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without our knowing.
For example in Africa, one tribe has been found to eat only one time in twenty-four hours, and they are perfectly healthy. When they saw the Christian missionaries they could not believe it -- "What kind of idiots are these? Their whole concern is eating and eating and eating. First the breakfast, then the lunch, then the afternoon tea, then a coffee break. And it goes on!" Those simple people could not understand -- what is the point?
And the people of this tribe live longer, they are healthier; they live twice as long. If the average person here lives seventy years, in that small tribe he will live one hundred forty years or one hundred fifty years very easily. And even at the age of one hundred fifty he is not old; that tribe has known only young people dying. At the age of one hundred fifty he is functionally as young as any young man at the age of thirty-five. But they have been habituated for millions of years to eating one meal a day.
If you are habituated in the American way, then one meal will kill you! What will you do the remaining twenty-four hours? The American eats five times, and in between cigarettes are needed, chewing gum is needed; somehow the mouth should continue to chew. They have become so accustomed, that even to take away somebody's chewing gum you have to hospitalize him because of the withdrawal effects! Chewing gum -- such a simple thing. In the first place you were doing something stupid and now you are talking about withdrawal effects! So something else has to be given in place of chewing gum; then something else, less addictive, and it takes a few weeks to get out of the habit.
The problem is, the habit goes into the back side of your brain, and we don't yet have any direct approach to the back side. The back side is still the unknown continent, and it controls everything. It freaks out if you drop any habit. It forces you to take the habit back.
I was staying in Calcutta with a friend, in the house of one of the richest men of India, Sohanlal Dugar. He is dead now. He must have been at that time seventy or seventy-five years old, and he told me, "I have renounced sex four times."
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