HOW LONG WILL YOU LIVE? STATISTICALLY, THE ANSWER CAN BE GIVEN with great precision, but for a particular individual the specific outcome is uncertain. Even discounting accident, there are simply too many factors that are not measurable. But the subject—the prolongation of human life—could be said to be the primary theme of Mr. Gurdjieff's last and most esoteric book, Life Is Real Only Then, When "I Am." It is the "chief problem of our existence," he says. Presumably, this is because if you don't know how much time you have in the body, you don't know how long you have to self-perfect, that is, to make a soul. Or at least to have worked on yourself sincerely enough to have crystallized a mental or emotional body or a Kesdjan body—each with a degree of individuality that will be integral enough to withstand the shock of death, of suddenly becoming disembodied. Otherwise, there is simply decomposition, "food for the moon."
Many times in his Third Series Gurdjieff mentions "noticeable coincidence,"
or what Jung called "synchronicity." In the last chapter of the published book
(there are other arrangements and additions to the material), entitled "The
Outer and Inner World of Man," Gurdjieff writes that he had become stuck
after he first used the expression "the problem of the prolongation of human
life." It was this question, among all the questions the book raised, that "I decided
to make the basic question, or as one might say, the 'clue.'" [Emphasis added.]
Yet he had no idea of how to proceed. This gripped him to the extent that even
his "desire for frequent coffee-drinking or cigarette-smoking disappeared." It was
then that the coincidence occurred. Not being able to sleep he went to buy a newspaper.
"By chance," he came upon two Russian newspapers, Russkoi Slovo and
Russky Golos. He bought both. It was in the latter that his attention was drawn to
a short article, "The Problem of Death." He says, "I was most enthusiastic, and
amazed to find in it everything about which I had thought and found necessary
as an introduction to the last chapter [of his Third Series]." It is not the intention to
speak about what Gurdjieff puts forth in that chapter, even if one could—Gurdjieff
buried the bones so that seekers might individually (not collectively as
many seem to think today) put forth the effort to dig them up themselves. But it is
clear from what he says in earlier chapters that he felt Orage died prematurely
because he refused to intentionally suffer, to give up his relationship with Jesse
Dwight, and thus strengthen his physical, emotional and mental bodies.
But here we are concerned in a less esoteric way with what it takes to prolong
human life on the physical plane in terms of physical food, which, like the other two
being-foods—air and impressions—contains, according to Gurdjieff, "The
Omnipresent-Active-Element-Okidanokh." Gurdjieff makes many acute
observations on food in his First Series. Though he felt that America had the largest
percentage of people who had the possibility of coming to true being, our
feverish fixation on making dollars and "the fact that in the common presences of
almost half of all the three-brained beings I met there…their digestive organs are
spoiled [which will result in impotence]." As Russia fell to psychic abnormalities,
America's downfall will be "stomach and sex… which are going in the direction of
complete atrophy; and moreover, at a highly accelerated tempo."
So the question of diet is not of concern only to those seekers who are obese
or overweight (heart conditions, diabetes and premature death are a statistically
likely future outcome for these people) but to all those striving to live by the five
being-obligolnian-strivings, the first of which necessarily is "to have in their ordinary
being existence everything satisfying and really necessary for their planetary
body." No discussion should take place without acknowledging that it would be a
gross disservice to interpret anything in this monumental allegorical work as having
meaning on only one level or advocating a permanent diet. (Dr. Maurice
Nicoll, one of Gurdjieff's oldest English pupils, for example, suggests
some of the Work interpretations of 'bread' as used in the New Testament.)
That said, as Freud once commented, "sometimes a cigar is just a cigar."
Because of the need to prolong life, Gurdjieff unleashed a torrent of invective against almost all aspects of the American diet. This includes criticism of the removal of the active element in food processing, the "poison-exuding tin cans," and fruits and preserves that look good but taste awful. His most pointed critique is reserved for "prosphora or as they call it bread," which as produced contains "nothing useful" as there is "the complete destruction of the active elements." The color is "white and simply charming" but the best part of the grain is "given to pigs." In fact, the removal of both the bran fiber and wheat germ component of bread robs it of vitamins, fiber and other nutrients, as well as taste and texture. Startlingly, considering that the remarks were penned over a half century before the current diet polemics, Gurdjieff's remarks precisely anticipate the one and only key item that the two diametrically opposed schools of diet doctors Dean Ornish and Robert Atkins agree on—the Ornish clan violently antagonistic to high fat diets and the Atkins tribe equally vociferous advocates of a low carbohydrate diet. It is most illuminating to observe (see chart) how this key point unifies these diverse diet approaches.
Specifically, the diet 'gurus' agree that empty calories from carbohydrates, as typified by 'white bread' (a category shared by other products made from nutritionally empty white flour, including pretzels, bagels, many pastas, etc.) are to be eliminated or at least significantly reduced. Based on Gurdjieff's concerns about hermetically sealed food, he would also eliminate all processed and canned foods, for the decomposition has already begun—"the prime connection with common Nature is severed." Of the American diet he observed: "They 'preserve,' 'freeze,' and 'essensify' beforehand all those products of theirs and use them only when most of their active elements required for normal existence are already volatized out of them." (This, mind you, in the 1920s, and long before in Russia he was speaking of foods that have an "inner triangle.")
