The periodic table of the spiritual elements

Angelic Hydrogen

In keeping with Swedenborg’s observation that every object, event, circumstance, and condition in the natural world has a corresponding one in the spiritual world, one notes that this means the law of octaves functions both in the natural and the spiritual worlds.

Just as all of the energetic phenomenon of vibration in the natural world are arranged according to octaves (enneads, or ninefold structures of cosmological relationship) all of the energetic phenomenon of spiritual vibration in the heavenly world are also arranged in this way.

Correspondingly, as I noted in the previous post, the periodic table of the elements must also exist in a spiritual version.

Of course, the spiritual elements that compose the spiritual periodic table will be characteristics of sensation and feeling, rather than matter and its mechanical action. Swedenborg said as much in his descriptions of heaven (although in different language.) But this is logical enough; and let us therefore translate the matter into terms more familiar to the Gurdjieff work.

Actions, operations, and agency in the spiritual world are all based on conscious behavior, not the behavior of materials. The spiritual world is a conscious world, composed of conscious interactions. In this sense, one could say that the entire material world consists of what Gurdjieff called "sleep;” and understanding the matter from this point of view automatically explains much of what the Buddhists say about this material world of ours being a world of dreams and illusion.

In order to further examine this question, let’s draw parallels between our own dreams and the dreams of this natural world and its mechanical, material interactions. When we dream in the natural state, we’re already asleep: we have withdrawn our being from engagement with what we perceive as "real" —the natural world, that is— and entered a jumbled and fragmented state in which the subordinate awareness of our unconscious – which is in fact, quite important for the arrangement and development of our ordinary ‘conscious’ state –works in a creative way with many different elements of being and experience to arrange things in a better order.