Macrobiotics means literally, "Big or Long" (macro) "Life" (bio) "Art or Technique" (tics). According to scholar David Kerr, Macrobiotics was founded, and the term coined, by Christoph Wilhelm Hufeland (1762-1836), who wrote a book called Art of Prolonging Life.
The word Macrobiotics, and the title of Hufeland's book, may give the impression that Macrobiotics is concerned only with extending one's lifespan. Hufeland stated two objectives for Macrobiotics, however: "to render the life of man more healthful and longer" and "to make him better and more virtuous!" (Then he wrote, "I can at any rate assert, that man will in vain seek for one without the other....") Further, he said "...that physical and moral health are as nearly related as the body and the soul. They flow from the same sources; become blended together; and when united, the result is, HUMAN NATURE ENNOBLED AND RAISED TO PERFECTION."* (This brings to mind the similar understanding of Mikao Usui, who founded what has become known as Reiki, but which Usui himself called a "method for achieving personal perfection.")
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More recently, George Ohsawa (1893-1966) became the icon of modern Macrobiotics (or, as he called it, Zen Macrobiotics). Ohsawa was a student of Sagen Ishizuka, a Japanese army doctor. After Ohsawa's passing, the icon of modern Macrobiotics became Michio Kushi, who continues to fill that role.
Reading Kushi's Book of Macrobiotics turned the whole world upside-down for me. For the first time in my life, I could understand Yin and Yang -- and, through an understanding of them, the whole universe began to make sense! As I read, I kept saying to myself, "Why didn't someone teach me this when I was five years old?!" Surely, if Macrobiotics were taught in elementary school, everything children learned after that would be so much more comprehensible to them! They would understand themselves and everything in life so much better! (Of course they would also be much harder for commercial and political forces to manipulate, especially to enslave them to drugs and pseudo-foods.)
Macrobiotics is like our innate divinity: we're inextricably enmeshed in it, whether consciously or not. Everything in existence arises from the interaction of Yin and Yang, the 2 fundamental energies. Nothing could be simpler -- or more profoundly miraculous! Yin and Yang together are the face of Reality. The Yin-Yang symbol (3 ancient representations of which are seen above) is called T'ai-chi, The Supreme Ultimate or Ultimate Reality. Everything in our life arises and shapes itself from the spontaneous need for balance between the energies of Yin and Yang. Once we become conscious of them and how they work, life becomes much more pleasant and understandable; we learn to stand at the helm and guide the boat, instead of being dragged in its wake.
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I've been practicing Macrobiotics consciously since 1995. At first my application of it was directed solely toward diet. It seems that many people never apply it to anything beyond the realm of food -- but of course it applies to everything (and our habitual thoughts and feelings and beliefs, for example, are much more powerful than what we put in our stomach).
It's sometimes amusing, sometimes irritating, that many people have trouble even saying the word Macrobiotics. They say Microbiotics instead. I take it as an indication of just how deeply entrenched we have become in the microscopic view of life. Modern science has become so fixated on viewing things in ever-smaller fragments -- an excessively yang behavior, it's worth noting, and one that is now thoroughly ingrained in society -- that we have practically forgotten the concept of wholeness. (Does the story of the blind men and the elephant come to mind here? Reality is staring us in the face, filling the room, filling the world -- "hidden in plain sight," only because we look at everything through a microscope!)
In these pages, my intention is to begin seeing the reality of things through a macro-scope. There are many students of Macrobiotics with more knowledge and experience than I, and websites with much more comprehensive information than will be presented here (links to a few of them can be found in the Macrobiotics section of my "Resources" directory). My intent is to explore things that may not be presented on other sites; to ask questions that may awaken your interest and inspire you to find your own answers; and to learn from sharing my thoughts with others.
The place to start is with the fundamentals, which Hufeland called "Natural Law" -- and which modern Macrobiotics (via George Ohsawa) calls The Order of the Universe....
* Thanks to David Kerr for getting me to begin reading Hufeland!
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