The gnashing of teeth

 

“The process of the growth and the warming of the moon is connected with life and death on the earth. Everything living sets free at its death a certain amount of the energy that has ‘animated’ it; this energy, or the ‘souls’ of everything living--plants, animals, people--is attracted to the moon as though by a huge electromagnet, and brings to it the warmth and the life upon which its growth depends, that is, the growth of the ray of creation. In the economy of the of the universe nothing is lost, and a certain energy having finished its work on one plane goes to another.

“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.

 

Commentary

The general agreement in the Gurdjieff tradition is that Gurdjieff used the planets as allegories to represent levels. This is in line with ancient traditions, which did much the same thing. (For example, Mars represented war.)

 

The point is that there are levels; this is a signature feature of his cosmology, and almost every cosmology in both Eastern and Western tradition. Perhaps only the scientific cosmology of the West is unique in insisting that there is only one material level of cosmology, all the little bits and bigger bits being part of one single level, kind of a cosmic mush. This would have been considered nonsense by any ancient society, and is certainly considered nonsense by students of metaphysics.

 

  According to Swedenborg, the souls who go to hell go there because they prefer to be there. His remarks on the situation are in fact quite accurate.