Crystalline Being, Part I

Photo: Beryl, var. aquamarine, with lepidolite mica

I'm going to come back to this question of the alignment of inner particles and speak about it a bit more.

The collection of impressions within being is actually composed of a very fine granular substance, actual particles. On the quantum level, these are quanta — tiny packets of energy. Those packets of energy represent potential and probability: the energy needed to act and a flexible likelihood to act in one way or another. How they will act is not determined yet. Roughly speaking, they can behave either as waves — functions of movement that affect particles or material — or particles themselves. What's weird is that they can “be” either one.

The quantum level resolves itself into what we call the material world. That is to say, quanta decisively end up manifesting as either waves affecting particles, or particles in waves. This is a very general description, but it's good enough for our purposes.

There are two levels here: the level of potential and probability and the level of realized actuality. If you wanted to translate it into the narrow terminology of the Gurdjieff work today, you might say that quanta represent the state of questioning. Valuable and powerful—but force that hasn't translated itself into the real world yet. And it is of course the quality of that translation which we ought to concern ourselves with in our work.