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You can take something from a world higher, say in the atmospheric world, and you specifically create conditions where you bring that into the world of solid bodies–whoa! Something very remarkable may happen. That’s the cigarette not burning the skin, that in this world that is not possible. It creates a condition where the laws of this world can obtain in this world–not forever. These are never forever things [when the function of laws cross over worlds]. You can walk over coals; yes. Could you do that 16 times a day, seven days a week? No, that’s not going to work.

It’s one thing to say we should be responsible, as a true three-brained being, we have the potential to be responsible, but we can’t hold all three-brained beings to that, as a measure.

We have two people in our group that I’ve known now for 35 years. Every time we have a meeting together, I am always impressed with the progress that they have made. I tell myself, “You should make so much progress as these people have” because you can see it. I knew these people when they were 20-22 years old, and I see them now in their 50s; boy, they have changed! Are they perfect? Hell no! That’s not the point. The point is that they really have substantially changed their capacity to come into and maintain a state; their generosity, their openness, their frankness, their directness, all that you can see incrementally has increased. This is what Gurdjieff was talking about.

How Do Things Happen?

As this happens, your concept of God gets bigger and bigger; it enlarges and it doesn’t leave anything out. It takes the whole of modern science, biology and physics and it simply wraps
it up in that same vision of, how do things happen? It puts it into what, for me, is a balanced and correct, logical progression of law, and it says this isn’t possible. Okay, fine; this isn’t possible. This is possible; here I am responsible. I am not responsible for what is impossible over here. Gurdjieff would simply say that at each level of the Ray of Creation, there is an arena of lawfulnesses, and that, as you go down the Ray of Creation, the laws become increasingly restrictive.

What does that mean? In a very straightforward way, if we go to where he considered World 24, or what he called the “planetary world,” or the “atmospheric world,” if we think about what can happen in a gaseous state, like in your lungs or in a gaseous state in our bloodstream, then that is an arena of almost infinite possibilities. All these molecules and atoms, many of them in an ionic state, are bumping around and all kinds of possible things can happen and change and suddenly move in different directions, and so forth and so on.

Once you get into the tissues and the organs, and you get into fixed proteins that make, for instance, the nature of your liver, your lungs and muscles, it cannot happen that they will suddenly change and morph into something different. It is against the law–the laws of chemistry; they are immutable at that level of World 48, which would be the world of solid, substantial materiality, like a physical body.

Now, are there aspects of the physical body that are not all material/physical? Of course, our circulation–the circulation of not only the blood, but also of the atmosphere, and most importantly, the circulation of the nervous system–they are all different levels of lawfulnesses. There are certain things that can happen in the nervous system that cannot happen in the circulation. There are certain things in the circulation and lungs that cannot happen out in the tissues. These are three different worlds, three different sets of lawfulnesses, each of them immutable in its own world.

Now, if you take something from a world higher, say in the atmospheric world, and you specifically create conditions where you bring that into the world of solid bodies–whoa! Something very remarkable may happen. That’s the cigarette on the skin, that in this world that is not possible. In this world–it happens all the time–the cigarette burns; that’s all. It burns off tobacco and that’s the end of it. Now bring them together where this is in a protected state. It creates a condition where the laws of this world can obtain in this world–not forever. These are never forever things [when the function of laws cross over worlds]. You can walk over coals; yes. Could you do that 16 times a day, seven days a week? No, that’s not going to work. So, that’s how I understand there is very clear lawfulness.

If you go to the Sun, to the solar level of emanations and radiations, and you see the solar wind and the solar condensations of billions of tons of sodiums and potassiums, and so forth, belched out of the surface of the Sun, heading out into space and sometimes coming close enough to impact the Earth, and then creating a hell of a mess electronically in the upper atmosphere, well, those are solar phenomena. They can tear into the atomic, molecular, ionic world and just create a big mess, which is what they do when they impact the atmosphere of the Earth. Who trumps? The Sun trumps. Why? Much higher energy levels, which Gurdjieff would call a different level of Okidanokh. We call them gamma rays and x-rays, and then high energy particles–sodiums and potassiums–that are revved up and projected out. Those have a momentum, an energy in mass and movement that is not characteristic or possible in the ionic world.

So, can you have a phenomenon here that suddenly appears in this world? Yes, occasionally, it does. This is why Gurdjieff puts such emphasis on having to learn to utilize the lawful processes of the physical world. Essentially, he is talking about electrophysiology. He’s talking about the electromagnetic functions of the brain: image formation, attention, and so forth, all of these in the quite specifically physical arena of photons, electromagnetic fields, and so forth. It is necessary to learn to utilize that in order to change this. So, yeah, absolutely, there are direct correspondences.

For me, Gurdjieff is as ultimately down to earth as you can get because he is saying you must change your nature, your physical nature, to the point where it becomes a servant, an able but willing servant of the higher. That’s when the triad of Holy Affirming, Holy Denying and Holy Reconciling changes. The Holy Denying changes from being denying to accepting. Then you have the willing servant in the physical body so that now the physical body, instead of resisting and holding back through all of this primal first brain stuff, it now gives up and allows itself to be a contributor to whatever manifestation is out there. I think that’s not difficult to recognize in the lives of certain of the people who are on the planet now, that you see in their physical gestures, their walking. Their body is resonant with their inner state.