Actually, I'm as wacky as the next guy, so it's kind of surprising that I didn't really get into a book called The Isaiah Effect, which combines ancient Essene prophecies with modern quantum physics to explain how we can rediscover the lost arts of prophesy and prayer to avoid global destruction and instead usher in an era of peace and love.

Probably I'm down on the book because the author, Gregg Braden, was unshaven in the photo on the back cover, and he looked pretty good. Me, when I don't shave for a day or two, I could audition for "third hoodlum" in a Jackie Chan movie. 

Anyway, the book came at a good time for me. Since the publication of my last newsletter on the link between poor nutrition and cancer, I've been struggling to find the right language for the connection. On the one hand, the research clearly and uncompromisingly shows that consumption of animal protein is closely linked with cancer. On the other hand, it's not a direct causal relationship, and people with cancer certainly don't need to be told, in the midst of their fear and uncertainty, that they brought this disease on themselves.

Braden's book offers three concepts that have given me a different way to talk about the link between our behavior and the health outcomes we live:

• Prophecy: the ability to predict future consequences of current thoughts and actions
• Prayer: the ability to change our thinking and actions to bring about the prophecy we desire
• Choice Points: any time before the prophecy comes to pass where we have a chance to change it through our thoughts and actions

Prophecy

The scientific research laid out in Colin Campbell's The China Study links poor nutrition to cancer. Specifically, the vast preponderance of the evidence shows that too much animal protein (greater than 10% of calories) causes cancer, heart disease, stroke and diabetes in humans. So, if you are a human, that's a relevant prophecy. It s not a fixed prediction, like something Nostradamus would say ("Two nations will go to war, and  one of them will win," as quoted by Woody Allen).

It's simply trend analysis, of the same kind carried about by Isaiah and Jeremiah and the other biblical prophets. "Keep doing X, and Y will happen." For example:

• "30 days more (of evil behavior), and Nineveh will be destroyed" (Jonah).
• "If you keep doing the rituals while ignoring my commandments, the land shall be desolate and yucky" (Isaiah).
• "If you don't like my apples, don't shake my tree" (Def Leppard).

They aren't foretelling the future, they're just connecting present actions to an undesirable future in an attempt to change behavior.

Prayer

Let's define prayer as a mode of thinking that seeks to connect with Ultimate Reality and act in accordance with the highest good. I'm no theologian, Thor knows, but I do have photos of my Bar Mitzvah from 1978, so I feel equipped to speak as an expert on the subject of prayer. All through my Bar Mitzvah, for example, I was fervently praying, "Lord, don't let my voice crack with Heidi Siegal sitting there in the 5th row."

When we connect with reality, we see how our actions partly determine our future. Once we have deep understanding, action becomes easier. The Ghost of Christmas Future achieved some serious leverage with Scrooge by showing him a nasty future. Many of us are jolted into improving our health after someone close to us gets sick.

Prayer is also mindful acceptance of the present moment. Try mindfully eating a Big Mac, and you'll also connect with the reality that this substance has no place in your body.

Prayer, in a religious sense, is a way of reminding ourselves that everything is holy, including ourselves. As Seattle, Chief of the Supersonics said, "What we do to the web, we do to ourselves."

Colin Campbell has always argued that nutrition is a holistic process. Focusing on individual nutrients as good or bad misses the point, and causes us to eat badly while consuming useless pills and powders. But Campbell means more than that these days. In a speech he gave last summer, he waxed almost spiritual about the process of nutrition. It's a beautiful, incredibly complex symphony, involving not just our food and our bodies, but the air, water, soil, sun - all of life works together to produce the food that all of life consumes.

Which means that, like pregnant women everywhere, we're not just "eating for one." What we eat affects global prophecies as well as individual ones.

The prophet Al-Goremiah recently showed us that Global Warming is a threat to the environment on which we depend for our very lives. Yet his movie, and the global anti-Global Warming movement in general, misses the point when they focus on light bulbs and cars. According to the United Nation's Food and Agriculture Organization, the greenhouse gas methane, produced by cow farts, is a bigger problem than carbon dioxide.

• Methane Fact #1: Methane traps 23 times more heat than carbon dioxide
• Methane Fact #2: Methane has a half-life of 8 years in the atmosphere, compared to 23 years for carbon dioxide. Meaning, if we stop producing cattle today, we can reverse global warming quickly, before Greenland turns green and New York City and Calcutta become coral reefs.

In other words, when you shift to a plant-based diet, you're not only significantly reducing your risk of cancer (potentially eliminating it entirely, actually), you're also acting to prevent the global disaster that many of us have seen premonitions of first-hand this so-called "winter."

As a species, we need to cultivate a mindset that connects our actions with the highest good. It's hard to see the big picture when we're so busy with daily details.

Last summer, I attended a fantastic festival put on by my local river association. Great music, crafts, storytelling, environmental advocacy and education, canoeing and kayaking, zero litter - even the forks and spoons were biodegradable. You couldn't find a more ecologically responsible group of people anywhere. And yet…

The food court served corn dogs, funnel cakes, half-gallon flagons of cola, mystery meat on a stick, and all manner of things fried, dead, and dripping with cheese or sugar. All around me, "environmentalists" who protest the pollution of the external environment were polluting their internal environments with abandon. If I had tried dumping what they were eating into the river, they would have tackled me.

It's a striking parallel to the people of Isaiah's time, who followed the rituals but ignored the realities. Just to drive home the point about meat eating in an eerily biblical fashion, let's see how Isaiah has God talk about the empty rituals:

What do I care for the multitude of your sacrifices? saith the Lord,
I have had My fill of the burnt offerings of rams,
And the fat of fed beasts;
And I take no delight in the blood of bullocks, or of lambs, or of he-goats…
Bring Me no more vain oblations; Incense is an abomination unto Me; —
And when ye spread forth your hands, I will hide mine eyes from you;
Yea, when ye make many prayers, I will not hear;
Your hands are full of blood.
(Isaiah 1:11-15)

Our hands are full of blood. And all the biodegradable forks in the world aren't going to heal the environment until we realize that we, ourselves, are part of the environment we're trying to save. Until we stop gorging on "the fat of fed beasts," we're just slowly boiling ourselves in a cauldron of our own making.

Choice Points

Since prophecy is not set in stone, we can change the future by embracing different choices. Prayer - heightened consciousness leading to right action - is effective when the future is in flux. Both cancer and global warming are examples of futures in flux.

Cancer, as Colin Campbell has shown, is not a "thing" you get one day, like a paper cut or a traffic ticket. It's a normal bodily process that we all experience, all the time. Cells mutate, and our body deals with it. At every moment, our cancers are either growing or shrinking. Tending toward wellness or disease. The green smoothie pushes the outcome in a healthier direction, the Chicken McNuggets in another.

Every moment is a choice point, until we run out of time. When the cancer is big enough to cause us discomfort, we're in for a tough fight. Winnable in many cases, if we reverse the causes through different choices, but it's not the point at which I'd recommend taking action. Even when the lump is big enough to be seen by medical instruments, it's late in the game. Our future outcomes are more and more determined the longer we wait.

That's why the concept of the choice point is so powerful. If I could show you two visions of your child's wedding, one of them with you dancing and laughing and toasting, and the other with you absent, your child sadly remembering you and wishing you could be there to share the day, and told you that the future hinged on your choice right now, in this moment…

The first line of the Bible that I chanted at my Bar Mitzvah went like this:

"Behold, I set before you today, a blessing and a curse" (Deuteronomy 11:26).

We can't determine our future precisely, but we can act in accordance with the odds. We can eat in a way that will bless us or curse us. We need not fear the results of the mammogram or the Papp test as the random wrath of a distant diety. We can study for them. We just can't pull all-nighters.

Nothing is fixed, not until we ignore too many warmings - er, warnings. At a certain point, climatologists say, global warming will produce feedback mechanisms that we'll be powerless to combat. At that point, consciousness and choice become irrelevant. That's the time to hope for miracles. I'm not saying miracles don't occur, but I'd rather bet on things in my control. Like the joke about the guy on the roof of his house in a floor, praying to God for salvation, turning away the rowboat and the motorboat and the helicopter because he's waiting for a miracle.

It seems to me, non-theologian that I am, that expecting miracles while avoiding actual responsibility is a pretty lousy way to treat a diety.

Near the end of his bestselling book, Moses reminds them of the blessing and the curse, and suggests that they take the blessing, "Choose life, that you and your offspring may live" (Deuteronomy 30:19). It's a long-term choice - "you and your offspring." And when should they make this choice? The first three verses of the weekly Torah reading give a clue: the phrase "this day" is repeated five times.

That's our choice point. This day. This moment. This meal.

The good news? It's not too late. While there's life, we get to choose life. The blessing is still available to us. The earth is in the balance, but hasn't tipped yet. Our environment still gives us holy oxygen, sacred water, and life-bestowing foods. If we're sick, we still have access to the divine medicines that can make us well.

And it's all connected.

What we do to the web, we do to ourselves.

We can choose today, blessing or curse, life or death.

Let's get out there and choose some life!