The kitchen is a traditional representation of the transformative appa
ratus by which we are “cooked” to produce being-substance or soul. We are going to follow through the analogy and extend it in many direc
tions, particularly in terms of the modern paradigm of the computer.
This will give us an opportunity to investigate what might be meant by the transformation of man and the formation of the inner bodies that Gurdjieffmany times referred to in his teachings.
The Analogue
Th e t e c h n i c a l a r t i f i c e of kitchens and dining rooms on the one hand, and the natural ingestion and processing of food in our organisms on the other, should be related. The kitchen has its counterpart inside us, in our own organism. Although cooking includes the breaking down of raw foodstuffs, making them more digestible, and the elimination of un
wanted parts, it is not simply an extension of digestion. As an art, it is also the construction of the food we eat in “impression-space,” so that it looks, smells, and tastes good. Cooking enhances the experience of food.
We can say that the equivalent to cooking in ourselves produces and processes experience.
If, in this analogy, the organism is similar to the kitchen, and experi
ence to the food being cooked, what is the dining room? It is the realm of assimilation. Instead of the productions of the organism going out into experience and being taken up by passing impressions, leaving our pres
ent moment, something can be formed out of them that remains. This is similar to the Gurdjieffian idea of an inner or subtle body. Only, the question rarely addressed is: Whose body is it? Gurdjieff might say that the dining room, the realm of our experience, is occupied by a variety of
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customers but rarely ourselves!* If we manage to attain an inner body, this is rather like becoming our own permanent customer.
We come to the point of picturing the possibility of dining on experi
ences instead of letting them be swallowed up by the world at large. Noth
ing is wasted in the scheme of things. What we do not consume is consumed by something. This suggests that we have to learn the art of cooking, to make our experience more digestible for an inner metabo
lism. We have to be able to assimilate a food that comes as much from inside as from outside. The generation and assimilation of experiences could also be called the generation and assimilation of energies, once we understand the connection between experience and energy. This is important, because we need to understand that energies can be subjective aspects. They are not just thinglike. When we feel, this feeling carries us along in its wake, it has subjectivity in it. Equally, experiences have a quantitative aspect. Gurdjieff says that we should be “economical with our experiences.”
In one of his talks, Bennett asked the question: What is experience for?
A student answered that it was to see. Just as food in the kitchen is trans
lated into experience in the dining room, so this experience in its turn can be made into seeing. Hence, the title of the previous chapter, “The Metabolism of Perception,” leads us into this one.
Three Bodies
In the abstract, it is easy to see that Gurdjieff’s idea of three foods implies the possibility of there being two other bodies besides the physical one. Just as we develop an embryo and attain the formation of a physical body, so we can, perhaps, “conceive” and develop two other, finer bodies.
These v^ll drive from the air and the impressions of the second and third octaves depicted in the enneagram. By analogy, the conception of the inner bodies must involve a seed and an egg coming together, the joining of the similar but different. Gurdjieff himself says nothing about this.
In general, the physical body is understood to derive from the earth, while the third or divine body is said to derive from above, to be God- given. If there is a second or in-between body, then this arises from be
tween heaven and earth—that is, from the air, or the spirits, or from some other intermediary realm that mediates between above and below.
Besides questions of conception, there are questions of nourishment
and development, protection and guidance. Biological parents are re
The sheer variety of perspectives available to us from the world’s tradi
tions is very important indeed. It is a sign that what is at stake is not any easily understood mechanism but something inherently uncertain. It is entirely misleading to aim at any simplistic formula. The reason for this is that, if there are higher levels of existence, then they are far more indi
vidualistic than our form in the physical world. The development—or realization—of the higher bodies is not possible without the participation of our own conscious intention, and is not guaranteed by life.
Spirit and Soul
Gurdjieff calls the second-being body the body kesdjan, which can be translated as “spirit body.” Sometimes he calls it the astral body. It devel
ops out of air. The word spirit derives from the same root as respiration.
The other, the “third-being body,” is called the soul. We can say that it develops out of impressions, but these are the finer impressions coming from higher worlds that we discussed before.
There is no established agreement in Western tradition of what the two terms soul and spirit mean in relation to human beings. Sometimes soul is the higher, and sometimes spirit. Sometimes both soul and spirit are associated with the air and breathing. Sometimes the soul is understood as the form of the body, while spirit is akin to its life or energy. Bennett himself reversed the meanings to be found in Beelzebub's Tales and called soul the “coalescence of mind-stufF” and spirit the “will-pattern of value.”^ However, Gurdjieff’s usage agrees with the terminology of the worlds we met before, where the second world or domain is called the alam-i-arvah, or world of the spirits. Interestingly enough, Bennett trans
lates this as the world of energies. In contrast, he associates spirit with will—or the world called in Sufism the alam-i-imkan—more usually translated as the “world of possibilities.” We ourselves characterize the third world as “of the substance of information.” The first world, the alam-i-ajsam, is of the substance of things.
It is well known that the second body of man has been associated with breath and the air in nearly all traditions. If we go back to the father of Western literature, Homer, we find that he portrayed the stuff of the inner bodies as both airlike and firelike. The latter idea was amplified by Heraclitus. Karl Popper comments: “That we are flames, that our selves
are processes, was a marvelous and a revolutionary idea. It was part of Heraclitus’s cosmology: all material things were in flux: they were all processes, including the whole universe. And they were ruled by law (logos):® The limits of the soul you will not discover, not even if you travel every road: so deep is its logos.’
In the Pythagorean doctrine, two kinds of soul are distinguished. The one associated with the second body as process—that is, with fire or energy—is related to the idea of tuning a musical instrument, and it is not, strictly speaking, immortal. It is an extraordinary representation that the tuning of an instrument can last beyond the existence of the instru
ment, as if we were a melody that can linger on after the instrument on which it has been played has perished. We may think of the not-so- uncommon feeling that the dead are in the air all around us. The other soul, associated with the third body, belongs to the pretemporal order of number and, contrary to Gurdjieff, has no beginning or ending. However, we should note in passing that the concept of number here is related to that of information.
The uncertainty of nomenclature can be seen in terms of the nonlinear type of hierarchy of the three realms. This was suggested earlier (in chap
ter two) by our picture of the enneagram as an impossible object. The three bodies are intimately related. It is this that makes them difficult to describe separately.
Matter, Energy, and Information
Energy and matter are interrelated. Energy can be seen as a state of matter. It is processed by means of material constructs. Nevertheless, the two are distinguishable, as they are in physics. What is called matter ap
pears as a kind of coagulation of energy, and energy as a kind of release of matter. Hence the famous equivalence relation of mass and energy first expressed by Albert Einstein. In this respect, it is quite permissible to regard Gurdjieff’s “fine matter” simply as energy. The processing of mat
ter gives rise to energy, which includes experience. This energy or fine matter, in its turn, can be processed to give rise to information.
It is highly likely that there is some equivalence between information and energy. Only, we need to picture information not in its usual repre
sentation as mere strings of symbols but as the very substance of
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ships. Thinking of energy as a coagulation of information corresponds to the picture of the triad derived in earlier chapters. We must understand that consciousness in its deeper sense is more than the organic awareness we share with the animals. Through consciousness, we see relationships.
To make this point clearer, Bennett spoke of the organic awareness as sensitivity.
Consciousness and Sensitivity
What makes consciousness comes from the third octave of impres
sions. We only generate or release consciousness through influences from above, from the realm of finer impressions, such as those we associate with creativity. Gurdjiefif also proposes that only “self-remembering”
makes true consciousness our own. If we turn to the enneagram model (see fig. 9.1), we can associate pure consciousness with point 7, while sensitivity, properly speaking, is to be associated with point 4. The inter
mediary point 5 is where consciousness is collapsed into sensitivity. It is this which gives us our ego-sense even though we exist just in surface awareness. The mixup of consciousness and sensitivity is sorted out by the inner linkage 8-5-7. Point 8 is creative-conscious, in contrast with point 5, which is conscious-sensitive. Our own special role in the process is self-remembering, which means to bridge the critical interval of point
THIRD BODY
9.1. The dynamic of awareness.
6. While the creative incursion (from point 8 to point 5) is spontaneous, understood as something capable of organization and not entirely gratu
itous. What comes to us “out of the blue” needs to be made our own.
periences translucent and intelligible. It is a radical displacement of per
spective.
This is not all that mysterious. The mathematician Rudy Rucker points out that this is very much like the step from the endless regress—^which we would call sensitive—to direct connection. In meditation seeking self- knowledge, he says, there can be a jump from looking at oneself looking at oneself looking at oneself... to a direct sense of the whole, to “I.”'*
This is true consciousness. The change of state is sometimes called satori in Buddhist literature. It may be the same as Gurdjieff’s self-remember- ing. It changes our understanding of everything; but it is not the end.
There can be a further, even more radical change, known in Sanskrit as samadhi. This is probably the same as Gurdjieff’s objective consciousness.
In Bennett’s scheme of cosmic energies it is associated with the creative energy.
The idea that there is more than one definite distinct level or kind of consciousness is crucial. Equally important is the understanding that these are not to be confused with different intensities of sensitivity. This has been emphasized in certain traditions where the state of objective consciousness or creative energy is called the black light. Similarly, the Hindu tradition associates this level with dreamless sleep, which appears to our sensitive minds as an absence. It is not. It is simply that the finite is not able to see the infinite.^
Sensitivity gives us a great deal. It has the property of bringing us into contact with phenomenon. One of the most powerful contacts we have with our ovm organisms is through the breath. Ouspensky observed that breathing is closely connected with our sense of time. The process of breathing, the state of awareness, and the transformation of energies are intimately connected. As the kind of energy working in us changes, so does our sense of time, of the here and now. This has great significance.
It is possible that the person who exists now can be intimately related to the person who was born and the person who will die, in a way quite different from that of memory or anticipation.*
It is important to note the twisted logic whereby the flow of breath
ing—the sense of ourselves as energy—becomes translated into some
thing fixed. For some reason, the perspective of a flow in life becomes associated with impermanence, and we are led to search after some supe
rior order of things. This is like valuing the musical instrument more than the music it plays. Incidentally, this comment suggests yet another anal
ogy for our situation: We have to be able to listen to ourselves as beings.
This is reflected in cultures like that of the Lapps, before it was destroyed by Christian missionaries. In such cultures, everyone discovered and practiced his or her own song.
The experience of flow (or music) can go very deep. It is connected with the basis of true consciousness in what mystical traditions call the heart. The flow is less trapped in existence than the physical and concep
tual objects which occupy the physical world. Yet we want to pin it down.
Even in Gurdjieff’s metaphors, we see attention being directed toward some kind of precipitation out of the flux of enduring atoms or particles, and not to the flux itself. The metaphor of finer particles is a holdover from Theosophy. It is far better to consider David Bohm’s interpretation of the subtle as “finely woven.” It is in this world that our treasures are to be laid up, beyond corruption. This is so even when we cease to be aware of them in our sensitivity.
Gurdjieff says that when a person expands his consciousness, he can assess a lower cosmos as well as a higher one. Bringing awareness into the body requires consciousness. True consciousness provides a link between the worlds. Most people have little awareness of what their bodies are doing or how they are breathing, just as they have little awareness of the food they are eating. However, such an awareness is possible. In Beelzeb
ub’s Tales, Gurdjieff makes much of what he calls cognized intention, which is his term for awareness with consciousness. It is not surprising that we find this kind of awareness featuring in what are called “spiritual”
practices. Such practices entail a greater awareness of physical realities, not less. This is particularly significant when we become conscious of our own breathing, which usually goes on automatically, by instinct. If we bring only sensitivity, we are liable to produce a reaction that mechani
cally alters the breathing. Consciousness does not do that. Without alter
ing the functioning of breathing in the least, it brings about a change in what it is.
State and Station
It is one thing to have experience of the various energies and another to be established in them. This is the Sufi distinction between hal (state) and makam (station). To be established means to be able to endure in higher worlds. The higher energies are available to everyone without ex
ception, but almost as soon as we are in them, we are displaced out of
138 The Hazard of Transformation
them. This means that we lack the higher bodies. In his parable The Great Divorce, C. S. Lewis vividly describes people in the second or astral world walking in pain over grass which cuts their feet because their bodies have little substance. Similarly, the content of higher worlds is unbearable to us, and any access to it renders us “unconscious.”
The higher bodies enable us to have a presence in higher worlds. If we recall our discussions of the different levels of existence in the universe, we can see that this means having a place in realms which are far more highly interconnected than the physical one. We need to organize for ourselves a different kind of state, one in which we are able to endure these extensive interconnections. This state is said to come about through suffering, but it must be emphasized that this suffering has more to do with bearing the impact of higher energies than with being miserable. In Gurdjieff’s earlier teaching, much was made of the idea of the transfor
mation of negative emotion. Quite rightly, this idea has always been treated with some respect and caution, for it has staggering implications.
Some of these were publicly expressed by Bennett in his coupling of the advent of Love through Christ with a necessary “explosion of hate.”^ This kind of coupling of the negative and positive had its place in the Eastern traditions of tantra, and some have found many tantric traits in Gurd
jieff’s teachings and practices.® The lower self and the higher self have to fuse, even though they are of contrary natures. The more common idea that the lower self has to be removed or neutralized misconstrues trans
formation. Transformation does not cheat the economics of life. Every
thing has to be used. There is no escape clause.
Hardware and Software
If there are objects and processes in the inner world, then these will obey a logic different to those of the physical world. Such a logic is hinted at in dreams, though most people draw the false conclusion that the inner world is only subjective. However, we can extend our concept of informa
tion to suppose that the logic of the inner world can exert an influence upon lower levels. The strength of this depends on the degree of organiza
tion of the inner body.
tion of the inner body.