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What is the purpose of fasting in religious practice?
The popular perception: it's the rule, so you follow it.
A few simple restrictions that deprive you of pleasure and comfort.
It's a centuries-old sacred tradition, after all. Fine, you can endure it.
But there is another way to look at it:
Fasting is a chance to test yourself: “How dependent or free am I?”
It's not obvious while you're eating and thinking, “Well, I could live without X.”
But then comes the challenge — "2 weeks without X. Clock starts now."
And that's when you discover how much power “just” food has over you.
You go without it, and suddenly your mood turns sour, a headache kicks in, anger flares up out of nowhere. It feels as if you've ripped off a patch and exposed a permanent hole, leaving your naked body open to the freezing cold.
You desperately want to cover that stupid hole with anything at all.
You may find that going without, say, meat and dairy is easy. But giving up perfectly legitimate coffee (it's not even on the forbidden list) makes your life significantly worse.
It has nothing to do with tradition. It's about individual attachment.
Someone has surely thought, “Hey, careful! Coffee is sacred!”
Exactly! Symbolically and physiologically, coffee is now a god.
Three or four times a day, it demands ritual worship.
Refuse to comply and it punishes you with body aches and headaches.
That said, there's no need to demonize the bright (ha) image of coffee.
The issue isn't the product itself, but your intense Desire for it.
Desire grows out of a deficit. No, not a caffeine deficit, but a deficit of whatever coffee helps you achieve: more energy, better focus, and so on.
I can't tolerate this "lack" in myself, so I rush to drown it in coffee. I don't have the bandwidth to think about the actual causes of apathy, despondency, or scattered attention. And so the years can quietly pass in the rush to relieve the symptoms.
Fasting offers a temporary pause in the automatism — a chance to ask:
“What do I actually want? What am I genuinely missing?”
The emptiness of the pause is unpleasant, but at least it leaves room for Novelty.
Out of nowhere come new thoughts, ideas, hopes, alternatives.
The degrees of your freedom multiply before your eyes.
The fast is over. A different person has returned to the world.
Sincerely yours,
-Alexander
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