PART THREE – COSMOLOGY
The Significance of Evolution, 1974
Harnelmiatznel—Transformation of Substance, 1974
Theomertmalogos, Energies, and Etherokrilno, 1974
One of Gurdjieff’s formulations of the law of three is “the higher blends with the lower to actualize the middle, which becomes higher for the preceding lower and lower for the succeeding higher.” This is known as harnelmiatznel.
When this formula is interpreted for the whole of existence, the word “higher” here means that which is beyond our knowledge, the world which we cannot reach with our senses, and the word “lower” means the opposite, the world we can reach wholly through our senses. We can for convenience call these the “spiritual” and the “material” world, but however far we may go we can be sure that we will never be able to grab hold of the spiritual world and subject it to our gaze. For us, it is always beyond. We can be touched by it, feel its action, even have glimpses of it and become more and more convinced that there is a reality of that kind but we cannot bring it into our knowledge the way we can the content of this visible world.
There is a gap between the two worlds that is filled by their blending: by life. Life is totally different from the material world and totally different from the spiritual world. Both of these ideas are difficult to accept.
We know that all living bodies depend on the material energies for their functioning and it is said these days that life is simply a special form of material organization. This is totally wrong. Every living thing has something that material bodies do not have; every form of life, however simple, is sensitive. Because of this sensitivity, it has a power of selection that enables it to accept that which will nourish it and to reject what is harmful.
We should recognize that life is to be regarded as a distinct creation. Gurdjieff in the chapter Purgatory says that our Endlessness paid special attention to the emergence of aggregates of microcosmo ses, the tetartocosmoses, capable of independent movement on the surface of planets.1*
On the other side life is totally different from the spiritual world because it is subject to the limitations of space and time. It is sometimes said that the most primitive form of life, the blue-green algae or “primeval slime” that has existed unchanged for two thousand million years, is immortal because it has never been born and never dies. This is right, but it is because the blue-green algae is not individualized at all, even in the form of cells. Every individualized life2* is born and dies and birth and death are properties of life. Material things do not go through a cycle of birth and death and neither does the spiritual world.
Creative action is something that belongs to the spiritual world. It is outside of time and place; if it were not so then it would only be a matter of combinations. In creative action there is a timeless action. Such an action can enter us people but it cannot be said to be individualized in the way we think of life as individualized. If there were not this creative action, the world would be entirely governed by cause and effect, therefore essentially knowable and predictable, and this would mean in effect that there would only be the material world.
There is creativity, but it is not life and is not an attribute of life. Life did not create itself and no part of life creates itself.
We can understand the law of harnelmiatznel by taking a simple action from everyday life.
The material world is passive compared with us people. We can act on it. In that sense we are higher and the material world is lower, or we are more active and the material world is more passive. As an illustration let us think of the material world as a knife and of myself, or my activity, as my hand. The knife alone can do nothing: it cannot cut although its function is to cut. Also, my hand cannot cut although it wants to cut.
There is a loaf of bread to be cut. This loaf of bread can only be cut if my hand and the knife come together; if the higher blends with the lower. Then something new comes into existence, which is neither my hand nor the loaf of bread nor just these two together. We can call this the “cutting action.” This is the middle. It is higher than the loaf of bread and lower for me, that is, for my intention.
In taking up the knife to cut a loaf of bread I have acted according to the law of triamazikamno. To understand this it has to be grasped that something has come into being that is more than just hand-plus-knife. Before they came together there was no cutting: the knife was a piece of metal and wood and behaved no differently from any other piece of wood and metal; it was inert. My hand had all the potential of what a human hand can do, but still there was no cutting. Cutting came only when my hand and the knife were blended.
We have to see that what comes through the blending is a really new property.
When Gurdjieff says that the law of three is a primordial cosmic law, he means that it does not come out of the way that the world works but that it is a law that enables the world to be what it is.
To see that the act of cutting is something really new is as difficult as understanding what is meant by the Holy Ghost in the Christian Creed. Gurdjieff said categorically about this that man is “third-force blind,” that is, man is not able without developing new perceptions to see the independence of the third force, even though it enters into everything that we do and see.
We tend to explain it away and say that to be active means to do things. We do not see that it is the third force that enables things to be done. It is not the active force nor the denying force that does anything. It is difficult to open ourselves to this yet it is not something remote.
To describe the differences of higher and lower Gurdjieff often uses the term “degree of vivifyingness.” Vivifyingness means life-givingness. It is not difficult to see that life is active for the material world and there should be no difficulty in seeing that life is an action, like the action of cutting, which is proceeding from some will or source beyond life itself.
Another way of looking at this is to think in terms of different media. We live in a medium of life and we live in a medium of materiality. We also live in a medium of something that is beyond life. There is something deeper than knowing within us that tells us that there is something more than the existence we are aware of. This something answers the question: “For what are we alive?” We can picture ourselves entering into the cutting and asking a similar question. When we come to see the loaf of bread and what is being done we begin to understand the answer.
Life cannot explain itself. Life depends on death and destruction; it is self-destroying. As we become more and more aware of life we see more and more how suffering and frustration enter into it. The more we look at it, the less we can see why there should be life. We need to come to the point where there is a “working in us” not just of life for the sake of living but of life for what life is for.
In thermodynamics, which is the study of the laws governing energy transformations in the material world, there is a law that amounts to saying that waste is inevitable in the transformation of energy from a lower to a higher grade. This was discovered about 150 years ago by Carnot. The realization that this was so gave rise to the feeling that eventually waste would predominate more and more; that is, energy would more and more move into a state where no useful work could be done with it. This feeling was given expression in Lord Kelvin’s famous address in which he used the phrase “the heat death of the universe.” The emotional feeling about the inevitable dissolution of all things—expressed so powerfully, of course, 2,500 years before by the Buddha—was given a new intellectual content. It seemed to be the fundamental law of the universe and later Eddington saw in it the very essence of time.
Gradually, it has come about, that it has been recognized that there is something quite different at work in the universe than this running-down process. Parts of the world are heating up, not cooling down, and life is admitted to have something different about it.
All these things were understood much better through direct insight by people who lived long ago. Gurdjieff certainly drew on these insights. The Merciless Heropass is undoubtedly an idea taken from the Zoroastrian teaching where it appears as Zurvan. Zurvan is beyond the control of the good spirit Ahura Mazda. It was by the creation of something, the Bull and then Man, Gayomart, that something was set up to prevent the inevitable destruction of the world.
We can put it his way: as long as the world was looking along its own path, where things were going, then it had to be running down. When it began turning round and looking back towards the source, then the process of evolution could be started. When we forget to look backwards to the source, we come again into the stream of destruction. In evolution, there is a reversal of forces, which means a turning back towards to source. Something new is brought into the situation; it does not bring itself about.
The secret of our work is that it is a creative work, making what was not there before. This is what we people were intended to do. If we allow ourselves to be carried along by the stream of involution then we are truly going against the reason for which we were brought into existence. But it is extremely easy to go by the way of involution and extremely difficult to go by the way of evolution.
In Beelzebub’s Tales, the transformation of energies is called the Ansanbaluiazar. It is in the nature of this existing world that there should be a constant interaction between the energies on different levels. The upward and downward movements of energies are called evolution and involution. In involution, the many comes out of the one; and in evolution, the many return into the one. To maintain these processes there are needed means whereby one kind of energy can act upon another. These Gurdjieff calls apparatuses or being-apparatuses and he says that we men are apparatuses, individually and as a whole. Without apparatuses, energies have no means of coming into contact with one another.
In the picture of the creation he gives in the chapter on Purgatory, Gurdjieff says that to permit the renewal of the Sun Absolute it is necessary to provide a means by which substances coming from outside could be available. Creative impulses, the theomertmalogos, are sent outward to act on the sub-material, prime source cosmic substance etherokrilno which produces a response by its very own divine nature. From this there comes the concentrations and different worlds and these worlds are the sources for the return to the one source. The whole of this process of transformation is called ansanba-luiazar and the evolution and involution of substances within any cosmos are also called by the same word. Ansanbaluiazar makes possible the reciprocal-feeding by which everything is maintained, called the trogoautoegocrat. In the unpublished version this was indicated by the word fagologiria, the reversal of forces by eating and being eaten.
The trogoautoegocrat was made possible, Gurdjieff says, by changes in the functioning of the law of threefoldness. In its original form, the law was simply a successiveness; one thing arises out of another and passes into a third. Then it was altered so that something new could arise. This can be roughly shown as:
There is now a difference in the role of the three forces. There is a place where two paths meet (C), one place where a path goes into a succeeding one (B) and one place where it all starts (A). This gives an end point, a transitional point and an initiating point. It is this change of working that enables something to be concentrated at a point.3*
The initial impulse coming from the Sun Absolute, the theomertmalogos, is destined to produce an independent creation and this must have its own spiritual life or freedom and is therefore the carrier of the third force. From the very start there is an invoking or foreseeing of the end to be reached.
To arrive at this creation, the creative act has to pass through a receptive or denying force. This gives the form of action symbolized by the formula 1-2-3: affirming-denying-reconciling.
We can say that from the start one is looking towards the end as an idea and one is moving towards the end as a fact. There is an ideal path and a factual path. When, in the great cosmic triad of world creation, the end is reached and the second order suns arise, there is not only the fact of their existence but also something of the vivifyingness of the original source in them. The sun is not just a concentration built up from the primary substance etherokrilno but also a reproduction or projection of the prime source. It is both a created thing and a creator.
The same applies to our arising. We have on the one hand our generation from the material world, from the physical and chemical substances out of which our bodies are produced and on which we feed; and on the other, we have the descent into the human essence of a spiritual nature. A simple way of putting this is that we are built up from below and spiritualized from above.
Apparatuses made in this way by a creative action of involution (1-2-3) are also apparatuses for the contrary movement of return to the source, evolution (2-1-3). The movement of return begins from below. This is why the work of our transformation begins from the material side of our nature. Primarily it begins in the physical body.
Where a finer substance arises out of the coarser one it is given the special name harnelmiatznel. The idea of harnelmiatznel, the higher blends with the lower to actualize the middle, is used extensively in the chapter on Purgatory to describe the process of transformation of food in the organism. It is said, for example, that when the food enters the mouth it mixes with the active elements produced in the body, the enzymes of the saliva, with which it combines according to the “affinity of vibrations” to give protoëhary. The affirming force must correspond to the denying force. The ferments and enzymes that enter into the digestive process are highly specific, they work on particular carbohydrate structures; one will hydrolyze a sugar, another a fat and so on. If the passive element is to be transformed it must meet with the precise active element that corresponds to its need, at that place and under these conditions. It is like the opening of a locked door; with no key it cannot open and with the wrong key it cannot open.
The need for a correspondence between the active and the passive principles applies to involution as well as to evolution. Let us take a very simple kind of involution, a fire. A fire is started and it requires fuel. The flame by which the fire is initiated can only go on as long as there is combustible material and air. The fire is helpless to reproduce itself unless the materials are available for it.
The further stages of the transformation of food also proceed by harnelmiatznel. The being-protoëhary passes into the intestinal tract. Here it blends with various ferments to actualize something active enough to pass through the membranes of the alimentary canal into the bloodstream. The new “middle” substance, the being-defteroëhary, yields the materials out of which the body’s needs can be met. A part goes “to serve the planetary body itself,” sugars to be burnt and substances to repair tissues; the rest passes through a further stage of evolution by the action of more specialized hormones to form the tri-toëhary which is concentrated in the liver. The liver is a special organ in all chordate forms of life, not only vertebrates. In the liver food becomes alive and part of us; it is, so to say, resurrected. There is, in the liver a combination of substances that produce the simplest living forms, as they were produced at the beginning of life on the earth. That is why in certain traditions the liver is regarded as the center of man; these traditions knew about the transformation of energies.
It is at this point that the harnelmiatznel can no longer carry the process forward unaided. At this point we pass from the law of three-foldness to the law of sevenfoldness. The law of threefoldness cannot ensure the completion of the process and there has to be something brought in from outside. The places where this kind of thing has to happen are called mdnel-in, ways in. Such a place is reached when the food comes in the venous blood to the liver and help is given from outside by the air we breathe.
Air, our second food, belongs to a higher order of energies than the food we eat. The food we eat has to go through various stages of transformation before it is on the same level as air. The blood from the liver is carried into the network of capillaries in the lungs. Then there is neither a process of evolution nor of involution. A kind of reinforcement is received from the air whose potential for transformation is greater than that required for its own harnelmiatznel.
Always in the harnelmiatznel something is built up from below to meet something from above. The principle applies in procreation. The initiating factor is in the egg, the ovum. It cannot fertilize itself and needs the sperm. There is the apparatus of the sexual function that enables the two to be brought together.
In the mother is the aim that the egg should be fertilized. This is represented 2 → 3. From the aspect of the apparatus, there is the necessity for coming into contact with the active force represented by the sperm:
Harnelmiatznel also applies to the working of this school.4* Those who come have a certain need; they come in order to get a certain development. The development is only possible if there is an apparatus and that is why schools exist. If this school possesses the right teaching, the harnelmiatznel will be set up. If it does not correspond to the need, or if those who come do not correspond in their potential, the harnelmiatznel will not be set up.
Similarly, there will not be a fertile mating unless the male and female principles correspond to each other. It is said that an action can come about only at the right time and place and with the right components.
The initiative in harnelmiatznel comes from the passive. In sexual reproduction it is that the woman attracts the man. In the case of a school like the Academy, if the initiative comes from the school and not from the students, harnelmiatznel is not set up. Instead there may be a process of involution. Such processes are necessary in other circumstances such as the spreading of a powerful idea in the world. Then the initiative is with the affirming force. If there is a sufficiently powerful potential in an idea it is only necessary to find situations to respond to it. The idea takes hold where there is “fuel” to bum; and gradually dies away as fires die away. That is why ideas in the world have to be renewed from time to time and no teaching can be permanent.
A School is different. It is concerned with providing conditions for evolution. The initiative must come from the seekers.5* In so far as we are seekers, we can enter into harnelmiatznel. When our searching stops so does harnelmiatznel and there is no further progress. The seeker must have a strong feeling of need, corresponding to which there is a goal to be attained. Then it must be found out whether there is a correspondence between what the School has to teach and what the seeker is able to learn.
The harnelmiatznel will go only so far. But it requires different ferments at different stages, or different kinds of action. Otherwise the working of the School remains at the first stage (protoëhary).
If harnelmaitznel is a blending process, the harnel-aoot is a disharmonized transition that Gurdjieff explained as resulting from alterations in two of the Stopinders6* of the heptaparaparshinokh. It is the fifth point in the process of transformation and comes after the first mdnel-in.
Here the vibrations are between the two extremes. Contact with the start has been lost and contact with the end has not yet been found. In the process of our transformation, this has been given names such as “dark night of the soul.” but it happens also on a small scale in little things, whenever we attempt anything. If the event is small, we may be carried through it by the momentum of some larger process.
When we try to attain something or learn something in depth there are at the beginning changes, which come from putting things together by the process of harnelmiatznel; but when we come to the point of looking for perfection, for that which will really manifest the truth of what we are seeking, we are bound to come to a moment of despair when we feel we have no possibility of being able to find it or do what is needed. The harnel-aoot is a very painful experience but it is the only condition for reaching the perfection at which the process is aiming. In climbing a mountain, one must reach the point at which there is no feeling that it is possible to reach the top and no feeling that one can return to the bottom. Once that point is passed, no matter how hard the going is, one has the confidence of getting there in the end. The end itself becomes a force that is working in us. The process goes forward to the moment of completion, the second mdnel-in, when something else again is required.
One way of characterizing the harnel-aoot is that here we have the separation between “I must” and “I cannot.”
In describing the transformation of food Gurdjieff tells how after passing the mechano-coinciding mdnel-in there arises tetartoëhary and then piandjoëhary. Piandjoëhary is the fifth stage and he speaks in an extraordinary way about it, saying that it can give “results not equal but opposite to each other.” Piandjoëhary is a powerful substance in us and through it we are able to go further into creative work or we can be satisfied and put an end to the process there. In the further process, piandjoëhary becomes exioëhary and finally resulzarion where the food has been transformed into a substance of the body kesdjan.
The question then arises: what of the second mdnel-in? In none of Gurdjieff’s talks or writings of which we have any record is it explained what is meant by the intentionally-actualizing mdnel-in. Everyone has the feeling that here something more is needed than that the apparatus should work, something has to come from us that has something to do with sacrifice and suffering. Gurdjieff would never answer questions about this. In Beelzebub’s Tales he simply says that it is here that the substances needed for the Higher Being Body or Soul, enter.7*
The language we have is based on our experience of this world. It is totally unsuited for talking about the invisible region. It has the disastrous effect of making us feel that we understand something. We borrow from the experience of this world to try and say something about what is beyond it.
We talk about God, but that word refers to something beyond our understanding. We feel a need to speak in some way of the Source from which we come and to which we must return; and of the Power that creates and guides the Universe. We begin to think of some being because we cannot imagine anything being done unless it is done by a being and then we are led to try and describe this being. In this way a totally fictitious science called theology has come into existence which is supposed to teach us about God, His attributes and qualities.
Because of the absurdities that result, some people fall into the trap of denying anything higher than themselves. They see the muddle and contradictions but get into a worse state of affairs.
When we use the word God we are using a word to stand for something about which we cannot possibly have an idea of. Of all the great teachers, the Buddha was nearest to expressing this. He constantly impressed on his followers that there was no way by which anyone can affirm or deny anything about the Supreme. Yet we are bound to say something.
It is possible to say a great deal about energies without being caught by misleading images. This had led people into making a different kind of mistake. People say that physical science has discovered that everything is energy and they say that thoughts and feelings and so on are also energies and so everything is energy and everything will be known in that way. It is not like that. There are different degrees of organization that cannot be expressed in terms of energy. There are the working of laws and the determinants of action.
One of the most important things we need to speak about is that there are different worlds. The simplest distinction we make is of a material and a spiritual world. This is really valid, but we can also talk about more than one spiritual world. Various teachings talk about seven heavens or seven regions. To live in the spiritual world one must be a spiritual being but there are different kinds of spiritual being. For men, we can talk about different bodies of man found in many teachings: natural body, spiritual body, divine body, resurrection body, astral body, mental body, causal body, and so on. Sometimes it is said that man has two bodies, body and soul, sometimes three, body, soul and spirit, or in Gurdjieff’s terminology the physical body, the kesdjan body, and the higher being body, or the body of the soul. In the same teaching it may even be that the number of bodies talked about is different and there is a reason for that.
When Gurdjieff talks about his centers, sometimes he says there are three, corresponding to the instinctive and bodily functions, emotional and feeling function, and intellectual function. Another time he distinguishes the instinctive center in its own right, the body as it regulates itself, from the moving center, which has to do with the body acting in the external world. There are different nervous systems and anatomical locations which make this a valid distinction. Then Gurdjieff sometimes speaks of sex and a sex center. The elaborate nervous system and the hormones and so on belonging to sex more than justifies this. So we start with three centers which then become four and then become five centers. At another point Gurdjieff will talk of two higher centers and even put them somewhere in a diagram as if they belong to totally different kinds of experience. So then we have man with seven centers. This is characteristic of Gurdjieff’s method and by using language that is not fixed he increases the power of language considerably. We must not let ourselves be disconcerted by hearing about three centers one day, five another and seven another. The same thing applies to Gurdjieff’s description of the bodies of man. Sometimes he even speaks of man as having only one body.8* Whatever the description, it refers to something; but to try and reduce it all to a scheme where everything is pinned down is nonsensical. The different descriptions are just signposts to help us feel our way around beyond the limitations of our understanding and consciousness. They are not really descriptions at all. They are more like evocations, arousing in us some sense of the different modes of experience that are possible. Perhaps they can help us organize our experiences as they come to us.
Each of the bodies of man enables him to live in a corresponding world. This is expressed [in Mathew 22, 11] in the parable of the wedding garment, where it is said that a man cannot go into a world if he does not have the appropriate body or “garment.”
We can also speak here of levels of consciousness. A common notion is that of the sleeping state and the waking state, but Gurdjieff in his psychology says that there is more than one kind of waking state. There is a real substantial difference between the dream state in which people spend most of their lives and the true waking state in which there is an awareness of direct contact with the natural world, when we are what we are and there is not a veil of dream between us and the natural order. It is possible to speak of states of consciousness beyond this higher consciousness; cosmic consciousness, objective consciousness and so on. Again, in different teachings different states of consciousness are described. It is said that these states fluctuate and that a man can be lifted up into another world by a change of consciousness. St. Paul [in 2 Corinthinas 12, 2] describes his own experience of being taken up into the third heaven and being aware of things which cannot be known in ordinary states of consciousness.
Gurdjieff’s use of the word “consciousness” is very changeable. Besides the notion of different levels of consciousness he sometimes uses the word to mean our ordinary experience. A phrase like “that consciousness in which they pass their ordinary lives” is saying pretty much the same as personality as distinct from essence. It is this consciousness with which you read these words.
Gurdjieff also spoke about objective and subjective consciousness. But in the later presentations used in Beelzebub’s Tales he did not use this but spoke about “gradations of reason.”
Different degrees of consciousness can be connected with different energies and we can say that every energy carries with it a corresponding state or level of consciousness. We can also say that the different bodies of man are made with different energies and that they are capable of different states. But there is a danger here too—we can begin to slip into ways of thinking in which everything is misunderstood. We can all too easily begin to think of a world as a place in which one is present, the state of consciousness as an awareness of whether one is in it or not, and that a body is something that one has as a mark of one’s own being. This happens when we put these ideas together in the same way as we put ideas concerning our ordinary experience together. Then we lose contact with their reality and our understanding is blocked.
We can be given something to enable us to stretch towards a different kind of understanding but still bring it back to something ordinary. People who have had the direct experience, and feel the responsibility to convey something to those who have not yet come to it, are faced with an impossible task. They are in the situation of going from the whole to the part. But the people they want to speak to are still in the situation of separateness and they have to go from the part to the whole. People in the situation of separateness are bound to think in a spatial and temporal way such as we do in making maps of territories, plans of machines, and anatomical charts of bodies. This not only blocks understanding but, more seriously, it thwarts the possibility of new kinds of experience. Even when an authentic experience comes it is thought about in terms of the old kind of picture. Things are put together in the old kind of way—as if they were separate.
The one thing that is not permissible when we are dealing with the spiritual world is to attempt to go from the part to the whole. The spiritual world begins from the whole, whereas the material world begins from the part.
It is said that it is useless to start from explanations and we must start from experiences; but the one thing that can be put in front of people is some idea of pitfalls to be encountered. In any study or search towards the reality of man, the universe, or God or whatever aspect it is of the whole within which we are what we are, we will get lost if we lose contact with the whole. It is possible to practice making contact with the whole as a spiritual exercise.9* The wholeness in which we share—for example, in getting together in a khalqa10*—cannot be reduced to quantity. Two or three gathered together are just as much a whole as the whole of humanity.
The reason why the study of energies is so important can now be explained. It enables us to talk about the workings of the universe without having to talk about beings doing things, whether great or small, absolute, divine or human beings. Being is very very difficult to understand; the important point is that being means something only for a very short distance and one must get beyond it; but to understand non-being is too much.
Energies lie somewhere between and their study enables us to understand action in a right kind of way, without picturing it always as some being doing something. In our usual modes of thought we assume that being comes before doing or that being is somehow independent of action. In many actions, we look and see a number of people, say, who are trying to do something or who are doing something. The truth is just the opposite. We are nothing at all, it is the action which makes us. Our being is only an illusion; it is the action that is really there.
We can hardly bring ourselves to see that there are doings who be things. If I say something it is not I that says it but that speaking says me. We can come to be aware of this if we observe ourselves well; then we can begin to understand that the world is an action of unlimited significance. Within this action there are beings but they are subordinate to the action.11* It is the action that produces beings and when the action is completed, it dispenses with them.
Sometimes an artist gets a glimpse of this when he realizes that he is not painting the picture but the picture is making him an artist by creating itself through him.
The world is in the process of being created. This is the ultimate thing. It is not possible to say that the world is either creating itself or being created by something else. This we can come to understand through the study of energies.
First, there is the ground from which the world is created. Gurdjieff speaks about the “prime source cosmic substance.” This is by no means a new or unusual idea. Modern physical science is finding it necessary to posit something that is not in being and yet out of which being can come. Whether people think of this in terms of a primordial state in the past, or something continuously happening throughout time, or something timelessly happening in a different dimension depends on the cosmological language they prefer to use. The prime stuff is always taken to be not yet sufficiently organized to be anything at all. It is neither radiation nor does it consist of particles.
The word that Gurdjieff used for this substance was etherokrilno in which the Greek word etheros is combined with the letters K and R which in many languages represents the creative power, as in the English word “creation.” In the Arabic language KR or KRR is an important element signifying creative action. Etherokrilno means therefore the formless material in which the creative process can work.
At first this seems to be a fairly easy idea but it is not so. In reality it is a very difficult idea. As soon as we have given something a name we start believing that we are talking about something that is. This difficulty is obvious in the problem physical science has with talking about the ether and whether it exists or not. If it exists, then it has properties and the point of it is lost; and if it has no properties, then it does not exist and therefore does not help us to understand anything. Etherokrilno is nothing in itself yet everything is made out of it.
Gurdjieff also speaks of a supreme organizing power, that which brings being out of the etherokrilno, the theomertmalogos—literally “the word from the mouth of God.” This is beyond being. It is expressed in the Qur’an: “Be and it was.” Between the theomertmalogos and the etherokrilno there is an infinite action and for this action to take place something must connect them. This third element that is present in all the different actions of the world, Gurdjieff calls the Holy Reconciling.12*
In Beelzebub’s Tales, Gurdjieff has the theomertmalogos coming from the Sun Absolute. The Sun Absolute is not a being, it is the completely unified source out of which the creative power emanates. He avoided using the word “proceeds” because this is generally applied to the third force.
The idea of the three forces is very ancient, particularly in the Indo-European tradition represented by the Vedas, which go back many thousands of years to a time when there was a very high wisdom in the world. Two or three thousand years ago the ancient tradition was re-expressed in the Sankhya school of teaching.13* There one has the doctrine of the three gunas, but later on the original meaning was lost and the guna became connected with moral ideas and states of being. In the earliest notions of this, the gunas are simply the threefoldness through which all the differentiation of the world comes about. Difficulties have always arisen whenever this threefoldness has been put into terms of being. This was especially so in the Christian teaching. There was special difficulty in understanding the place of the second power, which was associated with the Incarnation. The schools of North Africa and Alexandria made a great contribution and there was inserted into the creed the declaration that the third force proceeds from the first and second forces. This third reconciling force makes it possible for there to be love in the creation. The reconciling action is required to complete the creative process, not at some remote time in the past, but perpetually and timelessly. This profound teaching was given side by side with ways of helping people with their lives, by providing them with motives for serving the cosmic purpose.
Gurdjieff’s ideas are not in any naive sense new, but they are presented in such a way that they are relatively free from other associations.
To return to the arising of the creation, we can picture the surface of the primeval ocean where nothing stirs until the creative power descends upon it. The first action is a striving in the etherokrilno that precedes its emergence into being. This striving was understood by the great sages, the Rishis of Vedic times, as tapas, the movement that produces differences. This means warmth or heat, but the same word applies also to austerity and sacrifice.
This figurative language of an ocean upon which a creative power descends appears also in the beginning of the Book of Genesis where the strange word Elohim (spelled ALHYM) is used. The word has plural form and yet essentially expresses unity because of the syllable AL. The spiritual power that brings about the first movement has an equivalent in us. There is in the depth of our nature the potential for transformation by which we are able to enter into this cosmic action and in doing so, acquire our own being. Something has to start this off. There has to be the entry of the spiritual power into the soul of man. Here the word “soul” must be understood as something like the etherokrilno, as something that is not organized, simply a possibility of being something. When the spiritual power enters it produces in us the sense of privation.
One great Christian theologian, Meister Eckhart, did get beyond notions of persons or being. He saw so much and so deeply that it was impossible for him to convey what he had seen. From time to time this is revealed when something has to be brought into action. There are always people able to be aware of it sufficiently for continuity to be maintained. About a century or two earlier than Meister Eckhart, Gregory of Palamos, an Eastern monk living in Byzantium, also understood some extraordinary things which he was unable to express because they were too strange. Much earlier still there was that remarkable man Origen who was almost not regarded as a Christian at all.
One of the most significant notions that Origen expressed was of this privation, steresis. This privation has been introduced into the cosmos so that the creation can create itself. If it were not aware of being separated from its Source there would be nothing to make it return to its Source. Hence, privation is the beginning of the creation.
It is possible also to look at the other extreme where the theomertmalogos penetrates into the world. Here privation is transformed into something quite different, the immediate need for union, for the final liberation from all that keeps us separate. Between the two are all kinds of intermediate states that constitute different kinds of working.
The word “energy” properly means “a working,” energeia. At school we learn that energy is the “capacity for doing work.” What we need to do is to put together the notion that energy makes the action possible with the notion that energy is the action itself.
We know from physical science that we can talk of the amount or quantity of an energy and the intensity of energy and these are different things (such as the amount of heat and its temperature). We can also talk of the quality of energy and how energy of one quality can be transformed into another. The idea of quality was considered very deeply from another direction by Gregory of Palamos who used it very much in talking about the divine operations or energies.
When we come to the higher energies there is a wholeness that does not even have any parts. Even the notion of quality is not enough.
In the scale of energies from the etherokrilno as one limit to the theomertmalogos as the other there are different gradations which can be talked about in different ways: in terms of different worlds, different states of consciousness, different modes of being, different potentialities for playing a cosmic role and so on. This is not talking about different things, it is different ways of talking about the same thing. In the middle of the scale of energies there is life. We live in the midst of life. Life is really our natural world. We know that there are states below life, inertial material states. What we do not know is that there are states beyond life. They are very hard to conceive.
We know that life is organized in different ways. On the physiological level, blood and the human organism work like ordinary physical generators and motors and the muscles and so on are very much like the machines we ourselves make. When we come to the finer, spiritualized parts of man we begin to talk of a second body. For this kesdjan body, the “blood” is hanbledzoin. Hanbledzoin is one of the keys to understanding our inner and outer possibilities. Gurdjieff uses the word in many different ways. In the Third Series14* he spoke about his decision to sacrifice his own power in the field of hanbledzoin, a power he was able to use for his own purposes. In another place, he speaks of hanbledzoin as the emanation of tetartocosmoses, understood as three-brained beings. Hanbledzoin is also said to be the substance of a higher body of man.
We know in the physical world that there are different energies and every machine needs a certain kind of energy or fuel to run. We know something about generators, which convert one kind of energy into another. Usually we think of them as having to be regulated and looked after by some kind of external consciousness, a human operator, and having to be designed and built by somebody. When it comes to the body we know that we do not construct it and for the most part do not know how to operate it. All that has to do with the transformation of energy for its functioning is done instinctively without any participation of our consciousness. When we look at our bodies we soon come to a point where it is very difficult to make a distinction between energy and the machine that uses it. The most important example of this is the blood where it is very hard to say what is the energy, what is the machine, what is the generator or what is the material on which work is done. Yet we imagine that we know what blood is. Even if we say that there must be substances in the blood that we have not yet detected and some action we have not accounted for, we still imagine that these will be like the things we do know.
One must be quite ready to give up asking what the word hanbledzoin and all such words “mean.” We cannot deal with these things as we can with things of the physical world. Perhaps we have to go still further and give up asking about meaning altogether and realize that the very question implies a kind of division that must be short of the wholeness of things.
If we look at a tree and ask ourselves what it means it does not take long to see that this is a silly question. It is so with hanbledzoin. Hanbledzoin is really the action of the human essence.
Life is not only human and characteristic of this earth, it has the peculiar power of bridging the gulf between the separate atomic world of physical phenomena and the universal world beyond individuation, beyond being, the real spiritual world. Life is the bridge and we are part of life. Gurdjieff speaks of the threefoldness of the creation as a fundamental cosmic law. He calls this law triamazikamno, “I put three together.” In the ultimate, cosmic scheme, the theomertmalogos is the holy affirming and the etherokrilno the holy denying. The whole working of the universe, particularly through life, is the reconciling.15*
Somewhere between the formless ground and the creative source there is a region occupied by some kind of self-sustaining, self-renewing existence that is capable of acquiring the kind of consciousness we people have. We can grasp that when we are conscious we have possibilities we do not have when we are unconscious. Maybe we come to see that there are different degrees, ranging from states no different from sleep to a consciousness in which we can really see what things are. But is there something beyond consciousness? It is difficult to ask this question seriously. It is the same as asking if there is anything beyond life—not just a higher more organized kind of life, but something really different.
The reality we are searching for is beyond consciousness. We are not able to touch it so long as we are held by consciousness. Consciousness is a band in the middle with something below consciousness on one side and something beyond consciousness on the other.
1* In the early, unpublished version, this is connected with the search for food. A tetarto-cosmos is a living being with one, two or three brains; roughly speaking, an animal.
2* Individualization arises with division; See also, JG Bennett, The Dramatic Universe, Vol. I. p. 208, and Vol. IV. p. 134. Santa Fe: Bennett Books, 1994.
3* Mr. Bennett also spoke of the reversal of one of these forces. This requires a different diagram from the one shown here.
4* The International Academy for Continuous Education.
5* In Sufism, they are called salik and the murid is one who is willing to lead.
6* Stopinders is Gurdjieff’s term for the steps or components of the law of seven, or “gravity-centers of the fundamental ‘common-cosmic sacred law heptaparaparshinokh’“ See, All and Everything, p.139.
7* Gurdjieff in the chapter on Purgatory simply says that here enters the “foreign help” foreordained by our Creator for our perfecting, that is, being-partk-dolg-duty or “conscious labors” and intentional sufferings.”
8* Which may have some connection with the “sensation body” or “vehicle.”
9* Such as the making of the three rüküs: obeisance to the individual, universal, and absolute qualities of wholeness, though these words in spite of being very precise, do not convey what one might think they do.
10* A khalqa is a circle of sharing, a term used in Sufism.
11* Gurdjieff puts this in terms of being-apparatuses for the transformation of energies.
12* This is spelled out in the early version of “Purgatory” but is not so clear in the published version.
13* Founded by Kapila who must have lived before the sixth century B.C. though it did not flourish until much later.
14* G. I. Gurdjieff, Life is Real Only Then, When “IAm” London: Penguin, 1999.
15* All and Everything, p. 779. 76