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THE SHERBORNE THEME TALKS SERIES - # 4
FOOD By John G. Bennett – 1972 to 1974
Coombe Springs Press; Copyright© 1977 by the estate of J. G. Bennett ISBN O 900306 45 9
Sherborne House, Sherborne, Gloucestershire GL54 JDZ, England
©The JG. Bennett Foundation
INTRODUCTION
THE SHERBORNE THEME TALKS SERIES
Themes are more than ideas to be thought about. They are aspects of practical wisdom: how to
live. This wisdom can be awakened by making an active contact with our own experience. Observation is
not enough and thinking is totally inadequate. The aim we have is to work towards a new practical
understanding of life so that we can begin to live differently. The relation of our inner life to the
external world, our bodies, other people and nature needs to change. The new life cannot be reduced to
a set of rules or commandments which can only dictate behavior. It has to been discovered in action, in
the hazards of life; and usually through many small moments when something is revealed to us that we
cannot doubt.
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John G. Bennett was a master at conducting theme meetings and could draw out the most
profound lessons from the most faltering of contributions. He helped people to see for themselves the
practical core of the spiritual path and avoid the twin evils of doubt and philosophizing.
The Sherborne Theme Talks Series are taken from tape recordings of meetings at Sherborne
House between 1972 and 1974. We are able to publish only a small selection from the hundreds of
tapes.
JOHN G. BENNETT
Distinguished scientist, mathematician and Linguist I, John Godolphin Bennett was head of
Military Intelligence in Turkey in 1920, and his early contact with Gurdjieff and Ouspensky led to
intensive work with both men over a long period.
His studies of Asiatic languages and his extensive travelling in Islamic countries brought him
into communication with many of the world's spiritual leaders
Building on the ideas he had assimilated he gave up his purely scientific work and became
Director of the Institute for the Comparative Study of History, Philosophy and the Sciences, and set up
the five-year experiment in the International Academy for Continuous Education at Sherborne in
Gloucestershire, where adults from all parts of the world gathered to learn and live the techniques for
the Transformation of Man.
Mr. Bennett died in 1974 and Sherborne House has been sold. But his work lives on in the first
of the psychokinetic communities in which he saw man's future, at Claymont Court, Charles Town, West
Virginia, USA; in the many communities set up by groups of ex pupils of Sherborne: in the hearts and
work of those who knew him: and in the living ideas outlined in his books.
THE THEMATIC TECHNIQUE
When Mr. Bennett began working with themes at Sherborne House he gave the introduction
reproduced below. Reading the presentation and discussion of themes, without having worked on them
oneself, can create the illusion of understanding. It is important that the reader should try to grasp and
take seriously what Mr. Bennett says about the thematic technique.
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“The technique of theme consists in this: in persistently and with great determination occupying
one's mind with a specific clear notion so that one can penetrate into it in depth. There are various
techniques that involve this persistent directing of the mental attention towards one object. There are
various kinds of meditation. There is the Zen Koan exercise where the attention is persistently directed
towards something incongruous or impossible and because the incongruity and impossibility of the Koan
is clear, the mind can be occupied with it with less risk of wandering off into imaginary solutions to the
problem. Another kind of persistent occupation of the mind is described in the talks I had with the
Shivapuri Baba in Long Pilgrimage. He said; ''Think of God alone; put every other thought from your
mind. Think only of God and then eventually you will come to the realization of the meaning of life".
The way we shall work with this particular technique, which is one of very great value and
which, when combined with the other things that we shall be doing can be very fruitful indeed, is that
every Monday morning I will put before you one theme with which you should, as far as possible, occupy
your attention during the week, when your attention is not required for the external activities in which
you are engaged.
There are subsidiary benefits of this thematic technique. For one thing, you have something
positive to put in the place of the idle associations that ordinarily occupy our minds. You have
something to which you can turn your attention when you find you are disturbed, irritated. But these
are, as I say, subsidiary benefits. The main purpose is to go through the verbal and conceptual level of
understanding to a direct perception of the real world to which it belongs. I use the words "real world"
because we can look at it in this way: there is a gradient between states of subjective illusion where one
is connected with no reality except the immediate transient experience, passing through various states of
awakening to contact or full realization of the meaning of life and one's own real being. These
gradations do correspond to different worlds. Ordinarily people speak about 'this world' and the 'other
world'. But in reality there are more than two worlds, each one so different one from another that all we
can know about one world does not prepare us for the experience of the next world.
The next world is not Iike the popular idea of somewhere we shall enter into after death. It is
the next world here and now. It is only closed to us because we have become almost totally conditioned
to living in the world of these sense perceptions and the thinking, as we call it that is derived from our
sense perceptions. Although this is, in the full sense of the word, an illusory, that is, not even an
existing world, nevertheless while we are in these bodies we have to come to terms with it, not merely
because it would be awkward for us to disregard the requirements of our bodies, but because we have an
obligation to do so. We are not here in these bodies for nothing, simply to escape from them, but to use
them for a definite purpose for which this existence was given to us. We cannot learn this purpose nor
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can we fulfill it so long as we are wholly imprisoned in this world; wholly conditioned to it. Some
degree of liberation is needed in order to see, first of all, what it is like to orientate oneself in the
physical world. The ordinary state of man is like flatland that is, having only flat dimensions. He has
no real experience of height and depth, only an illusory experience coming from his emotions and the
interaction between his different functions. A real awareness of height and depth is in the sense of a
transition from one world to another. This seldom happens to people and when it does happen, they
misinterpret it. But we have to set ourselves to be able to add a dimension to our experience, to be able to
be aware of the height and depth of experience and not merely of its successiveness and its spread around
us.
Therefore, the really important objective in the thematic technique is that it should give us the
power to move in depth. For this we have to accept and be convinced that there is depth, that there is
more in simple things than meets the eye, or more than can be described in our conceptual language. It
is inherent in this, that everything, however simple, has its own dimension of depth, its own
significance. As Blake said: "Everything that lives has meaning and needs neither suckling nor
weaning". This means we neither have to put anything into it nor have we to extract it out of its
environment; it is where it is. This we have, first of all, to be convinced of and then, afterwards, to
learn to perceive. As we ourselves live in a flat world, we also see everything around us as flat.
The theme is to run through all the other activities of the week, as something independent of the
other activities. Although activities will impinge on one another, and we will doubtless find material in
our other activities for enriching our understanding of the theme, and the theme itself will throw light
on the other activities, they must be kept independent of one another. The theme is part of the Work in
its own right. One important feature of the way of using the thematic technique as I shall do here is
that themes will only be given for a limited period of time, that is for one week. This is quite unlike, let
us say, the perpetual meditation on the meaning of life that the Shivapuri Baba recommends, as it is
quite unlike what a Zen Master would do for a disciple in showing him a Koan exercise or some
meditation theme. But it has a special advantage of its own, and that is that it is circumscribed set
within limits. What you can get from it, you must get in one week, after that you have only the distilled
results of your own efforts. The next theme will then have to occupy your attention to the exclusion of
everything else. This principle of circumscription or limitation is one that enables an activity to be a
completing cycle that is to correspond to a completing octave. What is open ended, without an end to
which it is directed produces certain other kinds of experiences and possibilities, but it does not give the
opportunity to carry through to completion.
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You have to set the theme before yourself in this way that from Monday until Friday night is the
time that you have got to penetrate into the theme that I shall give you. Then Saturday and Sunday
you can either think about it or not, there is no obligation to put it entirely out of your mind, though
there is a certain in benefit in doing this, so that you will approach the next theme on the following
Monday without the momentum of the previous week. So in the five days from the Monday morning to
Friday evening, we try to complete the cycle of penetration into a particular theme. I advise you to
picture it to yourself in this way: that what you are looking for is really a world that you are not, in
your ordinary state, in contact with: a world which is beyond our ordinary state. In our ordinary state
we can see and touch things, we can think about them, we can reason with ourselves about them, we can
compare our memories. This is not enough.
If we were fresh, wholly natural people, we should be able to move from that into the depth of
things but, as it was said in one of the readings we have had recently, man is unable to perceive, to see,
to hear or to think anything new after childhood. By the time he reaches seventeen, eighteen, twenty,
twenty-one years of age, he becomes closed and he is only a collection of gramophone records. This is a
hard thing to accept, but it is really like that, and therefore you cannot accept it yet, but sometime this
will begin to really break into you, showing that all your processes are just automatic results of external
influences acting on what has already been formed in you, which it is already too late to change. The
only hope of escaping from this situation is to be able to penetrate into another world. The situation in
this world is as it is. But as it is said in "From the Author'', although it is possible to cross over from the
stream that leads to nothing into the stream that leads to the "boundless ocean" it is not so easy. It is
not enough "just to wish and you cross", for as Gurdjieff said, a long preparation and a great deal of
hard work is required. This is what we have set ourselves to undertake here. It is not at all easy for
people to understand that the way of life which is dominant in the world leads to nothing at all. The
whole of it is now illusion. This is impossible, not merely difficult, but impossible, for people to grasp
until they have had experience of looking at it from another world and seeing it how it is. My hope for
you all is that during this time you will have gained this vantage point where you will be able to see for
yourself and never again lose this understanding. Really, only that can give us the strength and
persistence to endure what is necessary, in order to transfer into and establish ourselves in the stream of
real life.
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FOOD
THEME PRESENTATION
Like any living creature man eats to live and draws on the lives of other beings to
provide for his own life. But man, unlike the animals, can be conscious of the significance of
eating.
Man can also abuse food by eating in a wrong way. The right relationship to food is
not produced by excessive attention to diet. It comes through the practice of simple
disciplines toward whatever it is one happens to be eating.
One can come to the point of glimpsing what it really means to eat, not simply on
the physical level or even on the psychological level, but also in the spiritual sense
This week we begin the first of a cycle of themes connected with food that we shall
return to during this time together. We have to remind ourselves of the place that food
rightly and properly occupies in man's life. Food is the key to the transformation of life;
before anything can be eaten by man it must already have been transformed by life. It begins
with the bare rocks of this earth, the waters of the sea and the air of the atmosphere; out of
this our bodies are made and from the transformation of all this the finer energies of our
experience are produced. But we cannot do it directly; put in front of a diet of rocks and
water and air we are not able to maintain life. It is useful to look at a stone and a pool of
water and to breathe the air and say to oneself, "What could I do if there were nothing but
that? Out of that my body is made, but I can't make it, and I can't maintain it." Only life can
sustain life.
Here at Sherborne House we live in the midst of vegetation, and are lucky not to be
living in a city where manmade objects predominate. Unceasingly we see around us the
process of transformation which vegetation is producing in the world of life, thus
maintaining this world. We also see and hear the animals on whose lives we depend for
food. If we were something even near to normal beings, we would have a deep love and
constant respect for everything that lives, and see our need for, and dependence upon,
everything that has gone to make us human beings. We have been lifted by the creative work
of Nature to the point where we stand at the halfway house between the Material and the
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Spiritual, at the point of change over in the ascent from Matter to Spirit. We are placed
there by our nature and we are placed there because this kind of nature is needed.
We stand at the summit of one pyramid, but we are the beginning of another one,
the pyramid of the spiritual world. This point in us is the change over or is intended to be.
We are so made that there must be the change over from the dominance of Matter to the
dominance of Spirit. All this, the limitless potential of a human being has been given to us.
And of course we are here at Sherborne to realize that potential; the whole "Why?"
of our being here is concentrated on that.
One indispensable link in this process is the transformation of food. I want you, this
week, when you eat, to remember this link: to have in you respect for the life which has
given you life, and to be conscious that food is entering you for maintaining your existence;
to experience the taste of the food and also to experience the way the body and psychic
experience respond to food. Man requires a certain combination of foods. He probably,
under present conditions of existence, requires a certain proportion of animal food; he
certainly requires different combinations of vegetable food.
Many of you have very wrong, self centered attitudes towards food. You are solely
concerned with your diet, your health, with vitamins and non-vitamins and so on. This is
really a very egoistic attitude towards food. All food is good, and all food can be assimilated
by man, providing he himself is in the right state. This idea, that we have to watch over our
diet and supplement it with this, or avoid that, is just egoism. This attitude cuts you off from
food: you are thinking of yourself, not the food you eat; if you eat food with the right inner
state, all food is nourishing and good. If a man eats in the right inner state and in the right
way, he needs very little food, and what he eats is unimportant.
This right inner state towards food is consciousness, awareness of what is always
prepared for us, what Nature has done for us. There is one exercise that is important for this
week when we are reflecting upon our relationship with food, and I want you to do this
exercise as sincerely as possible. Whenever you eat, whether it is a single bite or whether it
is a meal, whenever you put food into your mouth, with the first mouthful, the first entry of
food into your body be conscious of yourself, as in "I and this food." Everything happens at
that moment: the digestive process of transformation begins at the moment when the food
enters your mouth. But you must be present at that moment. You are to put it to yourselves
that, when you eat, you are receiving a very honored guest. It is Life that is visiting you, that
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has come into your gates: this honored guest that has come to give you life and must be
greeted at the threshold in this way.
Now, because this exercise has necessarily to be done in the presence of other
people, I must remind you of one other thing about this kind of work. It is necessary that we
should be able to do work that has great significance for us inwardly, without its being in any
way visible outwardly. That is to say, you must be able to do this exercise unperceived when
you sit down to a meal and food is brought to you. If you sit down and gaze at the plate and
prepare yourself for this moment of eating, then other people can say, "Ha, ha, he's
preparing himself!" If you ever see a man looking conscious, you can be sure there is
something wrong with him.
This exercise of conscious eating, of taking the first mouthful of food consciously, is
an extraordinary exercise. All of us who have done this exercise have been astonished and
therefore commend it to all of you.
Once you have taken the first mouthful of food, there should be something separate
in you that remembers to be in the right relationship to food. If I eat without a sense of
gratitude to the beings that have given me life -the plants and the animals who have given
their lives for me -then I am not as I should be. And I have to return this life a hundred fold;
I am a field in which the grain, the seed of life, is planted; it is for me to return the harvest.
If I do that, then I am a good field, the seed is sown to the benefit of the seed. I mean by
that, that if I transform the energy that I get from the food and fulfill my cosmic duty, not
only do I save myself but I also save the food that I eat. There is a tradition that man is the
heaven for food; that is, when food is eaten by man it is transformed and reaches its own
highest potential. So it is not degrading for man to eat food, nor does he destroy or harm
animal or vegetable food by eating it, provided that he does it consciously.
This was understood in former times; now we do things that are painful even to think
about in relation to food. I suffer if I see food wasted. If we are aware of the immense work
done by Nature to bring this food to that level of consciousness that makes it suitable for us
to eat, we can then think what wasting it means. That is why I beg people not to serve
helpings in excess of what people can eat. Everyone can have more if there is necessity, but
we should not leave food on our plates uneaten. It is good that we have hens here so that
they can eat the food we discard in preparing meals in the kitchen, thus helping us to avoid
wasting food. When I asked about the feeding of the hens, I heard that the preparation of
mash in the kitchen had not been started. It may be that according to text book of hen
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keeping you get more eggs if you give them food specially manufactured in factories for
them, but this idea that food should be thrown on the compost heap when there are living
animals who can profit by it is one of the things I call painful. One should have feeling for
food -a sensitivity about everything that can be food for ourselves and other forms of life.
We should say to ourselves that there is something unnatural and false in us if we are not
conscious of the significance of our daily food when we know that the whole cosmic purpose
-the whole Trogoautoegocratic process of the cosmos, or Reciprocal Maintenance in
Gurdjieff’s words consists in eating and being eaten. The Cosmic Individual, Ashiata
Shiemash, stands for the Trogoautoegocrat. "Ash" is the universal word for food throughout
Eastern Asia and "Ashiatashiemash" means to eat food and to be eaten as food. There is
another meaning built into this phrase, since "shiem" means the sun: namely that we are
food for the sun. This is our true destiny - that high level of being that corresponds to the
sun.
If we set ourselves to look at life through our relationship to food, our attitude will
change. We should have awareness particularly on the three occasions on which we have
contact with food: in the growing of the food, the preparing of food and the eating of food.
But first we must seek to see what our altitude to food is at present. Use the exercise and
any other means you can find to explore this. If we can manage to develop in ourselves a
non-egoistic love towards life, we shall have the right attitude towards food.
THEME OBSERVATIONS
Student: I had great difficulty with the exercise. It took me almost two days before I
could start on it. And then, on picking up my spoon and putting it into my mouth, I had just
an instant remembering that I had to do the exercise, but I really did not do it.
S. I found I could remember the exercise as I sat down to table, but only two or
three times remembered it as I was taking my first bite.
S. When I was eating I observed that having prepared myself and having remembered
all the way up, I was not aware of the fork in my mouth. It was literally a contest between a
desire just to eat the food -or indeed hunger -and a wish to do the exercise.
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S. I found I had much trouble doing the exercise. Between my deciding and actually
doing the exercise something happened. By the time the food reached my mouth, the next
thing I knew I had swallowed it.
J.G.B. I think that any of you who have tried very hard to do the exercise must have
noticed this peculiar thing, that it is not only a question of remembering, but that there is
something else. You can bring it to this point and even then the exercise is not done as you
wish, or as you supposed you could do it. You can do something and yet at the same time
know that you have missed an opportunity. You can bring food consciously into your mouth
during the meal, but the difference between this and the experiencing of the actual first
mouthful is something very striking and unexpected. Would you have expected that there
would be a great difference between the first mouthful any other until you had tried? Truly I
do not believe people would have expected this exercise to be so difficult.
As far as you could see the conditions that I had set you last week in the "I am"
exercise every hour, were not substantially different. But the former exercise you were able
to do without needing reminding, but this one none of you were able to do really more than
about three times. There is something that is required for this exercise that is not at your
disposal at the moment - something connected with being - but if you have the true
experience even two or three times, it is a very valuable start for many other things.
The question is how is it that you could, to some extent, do the previous exercise of
remembering yourself every hour, while you found that you could not do this one, even
though it is equally clear and precise, and you are able to form a definite mental image of it?
The problem lies in the fact that this exercise is an experiment concerning 'being' - in
working from your own conscious intention and initiative. If you do not know how to
prepare things in such a way that an exercise like this can be done when you try to do it,
there is a limitation on what is possible for you. I hope that in four to six weeks' time we
shall have prepared the ground and when we come back to this exercise you will find
something quite different.
Now let us look at the theme of understanding and being aware of our relationship to
the first being food. Have you followed the advice of not eating between meals?
S. Pretty well - but sometimes when am hungry....
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J.G.B. It is an important part of what we do here that we should come back to the
right equilibrium. We eat too much in general. A small portion of people are unable to eat
what is necessary - they have anorexia, that is a different thing - but, for the most part,
people have the habit of eating more than is really necessary and then they have hunger that
is largely imaginary. It is very good to take the opportunity of getting free from that. It is
very strong advice to you not to go and eat extra food, especially not to buy sweet things.
You must know very well from the ordinary dietetic and medical point of view that eating
sweet things is harmful, but the other side of it is that it is a very simple and most necessary
form of self discipline not to eat between meals and to get oneself out of the way of eating
too much. You spoke about this feeling of hunger: this will pass. But it is not that one should
not have the feeling of being hungry at all, one should be able to distinguish between hunger
as a proper instinctive sensation that indicates that our body is in a healthy condition, and
imaginary hunger. If one does not feel hungry then either one's health is out of order or one
is eating too much food. A healthy person is aware that the digestive system has cleared itself
and is really ready for another meal. But it is particularly harmful to eat small quantities of
food between meals, for this sets the whole digestive system in motion unwarrantably. It is
encouraged to think that it is going to eat a meal and everything is started in motion; the
digestive juices are secreted, the ferments begin and the small amount of sweet material
which really does not challenge our digestion is merely converted into fat.
S. I was out gathering Brussels sprouts for lunch, and while I was picking the sprouts
off I knew I was holding a living thing that was giving me something, and I felt gratitude to
this plant that we were all going to be able to ingest it. As I cut it with the knife I almost felt
I had to be careful not to hurt it, and also felt glad that it was going to be able to keep on
growing and produce more sprouts.
J.G.B. I am glad you have spoken about food producing because one factor which
contributes to the deterioration of our attitude towards life is that nearly everyone is
divorced from the sources of life because they have their food produced by someone else,
and they do not see the living things. It is noticeable that people who live on the land do not
waste food in the way that city dwellers waste it - even though food is more abundant in the
country - because they have contact with these sources.
In the time since I was a boy, the attitude towards food has changed extraordinarily.
Then, to waste food or to let a piece of bread fall on the ground was considered not merely
bad manners but a very great lack of feeling. There are some countries such as the Muslim
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countries, where to drop bread on the ground is regarded as sacrilege, but the sense of the
sacredness of food has disappeared during the last fifty or sixty years, in spite of being less
plentiful now. We should remember that if food were not wasted by those who have
abundance there would be enough food at this moment for everyone. But the deeper thing is
to understand how we depend on life and on life being given for us.
S. I had to kill the chickens for the feast and I was very aware that I had not had
contact with the chicken before I killed it - I had to make some sort of contact with the
chicken - almost ask if I might kill it.
J.G.B. It is very necessary to go through this painful experience which is usually
delegated to others and pushed out of sight. When we have to do it ourselves we really
come to this awareness that I life is a pact, an agreement, a give and take. When we read or
hear about Reciprocal Maintenance the central notion in Gurdjieff's teaching, the meaning
does not come home to us as strongly as when we enter into this relationship of taking life
and seeing that because of this we have to give. As the realization that we have got to give in
return begins to establish itself in us then the whole work comes to life for us.
S. I was not very successful in getting past my own mechanicalness in eating; but I did
have a very strong sense in preparing food for the house that there was a real responsibility
there and that it was sacred. I ha.ve been a cook for families of various sorts for years and l
am surprised that it did not make them sick - all the ego I put into the food.
J.G.B. This aspect is important - as we men are - our food requires a certain
transformation. This service that we perform in the kitchen is the first transformation of
food before it is eaten. You are quite right in saying that this is also a sacred process. In
monastic communities the monks are required to take great care about their own state, and
to be always in a state of grace when they cook. Cooking is regarded as a special privilege
and responsibility, and if you have been in a real monastery you will have seen that the effect
of food is really extraordinary. You eat the food and say to yourself "Such food as this I have
never eaten; such wonderful cooking is hardly to be believed". Again and again I have seen
what one transmits through food when one is cooking it: in the Dervish communities this is
the centre of the teaching, particularly with the Mevlevi Dervishes. The training of the
novices which last for 1001 days’ centers on the kitchen and the chief cook is second after
the Sheik in his responsibility for teaching.
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And here too - sometimes when I eat the food here I have very great happiness -even
though the food is perhaps not very skillfully cooked. But it has a very right kind of - if you
don't mind my using the word - vibration. There is satisfaction in eating the food because
people on the whole do try to keep themselves in the right state when they are cooking. This
is a very important thing indeed.
S. This week I was chief cook and had a very strong experience in the activity of
looking and the process involved, and saw that even though the food itself was not living that
there was something very active going on in the food itself.
J.G.B. Yes. You remember the reading from Beelzebub we were just having, about
timid food? In the very next section Gurdjieff describes how in Tikliamish they had this idea
of preserving food, and a certain man discovered how to concentrate food so that everything
could be obtained by eating a handful of powder. It was introduced to the Brotherhood and
they said, "In this way we shall not waste time eating food, we shall spend much more time
on higher things". But after a few months everything went wrong, and the Sheikh realized
that this was not the way of going about it. Of course we do eat, here also, invariable an
undue proportion of food that has been preserved in one way or another. But the great thing
is that there should be a sufficient proportion of fool that retains the vibrations of life - not
necessarily a very big proportion. The rest can go for the ordinary processes of the body but
some part of the food should not have been allowed to lose its living vibrations.
S. What caused my wonder mostly this week was the process of cooking. I was
breakfast cook on Tuesday night, and I took what appeared to be a desperately small
quantity of oatmeal, and I thought to myself, "This substance is like gravel. What is the use
of putting this in boiling water?" But I followed my instructions, got the water boiling and
put it in and stirred and stirred for twenty minutes... And nothing happened. My fellow
cook said "You could not have got this right." but I had seen Chris in the same dilemma so I
stuffed it in the oven and went to bed. And, lo and behold the next morning there was a
beautiful pan of magnificent porridge. This brought into focus the extraordinary process of
the transformation, which goes back, of course, to the grain itself. As I held the cup in my
hand and tipped the oats slowly into the cauldron I reflected upon its growth, the tilling of
the soil, the sowing, the joy of harvesting, the toils and cares in getting it processed and sold
and transported here in manageable quantities all that went into the pot and in a sense died
and rose again as porridge. And I hope this made a change in me as I saw that I was also part
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of this process, and that it was up to me to cook this porridge which had been transformed
so many times already and use it in yet another phase.
J.G.B. It is a very strange thing that we do not reflect on sufficiently, that we people
prepare our food - and have for a very long time prepared it with the help of fire. Nature
provides us with food in the state that any other animal can eat it, and we alone find it
necessary to take it a step further by bringing it into contact with fire. This is one of the
simple things that happens all the time everywhere and the wonder of it disappears through
familiarity. All the anthropologists' explanations of how man came to use fire really
disregard this mystery. Our precursors were capable of eating raw food in various ways and
as time passed we first transformed meat by direct contact with fire and later we came to the
discovery of bread making. This is more wondrous than porridge making because it has also
the extraordinary action of the yeast. It is an experience everyone should wish for to have
for themselves the experience of handling the flour and making the dough and seeing the
action of the yeast, and to see this is truly a living process - living in the sense that it is a
sensitive process. One actually sees for oneself the life force entering the bread, and you can
understand why for so many years’ bread has been given a special respect.
How and why did all this enter our lives? It was because the vibrations, the energies
that man has to produce are of a different kind from those needed from the animals, and the
action of the fire has to make its contribution. This transformation that you saw happening
overnight when the porridge was exposed to the action of fire is a mystery. We need to be
able to use our own eyes to see the mystery of the familiar. I am given to understand that the
Highlander does not cook his porridge, he just eats it in the morning and his own stomach
provides the fire. ls there some Scot here who can confirm or deny this story? I never know
whether the Scots are at a more advanced stage of humanity and capable of cooking without
fire! But we must consider this strange thing that the preparation of food before eating it has
come to be an integral part of human life and that this preparation practically always involves
bringing energy to bear. If we do not use fire, we cut and pound and stir, and this energy
also transforms. Most of us have seen here when our cooks have not quite reached the stage
of perfection that they have now reached that sometimes we had potatoes that were half-
cooked and we recognized that by mashing the potatoes with a fork we could put in more
energy and make the difference between the raw and the cooked potato more complete.
But I want you all to realize that this is a human activity that distinguishes us from
animals and to ask whether it occurred just by accident. I find it almost impossible to believe
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that people accidentally discovered the properties of grains and the possibility of converting
them by grinding them fine and combining them with water and cooking them. [t is much
more likely that mankind was taught from a higher source, perhaps as a preparation for our
entering into a more responsible phase and to make the raw material suitable for producing
higher energy.
S. I guess I felt very hungry. There was some kind of soft bean thing and I started to
eat very fast and I noticed that I seemed to be located in my teeth and there was a real biting
sensation throughout me - a tearing sensation. And I thought ''I will try to calm this", but it
did not calm and I felt this very animalistic violence - images kept coming into my mind
while eating this vegetable matter, of chickens to strangle ....
J.G.B. It is really necessary for us to remember - not just as an idea, but consciously -
that we are animals. We often say this but do we really understand what it means. We are
animals, and to be more than animals requires that we should live also as human beings, that
is, that we should live by conscience. But instead we separate ourselves from the rest of life
because we have power, and we put away the rest of life as inferior. If we look at ourselves
and say, "How is it that I assume this position that the rest of life is worthless, that only I am
worth anything - just because I have power, power to destroy?" If one has a real feeling of
remorse about this view, and a real wish not to be merely the most powerful and ruthless
animal on earth, then a different attitude can awaken. We read about "paying the debt of
our existence" but it is exceedingly difficult to come to this. We are so dreadfully taught
from childhood to think that our rights are more important than our obligations and to
believe that if we have power we have everything. But to look at it the other way round is
very difficult - even if our minds can see it, we cannot bring the whole of us to recognize it
and do it, and our minds soon forget. The enormous momentum with which mankind is
carried along in its current of activity is entirely based on "Take what you can: if you have
power, use it", and any other attitude appears strange. People justify, "If we do not use
power we shall be trampled on, we shall be weak". When you listen to the chapters of
Beelzebub you see Gurdjieff trying to convey a different attitude by looking through the eyes
of a being of another planet and saying that this is unbecoming for man and not appropriate
for a three brained being. We are so accustomed to power as sacred and as giving the right
to dominate. We are just about beginning to see that it is not permissible to use power to
dominate other human beings, but we cannot bring ourselves to see that the power we have
to destroy life on the earth and perhaps to destroy the earth itself is also not permissible.
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S. I noticed that most of the vegetables we eat, most of the non-animal foods we eat,
are directly concerned with making new plants, with reproduction and seeds....
J.G.B. And fruit and eggs too, yes. If you read the Appendix of my new book on
Gurdjieff, * you will see that I have noted that point. I am very interested that you made this
observation spontaneously because you have seen this mysterious thing - that it is the germ
that is good for man.
(* Gurdjieff: Making a New World, J.G. Bennett, Turnstone Books, London, 1973)
It is said that man really has "not merely to take life but even the source of life." For
many years I was puzzled by this particular statement of Gurdjieff and it was only when I
made the observation that you have just made that I began to see how much we depend not
merely on 'livingness' but on reproduction - the power of life to reproduce itself.
We need to call on the reproductive energies because of our creative nature. And
this creativity of man is directly linked to the kind of nourishment that he needs.
S. I have noticed a number of things about taking the first bite of food consciously.
The first is that although I have known for a couple of years that Gurdjieff felt that this was
important, I have never done it until last week, when you said, "Do it this way''. The second
thing was that after I put the food into my mouth, after the first taste, I got a tremendous
feeling in my feet each time. And the third thing is that I have noticed that when I am
conscious of the first bite I become much more conscious of eating the whole meal and it
carries through the whole meal to the end ... I sit quietly at the table for a minute or two at
the end of the meal, whereas when I have eaten mechanically - I am conscious that I have
eaten the first bite but it is mechanical, just out of habit - I just jump up and run out of the
dining room.
J.G.B. This is very good: the difficulty is that there are so many things. Will you be
able to remember this, to keep it going? I know that many times I have started with this
feeling that I must do this for the rest of my life, that it is absurd to eat any other way and
then after a certain time it is, "Oh, I have forgotten all about the first bite!" and I have felt
ashamed and gone back to it. It is quite true that it changes the whole of your state and your
feeling. This awareness that you have of your own feet - I recognize that also. Doing this one
thing of being conscious of the first mouthful of food that is taken can make everything that
we do fire far more productive. If you just regard this as a theme for a week and then forget
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about it you will lose a great deal. There is also the difference between being aware of it
with one centre and being aware of it with three centers. What you described is a very
characteristic observation about the difference of just knowing something with your head
while your body remains automatic, but it was clear to me that when you get it rightly it is
all three: not only thought and sensation but also your feelings. With this kind of exercise
which seems small in itself, if one truly does it with three centers, then it is very powerful
and very productive.
S. There was a day when I ate very fast, and when I had finished eating I felt the urge
- a very strong urge - to go down to the store and buy a chocolate bar. But I had made the
decision that day to go outside and look at my little plot of land, so I had to do that and
could not run down to the store then, I went out there and I was digging and I felt there was
something in me saying, “All right, hurry up and do this so that you can go and get the candy
bar!" I felt this very strongly and then suddenly I became aware that if I gave in to that urge
then everything I was trying to do here would be lost. At that moment the urge just
subsided: I said "No" and it just disappeared.
J.G.B. One must not underrate these moments they appear small, but they are the
very essence of this process here: without this the work cannot complete itself in us. I have
said that there are seven different kinds of work, all of which are really needed for a fully
balanced and harmonious development. One of them is taking that moment of choice.
When it presents itself to us it appears small, but size does not count here because it is
where it happens to us, which part of us is nourished by this, that matters. As everyone must
recognize, this moment where one says "No" to a mechanical impulse or habit is exactly as
he describes it. It cannot be organized; it cannot be prepared in advance. The moment is
given to us unexpectedly - the moment where we see that it is possible to make a choice.
This special kind of work is a combination of something that is given to us freely and
gratuitously and of something that we ourselves have to do to take that moment. Little by
little we become aware of the importance of these moments: we are partly taught this by the
remarkable changes that come over us from apparently trivial choices. Candy bars are an
instrument for work - apples in the Garden of Eden!
S. There was one other thing. I also felt that if I had not been in that spot - outside
there then it would not have happened.
J.G.B. That is correct. It is because you made the first ordinary kind of effort, the
straightforward one of saying "I'll go and look at my ecological plot", that the next moment,
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when you were able to make a genuine choice, it came before you. The first is not a genuine
choice because something draws you towards it; it has not got that quality which one should
learn to recognize quite unmistakably when one can say "At this moment I have a real
choice; it is possible for me to say, Yes or No”. When that is given to us we have to learn to
take it.
S. I was on service in the dining room and it seemed to be a link in the whole chain.
It could proceed in two ways, one by just shoveling the food on to the table with no contact
with either the food or the people, or by handing the plate to a prison - or even if you could
not do this because he was in the middle of the table, at least by following the plate to him
and maybe contacting his eyes - I noticed it was a very strong feeling when it happened.
J.G.B. It is right. When we come to study the Enneagram you will see the
importance of this observation. It is connected with the transition from point five to point
seven. It is very true that the serving of a meal is a sacred act - that is, it directly exemplifies
cosmic laws.
S. A lot of times I felt a sense of responsibility that food was entering my body. It was
life, and I had a responsibility to it.... life being carried on within me.
J.G.B. This should not be a transient or occasional awareness; it should be well
established in us. It will make a difference to our lives if we are able to keep the awareness
of the responsibility that accompanies the taking of food. Responsibility is a universal
quality. There is a personal sense of responsibility for some particular thing, we are
responsible for someone who is weak, responsible for the way we deal with money and
material objects, responsible for something that has been entrusted to us, but all these are
only projections of something which is in the nature of this creation, and the feeling of
responsibility without a particular object is the awakening of something very important in
us. You know how Gurdjieff talks about the difference between the preparatory age of
youth and the responsible age. This latter should be marked in us by the awakening of an
awareness that responsibility is objective. It pervades the whole world and we people have a
special place in this because we are able to have conscious responsibility. The trunk of the
tree is responsible for supporting the branches and leaves and allowing the life giving air to
reach it, but this responsibility is carried out by its nature. A dog's legs are responsible for
supporting it and enabling it to run and to hunt but this again is part of its nature. Our lungs
are responsible for providing us with air but again it is part of our nature. But then there
comes the threshold of conscious responsibility where one begins to feel that in everything
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that one does there is a responsibility - a thing that is not usually understood. Then we may
become aware that there is a universal medium, a pervasive quality of the world in which we
must participate. This is a big awakening and if you begin to have this through food it is the
right foundation. I know when it began to come over me and I was not able to eat without
being reminded of my responsibility, it made a great difference to the way I looked at
everything. When food becomes a reminding factor one can come to responsibility in a
better way than trying to understand our responsibility towards people because this is
necessarily mixed and confused by our lack of understanding of the needs of other people
and our own egoism. But this pure sense of responsibility that simply because I am, I am
responsible comes very much when one sees what food signifies, all that has happened on
this earth so that we could have food.
S. I felt I had an obligation to use the energy that was produced in me through food.
J.G.B. It is objectively true, it is not just a feeling or some social convention, that in
our dependence on life we incur responsibility in our turn for something else. We cannot
take life and not give life. We have to take life on the natural level and give life on the
spiritual level: this is the short way of speaking of the task of man on earth. It is not
something we choose to do because we are good or because we have been taught to do it; it
is an obligation that is inherent in our existing at all. It is not a virtuous thing to pay one's
debt - it is a necessity. In Gurdjieff's Five Obligolnian Strivings the fourth is the striving to
pay as soon as possible so as afterwards to be free to give something beyond our obligation*.
When you come to understand and see this the whole wonder of our human nature begins
to show
(*ALL AND EVERYTHING p.388 " ...the striving from the beginning of their existence to pay for
their arising and their individuality as quickly as possible, in order afterwards to be free to lighten as
much as possible the sorrow of our COMMON FATHER").
When you come to understand and see this the whole wonder of our human nature
begins to show itself. The theme occurs again and again in "Beelzebub" that we have come to
the stage where we can in the true sense be givers, because we have cleaned the debt we
incur by the kind of existence we have and by our dependence on other lives.
S. Something that has not been touched upon concerns the types of food we eat. We
have spoken much about our attitude to eating but I am confused as to whether you think
that it does not matter what kind of food we eat so long as it is not spoiled or poisonous.
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You said that eating too many sweets would be bad and that lime flower lea was good, but
does it matter at all? Is it a fantasy that one should eat a balanced diet?
J.G.8. There should be a balance. One should have as little animal protein as
possible, but a certain amount is enquired. In some parts of the world they eat too much
meat; in other parts too little. In the parts of the world while they eat rice almost
exclusively this has an effect on the human psyche - quite apart from the physiological effects
of an imbalanced diet. Every kind of food contains a certain psychological nourishment rice
eaters and bread eaters do have recognizable psychological differences. As also fish eaters
and meat eaters have. There has been a great deal of psychological study connected with the
effect of different foods on the human psyche. Many things which were discovered in past
times we has been forgotten. There was a time when drinking an infusion of the coffee bean
was used carefully as almost a ritual, to awaken rapidly a particular sense. Now we drink
constantly as a sort of stimulant, and the real significance - that a particular alkaline in the
coffee corresponds to a particular substance in our blood and is therefore able to pass a
message and produce a particular state - is lost. There are other things that we now use for
the exact opposite of their real purpose. The real use of alcohol is to strengthen in people
their own wish, and now it is used to get rid of feelings of remorse and so that one can feel
comfortable with oneself, or just to stimulate.
When you go beyond that - to the spiritual side then what matters is one's own
inner attitude, which should be that of treating all life with respect. So, looked at from the
physiological side there has to be a reasonable balance between the main constituents of food
- one hears that most American and European people eat too much meat. From, a
psychological viewpoint, a varied diet is desirable - people who have a very monotonous diet
tend to develop very uniform behavior patterns and to have very little initiative.
Maybe this is the reason why some of the eastern countries with large static
populations, and very few people who have ambition to change their status, are able to
remain stable. lf their diet changed they could all become too ambitious and unwilling to
accept their lot. On the other hand, the meat eaters can become too aggressive. But we are
mainly interested in the third aspect the spiritual side - that is, how we are related through
food to life, by our will.
CONCLUSION
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The evolutionary process that has taken two or three thousand million years to
establish itself on the earth's surface is incessantly going on and reaches us all the time
through food. By far the greatest part of the whole mass of life on the earth is not animals,
fish, birds, and men, it is in invertebrate life, insects, worms, spiders and the rest where
there is an immense activity, constantly transforming. Then there is vegetable life in
enormous quantity, a hundred times more matter than in all other forms of life put
together. Out of this comes animal life and human life. Everything depends on everything
else. Without insects there could be no flowering plants, without soil there could be no life,
and everything that all forms of life feed upon is first prepared in the vegetable world. And
we are in the midst of all this - is it to stop with us? It cannot be so; it must pass through us
and serve for higher purposes. The great difference between us and all other forms of
existence is that we have the possibility of doing this consciously: that is what it means to be
human. Though it may seem a strange idea, to eat without being aware of the significance of
food is the subhuman way, it is the way animals eat. Man should taste and experience and
remember and pray and worship as he eats. The principal reason why we have meals in
silence here is that we should have nothing to hinder us from eating consciously. In eating
we should experience this sacred impulse of gratitude and thanksgiving. Long ago nobody
ate without giving praise and thanks, but this act and its essential content has disappeared
from our lives.
In the process of evolution, finer and finer energies are being eternally produced
through different levels of being, and we men must transmit and make our contribution to
the whole process of transformation. We have to do this because these energies are required
for purposes more important than our existence, and if we will not do it consciously we are
compelled by nature to do it unconsciously. According to Gurdjieff -and I am saying
"according to Gurdjieff' because I cannot pretend that I see it really like that, although it is
probably right, the reason why there is such an increase in the number of people on the
earth is that we are failing to do what is required of us consciously and therefore we have to
do it by the process of dying, and ever greater numbers of people will have to die if people
do not produce these higher energies consciously. This was a very ancient teaching, but now
people do not think like that at all; it never occurs to us that eating is a cosmic function.
Food is a constant reminder of our cosmic obligations, of the responsibility that is placed on
us because so much has happened to make it possible for us to exist.
Now, although we leave this particular theme and exercise, I would not be happy if I
thought you forgot all about it and returned to eating unconsciously. If I were to introduce
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something here like thanksgiving before the meals, saying that we would not eat until we
had given thanks and reminded ourselves, this would be very effective for one or two weeks
or even months and everybody would remember; but after that it would become nothing
but a routine, and people's minds would be occupied with something quite irrelevant. This
cannot really be done from outside because these external reminders act only on a very
superficial part of us.
You should always try to remember the significance of food: by remembering this
you will look at things in the right way and come towards an understanding, a painful
understanding, of love.
Just stop a minute and consider how many things in the world would change if this
one thing about the responsibility involved in taking life was actually understood and how a
different value system would emerge for the whole of humanity. And we cannot evade this
responsibility by quibbling -"I won't eat vertebrates but I will eat vegetables" -whatever we
eat we are taking life and we have the responsibility for converting that life into conscious
energy. Meister Eckhart speaks of this in the wonderful sermon on the text "Young Man,
Arise" which I remembered just as I was speaking. He talks of the difference between the
man who can eat his food consciously and the man who eats it simply to please his stomach.
But we must not rest content with just knowing these ideas about food. We must
seek to experience so that knowledge can be transformed into understanding. Although you
may know these things and even act on them, it has not become part of you. This is the
difference between what Gurdjieff calls "reason of knowing" and "reason of understanding."
If you persevere, something may happen; an opening may occur and you will actually see for
yourself that it is so and you are no longer dependent on anything you have been told or read
about.
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The Sherborne Theme Talks Series – #1; The First Liberation - Like and Dislike
This theme is also called 'The First Liberation·. Overcoming like and dislike is the first practical step out of the dream
world. What is there in our nature that is slave to like and dislike? How easy is it to break free from that slavery? What is opened up
for us then? No practical treatment of human life can neglect like and dislike. It is the main subject of the Shivapuri Babe’s “moral
disciplines: and we need to understand it if we are to make any progress in the inner world,
ISBN O 900306 32 7
The Sherborne Theme Talks Series – #2; Noticing
Unless we notice we cannot be in a position to choose or act from ourselves. It is a transition from one state of existence to
another. The significance of this transition -which is not a process in time – is largely negated because we fail to understand its
concrete relevance to freedom. Noticing is the opening of possibilities. How can we train ourselves to grasp this kind of opportunity?
ISBN 0 900306 34 3
The Sherborne Theme Talk Series – #3; Material Objects.
We are trying to wake up from a dream world. This had to be done before we can begin to realize our own destiny. There
is a spurious kind of inner life that is dreaming and useless imagination. In front of material objects we can assess our true situation.
Do we see them? Do we use them responsibly? Do we have any contact with them? Any freedom of attention to direct towards them
and their working in our world? If we are asleep, material objects become our masters. If we are to begin to be awake, we must
understand how to be worthy masters of the material world.
ISBN 0 9000306 35 1
The Sherborne Theme Talk Series – #4; Food.
Like any living creature man eats to live and draws on the lives of other beings to provide for his own life. But man, unlike
the animals, can be conscious of the significance of eating. Man can also abuse food by eating in a wrong way. The right
relationship to food is not produced by excessive attention to diet. It comes through the practice of simple disciplines towards
whatever it is one happens to be eating. One can come to the point of glimpsing what it really means to eat, not simply on the
physical level or even the psychological level, but also in the spiritual sense.
ISBN 0 9000306 45 9
