Life

LIFE

Greg W. Goodwin

Organic life on the planet Earth is a thin film of sensitive organic material coating the otherwise bare mineral and liquid laden surface of our planet. This organic film is responsive to light and heat from the sun and it is psychologically responsive to the fluctuation of solar radiation emitted by the sun. Organic life is also responsive to the gravitational pull of the moon, having gradually developed under the influence of the evolving gravitation of the moon. The organic film of life is responsive to the light and electromagnetic influences from the star constellations and it is responsive to the electromagnetic radiation from the other planets of this solar system. Each of these distant forces: sun, moon, stars and planets sets in motion different external phenomena and changing internal psychological activities within the world of this thin film of organic cellular machinery developed by Nature. Nothing happens on a general scale or on an overtly widespread range around this planet that is not an automatic mass reaction to the initial stimulation of invisible stellar and planetary influences. Such a statement must seem to the modern rationalist an archaic, simplistic superstition, but within the reality as witnessed by the understanding of the Fourth Way system of psychological evolution such a statement is a verifiable certainty.

Such a world-view is difficult to verify in that a realization of this strange actuality depends on the ability to raise the usually low level of consciousness within the observer in conjunction with at least a decade long period of observation in relation to studying planetary movements and witnessing the corresponding general human activity, while at the same time examining the ever-changing moods and states of the human machine from a carefully maintained separate psychological standard of internal normality. Even then such a realization is impossible to prove to anyone incapable of perceiving the functioning of the organic devices of awareness from an objective psychological distance. The value of such a perspective is that it is in fact an objective view of ourselves and our world. To witness the world in this way, to see directly from dayto-day that the world reacts in kind to certain planetary events, is to witness reality from a higher state of consciousness than the world-view that presumes actions and activities are entirely random and arbitrary. Some events are certainly random and arbitrary, but the general trends are created by the motions of the surrounding worlds and this fact is evident if the witness can bring himself to a higher state of awareness and look into events using the wisdom of objective knowledge. The plants, people and animals living on this world are involuntary receivers of energy from the surrounding cosmos and are remotely controlled by the mathematically predictable motions of the surrounding worlds in order to produce constantly

altering actions and materials on the surface of this world. The phrase “As above, so below” is in fact a near absolute law that demands the living objects on the earth conform to the electromagnetic reality of objects moving through surrounding space.

“At this moment I want you to understand one thing: it is impossible to become free from one influence without becoming subject to another. The whole thing, all work on oneself, consists in choosing the influence to which you wish to subject yourself, and actually falling under this influence. And for this it is necessary to know beforehand which influence is the more profitable.” –G. I. Gurdjieff, In Search of the Miraculous

Organic life on the planet Earth serves as a shock on the scale of the cosmos in the overlapping interval between the sun and the earth, between the earth and the moon and between the planets of the solar system and the body of the earth. Organic life on earth combines the minerals of the earth with the light of the sun to produce cellular life and then assumes a variety of definite forms through the invisible instructions radiated as electromagnetic influences from the planets. Organic life on earth absorbs the impressions of existence on earth by virtue of the light and heat from the sun. The sun is the enabler of existence on this world and everything living on earth directly or indirectly feeds on the sun’s radiated fuel. Human life-forms experience thoughts,

emotions and sensations generated by the sun-enabled impressions and events of their lives and digest these experiences into their essences (essences that are fashioned by the invisible instructions of the planets), but these impressions and events enter essence only after having been filtered through the personality imposed on each citizen by the surrounding social order. These human essences once filled with a lifetime of experience and emotion are shattered at the moment of death of the body into the many fragmented pieces that represent the lack of psychological unity and internal corruption existing at the heart of the typical human being and these pieces of emotional experience are then released to the gravitational vacuum of the moon at the moment of death. The rumor and legend throughout history of an awaiting Hell, of a land of the dead, of a Hades, an underworld where weak souls lacking in integrity are drawn down into, is no mere myth according to the theories of the Fourth Way. In Egyptian mythology, for instance, it is in the Hall of Maat, the chamber of the two truths, one truth representing order and one truth representing justice, that the souls of the dead are weighed against the mystical feather of objective decency. If those newly exited from life are found to be disordered and unjust then their soul is eaten by Ammit, the crocodile-headed prosecutor of cosmic retribution. In Fourth Way terms those lacking a coherent soul, lacking a soul that can only be made coherent through a lifetime of self-remembering and the transformation of negativity into non-identified states of consciousness, are

condemned by their own identification to various positions in the cosmos depending on the quality of their being and their possibilities to evolve. Those that have exhausted their possibilities to evolve are condemned to the ultimate low-lying region of the cosmos, the moon. In Fourth Way theory the moon is a developing bud at the tip of the branch of the Ray of Creation and organic life on earth supplies it with its nourishment as it develops into a full-grown planet. The message in such a world-view is clear: there is a limited amount of time for an individual human to accomplish an ultimate transformation and the consequences of failing to accomplish the task is complete destruction of that particular singularity. Nature -- the coating of organic, cellular, biological mechanisms and their artifacts on the surface of the planet earth -- serves the solar system in the same way that the stomach serves the body. Nature is the digestive organ of the solar system. The sun’s raw energy and the earth’s raw materials are combined into living beings by virtue of the energizing shock of electromagnetic waves emanating from the planets. These living beings eat and digest one another, they reproduce, grow, they destroy one another, suffer disease, they alter the surface and the atmosphere of the planet and transform mineral, light and circumstance into psychic functioning. This psychic functioning accumulates in the creature essence of each organism and is ultimately vacuumed up by the gravitational force of the moon at death. The moon accumulates this psychic ‘warmth’ over eons and potentially eventually develops into a planet over a

vast expanse of time, according to the theory of this system (which is entirely contrary to modern scientific understanding). In the view of 21th century science the local universe is going from hot to cold. In the view of current scientific theory the heat of the sun and the earth will gradually diminish. Even so, in the view of the Fourth Way the universe is growing and refining. The souls of one level of existence are the food source, the energizing sustenance, for the next level of existence. There is a perpetual motion of sorts that transforms lower energies into higher energies and continuously resupplies the ultimate point of creation with near unlimited resources.

“This it is that replenishes the earth; when she approaches it, she fills all bodies, while, when she recedes, she empties them.” -- Pliny the Elder (speaking of the moon), Natural History

The common denominator in the chemistry of organic life is water. A living cell is approximately 70% water and organic life is a cellular-based phenomenon. Organic life on earth is in fact a kind of living soup that is being continuously pushed and pulled by the tidal influence of the huge ghostly orb that appears so large and unlikely against the night sky. Not only are large bodies of water affected by the phases of the moon, but even the bodies of cells feel the influence of the moon. Though restricted in scale of perception in general, even modern mankind has a limited capacity to

intuit the psychological relationship between the earth and the moon and subsequently names the naked and empty features of that infant planet for seas, signifying the jurisdiction exerted over the organic moisture of life. What is not part of common lore is the Fourth Way theory that the moon’s ghost seas are filled with the death tides of animal and failed human souls. The ancients understood the relationship of the moon and the planets to the earth’s life forms and in naming the visible planets for gods, each representative of a psychological archetype, encoded esoteric and psychological knowledge into the everyday lexicon of modern culture in the guise of the names of the days of the week. In the business of everyday living the designation of the days of the week have as their origin the hidden esoteric idea that the planets of the solar system, including the moon and the sun, construct in the characters of human beings the psychological archetypes that produce the grand theater of human interaction. The celestial bodies of the solar system in their movements relative to earth are a vast clockwork that generates various tensions as the planets pass one another in their complicated interrelated motions through space. This tension is translated by organic life on earth into a series of changing activities and general moods. This is the function and history of human civilization, to act out the interplay of the planets, the stars, the asteroids, the meteors and comets. History is war-torn and bloody, it is periodically a plague-

infested disaster written by the planets for the purposes of the moon. Cyclically there is the pattern of a buildup of the population of organic material in a specific location and then sudden destruction and elimination. Large scale destruction happens on our planet, as dramatically witnessed during the advanced and “rational” age of the last century, because the moon is hungry. Mass extinctions or mass executions, considered exceptional periods of inexplicable madness by modern minds, is a direct result of the metabolism of the moon and planets calling for an influx of souls. Mankind can no more rationally control the eruption of war than it can end earthquakes, hurricanes or volcanism. Mankind exists primarily as a resource, as a transforming medium, for “natural” disasters. These are only disasters from the point of view of mankind; from the point of view of nature disasters are necessary for the wellbeing of the moon. Mankind in general cannot avoid disasters, but an individual man can avoid being caught up in the general laws that rule over men as a whole. To accomplish this evasion of the collective karma an individual must stop thinking of himself as part of organic life, as part of the local social order. An individual has to single himself out as an independent agent within his own mind and heart through the liberating psychological effects of selfremembering. A would-be escapee has to struggle to cease to believe in himself as an integral part of the surrounding society and its general interests in order to begin to escape even the outlying negative

psychological influences of the moon. Everything has a “cosmological purpose.” If a man’s being rises in the Ray of Creation then there is a cosmological purpose at the service of such a rise, if his being is consumed by a larger world operating at an energy signature denser and therefore below the level of organic life on earth then there is a cosmological purpose behind the decline. Whether a man is sly enough to serve existence voluntarily by resisting his own artificial personality or ignorant enough to serve existence involuntarily by indulging in artificial personality he will wittingly or unwittingly have to serve some cosmological purpose. To the extent that a citizen pursues exclusively materialistic aims for exclusively materialistic reasons -- health, security, wealth, pleasure, amusement, novelty, vanity, pride, fame, sex, power, etc. – then the citizen in question must share the purely materialistic fate of life in general. Those living in the social order that are interested in only the superficial material aspects of life, or worse, those also interested in certain obsessive preoccupations such as drugs, abnormal sex, extreme political and or religious movements, extreme ideologies and or obsessions with the fad movements of popular culture, are forced by the power of identification manifesting through their false, socialized personality to live under more psychological laws than is strictly necessary and such a lifestyle will retard, damage and even kill that part of them that survives the death of the body, the essence. It is in part the quality of the essence of an individual that determines

what happens to the soul at the point of death. The Fourth Way’s theory is that the average “A influence,” “formatory” inhabitant of life has the fate that he is ‘food for the moon’. This is an embarrassingly central issue of the Fourth Way system. The educated rationalism of the modern mind cannot help but find the suggestion ludicrous. Indeed, the modern “new age” minded individual finds it hard to admit that there is any kind of punishment for mere ignorance, there is a faith that there are only benevolent forces in the world and that eventually everything will “equal out” to a positive result. The Fourth Way system will never become popular because it begins with the insistence that the person reading about these ideas is asleep, that he or she is inherently unconscious and not only ignorant but an actual liar. The system goes on to explain that the penalty for living in such an ignorant fashion is to be devoured by that object of romantic illumination that seems so familiar to the sentimental. What’s worse is that this system actively hopes to discourage those approaching these ideas with a sense of curiosity rather than encouraging them simply because there is only so much knowledge available and only when it is concentrated in a few does it do anyone any good. According to the Fourth Way system there are only two main yet opposing paths available to those citizens existing in the world of the global social structure. The general direction for the life-force of the biologically animated

inhabitants of earth, including the whole of the human social order or what is generally thought of as culture or civilization, is as nourishment for the earth and the moon. The earth eats the physical bodies of organic life while the moon eats their souls, according to the cosmological theories of the Fourth Way. The many intellectuals that are drawn to the seeming complexities and intricacies of this system of psychology soon fidget uncomfortably under the pressure of this first and near central proposition: that all of human life can readily be divided into two rivers flowing in opposite directions. The first and general direction is the natural flow of the diverse materials and energies generated by the biomass of nature in its journey along the path of least resistance. The other exclusive option is toward the possibility of relative immortality through the development of an ethereal body, a correctly crystallized soul, experiencing permanent higher consciousness. The general path for the majority is that of tracking a downhill current flowing naturally toward the methodical digestion and growth of the whole of nature. The sole opposing and exclusively ascending path available to a limited number of perceptive human beings is the escalating struggle to follow the deliberate, calculated resistance against the routine instincts of nature. For modern humans the psychological direction of the common commotion as it is swept along by the near irresistible river of gravity is the direction of unreserved confidence in a prideful, self-congratulatory false personality acquired through imitation from the general influences of the social order. Each

citizen’s own self-importance insures that the descending tide will take him into the current where the millions and even the billions follow one another into oblivion. This is the direction of psychological sleep, of vain ignorance and clever selfdeception; it is the path of unwarranted self-confidence. The opposing course of higher consciousness and the possibility of life beyond the death of the physical body is the direction of inner psychological awakening and esoteric work. This exclusive opposition to the common direction inevitably leads to the eventual horrific discovery that there exists in the minds and hearts of most inhabitants a trance-state of life-long self-deception. Self-satisfaction is always a sign of sleep in the psychology of men, their belief in the infallibility of their organic senses alone is sheer ignorance. Self-satisfaction and over-confidence are two of the many certain indicators that an individual’s psychology is following the way of least resistance. The uncertain and uncomfortable sense of self-doubt, if it is met with an effort to not-identify, is the beginning of the way of most resistance against the self-hypnosis of typical life. When the Fourth Way suggests that those studying this system endeavor to believe nothing then one of the first and most difficult things to disbelieve is what a man mistakes as himself: his own personality, a personality that has struggled for a lifetime to feel secure, convincing itself of its legitimacy. There is no legitimacy in adapting to a world of false values based primarily on the delusions of vanity.

A typical citizen’s life is spent wading through the insistently familiar tide of life where everyone continually insists that they understand what is happening and why it is happening. The usual level of optimism and positive thinking are in no measure substitutes for the intentional effort to become and remain as conscious as possible as life imposes its many experiences on the being of the participant. In fact, enthusiasm and cheerfulness can be effective buffers against experiencing life intelligently, much less consciously. Commonly what it is that delights the lower emotions is unsuspectingly an effective diversion against facing oneself and the presentations of life directly and fully. The cheerful attitude and tendency to sweep aside the serious side of life helps maintain the level of emotional superficiality that allows human beings to exist on this world and never wonder about the fact that the comfortable familiarity is continuously and relentlessly whispering a faint warning that the society one feels so at home within is an illusion, an unreality where something urgently vital is woefully missing. The actual reality of our existence is that most human machines are an inescapable part of the cosmic food chain because they do not and in most cases cannot remember themselves. If there is any higher emotion circulating within the lives of typical people then it is either ineffectively philosophical, religious or impractically fanciful. To escape the great sinking river of unholy nature there has to be a practical effort to wake up in the midst of this sequential dream state.

Otherwise all the noble and fine ideas in the universe are merely thoughts, empty words and emotional fodder for the grinding jaws of the awaiting demon, Ammit. Rather than developing an irrepressible cheerfulness the task in life is to develop an irrepressible ability to bring intelligence and an unidentified witness to the fore permanently. The psychological habits that insure the fate of soul-dissolution at death are habituated into each human creature and insistently reinforced by the characteristic substandard functioning of the surrounding everyday culture. The human machine is saturated in the inertia of superficiality, stirred by the momentum of lower emotional expectations, which perpetuate the obligatory imitative busywork that stimulates the kind of reassuring agreements that create the great cultural illusion that the mentality of the majority is infallibly accurate. In truth the vague but hypnotizing agreement among the majority is exactly the psychological device that gravity uses to suck the souls out of humans into the awaiting ghost seas of the moon. There is predictably no persona spontaneously occurring in the human mind that comprehends the direction of an ascending psychological endeavor, such is the condition of an average citizen conditioned by the ‘education’ of the social structure that spawned him. Human personality is designed within the mix of culture to lie to itself and everyone else and indeed the older the human machine in question is then the bigger and more complete are the lies. Citizens fall into the

mass-fate of life without any selfquestioning and if there is any interest in something psychologically useful then they turn to others for answers, never once seeking within. The reason for such a mind-set is that there is nothing within other than personality, an acquired and artificial self. Their essence is entirely vacant. Each human thing wants ego recognition more than anything else in life and this acquired taste for recognition blinds the citizens to the mentality of the mass-outlook. Men are blind to the insignificance of their imitated activities and motivations. Human machines live their lives under the influence of the moon; it is the moon that instigates the superficial, imitative personality that rules the modern world. Anything that happens without resistance from and the aid of deliberate intelligence is ruled over by the psychological influence that the moon has on the hearts and minds of men. That is the central reality of life and a central truth that few will ever suspect or verify. Human perceptions about the conditions of life are distorted by the psychological falsifications created by a mass personality that agrees with the automatic reactions of culture and the purpose of this situation is to ultimately satisfy the moon’s appetite. Everything related to an ascending psychological activity, everything struggling against this appetite of nature, must be learned. Those working on the way of most resistance have to persist on this way long enough not to be deceived by the organic machine, they have to learn not to be seduced by their insistent false personality and thus fall back under the

moon’s influence.

Relevant quotes from “In Search of the Miraculous”:

“Consider what the cultured humanity of our time spends money on; even leaving the war out, what commands the highest price; where the biggest crowds are. If we think for a moment about these questions it becomes clear that humanity, as it is now, with the interests it lives by, cannot expect to have anything different from what it has. But, as I have already said, it cannot be otherwise. Imagine that for the whole of mankind half a pound of knowledge is allotted a year. If this knowledge is distributed among everyone, each will receive so little that he will remain the fool he was. But, thanks to the fact that very few want to have this knowledge, those who take it are able to get, let us say, a grain each, and acquire the possibility of becoming more intelligent. All cannot become intelligent even if they wish. And if they did become intelligent it would not help matters. There exists a general equilibrium which cannot be upset.”

“There are periods in the life of humanity, which generally coincide with the beginning of the fall of cultures and civilizations, when the masses irretrievably lose their reason and begin to destroy everything that has been created by centuries and millenniums of culture. Such periods of mass madness, often coinciding

with geological cataclysms, climatic changes, and similar phenomena of a planetary character, release a very great quantity of the matter of knowledge. This, in its turn, necessitates the work of collecting this matter of knowledge which would otherwise be lost. Thus the work of collecting scattered matter of knowledge frequently coincides with the beginning of the destruction and fall of cultures and civilizations.”

“Yes, that is because people believe in progress and culture,” said G. “There is no progress whatever. Everything is just the same as it was thousands, and tens of thousands, of years ago. The outward form changes. The essence does not change. Man remains just the same. ‘Civilized’ and ‘cultured’ people live with exactly the same interests as the most ignorant savages. Modern civilization is based on violence and slavery and fine words. But all these fine words about ‘progress’ and ‘civilization’ are merely words.”

“People of Western culture put great value on the level of a man’s knowledge but they do not value the level of a man’s being and are not ashamed of the low level of their own being. They do not even understand what it means. And they do not understand that a man’s knowledge depends on the level of his being.”

“Culture creates personality and is at the same time the product and the result of

personality. We do not realize that the whole of our life, all we call civilization, all we call science, philosophy, art, and politics, is created by people’s personality, that is, by what is ‘not their own’ in them.”

“If we take an average cultured man, we shall see that in the vast majority of cases his personality is the active element in him while his essence is the passive element. The inner growth of a man cannot begin so long as this order of things remains unchanged. Personality must become passive and essence must become active. This can happen only if ‘buffers’ are removed or weakened, because ‘buffers’ are the chief weapon by the help of which personality holds essence in subjection.”

“Contemporary culture requires automatons. And people are undoubtedly losing their acquired habits of independence and turning into automatons, into parts of machines. It is impossible to say where is the end of all this and where the way out—or whether there is an end and a way out. One thing alone is certain, that man’s slavery grows and increases. Man is becoming a willing slave. He no longer needs chains. He begins to grow fond of his slavery, to be proud of it. And this is the most terrible thing that can happen to a man.”

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------------------------COPYRIGHT © 1995 (updated 2008) Greg W. Goodwin. All rights reserved. COPYRIGHT © 2008 Greg W. Goodwin. All Rights Reserved. Note: Please do not print a copy of this document (all or in part) or reproduce it in any way, including reposting it in other locations on the Internet. All are violations of international copyright laws.

November 11, 2008 Greg W. Goodwin The Fourth Way [email protected] YouTube Version of this essay Discussion Group http://ivanosokin.tripod.com/index.html http://www.geocities.com/higheremotion/index.html