When talking about ‘nutrition’ and ‘nourishment’ we start with a remark Goethe once made:

“Every day you should at least hear a new song, read a new poem, look at a fine painting. And after that you should speak a few reasonable words’. 

Anyone who does not immediately understand why exactly this is vital nourishment – nourishment of the spirit – well, he or she has understood little about nourishment and the hunting and gathering of high energy as the basis for life. Sure, you can chug high quality food every day, but if you don’t know how to feed the mind with high nutrition, what will you know in the end? A kind of deformed person, with a healthy body and an undernourished mind. No! Every day a new song, a new poem and a new painting. That is food for the mind, and he who feeds his mind well will not always be so greedy in body too.

Effect of the Goethe Diet

Practise the diet for about ten years and you will become a revered man or woman who can quote hundreds of musicians, poets and painters and will be seen by others as a source of sensitivity. Is that not enough to provide the right motivation? If your answer is ‘no’, then I ask you to spell out for me exactly what spiritual nourishment is for you. What are you feeding your mind?

Observe

Observe the majority of people for a day and you will see that they consume mainly news items and social media (news items) as mental food or rather fast food. Think about how logical that is: you treat the food of your body with care, but stuff your mind with fast food all the time. In my experience, this is where the boomers and my generation are the worst; they seem to move in ever smaller, more cramped circles of information. Millenials and younger have already started looking for alternatives and they hardly ever watch the old media. They put together their own television via video sites, which is a substantial improvement on cramming items together that the parasite puts together for you. The parasite is only interested in creating as much depression as possible.

Stop Watching the News

At this point, let me make a small linguistic intervention to redirect the black magic hidden in our languages. No Die-eating or Death-eating but High-eating! So from now on I will speak of a mushroom hieat, and the intention behind a hieat is not to starve yourself with low energy but just the opposite: to gather high energy becomes the aim of everything you consume, and that includes spiritual food in particular.

So let’s start with the Goethe Hieat. What is that?

The Goethe Hieat is the simple spiritual basis of your existence. It makes use of one of the highest qualities that man is capable of. What is this quality, do you think? It is the power that made us what we are, without this quality there would be no spiritual growth. Have you guessed what I am referring to? Indeed, curiosity. What I often notice about modern people is a total lack of exactly that quality. They are hardly curious about anything, precisely because they are on a kind of information drip. In order to escape from this, the motto of the Goethe Hieat is:

• Read one new poem a day by a great, preferably unknown poet.
• Every day, learn one new song, preferably by an unknown artist
• Every day, discover one new painting, preferably by an unknown artist

Every day, write a few sensible words about these discoveries in a magic diary.

That is it. It sounds very simple, but it is a hunting task for experienced hunters. To find the great works of literature and music in the great mass requires good hunting skills. And hunting in itself provides a solid growth impulse for the brain – and how much time will you spend on this? An hour a day, resulting in a good general education, because if someone asks you now how many Czech poets you know, what should you answer? You probably don’t even know the poets from your own country. And that is because you allow your brain to be used as a kind of storage warehouse for advertising tunes and other intoxicating rubbish that the parasite wants to display.

High quality. Great poets, great musicians, genius painters.

Learn to be curious about greatness again. Because they have killed that curiosity and that is why, in reality, you look like a malnourished ghost, even if you have managed to grow such a perfect body, a really healthy body starts with a healthy mind. And a healthy mind is a mind that is curious about what is bigger than itself. Bigger. Not smaller. Then you are in the entertainment mind, the predator mind. It looks for things that are smaller in order to have a good laugh and feel superior. If you detect that tendency, then you are in the wrong mode where they want you to be.

Purity of mind in a constant waterfall of the great. That is the Goethe Hieat, and that is the first basic stone of the Hieet that I am going to teach you in this book.