Souls, Being, and Quanta Part VII

A Natural Magnetism (the Network)

Photograph: Arles, France, 2022

I saw something this afternoon that can be of great service to all of you. You have no contact, you don’t poison [influence] one towards another other to go towards your aspirations. It’s possible to have a common contact through the common goal.

It’s possible by exercising it. For example, when you’re seated together, don’t spend your time inwardly as in life. Use this opportunity to do an exercise. Suggest to yourself how this atmosphere around you awakens a desire to go towards the goal ... Anyone here can produce such an atmosphere. This atmosphere is a fire which allows all of being to aspire to the common goal.

When you find yourself together, immediately, automatically, this fire will occur. You can have an action on a whole city. Paris is big, but if you start and a movement takes place in a point of this atmosphere, it will gradually become possible for a wave which will spread everywhere to start ... You know the different laws of telepathy ... It’s as if the atmosphere is expanding, a fabric like a spider's web is created. If a new force enters the mesh, it can spread throughout the mesh, as in an electric cable. When you’re accidentally together, it's necessary that you do this exercise. You create a factor to achieve the goal together. For that it’s necessary to do two things internally: autosuggestion and representation by forms, by subjective forms. Little by little you’ll understand what’s happening. It’s not important to represent it exactly.

Imagine that a net is formed between you, like a network. If a current passes through a point of the network, it will pass everywhere. If there’s a sensation of heat or cold at one point, all the points will feel hot or cold. Imagine that what’s happening in one place is happening everywhere.

Paris Meetings 1944, Thursday May 25

There are a number of places in the Paris 1944 meetings where Gurdjieff discusses the networking exercise. What he describes above is a form of entanglement.

Perhaps Gurdjieff was aware of the theory of entangled particles; perhaps he wasn’t. But he was certainly aware of the effect that they had on human beings; this passage alone demonstrates his comprehension of the way that people collectively concentrate these particles of Being, both within themselves and between each other. This is one of the reasons it’s often said “the work is not for oneself.“ We work on behalf of a much larger organic cosmic purpose, which is a whole thing of its own.

The very word “holy” itself describes something that’s whole, not partial. This wholeness isn’t imaginary; it’s created by the entangled particles that cause various parts of reality—all the parts, in the end—to share a single energetic identity through this property.