The High Commission and other Sacred Individuals
What Do They Represent?
Ginsburg, Seymour
In reading through Beelzebub’s
Tales to His Grandson over many years, I have often speculated about just
what Gurdjieff intended when he wrote about the High Commission and the Sacred
Individuals. The email discussion group on this subject that emanated from All
and Everything 2001, has helped me to organize my thinking on this matter and I
wish to propose the following ideas about what Gurdjieff
intended.
Throughout Beelzebub’s Tales Gurdjieff exaggerates the
nature of Endlessness with pompous and superfluous titles and adjectives.
“All-Most-Gracious Endlessness” (BT1128), and “All-Loving, Endlessly-Merciful
and Absolutely-Just Creator-Endlessness” (BT745), are but two examples of more
than sixty such appellations throughout the book. In a similar vein, in writing
of the High Commission and the Sacred Individuals, Gurdjieff uses the same
tactic. Universal-Arch-Chemist-Physicist Angel Looisos” (BT88), and
Most-Great-Arch-Seraph Sevohtartra BT89), are just two examples of many used
throughout the book to describe these supposed beings. These overly gushing
descriptions ought to put us on our guard.
Gurdjieff goes even further
in mockingly calling Looisos “His Conformity” (BT182-183). Let us remember that
Gurdjieff was keen to follow his grandmother’s advice when she said to him:
“Eldest of my grandsons! Listen and always remember my strict injunction to you:
In life never do as others do.” (BT27)
And we can just picture the
buffoonery of Looisos who, with his colleagues on the Most High Commission, not
only messed things up for the three-brained beings by implanting the organ
Kundabuffer in them, but then had to return to Earth to beseech Beelzebub to
help stop the animal sacrifices resulting from the unintended consequences of
that implanting. Picture the ridiculous pomposity in this quotation from
Beelzebub’s Tales as Looisos shouts down to Beelzebub: “His Conformity
ascended and when He was fairly high up, added in a loud voice, ‘By this your
Reverence you will be rendering a great service to our Uni-Being All-Embracing
Endlessness’.” (BT183).
What is going on here? Gurdjieff is clearly
making fun of these so-called Sacred Individuals. Are Gurdjieff’s overly
obsequious descriptions of Endlessness as well as of the High Commission and the
Sacred Individuals really serious? Obviously not!
Are they examples of
the primary title of the First Series: An Objectively Impartial Criticism of
the Life of Man? My short answer is “yes!”
In my view, there is no
reality to either a hierarchy of angels and other Sacred Individuals or to an
Endlessness that is separate from each of us. There is no separate Mr. God as
Gurdjieff makes abundantly clear to us in chapter XX of Beelzebub’s
Tales. (BT217). Mr. God was invented by clever leaders such as King Kunuzion
as an ingenious religious-doctrine for a specific purpose (BT219) in the
Beelzebub’s Tales allegory. Similarly, Gurdjieff has invented a separate
Endlessness, a rather bumbling one at that, and separate inept Sacred
Individuals who throughout the Tales are encumbered by the scores of pompously
descriptive titles with which he weighs Endlessness and the Sacred Individuals
down. This is a prime example of Gurdjieff’s objectively impartial criticism of
the life of man, who imagines that he experiences such external beings as
separate from himself because he/she cannot see reality.
I am going to
ask you to explore with me, at least by way of hypothesis, the idea that there
is no reality to any apparently separate sacred individuals, no matter who, no
matter how they appear, no matter that they are Endlessness itself.
All
of the hierarchy of angels and all our imaginings of God are projections of our
mind in which we erroneously create God and his supposed assistants in our
image. Because of our improper oskiano, our improper education, we have become
convinced of the truth of a lie. That lie is that our persona is real and
important. We believe this lie even in the face of the history of our planet
which demonstrates the temporariness and insignificance of all the personas of
the three-brained beings that have inhabited it since the time of their first
arising. Because we erroneously believe that we as personas are real, we are
then able to separate ourselves from other so-called entities like angels or
God, however we perceive them.
Because we have become convinced of the
reality of the personas of mankind, we anthropomorphize everything, seeing
everything in terms of the anthropomorphic state, and we do this based upon our
respective conditionings. So, while someone from the Judeo-Christian background
may think in terms of angels that look like men and even converse with them,
someone else from the indigenous Hawaiian background of the Kahunas, for
example, may think in completely different terms and see completely different
images. The wrathful deities experienced by the Tibetans as described in the
Tibetan Book of the Dead, is another example of this anthropomorphizing,
with still different images such as the blood-drinking deities Ratna-Heruka and
Karma-Heruka.
Well then, if there is no separate Endlessness, no separate
Mr. or Ms. God, is there no divinity at all? I must answer that question with a
“yes”, a very firm “yes there is.” Yes, there really is a divinity of which each
of us are the three-brained tetartocosmic projections on planet earth. Enjoying
a bit of levity in the contemporary language of today, we may say that “God R
Us.” Or to use Gurdjieff’s word for the divinity, “Endlessness R us” as are all
the rather soupy group of angels, arch-angels and the rest of the so-called
hierarchy with which Gurdjieff presents us.
Gurdjieff helps us to see
this when, in the Third Series, he explains his great discovery in terms
of scale. He writes: “For He is God and therefore I also have within myself all
the possibilities and impossibilities that He has. The difference between Him
and myself must lie only in scale. For he is God of all the presences in the
universe! It follows that I also have to be God of some kind of presence on my
scale.”.
This idea, that we in the form of tetartocosmoses, the
three-brained beings that have evolved on Earth, are the most conscious
expressions of the divinity on this planet, is an idea that has been largely
lost to most human beings because of our inability to see reality. But it is
this very idea that is at the basis of all religious doctrines because it is the
vision of truth, the unitive vision, that was seen by the founders of every
religion, and subsequently distorted by their less perceptive followers.
This game of finding the true Self, of finding out who we really are,
requires what Gurdjieff has called metanoia, a change of outlook. To take
an example from another tradition, the advaitic philosophers of esoteric
Hinduism have long insisted on this change of outlook. Two well known
contemporary exponents of advaita, Ramana Maharshi (d. 1946) and Nisarga Datta
(d. 1981) have expressed the idea in modern terms. Nisarga Datta explains it in
this way:
“The world is but a show, glittering and empty. It is, and yet
is not. It is there as long as I want to see it and take part in it. … Only the
onlooker is real, call him Self or Atma. To the Self the world is but a
colourful show.”
Nisarga Datta in agreement with other advaitic
philosophers, goes on to express this idea even more directly and more
forcefully. To a questioner who asked, “If I am the sole creator of all this,
then I am God indeed! But if I am God, why do I appear so small and helpless to
myself”, Nisarga Datta replied, “You are God, but you do not know it. [The
world] is true in essence, but not in appearance. Be free of desires and fears
and at once your vision will clear and you shall see all things as they are.”
These are dramatic words, but they raise several questions for students
of Gurdjieff’s teaching because his teaching presents us with an apparently
hierarchical structure and an apparent path to get from our belief that we are
real as personas in the second state of consciousness, so-called waking
consciousness, to the fourth state of consciousness, that which Gurdjieff called
objective consciousness or enlightenment , in which we can see things as they
are. In that state we stand in the unitive vision by which “the identity of the
individual with the universal is experienced.”
But what about the
hierarchical structure of orders of laws from ninety-six to one, with their
increasing degrees of freedom that Gurdjieff teaches? What about the
intermediate higher being-body kesdjan that Gurdjieff suggests must be
crystallized prior to the crystallization of the spiritual body (BT 765-768). It
is one thing for the advaitic philosopher to say “you are God, but you do not
know it” but quite another to realize the truth of this statement in more than
an intellectual way. Gurdjieff, in the Third Series, acknowledges this
difficulty in his great discovery that even though he has to be God, it is in
terms of scale and at the moment of his discovery he recognizes his limited
state of the awareness of his divinity: “He is God of all the world, and also of
my outer world. I am God also, although only of my inner world.”
The
uniqueness and great value of Gurdjieff’s teaching is that to overcome our
limited state of awareness, he gives us specific methods designed to help us
discover the nature of reality by helping us to change our outlook. His methods
are intended to correct our improper oskiano through the techniques that we know
as the Work. To do this Gurdjieff builds an interesting though illusory
hierarchical structure so that we can struggle our way “up” as we are accustomed
to struggle in our incarnated experience.
Gurdjieff suggests, for
example, that there is an intermediate state between the sleeping self that
regards the persona as real, and the awakened Self or big “I” that experiences
the identity of the individual with the universal spirit or Endlessness. I
equate this intermediate state in which he says that the body kesdjan is
crystallized with the practitioner who has balanced his/her centers, is almost
continuously aware of being aware, and so exists in the third state of
consciousness, self-consciousness, with perhaps glimpses of objective
consciousness.
I mention the hypothesized intermediate, interpenetrating
body kesdjan here only as an example of the sort of hierarchical structure
Gurdjieff builds for us to appeal to our accustomed struggle to attain, whereas
there is nothing to attain, there is only that to discover. Many interesting
questions derive from a hypothesized intermediate interpenetrating body. For
example, how does the body kesdjan in the three body structure of Beelzebub’s
Tales fit in with Gurdjieff’s four body scheme put forward in In Search
of the Miraculous? How does it square with the seven body scheme of
theosophical teachings? How is it that hypnotic powers may be a characteristic
of the being with a crystallized kesdjan body, and yet many accomplished
hypnotists may not be seen to have any such crystallized interpenetrating body
at all? These and similar questions are beyond the scope of this paper. We
should note, however, that ultimately the body kesdjan, just as the
planetary body, must decompose (BT766), and in that sense is no more real than
the planetary body.
Gurdjieff gives us numerous practical exercises to
help us enter the two higher states of consciousness that he says are possible
for a human being, self-consciousness and objective consciousness. These
exercises, of which I would like to mention six, are familiar to pupils of
Gurdjieff’s teaching. These include first, exercises to help us exist in the
third state of consciousness. Three of these exercises are:
1. Self
observation over a long period of time to discover the things about
ourselves, the identifications that keep us from realizing the truth. These
identifications are mostly with the so called negative emotions of which
Gurdjieff speaks, but these identifications also include those that can be
classified as desires. These identifications fool us into believing that our
persona is real.
2. Self-remembering, the discipline of being aware
of being aware by which we enter into self-consciousness. This state is the
gateway to objective-consciousness in which we realize that we are Endlessness
as is everything existing. Gurdjieff taught body sensing exercises in which we
direct the tool of attention to help us enter into this state.
3.
Sacred dance, known as the Gurdjieff movements. Practice of the movements
are another method of making use of the body to overcome the intellect so that
we are seated in the observer in the third state of consciousness. Many years
ago, I participated in regular weekly movements classes over a six year period
as part of a Gurdjieff study group, and afterward I participated in occasional
movements classes as part of another Gurdjieff study group. I can attest to the
efficacy of the movements to carry one into a state of profound self-awareness.
But I do not claim to be an accomplished practitioner of the movements and
consequently, I cannot speak with authority about whether adequate practice of
the movements will carry one into the fourth state of consciousness, the
objective consciousness that I have characterized as the unitive vision. We
know, however, that Gurdjieff placed great importance on the movements and
signed his great literary work, All and Everything, as written by “simply
a ‘Teacher of Dancing’.” We know further that sacred dance is a suggested
exercise in other esoteric traditions from the dervish whirling of Sufism, to
the ecstatic states induced by dance that are characteristic of esoteric forms
of orthodox Judaism. The dance of Shiva in Hinduism is another suggesting the
importance of sacred dance.
Gurdjieff then gave additional exercises that
are clearly designed to help us into the fourth state of consciousness assuming
that we already reside in the third state of consciousness. Three of these
exercises are:
4. Using the “as if” technique, in order to
function as if we already stand in objective-consciousness. Gurdjieff’s “I am”
exercise is an example of this technique using constructive imagination to
imagine a vibratory reverberation in the solar plexus when “I am” is pronounced.
An actual vibratory reverberation is characteristic of the person who already
stands in objective-consciousness. It can be described as the life force that
vivifies us. By repetition the practitioner actually experiences the vibration
because the vibration is real even though it formerly had been unnoticed. In
quiet meditation the vibratory life force is readily experienced.
5.
Conscious laboring and intentional suffering to develop the will which is
a characteristic of the unitive state. As we learn to like what “it” (the
persona) does not like, we come to realize more and more that we are not the
persona, that temporary collection of tissues and memories, but that we are
essence, “the truth in man.”
6. Putting ourself in the other person’s
place. In the Beelzebub Tales allegory, Gurdjieff tells us that “only
he may enter here (the Holy Planet Purgatory), who puts himself in the position
of the other results of my labors” (BT1164). He tells us further that it is the
dwelling place of the higher-being-bodies (BT745). We know, therefore, that
existence on the Holy Planet Purgatory is a characteristic of those individuals
who have crystallized the higher-being-body. As we practice putting ourself in
the position of others, we begin to realize that this is more than mere empathy.
We realize that we are the other person. In this state we realize that we are
Endlessness manifesting through all other persons.
To enter into this
ultimate state of consciousness, objective-consciousness, is where
metanoia is required. The direction is inward, whether in meditation or
simple introspection in which we ask, “who is aware of all this?”
Given
that we can enter the third state of consciousness using the body sensing
exercises proposed by Gurdjieff and other techniques in other traditions, we
need then to look further inward, benefiting from the additional exercises
given, not only to realize who in us is doing the observing, but then to realize
who is observing the observer. It is like an infinite regression inward until
one stands firmly in the unity of all being. To remember this from moment to
moment, to remember who we really are, to be aware of being aware, is
self-remembering taken to its deepest level. At that level in which we are aware
that we are all other persons, in which pattern blends with pattern in a vast
and wondrous whole, we enter into the unitive vision.
This is not to
maintain that people do not have the experiences of meeting angels, guardian
angels, spirit guides, all the messengers from above, and even Endlessness as
Ezekiel did in the recounting of his story in the Old Testament. However, we
eventually come to recognize that all these experiences are projections of our
mind based on the anthropomorphic conditioning with which we have been
inculcated.
It is a mystery that many individuals who have entered into
objective consciousness continue to guide others to the same goal long after
their physical deaths. They are Endlessness in full and they are the projection
of Endlessness in individuality (not persona) tempered by a series of human
lifetimes in which essence has grown through experience. These lights of
awareness as, for example, the energy we know as Gurdjieff do indeed come to us
in dream, in meditation, through channeled communication, or sometimes simply as
intuitive understanding. Their appearances to us are similarly projections of
mind by which the one power that is really us all along can communicate with
each of us who are not sufficiently awakened to realize our true nature. As the
extent of our awareness becomes greater, and is less limited to the lower
intellectual center - the mind of our persona, that awareness of mind in higher
intellectual center begins to include other minds. It is akin to C. G. Jung’s
idea of a collective consciousness. In this way the projections of so-called
entities not limited to the mind of our persona are possible.
Whatever
the phenomena experienced, we must then always go more deeply inward and ask the
question: Who is aware of all this? When we fully enter into that state in which
we are aware of being aware, we move toward objective consciousness, toward
enlightenment.
It is a very great work, a metanoia, to remember
from moment to moment that we really are Endlessness, and to give up, in these
moments, our identification with the persona. In my case, for example, I need to
give up the importance of being Sy.
We each need to give up the
importance of being “me” so that we begin to see our persona as transient,
ephemeral and in that sense unreal. When we stand in the real world, that which
Gurdjieff has called objective consciousness or enlightenment, we realize that
we stand in the unity. We are that which is indescribable, and which Gurdjieff
has called Endlessness including all our projections of High Commissions and
Sacred Individuals.
Metanoia, the change of outlook described
here, when it is complete, is a breakthrough in which the individual in whom it
takes place is no longer a separate individual. The light of universal awareness
shines, unobstructed by the persona, through the vehicle of its own form. In
this great spiritual journey we ultimately come to discover who we really are.
In that sense it is a journey of discovery, not of attainment.
We
ultimately discover that: “Thou art thy Self (capital S), the object of thy
search.”
Sources
“BT” followed by page numbers refers to Gurdjieff, G. I. All and
Everything, First Series: An Objectively Impartial Criticism of the Life of Man,
or Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul,
1950).
Evans-Wentz, W. Y. The Tibetan Book of the Dead (London: Oxford
University Press, 1927) 131-152.
Gurdjieff, G. I. All and Everything,
Third Series: Life is Real Only Then When I am (New York: Triangle Editions,
1975) 22-23.
Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj. I Am That (Durham, N.C. Acorn
Press, 1973) 178-179.
Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj. 533.
Ouspensky, P. D.
In Search of the Miraculous (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1950)
141.
Ouspensky, 141.
Ginsburg, Seymour B. In Search of the Unitive
Vision (Boca Raton: New Paradigm Books) 165.
Ouspensky.
83-89.
Gurdjieff, Third Series. 23.
Ouspensky, 40-44.
Gurdjieff, Third
Series. 132-136.
Ouspensky. 162.
Blavatsky, H. P. The Voice of the
Silence (Wheaton: Quest, 1973 facsimile of 1889 edition) 34.
This article is reprinted with the permission or the author. It was
originally published as: Sy Ginsburg, “The High Commission and other Sacred
Individuals, What Do they Represent?” The International Humanities
Conference, All & Everything 2002, The Proceedings, 2002, 177-187