February 25th, 2009.

I can boil an egg without using a timer. I don’t count the minutes. I don’t watch the clock. I just know. I can also stop muscle spasms. Like that one that happens underneath the eye. I can just say stop and it stops. I was doing it about an hour ago and it worked then too. We all have deep, magical powers. The only question is how long we decide to deny them.

The other day I met two men who’ve done away with denial altogether. Next to them my egg magic was nothing but a stunt. A crowd pleaser. Something fancy but ultimately showing little mastery. Because Leonard Orr and Dr. Gerry Epstein are men who teach physical immortality. Men who state quite categorically that our current general rate of aging is simply a product of our conditioning, and nothing else.

Orr must be in his early eighties but he was still tanned and limber. He had this nice glow to him and a story telling style that appealed to all the ladies. He leaned into the crowd, caressed them with zingers, and dropped names like Babaji, and Moses. He began his talk by telling us how he’d been a Christian, then a born again Christian and then a trouble maker. He spent his youth asking questions in Church like how did all the men in the bible live into their hundreds? Why in John 3:16 it says that the gift of eternal life can be ours? And how did Enoch, Melchizedek and Elijah all attain immortality? In total sincerity he kept asking the Bishops what the hell was going on. But even in their cassocks, they didn’t know.

So he traveled to India where he sought out anyone who had lived for over 300 years; the required chops for anyone claiming mastery over the physical. He said he found seven and then proceeded to tell us about each in detail. What they ate, how they lived, what their practices were. By this time the energy in the room was electric. People were sweating, women were hyperventilating. This was no miracle cream. None of us could keep still. And we all knew what was taking place. Leonard was attempting to shift mankind’s single greatest paradigm – that death is inevitable – on a Tuesday evening from between 7 and 9 at the Om Centre on West 59th street. It was ballsy.

But Leonard’s not new to controversy. He was pulling in crowds back in the 60s when he first started speaking about abundance management skills and how to set your emotional state to receive. And that was even before he’d invented rebirthing - a way of overcoming the trauma of being born by re-inducing the experience with prolonged underwater hyperventilation so that memories stored in the body can be brought to the surface and released. The concept is in line with most disciplines in which we draw ourselves into a state that we want nothing more than to escape. Because then if at that very moment we remain in it, a tremendous transformation can be achieved in a short space of time. Like an acceleration of the evolutionary process. Leonard calls these thresholds Urgency Barriers.

Epstein came from a different school altogether but was essentially of the same mind. A long time MD who now teaches visualization and meditation, he runs the Institute for Mental Imagery and is a long time doctor who refers to all doctors as quacks. I liked him. He wasn’t confined by conventional medicine but used it to confirm alternative forms of healing scientifically.

What is the greatest cause of premature aging? Epstein said that it was the perpetual instigation of the False Emergency State. Not to be confused with Urgency Barriers a False Emergency State is any instance in which we allow ourselves to enter into a state of fear, stress or anxiety that is not justified. Unless someone has a gun to your head you have no reason to get stressed. And why would you want to? Releasing chemicals from the endocrine system, the pituitary glad, the adrenals and countless others that will need to be broken down by an entirely different set of chemicals if you don’t immediately run a mile or fight your way out of crowd is the fastest way to die. Stop taxing your body as if it’s life and death every time your lover leaves the knife in the jam or your mother gives you a guilt trip for not calling her. You want to know what causes a system to break down? Undue stress.

Epstein’s advice was self-control. Stress inducing situations are like the weather - they’re going to keep doing what they’ve been doing for thousands of years whether you like it or not. So you have to ask yourself - how is it that after all these years I still haven’t learned to control my triggers? He indicated to the woman who’d asked the question. What are you? 60?

This, they both agreed, was the first stage of physical immortality. Next to that stage two was easy - feeling the energy body. Another one of the many aspects that we’ve pushed out of conscious range because of the noise, din, and sheer racket of daily life. Feeling the energy body is like attempting to feel the movement of fluid in the space between your skull and your brain if that space went all the way down to your toes. And usually, along with meditation it’s exactly where the cynic stops. Right at the moment where they could have all the proof they need. Because for proof you just have to sit and feel it. But no cynic ever sat for a serious amount of time attempting to feel the energy body because  any of them that did, were converted.

Don’t try to escape it - unless your parents are immortal, you have inherited a death urge. Orr spoke of the four foods of an immortal; Fire, Air, Water, and Ether. You have to sleep near a fire he said because it cleanses the auric field. You have to drink and bathe in water filtered of all heavy metals because it cleanses the physical. Air he went on and on about. He even laughed and said that since he’d walked in the room he hadn’t noticed a single one of us breathing deeply. Shallow breath is a symptom of stuck energy. One of the classic mechanisms of suppression. Breathe deeply and you stop fidgeting, you stop the elegant habit of eating the inside of your mouth and, yes, you have better sex.

They both spoke about breath for the rest of the night. The consensus was unanimous. Breath controls your state, your centre, even your health. When asked what life was Gurdjieff said breath, and if you watch a clock long enough and connect your inhalation with your exhalation like babies you can slow down time. Orr finished by saying that if there was one thing that all the great immortalists agreed on, it was that breath was the key to life. Then again what advice did the oldest immortal that I ever met give me? - Stay away from humans.