It’s hot. It’s miserable. If you wash down a triple cheeseburger and a bucket of fries with a milkshake in this weather, you could die. Why not whip up a batch of Mr. Gurdjieff’s special salad instead? Gurdjieff’s teaching is very strange and doesn’t lend itself to summarization, but one of the fundamental ideas is that people are asleep and need to wake up. (Colin Wilson named his book on Gurdjieff The War Against Sleep.) Approached with care and full attention, all sorts of everyday tasks can aid in waking up, especially preparing and eating food. As Dushka and Jessmin Howarth—Gurdjieff’s daughter and her mother, respectively—explain in It’s Up To Ourselves: Of all the examples Gurdjieff might have used to illustrate the essential aspect of his teaching, “quality of attention,” he chose the one experience that all human beings share: “When you do a thing, do it with the whole self, one thing at a time. Now I sit here and I eat. For me nothing exists in the world except this food, this table. I eat with the whole attention. So you must do—in everything. To be able...