Forgetting About Heaven

The search for a path through life

Along with sensation which belongs to different worlds, or levels, on the ladder of the cosmos there are different kinds of intellect and memory which belong to different worlds. The memory of the astral or Kesdjan body is, for example, a quite different thing than the memory of the planetary or natural (i.e., ordinary) body. Without entering the realm of actual experience of the Kesdjan body it’s difficult to explain the difference, but let’s try.

In a general sense, one of the effects of the organ kundabuffer (Gurdjieff’s mythical material cause of man’s alienation, which has something… perhaps… to do with the loss of our tails) is to cause human beings to forget; and what they principally forget above all other things is their sense of connection to the greater cosmos. Gurdjieff brings up this particular (but also in context general) loss more than once—in fact, a LOT—in the course of Tales; and the loss of this connection causes humans to collapse into a stubborn and steadfast belief in the ordinary body alone. That’s pretty much where “modern” science is now.

With that, intellect and memory are bound to mere flesh; and flesh is mere simply because it is so temporal. The word mere, by the way, means undiluted, and I use it in the sense that a human being bound to flesh alone is bound to the strictest limitations of their meaty molecules: in the eyes of our fellow cannibals, candidates for steak, as it were.