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There is a particular yoga pose that I often attempt, called the Half-Moon, that requires me to bend forward on one foot, touch the ground, raise my other leg and gaze back up at my upraised foot. If my hair falls over my eyes, I topple over; if I cannot see, I cannot balance. Often I find that my yoga practice shows me things about the world – especially the spiritual aspect of our world. It is said in the Bible that without vision, we perish.1 Obviously this doesn’t mean that we perish physically; this is about spiritual vision and spiritual death. We have learned from the Ascended Master teachings that chocolate is an invention of the Nephilim2 and that spiritually it causes a covering over of the third-eye, or a loss of spiritual vision. In one of his dictations through Elizabeth Clare Prophet, El Morya said that chocolate is “one of the deadliest poisons in the earth”3; we cannot survive and grow spiritually, without vision.
The cocoa bean, which is what chocolate is made from, is by itself unpalatable. Like the coffee bean it is very bitter (anyone who has unwittingly bitten into an unsweetened baking chocolate bar would know this). Only a lengthy process of fermentation, drying and roasting, as well as the addition of sugar and fat, turns the cocoa bean into something tasty – and not only tasty, but highly addictive, especially for women. In fact, many, if not most, researchers claim that women prefer chocolate over sex. In her book, Constant Craving, Doreen Virtue says, “In my surveys of clients and audience members, chocolate is always the number one food that is craved.” Virtue links chocolate cravings with the emotional craving for love, saying that chocolate “creates the feeling of being loved.” She observes that, “chocoholism is a cry for love, intimacy, and romance. It is the perfect anti-depressant for the lovesick”.
 Chocolate contains chemicals such as phenylethylamine, theobromine, anandamide and tryptophan which trigger mood enhancing chemicals and neurotransmitters to be released in the brain. Therefore chocoholism is primarily, and some would say exclusively, an emotional addiction. Phenylethylamine, or PEA, is the same chemical that the brain creates when we feel romantic love. According to Virtue, PEA is so powerfully mood altering that it used to be a prescribed medication. She says, "Until the early 1980's, PEA was the main ingredient in a pill called MDMA. Then it was declared an illegal drug and it was taken off the market. Today, the same pill is sold on the streets as ‘Ecstasy’ or ‘X’.” She goes on to explain that MDMA triggers feelings of euphoria. Here are some other feel-good properties of chocolate according to Dr. Virtue:
* The high-fat content soothes feelings of emptiness, insecurity or loneliness.
* Its high- carbohydrate content triggers production of the brain's feel-good chemical, serotonin.
* It also contains a serotonin-like substance called dyphenylamine, which appears to promote feelings of calm and serenity.
* The stimulants in chocolate - PEA, theobromine, tyramine, and caffeine - are instant pick-me-ups.
* Chocolate's appeal may be due, in part, to having a flavor that equally combines sweet, salty, bitter, and sour tastes in a perfect balance.
* Pyrazine, a chemical that is found in the odor of chocolate, triggers the pleasure center in the brain.
* The texture can be creamy if you need comfort, or crunchy if you are angry over your love life.
Basically people who crave chocolate are subconsciously longing to reconnect to and feel love. It is that soft feeling of joy that we feel quite naturally when we are in the flow of giving and receiving God’s love. Any craving is an attempt to self-medicate, or, in other words, to fulfill inner desires in an outer way instead of facing our pain and working through it, making changes in our lives and reconnecting to who we really are. An addiction to chocolate is a clear sign of a need to reconnect to the love that is within our own hearts, and to not only know and accept that we are lovable in the eyes of God, but to love ourselves.
Is There Benefits to Chocolate?
The supposed benefit of eating chocolate is said to be that it is high in anti-oxidants, called flavonoids, which ironically, are thought to help prevent heart disease. However, fruits and vegetables also contain flavonoids, and without the processed sugar, caffeine, preservatives and multitude of other chemicals, to say nothing of the spiritually detrimental effects. Caffeine is a very powerful, quick-acting stimulant (drug) that produces an effect similar to the stress response in our body. Processed sugar is a substance with no nutritional value that destroys teeth, over-works the pancreas, plays havoc with the blood sugar, and, after providing a quick rush of energy, robs the body of energy and nutrients in order to be processed. Therefore, to say that eating chocolate is a health benefit because it contains flavonoids is like saying that smoking cigarettes is good for us because nicotine has been shown to have a positive effect on short-term memory.4 Perhaps, along the same line, hitting ourselves in the head with a sledgehammer is good for us because it stimulates blood flow to the brain.
Personally, I used to be addicted to chocolate. I used to buy the really big thick bars to eat, but even so, they didn't last long with me. I felt like I never could get enough. Shortly after eating the chocolate (always way more than I intended) I would feel drained of energy and sick to my stomach, and sickened with myself for having no "will power" to stop. And yet I would do it all over again the next day, or even later on that same day, seemingly powerless to stop. It took me years to overcome this addiction. It was much harder to overcome than my addiction to coffee, which withdrawal symptoms lasted for two months with feelings of crashing fatigue in the late morning of every day.
It is certainly easy in our current society to justify eating chocolate, even in excess, and the claims of health benefits certainly give us only more reason to do so. One of the most difficult things to accept for a spiritual student, is that there are certain earthly creations that may seem outwardly benign and even beneficent, that are in reality extremely destructive spiritually. This is why Jesus admonished us to judge not by appearances, but to use our inner discernment and our inner direction as our compass and guide5. Of course the forces of darkness want to pull us off the path and prevent us from reuniting with God in our hearts, and with chocolate we have a highly addictive substance with mood altering properties that causes the loss of spiritual vision, energy and will, and which encourages us to fulfill our longing for love through ingesting what is really, when you get down to it, a drug and not even a food, if you define food as being that which nourishes.
Could this gift of “love” to ourselves – of substitute love, as chocolate often seems to be, tie in with the Great Whore’s attempted substitution of herself for the Son of God’s feminine self? Would we be vulnerable to the allure of chocolate were we in tune with our own feminine self and in balance with our feminine and masculine energies? Perhaps the epidemic of chocolate addiction is a testimony to the fact that most people feel disconnected to the love of their hearts, to the divine romance that goes on within them between the feminine that they are as souls of light and the spiritual part of them that loves them from Above through their hearts within. How can we reconnect to this divine romance as long as we are fooled by the Great Whore consciousness into indulging in a false romance with chocolate that blinds us to who we really are and blocks the true love of our hearts? It seems much easier to pick up a candy bar than to do the work of reconnecting to our hearts.
Looking back, I see that part of the difficulty in overcoming my addiction to chocolate was its seductive nature and its popularity, as it is offered everywhere you go and in very enticing ways. It's no wonder that it is probably the most popular gift for women on Valentine's Day, but from my perspective, it is no gift.
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