The Gnostic in Us All: Thinking from the Macrobiotics of Michio Kushi

Abstract Around 1970 in graduate school, I wrote a paper on the Gospel of Thomas, one of the documents discovered at Nag Hammadi in 1945. The debate over its gnosticizing elements was alive and well, and I weighed in with an argument that its thorough oblivion to history rendered it Gnostic—in the capital-“G” sense. I published a revised version of the paper in an academic journal in 1976. Then in 1986, I began to practice macrobiotics. As I studied the teachings of Michio Kushi, its foremost American teacher, I began to suspect religion. With longtime political interests in world government, Kushi elaborated on a cosmological spiral, with humans descending from a “unique principle” as it divided into yin and yang. Finding balance with yin and yang energies through diet and lifestyle would lead to alignment and peace, even as the earth itself wobbled on its axis through cycles that lasted thousands of years—the earth’s particular location influencing humans for good or ill. Even so, if macrobiotic principles were followed, what lay ahead was “one peaceful world.” Somewhere on the road to one peaceful world, Kushi discovered the Gospel of Thomas. He began to use it regularly in his popular “spiritual” seminars. This article leverages an account of the gnostic (here small-“g”) content of macrobiotics on Michio Kushi’s commentary on the Gospel of Thomas—The Gospel of Peace (1992)—and also on related works. The paper explores the gnosticism of macrobiotic foodways and a peaceful world in terms of American culture, looking for lines of connection and viewing them as encrypted signs—in the twenty-first century still—of the gnostic in us all.