04.01 – Natural Hygiene as a New Concept of Healthful Living – Part 1

Natural Hygiene is the study, description, and teaching of the conditions and healthy practices best suited to human life.

In pristine nature humans lived nomadic lives based on primal urges – mostly on the instinctual level. They lived as gatherers of fruits, berries, nuts, leaves, shoots, flowers, and roots from vine, stalk, and tree.

With the incredibly rapid growth of the human brain, in both size and complexity, sprang a very advanced intellect, creative imagination, and spiritual sense of self. Humans became ever more versatile in dealing with the forces of nature. Their incredibly rich diet, flush with an incredible variety of organic hormone-like compounds and a wealth of macro and micronutrients, served to jump-start rapid growth, complexity, and optimization of their brain, nervous system, endocrine system, immune system, and so on.

But at some point, likely between 200,000 to 10,000 years ago, their abundant tropical rainforest home began to dry out, perhaps due to natural climate changes. Gradually the tropical forests were no longer capable of providing adequate year-round sustenance. These very advanced, very large-brained Homo Sapiens primates, gradually over time, had leave their original nurturing home. Now living in the small patches of the remaining rainforests, they were forced to venture in the much drier and inhospitable savannas. This new and unforgiving climate and environment was far more harsh, threatening, and challenging. Their extremely large brain was likely the only reason early humanity was able to improvise and survive.

Living on the harsh savanna, the new and intense survival challenges spurred early humans on to create tools and learn to control fire. While these accomplishments did improve chances of survival, they eventually led to wholesale separation and alienation from their original natural habitat, natural lifestyle, and natural diet. Indeed, this alienation from our natural heritage led to a progressive devolution of body and brain: a shrinking of brain size, brain complexity and narrowed scope of operation… with some selected abilities amplified and honed, while others atrophied and essentially became dormant. Further, it appears likely that body strength, musculature, and agility decreased significantly, along with dramatic negative changes in digestive strength, microbiome robustness, and decreased defensive system (immune system) strength and power.

Jumping ahead thousands of years, factions of humanity realized that something was very wrong with their inner state of being, and their resulting outer difficulties in life. World-wide cultural stories describing a previous Golden Age of Humanity seemed more and more remote and fantastical. Those who were still gifted with somewhat advanced capabilities created ascetic practices and ritualized disciplines, in an attempt to resurrect the consciousness and abilities our ancestors once had.

Many generations came and went, people adapted as best they could. Tribal frictions developed, fear and violence increased, resources were stolen and hoarded from other tribes. Social hierarchies developed based on threats and overt violence, skirmishes became wars, small tribes assimilated together over time… and the epic Golden Age of Humanity completely disappeared. (This simplified scenario outlined above has extremely important ramifications for our species, perhaps explaining why we are as we are today. This hypothesis about the growth and loss of human potential will be explored in depth in an Advanced Course at TI.)

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Moving forward again to the ancient Greeks, Pythagoras elaborated a rather extensive philosophy of living, investigating all planes of life. Among them was perhaps the best formulated statement of Hygienic living until this time. While the Greeks, of whom Pythagoras was one, were heavy on fruitarianism, they were also heavy into practices of herbal drugging that have morphed into today’s medicine.

The philosophy of Pythagoras gave rise to Appolonius and the Essenes, an ascetic culture that was vegetarian/fruitarian in practice.

Much of the Essene philosophy and practice were preserved in the New Testament and are quoted in the teachings of Christ in the four conventional gospels, along with a number of other Nag Hammadi Library gospels and Gnostic texts. The thin thread of Hygienic philosophy survived and received a modern impetus from the greatest universal genius of all times, Leonardo daVinci, who was a vegetarian/fruitarian.

It was not until the time of Dr. Isaac Jennings in 1822 that Natural Hygiene, as a formalized philosophy of life, had its beginnings. Not until the consummate genius of Drs. Graham, Trall, Dewey, Tilden, and Shelton did the philosophy and science of health become fully elaborated.