Nourishment and Formation of Tissues

By Dr Patrick Quanten MD

According to Ayurveda, ‘the science of life’ and the natural healing system of India going back to ancient times, the human body is composed of seven tissue layers. These form concentric circles from the gross to the subtle. From the most subtle downwards, the tissues are formed one out of the other as the most subtle layers feed the more dens layers underneath.

It is not always easy to translate the Sanskrit terminology into other languages and if we do we very often find ourselves struggling to understand because the translated word has some other connotations for us as well as the translatory one. But we will try to describe the various tissues and what they stand for. Each tissue satisfies one of the natural requirements for existence in a human body. How well you – your personality – fits into your body will determine your resistance to disease.

Juice – or tissue fluids, including chyle, lymph and blood plasma. Its accessory tissues are breast milk and menstrual blood. Its function is nourishment.
Blood – red blood cells. Its accessory tissues are blood vessels and tendons. Its function is invigoration.
Flesh – skeletal muscle. Its accessory tissues are ligaments and skin. Its function is ‘plastering’ the skeleton.
Fat – fat in the limbs and torso. Its accessory tissue is omentum. Its function is lubrication.
Bone – all bones. Its accessory tissue is teeth. Its function is support.
Marrow – anything inside a bone: red and yellow bone marrow, the brain and spinal cord. Its accessory tissues is head hair.
Sexual fluids – male and female. Its function is reproduction, and the production of fluid which produces the aura and controls immunity.

Each tissue layer is formed from the one immediately prior to it, except the accessory tissues, which are only nourished and do not nourish in return. All layers nourish each other and inadequate nutrition of some parts will be felt throughout all seven layers. Digestion and assimilation of nutrition are essential to an individual’s wellbeing at all levels.

Most of us could accept that ingested food first forms gastro-duodenal juices (chyle), which then produces red blood cells, which then go to nourish flesh. There our common sense understanding of the process ceases though. How can flesh nourish fat, or bone nourish marrow? The answer lies in a re-definition of the word ‘nourish’. The tissues nourish one another by providing metabolic conditions which are conducive to production of the next line, and by each satisfying a need of the living being, which allows the next need to be addressed.

The texts recognise three ways in which this environment can be influenced:

1. One tissue may completely convert itself into another. For example, Juices provides direct nourishment for the production of Blood. A large part of circulating Juices is converted into Blood.
2. The tissue may flow through the body, gradually nourishing the next tissue in line through a more complicated series of reactions. For example, when Blood nourishes Flesh it flows through many different parts of the body, nourishing Flesh all along the line.
3. The tissue may merely ‘seed’ the next layer of tissue by sending hormonal or enzymatic clues to it. This is the way Flesh nourishes Fat and fat nourishes Bone.

Juices

The Force of Life and the tissues are mutually interdependent. Without ‘permission’ from the Life Force no molecule can be admitted into the fellowship of your body. The progression of the Seven Tissues represents the seven stages involved in the nourishment of the Life Force. Tastes alert the brain to the sort of food, which has been ingested, and the brain directs the digestive process accordingly. As digestion proceeds, material which has undergone preliminary conversion is absorbed into the system and begins to circulate. This tissue is Juices.

Rasa, the Sanskrit word for Juices has a variety of meanings such as water, semen, plant sap and metallic mercury. It mainly signifies chyle, blood plasma and lymph, but it also refers to taste and emotion.

Juices special function is Prinana, a word that means nourishment but is derived from a root which signifies romantic love. When the body is hungry, each of its cells is hungry. Just as a plant withering from lack of attention and water seems to freshen immediately when sprinkled by a thoughtful passer-by, so too all of your cells perk up, physically and emotionally, when they receive the ‘sap’ of Juices. In itself Juices is not sufficient to nourish the whole organism, but it is a promise of better things to come.

Romance is an ephemeral emotion, which projects a potential to provide more. Likewise, the satisfaction you feel from a glass of fruit juice at the end of a long fast, or the relief your organism experiences when you drink a glass of water after several hours of thirst, is really just an anticipation of the nourishment your tissues will experience after your digestion operates on the food or water. Prinana is the satisfaction you feel when the nourishment first enters your system.

It is called ‘romantic love’ because it is really a waltz of two separate existences – you and the food – who are trying to become sufficiently intimate with one another to unite together. The sense of danger, the exaltation of excitement, the thrill of the unknown, and all the other emotions including the lust you feel when you fall in love you also feel, in simpler form, when your body is suffused with the fresh Rasa from a well-digested meal.

If your food is not properly digested, or if it is well-digested but improperly assimilated, your Life Force will feel precisely like the lover whose date stands her up: cheated, used, abused and frustrated. To be led (by the process of digestion after thorough chewing and swallowing) to expect a night on the town (good assimilation of healthy Juices), and then to wait for hours in growing despair as your corsage wilts, is an affront to self-confidence (a weakening of Life Force power to protect a unified personality), and can lead to self-denigration (weakening of immunity) if it happens frequently.

The texts list many symptoms which develop when Juices are disturbed. The most important are ‘lack of faith’ and ‘lack of taste’. Lack of faith develops from lack of self-confidence. It shows a lack of faith in yourself, in others, or both, depending on whether your Life Force concludes that its failure to be nourished derived from its own insufficiency or from the malicious intervention of some outside party. Lack of faith can develop into suspicion, and suspicion can create barriers against whatever aspect of the outside or inside world has been adjudged by your Life Force to be guilty of treachery.

Lack of taste has a twin meaning. Physiologically it indicates a lack of desire for food, which happens when toxins are produced in preference to Juices. The system then recognizes that it must first digest the toxins to clear the obstruction to the nourishment process before any further nourishment is taken in.

Psychologically, lack of taste means lack of interest in living, lack of flavour for the things of life. Unable to get excited about anything, the afflicted individual moves about in a perpetual funk. This is a form of lovesickness: bereft of the love object, the lover moves about in a fog, unable to derive satisfaction from normal pursuits. Here the lover is the Life Force and the love object is Rasa.

If the suitor of the Life Force (the food) is exposed to be a criminal (toxins), a being who actually wishes her harm, he must be kicked out of the house and out of the relationship. The Life Force must then repair her broken heart, turn her back on her previous life (avoid certain foods and undergo therapeutic procedures) and wait patiently for a new suitor. No personality can be mentally and emotionally healthy until its physical body is freed of indigestion.

Blood

When your organism is able to obtain sufficient Juices, the date between your Life Force and her nourishment takes place, and Juices have a chance to be converted into Blood. Blood produces ‘invigoration’, that rush of vitality which makes us feel the full vibrancy of life. Some of the sense of danger evaporates as the Life Force gets to know her date and finds him exciting and stimulating. He has “got into her blood”. She is fascinated by him; she begins to think that maybe he is a fit mate for her. Hope and anticipation invigorates her.

When Juices are not well-digested, Blood is insufficiently produced and a waste product is at this stage overproduced. This waste product is hot, intense influence, just like Blood, but it cannot perform Blood’s function of invigoration.. This waste product can only heat up the organism, resulting in increased anger (at the love object for refusing to submit to domination by the Life Force) and jealousy (lest any other Life Force dare to try to snatch the roving love object away). “Hot-blooded lovers” have ample Juices for romance and lust, but they have too much heat in their blood; their violence is a manifestation of this heat energy, as it exists after scorching the individual.

Flesh

When Blood is healthy and well formed it nourishes Flesh, whose job is ‘plastering’, covering the skeleton and internal organs so that they are not exposed to the outside. The wastes produced at this stage are wastes which develop in and occlude body orifices. Flesh also provides a preliminary barrier between the ‘you’ of your organism and the ‘not-you’ of the external world. Your muscle fibres are like bricks and stones in your body’s fortifications against attack from without; they provide a sense of security.

To continue with our analogy of the date , our couple – the Life Force and her food – have decided to go steady. He will now defend her as his against challenges; she now has a protector, a bodyguard, to shelter her from the world. A Life Force who lacks sufficient healthy Flesh feels naked and defenceless, uncovered to the world, open to external influences in spite of romance and invigoration. Body builders who run away from all other human pursuits in order to magnify their muscles are often insecure individuals who use those muscles to insulate themselves from the need to interact substantively with anyone on the outside.

Fat

Well-nourished Flesh feeds Fat, whose function is ‘unctuousness’. The Sanskrit word Sneha means love, though it is love of a different sort from Prinana. It is a bonded, secure love relationship, like that which exists between mother and child, or husband and wife. Just as loving partners snuggle and cuddle together for warmth, fat ‘snuggles’ our body and provides us warm, satisfying love. The Life Force and her food have finally tied the knot; they are now wed to one another, for better or for worse. Fat, and to some extent Flesh as well, provide us with that sublime satisfaction that a sound sleeper receives from a warm quilt on a cold night.

Fat and its waste product sweat both help maintain the body’s internal temperature. Fat insulates us to hold heat in; sweat radiates heat away. A human whose fat is insufficient is perpetually physically and emotionally cold, lacking the thermal insulation which Fat provides. The coldness makes the individual seek increased physical and mental nourishment, without much concern for the means used, to nourish Fat and achieve the warm, satisfying love it can give. It is possible that the anorexic look which is so popular in fashion today is partly derived from the drive for independence and rootlessness which breaks bonds and restrictive relationships and displays itself psychologically as a near-pathological aversion to fat.

Extreme overabundance of Fat is characteristic of those people who despair of locating a bonded love relationship with another human and turn to the solace that Fat can provide. Such warm-hearted people simply lack that loving life-partner or that stable family situation which could act as an object for the affection. The satisfaction an obese individual feels in being fat is real and perceptible to the Life Force and the likelihood of successful, permanent weight loss is low until the Life Force is redirected and becomes willing to relinquish the ‘security blanket’ to which she clings. This affection must be directed at other objects, perhaps externally to community service activities, or internally to spiritual development. Obesity is neither a simple psychological problem nor a simple problem of nutrition. It is a problem of psychological nutrition.

Bone

Healthy Fat makes for healthy Bone, whose job is ‘support’. Bone makes it possible for us to move in the world. Without our bony skeletons we would lie limply in puddles on the floor like jellyfish. The bones and joints are closely connected with the mind’s ability to express itself, because capability for expression is a function of ability to move. Bone is ‘supportive’ as well as ‘supporting’; it allows us to project our own identity out into the world, just as its wastes – body hair, beard and nails – grow and project themselves from the interior out into the exterior. When support is lacking, gratification, invigoration, security and commitment provide only limited satisfaction.

The previous four tissues are connected solely with our internal health and are quite external to our most vital body organs. Bone marks a shift in emphasis. Now the food begins to flow deeply into the organism’s interior, into its centre, to assist in maintaining external health. The ability of the Life Force to maintain her internal integrity has been protected; now her ability to maintain her external integrity, her ability to present a coherent, unified face to the world, must be stabilized. Weak Bone reduces the support of the Life Force for her external projection. Healthy Bone allows the Life force to concrete her personality and establish firm personal parameters.

Marrow

Bone produces Marrow. Marrow is anything inside a bone, including the fatty yellow bone marrow, the blood-forming red bone marrow, and the brain and spinal cord, which are entirely encased in Bone. Note that although Marrow physically produces blood, Blood is identified in Ayurveda with the liver, which western medicine knows to be the controller of blood production, if not its actual site. Ayurveda is interested in root causes.

The function of Marrow is ‘filling’. Healthy Marrow prevents emptiness of mind. Already the food has provided the Life Force a firm foundation against which to brace while projecting; any good spouse would do this. Now the food dives deeper into the depths of the organism and pools itself inside the Bony bastions which the Life Force has created for it. As Marrow, it acts as an energy-storage medium, something like a computer memory bank; a pool of passive, available power.

The mere ability to project your personality into the world is insufficient. You may feel gratified, invigorated, secure, loved and confident, but unless there is something of value present in your personality which can be projected, you are hollow, your ‘headpiece filled with straw’, your words ‘full of sound and fury and signifying nothing’. This is a very prevalent disease today and is characteristic of the world’s generally poor state of nutrition. It is diagnosable from the eyes, which are the single most significant projector of the personality into the environment.

Healthy Marrow gives the eyes a clear, strong sheen which radiates warm light just like a lamp flame in a quiet place; dull, lifeless eyes are indicative of weak Marrow. In some terminal diseases the eyes become feverishly bright toward the end. This does not indicate health, of course; it shows that the organism has marshalled its last fading reserves of strength and is using them to project its personality outwards for as long as it has left. The body burns its own tissues to provide light to project its Life Force through its windows on the world, the eyes.

Marrow is prone to inadequate nutrition, even if the rest of the body is healthy, because of the drying, roughening and destabilizing ‘wind’ effects (effects caused by the ‘wind’ element). Some empty-Marrow individuals can project their personalities into the world and influence others with great ease. They are forceful and persuasive, but there is no substance to their projection. It is all so much ‘hot air’. This disturbance eventually affects Bone too. When the bloated balloon of the inflated, aggrandized personality finally bursts, all the air whooshes out and the individual is left crumpled in a heap on the ground.

Sexual Fluids

Properly nourished Marrow goes to nourish Shukra, the collective word for all secretions involved in reproduction. The food has now been transformed into a substance which can unite with the Life force. The function is creation and creativity. It can be used for procreation, which is the production of children, or it can be used for the production of artistic or intellectual creations. Shukra’s job is to act as a matrix through which new creations can manifest on our plane of existence. It is the clay which creativity shapes into forms.

Weak Sexual Fluids mean weak creativity. Affected individuals may have it all; they may be gratified, invigorated, secure and loved, may be able to project themselves cogently and coherently into their environment, and may have plenty to offer, but without strong Sexual Fluids they will be unable to consummate any productive arrangement or exert any lasting effect on the flow of events. A child is a lasting effect; so is a new corporation, a sheaf of music, or an amended law. Sexual Fluids control an individual’s ability to make a mark on the slate of the world.

When the Life Force couples excitedly and expansively with Sexual Fluids the energy aroused becomes uncontrollable. It then flows out of the body into another body via the sex act, or into some other project or enterprise. When the Life Force couples with Sexual Fluids calmly and collectedly, the new substance created remains within the body and solidifies the link between the physical, mental and spiritual existences.

Conclusion

All forms of physical and mental indigestion encourage toxin formation. Indigestion is the easiest to deal with when it is limited to the digestive tract. Once it moves into the tissues, and disrupts the ability of the Life Force to nourish herself, its management becomes much more complicated. If toxins block the tissue nutrition in your digestive tract, your life first loses its zest as Juices becomes malnourished. Then heat-polluted Blood saps your vitality, malnourished Flesh strips you of your security, and each tissue in turn is weakened until the foundation of your immunity is starved into dysfunction. Mind pollutes body by forcing it into unhealthy activities, and body pollutes mind by producing toxins and starving the organisms of reproductive energy. Mind and body are concurrently and inherently joined.

September 2008