Beelzebubs-Tales-to-His-Grandson-by-G-I-Gurdjieff

years to keep under daily observation the general state of the organism ofthousands of people who lived under test conditions at the expense of thegood shepherd Alia Ek Linokha.' "May our Creator multiply his flocks! ' "Well then, thanks to thisexperimental research of mine, I became fully convinced that if peoplecontinue to consume meat for their food it will be very bad for them and that,on the other hand, if only some of them abstained, no good would come ofthis either And so thereafter I devoted myself entirely to finding out whatcould be done for the future welfare of the majority of peopl.e" ' "At the outset, I categorically established the following facts:" ' "The first, that people accustomed for so many centuries to consumingmeat for their food would never, with their weak wills, be able to makethemselves renounce it and overcome this criminal tendency of theirs, and thesecond, that even if people decided not to eat meat and in fact kept to theirdecision for a certain time, eventually even losing this habit, they would neverbe able to abstain from eating it for a long enough period to acquire a totalaversion to it And they would be unable to do so because never on the Earthwill it occur that all people have the same religion or form a singlegovernment, and without these conditions there can never exist anysuggestive, prohibitive, penal, or other kind of compulsory influence,common to all, thanks to which people who are easily stimulated by exampleor envy, or by some magnetic influence, might be able to keep a resolutionforever once it is taken."Notwithstanding these two facts, to my mind incontestable, andtaking them as the basis of my subsequent investigations, I persevered in mysearch for some possible way out of the unhappy situation confronting people."And again, of course, I was only able to continue