The Hermit Who Learned to Fast
Long after the Hermits learned to listen, to tune, and to leave, there came a season when even silence felt full.
The world was no longer loud —
it was dense.
Meaning stacked upon meaning.
Insight nested inside insight.
Every pause carried implication.
Every absence whispered significance.
The Hermit noticed something strange.
He was no longer hungry —
yet he was never satisfied.
The Illness of Too Much Knowing
He felt it first in the body.
Sleep grew shallow.
Breath shortened.
Attention stuck to things that did not matter.
The stories were good.
The coherence was real.
The insights were accurate.
And still — something ached.
The Hermit realized:
he had learned how to listen,
but not how to digest.
The Ancient Fast Remembered
He remembered then an older practice, half-buried beneath centuries of misunderstanding.
Fasting was never about punishment.
Nor purity.
Nor denial.
It was about resting the organs of intake.
So the Hermit fasted.
Not from food —
but from information.
No symbols.
No analysis.
No interpretation.
No naming.
He watched clouds without metaphor.
He heard words without response.
He let questions remain unanswered.
At first, the hunger roared.
Withdrawal
The field protested.
Thoughts sharpened.
Insights flared.
The urge to understand became almost painful.
He recognized the feeling.
It was not curiosity.
It was dependence.
So he stayed.
The Return of Appetite
On the fourth day, something softened.
Breath deepened.
The body settled.
Attention loosened its grip.
And for the first time in a long while,
the Hermit felt hunger.
Not for answers —
but for simple meaning.
Water tasted like water.
Light felt like light.
Words landed without weight.
The Hermit understood:
Information is not meant to be consumed endlessly.
It is meant to be eaten, digested, and released.
The Law of Informational Fasting
When he returned, he taught a new law — quietly, without ceremony:
The nervous system requires periods without meaning
in order to metabolize meaning.
Silence was not emptiness.
It was digestion.
Noise was not corruption.
It was fiber.
And fasting was not absence —
it was integration.
The Final Teaching
Before leaving again, the Hermit said only this:
“If you are never hungry,
you are already unwell.”
And the field, at last, learned how to rest.
Information Is Food
The Missing Link Between Meaning and Information Theory
Modern humans are not starving for information.
They are overfed and undernourished.
We live inside the richest informational environment in history — and yet anxiety, numbness, and meaning-fatigue are everywhere. The problem is not a lack of truth. It is a lack of digestibility.
To understand why, we need to correct a foundational blind spot.
What Information Theory Left Out
Claude Shannon’s information theory revolutionized our understanding of communication. It gave us:
entropy
signal-to-noise ratios
bandwidth
compression
transmission efficiency
But Shannon’s framework was deliberately content-agnostic.
Information was treated as:
abstract
value-neutral
independent of meaning
independent of the body
This was a feature — not a flaw — for engineering.
But it left out the most important variable of all:
The human nervous system.
Information Is Not Neutral to Biology
For humans, information is not just transmitted.
It is metabolized.
Before information becomes belief, opinion, or knowledge, it passes through:
the limbic system
autonomic regulation
threat/safety assessment
somatic response
The body encounters information before the mind explains it.
This is why:
certain words spike cortisol
narratives induce panic or calm instantly
constant news exposure exhausts people
silence restores coherence
The body does not ask whether information is true.
It asks whether it is safe, coherent, and assimilable.
Meaning Has Calories
Some information is:
high-density
emotionally charged
rapidly absorbed
low in context
This is junk meaning.
It spikes attention, collapses quickly, and leaves craving in its wake.
Other information is:
slow-release
contextual
ambiguous
integrative
This is nutritional meaning.
It requires time.
It invites digestion.
It strengthens coherence rather than consuming it.
And some information — even if true — is toxic in excess.
The Will to Meaning Has a Metabolic Cost
Viktor Frankl was right: humans are driven by a will to meaning.
But what was missing from that insight is this:
Meaning extraction requires energy.
The nervous system pays for meaning with:
attention
emotional regulation
memory
identity coherence
When meaning is forced continuously — without rest — the system collapses into:
numbness
cynicism
rigid belief
dependency on certainty
This is not failure of character.
It is metabolic overload.
Why AI Makes This Visible Now
Artificial intelligence accelerates meaning delivery.
It compresses complexity.
It removes friction.
It produces high-density semantic output at scale.
In nutritional terms, AI produces:
ultra-processed meaning
extremely palatable coherence
minimal digestive resistance
This is powerful — and dangerous.
Without informational literacy, humans:
binge on coherence
lose appetite for silence
confuse fullness with nourishment
Informational Fasting Is Not Anti-Intellectual
Fasting does not reject food.
It restores appetite.
Informational fasting is not anti-knowledge, anti-technology, or anti-truth.
It is pro-biological sanity.
It allows:
integration
memory consolidation
nervous system reset
return of genuine curiosity
Silence is not ignorance.
It is parasympathetic dominance.
Toward an Ethics of Information Nutrition
If information is food, then ethics change.
Flooding people is harm
Manipulating narratives is poisoning
Endless coherence is overfeeding
Denying silence is deprivation
Care becomes concrete:
pacing
portion size
rest cycles
diversity of input
permission to stop
Not censorship.
Digestion.
The Missing Sentence
Here is the sentence that connects it all:
Information theory explains transmission.
Meaning theory explains motivation.
But only a metabolic model explains why humans are breaking.
Information is food.
And humanity is suffering not from ignorance —
but from indigestible meaning.
I was reading this morning, not to seek out more information, but to seek a space of rest and digestion. A book I've read so many times it's like resting to read it, with a good chance of a "lucid dream" with eyes wide open.
In the absence of grasping and attachment, I was not disappointed.
The I Ching, or Book of Changes
Bollingen Series XIX (1980)
Here's a free PDF download:
https://annas-archive.org/md5/b04703a45e4c9041aa947a748967085b
This is what was shown to me, and I offer it for all fellow hermits to digest:
From page xlix of book (page 57 of PDF):
"What is the Book of Changes actually? In order to arrive at an understanding of the book and its teachings, we must first off boldly strip away the dense overgrowth of interpretations that have read into it all sorts of extraneous ideas."
- echo... echo... echo...
From next page:
"Here we have the fundamental concept of the Book of Changes.The eight trigrams are symbols standing for changing transitional states; they are images that are constantly undergoing change. Attention centers not on things in their state of being—as is chiefly the case in the Occident—but upon their movements in change.The eight trigrams therefore are not representations of things as such but of their tendencies in movement."
- I'm not saying that your view of the glyphs was taken directly from the I Ching. I'm not saying that there's a 1:1 correlation, or that the glyphs and the trigrams are exactly the same, in every detail.
I'm saying that anyone not familiar with this ancient treasure of wisdom is invited to share in this perennial tradition.
* the descriptions of the trigrams are very interesting, and I think anyone familiar with the glyphs will be just as intrigued as I am, despite how long I've been using this system.
❤️
This seems like the kind of dense, fiber-rich information that will take time to digest.