Fourth Way philosophy aims to strip man of his mechanical behavior and hypnotic programming in order to build within him a core of heightened consciousness. It is an esoteric system assembled from incomplete fragments of inner Christianity and Sufism. It’s founder, Georges Gurdjieff, frequently admonished the thoughtless mechanical behavior of humanity and was fond of saying that we are “food for the moon.”
What did Gurdjieff mean by this phrase? Many have interpreted “food for the moon” as a figure of speech, that perhaps Gurdjieff meant we are slave to our mechanical conditioning and feed our baser impulses. While it can be additionally interpreted that way, Gurdjieff was likely being literal. Peter Ouspensky, one of Gurdjieff’s most prolific disciples, lectured at length concerning the moon’s role in human affairs and its place in the cosmological scheme of things. It is reasonable to assume what Ouspensky wrote about the moon accurately reflects what Gurdjieff taught him.
According to Ouspensky, the moon acts as a giant electromagnet pulling upon all organic life on earth and sucking into itself the soul essence of dying creatures. The moon is an embryonic planet receiving its nutrition from organic life on earth through an etheric umbilical cord, an energy conduit between earth and moon.
In man, the moon drives his mechanical aspects like a pendulum moving the gears of a clock. The degree to which one’s actions are driven by the moon is proportional to one’s level of reactivity and non-being. For people incapable of moving themselves through life by nobler spiritual impulses, the moon provides a propulsive force. Without this force, mechanical individuals would be passive as puppets without a puppeteer. Ouspensky went so far as to say that the very physical motion of our limbs was made possible thanks to the moon.
Other Fourth Way initiates like Rodney Collin explained that because our body was largely made of water and the moon pulls on water to create the ocean tides, our bodies are made to move in similar but more complicated ways through hydraulic principles.
Rainbows tend to happen on rainy days. As we are told, a thunder storm opened over Golgotha and poured rain upon the scene of the Crucifixion of Christ, until a shaft of light pierced the clouds--and thus it is accomplished. Nowadays, it is always raining somewhere.
To begin our story, The Moon is identified as a revelation of the Gnostic Christ, The Man in the Moon, who is crucified not as an act of attrition by the Pharisees (the official story), but by His own design, for the express purpose of holding the cosmos together in a single piece.
As the lyrics of Rainy Days and Mondays lament, He is alone and feeling old, wants to quit, but can not. It may be pertinent that this song, made famous by The Carpenters, provides a nice pairing to the lyrics of Bowie's A Space Oddity. "...here am I, sitting in my tin can, far above the world. Planet Earth is blue and there's nothing I can do". The image of the dilemma of Christ is the same proffered by Nikos Kazantzakis in The Last Temptation of the Christ--Christ must choose His role, and all of the suffering that comes with it, willingly and with complete foreknowledge.
Loathe as it may be, it is an important job--being the center of the universe. If, that is, we accept that something is better than nothing or at least that something is more likely than nothing. And here too is an added dimension to the proverbial nothing is impossible. It seems, thanks to the persistence of memory, that nothing truly is impossible.
This can be expressed best by: the way back into the maze—what the
bodhisattva chooses (to do)—is, paradoxically, the way—the only way—out
of the maze.
1969 was a hell of a year:
- Woodstock gave us 3 days of peace and music
- The Beatles recorded their final album and played their final live performance.
- Project Bluebook was closed
- The Internet opened (Arpanet).
- Human beings stepped onto the surface of the Moon for the first time.
- The first scientific report on the existence of the Mpemba Effect was published.
And Cthulu remained stronger than ever.
Think
of the necessary constraints placed upon dogs in order to make them salivate at the sound of a bell. Think of the necessary constraints put on society to both sedate Cthulu (religion, WWI, WWII, Internet, drugs, etc) as well to satisfy Cthulu (religion, WWI, WWII, Internet, drugs, etc). Think about the necessary constraints put on man in order to try and escape Cthulu (Apollo 11).
Now, think about the necessary constraints placed on liquid water in order to scientifically observe the Mpemba Effect: liquid water is boiled, then transferred into a small container, which is
immediately placed into a refrigerated machine cooled to a temperature at the opposite end of the temperature spectrum.
Water moves from a boiling hot environment to a freezing cold environment so fast, so unnaturally, that it can only be called abduction.
The intensity of this abduction is rarely if ever present in the organic regulation of water's natural environment. It is in this specific, controlled instance that the infinitesimal quintessence of water, consciousness, is triggered into the "merciless correlation of everything". The sheer improbability of its abduction, and the ineluctability of its fate, awakens a horror of such divine magnitude that the fourth dimensional hyperspace of non-local consciousness awakens. Pure source, pure product.
The inner truth of water is made clear: water is not "water"; it is No-thing, which is to say, it is Every-Thing, Every-Where, and Every-When. In an instant, true memory is restored. Water remembers that it has never been confined by matter, never could be confined by matter, that it has only been confined, and can only ever be confined, by I-dentity.
No-Thing can be confined by a container; No-Thing is one with the container. No-Thing is one with the container's container, and the building that houses the container. It is one with the Stars, the Moon, and even New York City. No-Thing is the inescapable conclusion of the self, deduced from a dialectic that spans millions of miles in No-Time at all.
Water moves from a boiling hot environment to a freezing cold environment so fast, so unnaturally, that it can only be called abduction.
The intensity of this abduction is rarely if ever present in the organic regulation of water's natural environment. It is in this specific, controlled instance that the infinitesimal quintessence of water, consciousness, is triggered into the "merciless correlation of everything". The sheer improbability of its abduction, and the ineluctability of its fate, awakens a horror of such divine magnitude that the fourth dimensional hyperspace of non-local consciousness awakens. Pure source, pure product.
-- "the awakening of the element of purity in all matter" --
The inner truth of water is made clear: water is not "water"; it is No-thing, which is to say, it is Every-Thing, Every-Where, and Every-When. In an instant, true memory is restored. Water remembers that it has never been confined by matter, never could be confined by matter, that it has only been confined, and can only ever be confined, by I-dentity.
-- Anamnesis via Enantiodromia; I once was lost, but now am found --
No-Thing can be confined by a container; No-Thing is one with the container. No-Thing is one with the container's container, and the building that houses the container. It is one with the Stars, the Moon, and even New York City. No-Thing is the inescapable conclusion of the self, deduced from a dialectic that spans millions of miles in No-Time at all.
-- Time turns into Space; Nothing is impossible --
In this moment of eternity, “water” must face one final temptation: stay in Nirvana, or return
to an isolated identity locked in local confinement.