Discovering Reciprocal Maintenance with the First Bite

Gurdjieff developed a theory he called Reciprocal Maintenance. Reciprocal Maintenance has to do with organic life on earth, including humans, being food for the cosmos. I’m learning to understand what this means via eating.

Last summer during a seminar I listened to a recording of JG Bennett suggesting an exercise. Be present to the first bite of a food. He said something to the effect that it was a simple exercise but almost impossible to do. He also said that this exercise could change your life. (It’s beginning to change mine.) Around the same time, I noticed a fellow seminar participant at mealtimes. She was cupping her hands around her plate for a few moments before beginning to eat.

Being Present to the First Bite of Food

After the seminar, I began to practice being present to my first bite of food. I could not. I’d be chewing or swallowing, or two to three bites into the meal before remembering. So, I tried cupping my plate before starting to eat. I felt an immediate energetic presence, as if I was holding “the lives that have died to give me food” from Bennett’s Grace. I also found myself thanking each life-form that was on my plate. Then feeling the force of the life that had been given up. The extension of this was to come into an awareness that I, too, was a source of food. At the very least, my body will become compost in the dance of reciprocity. Considering all this, being present to my first bite of food started to come of itself.

Likewise, while listening to another recording of JGB speaking about air, I was brought back to contemplating that mystical element. He speaks of air being “everywhere” and “impartial.” Air gives itself to all—good, bad, the mighty and the meak. It does not judge. It not only carries the vibrations of sound, scent, light, heat, and cold, but spiritual attributes that we cannot quantify. All living things— plants, animals, and humans breath and share this medium. “All must breath to live and nourish one another.”

Eating Air

We “eat” the air by being aware of the finer elements that remain within us, the “something that is left behind,” as Gurdjieff says. Like fish sharing the water that moves in and out of their gills, we swim in an environment of shared air in and out of our lungs. Between the life forms that breath oxygen and those that breath carbon dioxide, there is reciprocity. The same is true of our higher and lower bodies. Our ordinary self provides the material for the work that feeds our higher self.

Reciprocal Maintenance in a Bite

When I am aware that I eat and I am being eaten, that I breath and I am being breathed, that we humans live in a milieu of shared sustenance that we both create and ingest, then I am experiencing reciprocal maintenance. I eat lives that have to die in order for me to live. In some form, my organic body is also a nutrient. Is it too far flung to see that when I feed and grow a higher part of myself, with finer substances, that rarified body then becomes food for a cosmic purpose as well?