What is it that sends a tingle through your body when you look upon Victoria Falls or the Grand Canyon? I’ve come to think about travel experiences as food for the soul. But I suppose I have only taken a circuitous path to the obvious.
P.D. Ouspensky, a Russian mathematician, wrote a memoir that described his travel experiences with a Caucasian mystic named Georges Gurdjieff. It was called In Search of the Miraculous and was a fascinating glimpse into a non-Western mind.
One of Gurdjieff’s many fascinating ideas that set me to pondering was that there are three kinds of food. There is what we normally refer to as food, things we ingest, such as cheeseburgers, pizza, etc. You can survive a few weeks without food, even less time without water. Eventually you need food to sustain life.
The second kind of food, he said, is air, your breath. You can only go a few minutes without air. It’s more vital, and also more ethereal. It’s another order of matter.
But the third kind of food he spoke of consists of your impressions. Without your sensory impressions, he said, you would die instantly. According to Gurdjieff, your senses connect you to the engine of the universe. Your eyes, ears, touch, movement, all your senses, named and unnamed, transmit energy to you in many forms.
He said, “The flow of impressions coming to us from outside is like a driving belt communicating motion to us. The principal motor for us is nature, the surrounding world. Nature transmits to us through our impressions the energy by which we live and move and have our being. If the inflow of this energy is arrested our machine will immediately stop working.”
When I first read this, it struck me as odd, certainly. I’d never thought of anything that way. But at the same time, it made sense. It didn’t fall apart under closer examination. On the contrary, the idea that your sensory impressions are a kind of nourishment seemed not so far-fetched.
If you think of it that way, it presents a kind of a hierarchy of the energies that are the driving forces of life, from gross to fine. The physical food we consume provides the basic energy to maintain the physical body, the machine. The breath transmits a higher frequency of energy, and nourishes us in a different way.
The sensory impressions are yet a higher order of energy, a finer frequency. It includes energy as information. It is nonphysical, but transmits energy to your mind and…
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