A Spiritualized Gil: the Transcendence with Macrobiotics and Eubiose

The search for spiritualization in Gilberto Gil emerges when the cruelty of the surrounding world leads him to search for lightness, to sound out alternatives for decompression and resort to strategies to help him to get him back believing in shiny days.

It was one of those cruel situations, for instance, that lead him to his first big epiphany towards elevation, through the reconnection to himself:

The unfair incarceration was inflicted upon him in the end of 1968, due to the persecution Gil and his partner, Caetano Veloso, were suffering during the military dictatorship in Brazil.

During this time, Gil, who already had a flirt with the macrobiotics diet (inspired by the traditional Chinese medicine and based on grains), thickened his practices, as a way of achieving a certain degree of spiritualization, through the cleansing of the body through food.

He also became more and more a pacifist, going completely against the war wave established around him by the dictatorial government running the country.

As much as this period brought him closer to the darkness, Gil resisted and managed to make his peace-of-mind influence those around him, reinforcing the only connection that could exist between him and his tormentors: being too human.

“It was their war. I was victimized […], incarcerated, immobilized, virtually unresponsive. I could only count on weapons that were true to me and that, for a fact, were at my reach, in the efficacy of which I believed on…

“… I believed dialogue […], the comprehension that, inside all soldiers of that war, there were human people […]

“… I looked to establish my relationship with this level of humanity of soldiers of that barracks, of the two barracks where I have been,” said Gilberto Gil in an interview to Ana Oliveira and Jorge Mautner for the book Disposições Amoráveis [Lovable Dispositions].

His “war strategy” worked out. Macrobiotics, in this case, not only served to help in his path for spirituality through body detox. It created, in the very space where he was incarcerated, a wave of empathy that had contaminated his alleged tormentors.

Compelling them not only to help keep his diet—“trafficking” into the Gil’s cell oats, brown rice, “the beans I asked for”, as the artist recalls it—, but also to forge a mood that would ease the hardships of incarceration.

As a result, macrobiotics almost turned into an agent to raise, in the spirits of Gil and everyone else around him, a pacifist atmosphere, so advocated by the singer and songwriter throughout his life, and which is a fruit of his spiritualist path.

The consciousness expansion resulting from what he had gone through while in jail was a key factor in Gil’s spiritual life a direction. A spirituality he developed grounded on the pacifist ideals he started out to profess, connected not only to Mahatma Gandhi, but also to the Eastern philosophies.

“This first polishing, this first dusting in the surface of my being happened there, inside the prison,” as Gilberto Gil stated in the article O Mistério na Tessitura da Vida: A Espiritualidade de Gilberto Gil [The Mystery in the Weaving of Life: The Spirituality of Gilberto Gil], by theologian, professor, and researcher Faustino Teixeira.

As per the article, Gil also states it was “the place where his spiritual search had manifested a “more visible face” as well as “his mystical eagerness.” […] Incarcerated, Gil first starts his readings on macrobiotics diet and begins an “incipient vegetarianism…”

“… he also gets access to yoga and starts relaxation and breathing exercises. Within that limited, restrictive space, Gil searches for paths of freedom, in the lines of an “ascetic view of life” and a “higher aim…”

“… a few songs were created during this time, such as ‘Vitrines,’ ‘Futurível,’ and ‘Cérebro eletrônico.’ In the latter, he approaches contrasts and proposes dialogues between the world of mankind and the world of God,” says Teixeira’s article.

After being freed, Gil goes on his spiritual journey, obeying a degree of fidelity to the macrobiotics diet during exile in Europe, where he and Caetano Veloso were forced to go, by the same military regime.

When he got back to the country in 1972, Gilberto Gil had a new encounter with his religiosity with ancestors’ roots, Candomblé. 

Mas seguiu em um mergulho ainda mais profundo ao encontro de outras filosofias e consciências. Mas, sempre ligado a uma corda que o levava instantemente à cultura da paz.  

This search would show in his behavior. Healthily skinny, he got back to a bodily ritual of broad and paused gestures—maybe inherited from his yoga years, which he had been practicing since jail, in 1968—, a placid face and always smiling.

With a paused and harmonious voice, no fussing in his words, Gil got back declaring, at the airport, that he had come to see “the sun and the people” —without any bitterness or evidence of hard feelings about anything he had gone through up to that point.

In one of his first performances post-exile, Gil performed at the Engineering School of the University of São Paulo [USP, in the Portuguese acronym], in protest against the torture and assassination of the Geology student Alexandre Vannuchi Leme by the military dictatorship.  

At the occasion, before singing the song “Iansã”—an elegy to the orixa of the rays and freedom, a partnership between Gil and Caetano Veloso—, he gave a small speech, in which he established his intents towards the search of spiritual enlightening. 

A search he wants to get prepared for, grounded on philosophical elements for the understanding of religion through an humanist view:

“This song I am singing now […]is called Iansã, and I like it very much because it is us, really, in the way, you know, we perceive the existence of immanency and transcendence. One day I shall entirely redeem from the sin of intellectualism. If God wills…

“… I will have no need to talk anymore, no need to think in opposite terms about everything, no need to try to explain people I am not perfect, but neither is the world…

“… no need to say I am not trying to be always right… I am not trying to do on my own a work that belongs to all of us plus something else, which is time, the true big alchemist, the one that really changes it all.”

Around the time when he came back, Gil gets in touch with Eubiose, a philosophy communing in itself two essential searches for the artist: the transcendence for the good of life, while professing peace.

“When I came back from exile, my interest in religiosity in England had been broadened through macrobiotics, which led to Zen; Zen led me to Buddhism; and Buddhism led me to everything else,” says Gil in an interview.

He goes on: “From there to the millenary sciences of several occultism branches. All of it ended up flowing into Eubiose.”

According to the definition of the Brazilian Society of Eubiose, the practice preaches “living in perfect harmony with the universal laws. […] It is the science of life, the starter knowledge of the ages. It is experiencing a set of knowledge, which main goal is to congregate…

… to build and reunited in full the dimensions of sacred, profane, divine, and human.”

Founded by Salvador-born Henrique José de Souza, in 1921, in the city of São Lourenço, Minas Gerais state, the esoteric philosophy conducts occultist studies related to the process of human evolution.

This process “tries to transmute energy into consciousness, highlighting paths for self-knowledge,” as per the society’s rules: “Working, therefore, beyond the studies of compared religions, the Brazilian Society of Eubiose has its own fountain…

“… of knowledge, ranging from the knowledge on the occult nature of the human body to the cosmogenesis views.”

As those ideals were in consonance with Gil’s search for transcendence, he got pretty close to Eubiose.

The hands of his friend, the musician, researcher and Sweden-Brazilian professor Walter Smetak led him when Gil arrived back in Salvador.
“This contact with Smetak brought me to this. He kept saying ‘you need to know Eubiose,’ says Gil, mimicking his friend…

“… But all of it was already associated to that other side I had, the search for the Eastern philosophy, for the intersections between Eastern philosophy and Western religiosity, philosophy and everything else. The books I have read of several European authors about all of it…

“… all of which was already in the core of my speculation on Eastern philosophy. When I met Smetak, he told me you can find it here. You find this professorial thing here,” he recalls.

Eubiose had reinforced in Gil the existence of these parallel universes, extraterrestrial beings, extrasensory, yet they would not come from the higher, but instead, from deeper layers on Earth—and from the individuals themselves.

A “quantum” universe, to the extent that there would be another parallel universe, capable of releasing diverse energies, from the inside to the outside.

These searches, meetings, and deepening are engraved to his songs—the composing process of Gilberto Gil is like a philosophic regurgitation of things he is fond of. 

Dated from this time, referring to his return to Brazil and to the continuous acquisition of a new consciousness, he mentions “Objeto sim, objeto não” as the representative song of his spirituals thoughts, inspired by the Eubiose ideals. In the same interview, he hummed the most evident verse:

Attracted in an Eubiose way
Pela luz do Planalto Central / To the lights of Central Highlands
Das Tordesilhas / Of Tordesilhas
Fundarão o seu reinado / They will found their kingdom
Dos ossos de Brasília / Of Brasília bones
Das últimas paisagens / From the last landscapes
Depois do fim do mundo / After the end of the world

He says: “It is sort of connected to these theories of beings from the Earth or extraterrestrial, which are attributed to outer worlds. Some of them would be in the cores of Earth: Atlantis, Shamballa and Agartha, cities within the core of Earth, all of these in and outer worlds…

“… they are quantum because they are intrinsic, within the Earth, and are externalities of the human consciousness, of the quantum world. From the theoretical point of view, quantum theory would unite these fields.”

Gil recalls the stay in Salvador, when he first started to show interest and study Eubiose, under the guidance of Smetak. “And that was it, my search ended up flowing there…

“… and we would stare at that triangular pyramid (that is located) at Itaparica Island, on the opposite side of the Todos os Santos Bay… 

“… and we would stare at it, which is a river mouth, one of the most important places from the energetic point of view. This is one of the three energetics river mouths, there is another one in São Lourenço, Minas Gerais state, and the third one is in Roncador, Mato Grosso state. These esoteric things.”

This is how Gil’s spirituality is forged: as an alternative to evade worldly vicissitudes, in order to reach other spheres.

“As you detach from yourself, the idea of internalization changes. I am progressively detaching from myself…

“… I have a lessened interest in knowing what I am, what I mean, how others care of me. I progressively regard myself as less important. Thus, the internalization of God goes with it, that is what God is for me, exactly where all possibilities have been diluted.” 

Gil’s statement was given in an interview to actor Cissa Guimarães in the book Viver com Fé: Histórias de Quem Acredita [Living in Faith: Stories of Believers]. A path towards peace, facing the setbacks in life, as he wrote in the verse of the song “A paz”: