/lit/ - Literature

>>20400709
I would recommend never giving up faith in your higher development, as well as a massive and respectful devotion to the vast corpus of the mystical and religious literature of the world. As Gurdjieff himself would put it, “If you are going to go on a spree, then go the whole hog, including postage.” You may as well fully devote yourself to esoteric knowledge, whether or not traditional religious folk think you are heretics going on a demonic path, and the non-religious that you are a kook wasting your time.

Gurdjieff’s ray of creation, as I pointed out, has a parallel to and precedent of the conception of the “great chain of being” in medieval Christian theology, Ancient Greek philosophy, and Neoplatonism, as well as to certain ideas in Hermeticism — Hermeticism also being referenced in Ouspensky’s “In Search of the Miraculous,” with the Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismegistus being an artifact G. mentioned.

Central to it is the idea of microcosmic and macrocosmic recursion — in Hermeticism, alluded to with the phrase, “As above, so below,” as well as of panpsychism. The idea appears to be as such: there are gradations of “being,” from the more inanimate to the progressively more and more animate and ensouled. All these are in a process of evolution. The crucial turning-point of humanity, is that it can continue to mechanically evolve, which is a very slow, aeonic process, taking millions of years to turn it into a higher more enlightened life-form — but, for a few of humanity, the chance is held out for the conscious evolution of the possibilities latent within them.

Furthermore, the panpsychist part holds that the qualities of emotion and thinking humanity has, has to come, so to speak, from somewhere. As Gurdjieff strangely puts it, they can be compared to forms of higher matter, subtle matter, or energies, which definitely exist just as crude matter as we perceive it exists. The planets, stars, and galaxies themselves are also living beings complete unto themselves, and have, on a profoundly vaster scale, these energies of emotion and thought enlivening them, which organic life on the Earth is like an extrusion and microcosmic development of. You can then further see, that the human body is made up of many cells, which are also animate and living entities, but on a much smaller scale than we are, obviously.

Gurdjieff’s insight is this: to the cells of our body, we are “God,” relative to them. We stand in a similar relation to the planets, stars, galaxy, galactic systems, and universe we live in. There is a planetary consciousness or soul of the Earth, a solar consciousness, stellar consciousnesses, a galactic consciousness and a universal consciousness or mind. We comprise cells in them. We are the microcosm relative to the universe we live in, which is the macrocosm for us, and, relative to the cells and atoms of our own body, we are the macrocosm and they are the microcosm.