn’t eat. You’ll begin a journey toward forgiveness—and you’ll notice that forgiveness is one of the core elements of every major religion and spiritual system.
That’s the challenge and the great potential here. Fasting in all of its forms teaches you to be less judgmental of yourself. From there, you can learn to be less judgmental of others. Change yourself, change the people around you, change the world.
8
Supplements to Fine-Tune Your Body
During my vision quest I was living like a modern-day caveman—if only for four days—so I decided to pull myself together and act like one. The nighttime mountain lion visit that happened only in my head still spooked me. All of my senses were on high alert. Instead of waiting for real mountain lions to eat me, I ventured out into the cool night and piled brush at the entrance to First Woman cave, knowing that some indigenous cultures have used such a natural alarm system to keep wild animals at bay. My little pocket knife practically wilted in my hand when I realized how useless it was to protect myself.
To be fair, it wasn’t entirely the fast and the solitude messing with my head. There truly are predators in the Sonoran Desert, and in principle, some of them are powerful enough to kill you and leave your corpse for crows and turkey buzzards to pick clean. But I grew up backpacking in remote places similar to this Arizona desert; I knew that none of the animals around there were big enough that they’d tangle with a human unless they were cornered and forced to fight. There�
��s not going to be a mountain lion silly enough to think that I’m suitable prey, and the bears are little black ones, not grizzlies.
But your fear doesn’t care what you know. It thrives on what you feel, and it can use your feelings to overwhelm your rational brain. Even though the vast majority of us no longer have to fear animal predators (seriously, when was the last time you worried about being eaten?), we still have to deal with the imprint that our ancestral fears have left inside us. The evolutionary imprint is what makes us so susceptible to cravings: the fear that we won’t have enough food or companionship or other comforts. My sense of impending starvation and my delusion that mountain lions were about to attack me came from the exact same place. In today’s world of plenty, the disconnect between our primal fears and the endless modern indulgences being pushed toward us can put us into a profoundly dysfunctional state.
Fortunately, that evolutionary legacy also gifted us with a powerful set of tools for conquering those cravings and tapping into the strengths that enabled our ancestors to survive—all of our ancestors, going back to the very first cell on Earth some 3.8 billion years ago. Over the days when I was fasting inside the cave, I slowly became aware of those powers inside me. And there’s nothing special about me. Intermittent fasting, multiday fasting, sleep hygiene, exercise, controlled breathing, and spiritual exploration will give every reader of this book—including you—the ability to summon the same powers. Add the right biohacks, and you can crank your powers even higher.
There are a time and a place for biohacks, things that give you an advantage biologically so you will get more of the effects you want more quickly. I could have hooked a little monitor up to my earlobe, which would have helped me use subtle variations in my heart rate to exit the fight-or-flight mode. I could have turned off my hunger with MCT oil. I could have taken brain-boosting nootropic compounds to sharpen my rational thinking or plant medicines to make the cave melt into insignificance. But I wouldn’t have realized my particular, transformative vision quest if I hadn’t pushed through the day on my own. Don’t let your ego trick you into leaning on biohacks to distract you from learning the lessons you may be seeking on a spiritual fast. Sometimes the best way out is through.