A few notes on consciousness

 

““The souls that go to the moon, possessing perhaps even a certain amount of consciousness and memory, find themselves there under ninety-six laws, in the conditions of mineral life, or to put it differently, in conditions from which there is no escape apart from a general evolution in immeasurably long planetary cycles. The moon is ‘at the extremity,’ at the end of the world; it is the ‘outer darkness’ of the Christian doctrine ‘where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.’

 

Excerpt taken from In Search of the Miraculous by P. D. Ouspensky, pub. Paul H. Crompton Ltd, 2004, p 85.

 

“Your principal mistake consists in thinking that you always have consciousness, and in general, either that consciousness is always present or that it is never present. In reality consciousness is a property which is continually changing. Now it is present, now it is not present. And there are different degrees and different levels of consciousness. Both consciousness and the different degrees of consciousness must be understood in oneself by sensation, by taste. No definitions can help you in this case and no definitions are possible so long as you do not understand what you have to define. And science and philosophy cannot define consciousness because they want to define it where it does not exist. It is necessary to distinguish consciousness from the possibility of consciousness. We have only the possibility of consciousness and rare flashes of it. Therefore we cannot define what consciousness is.”

 

Excerpt taken from In Search of the Miraculous by P. D. Ouspensky, pub. Paul H. Crompton Ltd, 2004, p117.

 

Commentary

The evidence is unambiguous: Gurdjieff never, at any time, said that there were only two states for man, to be "awake", or to be "asleep.". He used these terms specifically to refer to relative states of consciousness, which clearly have many degrees, according to the development of a man's being. As readers can see, he indicated that even at the level of the moon, a degree of consciousness still exists.

The level of a man's consciousness depends on the interaction of all the elements in him, all the energies which are developing and which continue to develop, and their dynamic interaction. All of these principles are adequately demonstrated in the enneagram; and all of them carry both superior and subordinate qualities within themselves, so that the interaction of the subordinate states helps to, in summary, create higher states. The chemical factory reflects the same truth. Each hydrogen represents a relative state of consciousness, according to its action.