Cosmologically Conformable Results

Photo: Narcissus, December 2022

I use the phrase "cosmologically conformable results."

But what does that mean?

Gurdjieff continually brings us back, in Beelzebub’s Tales, to the idea that mankind no longer senses what is sacred. That is to say, mankind once had the ability to sense the cosmos and his place in it, quite literally, sense it in his body and not just think about it with his head.

Furthermore, that sense was a sense of what is sacred.  He uses that word 466 times in the book, or more than once every three pages—nearly as much as he uses the word "cosmos." So I think we can safely say that without any doubt the book has a great deal to do with understanding what is sacred.

Cosmologically conformable results are results that fulfill the purposes of the cosmos and not our own selfish purposes. Yet we’re obsessed with our own selfish purposes. If we don't recover our cosmological sensation of Being, which is at its heart and in its essence a sense of what is sacred, we can't possibly begin to sense or understand anything whatsoever about cosmologically conformable results. This is because we lack the faculty designed to perceive their meaning — which is a sacred meaning.

Recently a very close friend in the work spoke to me in earnest and absolutely sincere terms about the way that feeling is a whole world of its own. Of course she was speaking of real feeling: and it’s in that capacity, along with real cosmological sensation, that we can begin to sense the sacred. When we try to figure out the sacred with our minds, it’s impossible.

Imagine a period on earth where the learned beings decide that although mankind has developed an alphabet which has 26 letters, heaven employs an alphabet with only 25; a single letter is missing, and that changes everything about language in heaven. The learned beings furthermore pass a teaching around between one another in which, if they can determine which letter is missing from the alphabet in heaven, they will be able to speak the language of heaven and understand everything about it.