Anyone familiar with the basic fourth way material will be familiar with the Food Diagram shown below as it appears in Ouspensky's In Search of the Miraculous . (Click on it to reach the page I conveniently downloaded it from, which gives some context).
This diagram shows how ordinary food and air and "impressions" are processed in the human body, according to the law of the octave, to create the "higher substances" on which human evolution depends. The "bottom story" is supposed to refer to the gut and spinal cord, the middle to the chest and circulatory system and the "top story" to the head. This diagram shows the processes when "self-remembering" or some similar exercise is carrried out. The diagram of "ordinary life" is simpler (see below)
The numbers on the diagrams refer to "hydrogens" . As used here "hydrogen" is a technical term referring to the consciousness of matter, the higher the number the lower the consciousness. (Follow the link given for a quick summary.)This depends on a fascinating "alchemical" view of matter which is one of the intellectual attractions of the fourth way material, although this alchemical view is left in a very uncompleted form. It does not contradict modern analytical chemistry but offers another way of viewing and making sense of the material world. The octave itself is of course very much part of that alchemical view of matter, and the theory of hydrogens in intrinsic to the theory of octaves; at least as it appears in fourth way work. This area is little explored, in public at any rate. The Food Diagram is our main source from primary material as to how the octave and the theory of levels of consciousness (or "vivifyingness" or "density" or "vibration" etc) of matter interact.
In the diagram below 768 is the hydrogen of food, entering in the stomach. It is transformed by saliva and stomach acids and so forth into digestible slop in the intestine, at hydgogen 384. 384 is also the hydrogen of water (remember always the numbers are only intended to be very approximate indications). Nutriment actually entering the bloodstream is at 192, which is also the hydrogen of air. Air enters in the second story as a new Do,that is "do 192", and this "do 192" also functions as the MI-FA shock for the octave beginning with food. If the air and the blood were not at the same hydrogen, ie 192, they could not "blend". (And so on. If you haven't seen the diagram before this should be enough to get a bit of a handle on it!)
We could also show the information in the food diagram more conventionally as so:
,
do..re....mi _ IMPRESSIONS
Do..Re.....Mi.. _ ..Fa....Sol.......La AIR
DO....RE....MI.. _ ..FA.....SOL.. _ ..LA....TI _ FOOD
768 384 192 192 96 48 48 24 12 6 Hydrogen 768 and 384 appear in the "lower story" of gut and spine, as does Hydrogen 12. Hydrogens 48 and 6 appear in the head. The others; 192, 96 and 24; appear in the middle story. Without the First Shock of self-remembering the Impressions octave does not proceed and so the Food Diagram appears like so:
do IMPRESSIONS
Do..Re.....Mi.. _ AIR
DO....RE....MI.. _ ..FA.....SOL.. _ ..LA....TI _ FOOD
768 384 192 192 96 48 48 24 12 6 On some browsers those last two diagrams may have appeared as a bit of a pigs breakfast...sorry if that is the case with you!
The Food Diagram shows how ordinary food, approximately Hydrogen 768 (all hydrogens given are very approximate)is processed into chyme in the intestine (Hydrogen 384, which is also the approximate hydrogen of water)and then enters the bloddstream (c. Hydrogen 196). In the octave this is the "MI" point, where a further shock is needed. That shock is provided by air, which is also Hydrogen 196, and so can blend with the bloodstream. Hydrogen 96 is the approximate level of "vitamins and hormones" (also fire and rarefied gasses) , while Hydrogen 48, the material of Thought was supposed to be a material beyond the ken of official science. Mainstream science has moved on since Gurdjieff first taught, and I have little doubt that neurotransmitters and visible light are in the area of Hydrogen 48. (Although I believe many fourth way people would disagree.) Production of the neurotransmitter serotonin is sensitive to light.
"Impressions" enter as Hydrogen 48. Ordinarily this new octave does not proceed, but if one experiences self-remembering then the process continues as shown in this diagram. This is the "First Conscious Shock". In any case where it does progress Hydrogen 48 becomes Hydrogen 24 (the material of lower emotions and of moving centre energy) which then can be processed to Hydrogen 12, the material of sexual energy and also "higher emotional" energy. (And also it seems of the "instinctive centre") Where there has been no "First Conscious Shock" then SI12 is the only type of this energy produced; and it is sexual in character. Some believe, from an indication in Gurdjieff's Beelzebub's Tales that SI 12 is literally sperm; but a closer reading shows that this cannot be true as "SI 12" is produced by women too....and taking Beelzebub's Tales with solemn literalness is not wise. We should remember that human thought, the "lower intellectual centre" operates around Hydrogen 48. It is necessarily going to be difficult to grasp anything happening at the Hydrogen 12 level or to talk about it even if grasped. My own suspicion is that it closer to the truth to say that DNA, or the information coded in DNA, is in some way part of Hydrogen 12. (Myth is said to be the language of the higher emotional centre which functions on Hydrogen 12...so story is something to do with Hydrogen 12) But anyway it is clear that one way that this octave can progress is through the generation of a new human being, through sexual intercourse, while another way it can progress is through the great transformatiom of which many traditions speak. Gurdjieff, as quoted by Ouspensky, called the beginning of this transformation the Second Conscious Shock. He is quoted as remarking that while many traditions speak of the Second Conscious Shock, they tend not to speak of the First. The result is that some attempt the transformation on sexual energies alone, which is not a good idea. Gurdjieff's Beelzebub explains how this knowledge, that the sexual energy could be transformed, lead to the belief in the inherent virtue of celibacy; and Beelzebub is amusing on that subject in a dark way.
However, if one has caused the First Conscious Shock to happen in some way then one has mi 12 and Sol 12 to work with as well. In fact if one has done one's first shock "intensely" enough then one will also have perhaps some La 6, the energy of the higher intellectual centre. (And there I think hangs a story for later) Ouspensky remarks in The Fourth Way that Sol 12 is an energy of the instinctive centre and mi 12 is an emotional energy. Basically the these extra Hydrogen 12 energies help the transformation to occur. In some way. The Second Conscious Shock must itself be of Hydrogen 12. The nature of this Second Shock has been much debated, some believe that it is literally a pill one eats; and it is easy to see from looking at the diagram how some came to believe that they could induce transformation by eating bodily products. My own belief is that the matter of the Sermon on the Mount (for example) relates to the Second Conscious Shock.
So far so familiar for many readers. Many have found this material hard to work with. I think it does help explain a couple of things though, and one is the essential nature of "black magic"...so we get at last to the hook line I used for this page. Ouspensky tells a story of how the "Work" began, in The Fourth Way . The gist of the story is as follows: The Sly Man found the devil starving because people had no souls anymore...so the devil taught the Sly Man how to grow souls. So the Sly Man set up fourth way groups and taught them self-remembering and so forth. But when the disciples of the Sly Man came before the Pearly Gates they met the devil alongside St Peter. The devil asked them if they could self-remember and when meeting the answer "yes" claimed the soul for dinner. When this news got back to the Sly Man's disciples they confronted him, but he was unrepentant. He had told his disciples not to talk about what happened in groups to the devil or St Peter or anyone else! Those disciples who had remembered this had made it through the Pearly Gates. The Sly Man had indeed made a deal with the devil but he had also made a plan to trick the devil. Thus Ouspensky.
Gurdjieff made a number of interesting remarks about evil. In general he insisted that there was no conscious evil, what we called evil is just unconsciousness. But on one occasion (in In Search of the Miraculous )he was quoted as conceding that sometimes intelligence might evolve in such a way that it became "separated from its roots" and then something called conscious evil might exist. Likewise Ouspensky quotes him talking of the possibility of illegitmately opening higher centres "with a skeleton key" in which case it was uncertain what we would find there...In my view both these remarks can be best understood by reference to the food diagram. Sufficiently intense self-remembering can produce La 6, which will begin to awaken or contact the higher intellectual centre. This is without the transformation occuring, without the Second Conscious Shock even beginning. This is the Sly Man's "meeting with the devil" as described in Ouspensky's story. But the Sly Man wanted to grow souls, that is to cause the transformation to take place. What if one just wanted the powers and knowledge associated with the awakened higher intellectual centre without the transformation taking place? If one wants powers for the sake of preying on other people then undergoing the transformation would defeat the whole purpose. One might find ways of artificially intensifying self-remembering, or a substitute of self-remembering, so as to produce large quantities of La 6. This I think is what the taboo-breaking often associated with black magic, the "blood magic" up to and including human murder and so forth, is all about. And again, there are drugs which facilitate an experience close to self-remembering but far more powerful than most of us are capable of.It seems to me that Gurjieff's "higher intellectual centre" is associated with the Cabalist's Gevurah and his "higher emotional centre" with the Cabalist's Hesed. If this is right it is striking that the influential magician Aleister Crowley believed that Gevurah had to be opened before Hesed. (Ie he assumed that the order of evolution up the Tree was the exact inverse of the Lightning Flash of creation, a foolish assumption.) The magic of Abramelin the Mage, which Crowley followed, appears upon examination to be essentially a program of intense self-remembering enhanced with some mythic scary stuff. Its aim is to invoke the Holy Guardian Angel. Crowley claimed to have acheived this...although we may find his results problematic....
Look again at the Food Diagram in this connection. Note that La 6 produced by intense self-remembering is produced without, so far as the Food Diagram shows, the "mis-placed shock" of conventional enneagram theory; that is, without the shock between Sol and La which enables "external manifestation". Also the First Conscious Shock provides a "mis-placed shock" for the octave that results in si 12, thus fundamentally (we would expect by octave theory) changing the nature of the process......
Incidentally, it is often believed that divination is an inherently dicey business....Why? I would say that divination involves contacting the Higher Intellectual Centre with the dangers remarked upon and implied above.
I will leave this subject here but it has profound practical implications and I commend it to your further thought.
Links to other sites on the Web
