Now, when we have got acquainted with base concepts of esoteric doctrine, we shall look over the person and his life in the energy-informational world once again.
Man is a part of the system (a planetary organism). He is controlled by this organism through his consciousness with the subconsciousness, connected to the system of egregors. We divide egregors into two types – being a part of the planetary consciousness (created for a long time and “nobody knows, by whom”) and social - formed by the consciousnesses of people lived or living on the Earth.
Any egregor is the energy-informational organism of the third level, having its own energy body and consciousness. Man is always connected to the egregors of both planetary and social plane through the two hemispheres of a brain, one of which works with consciousness, and another with subconsciousness.
Man’s society is the planetary mechanism for the development of people of the first three castes. It is incorrect to think, that society is parasitic formation for man by one’s nature. Society is a planetary system and it develops and evolves together with the development of consciousness of people entering into it. Therefore, there are societies of Magicians, of democratic states, of military juntas etc. And the society of military junta cannot be reconstructed in the society of democratic state only because the level of consciousness of personalities forming it corresponds to a military junta on the given stage, but do not corresponds to the democratic state.
If we shall observe the way of development of society, we shall see, that it reflects the way of development of the separate consciousnesses of people. Its development also reminds a grapevine, on which there are numerous spears appear in spring, the part of which dies off in autumn, forming one general direction perceived as a cane by us as a result...
Just as man who uses his freedom of a choice (a gap in the movement inside of system) and enters into the contradiction with the system, will be destroyed, as well the societies that enter into the contradiction with the general direction of development of the planetary consciousness (the rod) are destroying. It is enough to remember a quite recent Nazi and communistic societies. They have existed only some tens years, while were created forever and millennia.
The society is the more complex structure, than individual human consciousness and so it’s a more inertial structure. First, the consciousness of people changes and then society starts to change. It is all natural because society is formed by the consciousnesses of people. It is possible to tell, that society reflects the collective consciousness of people joined by the given state, party, religion etc.
Since all people have a various level of consciousness, society will display the average level as the certain neutralizer. Thus people with the higher level of consciousness than social will feel themselves unnecessary in such society.
Such personalities are trying to solve social-personality conflict, passing to other social structures – leaving to other states, escaping to religion (monasteries, ashrams), or living like a hermits...
We shall examine on the specialized sections of our site the social-personality conflicts and all that, how the mismatch of the collective (social) and the individual consciousness influences life and health of the person.
Man is a multivariate energy-informational structure which receives the informational operating signal from the planetary organism through the top Sahasrara chakra, and this operating signal passes further in a human cocoon a kind of the cascade amplifiers in Mental, Astral, Etheric and Physical bodies and leads to some action...
The operating signal from the system (planetary egregors) comes to the subconsciousness (the right cerebral hemisphere), passes through the system of motivation – socially caused concepts of good and evil, fine and bad, pleasant and unpleasant and comes further on the hormonal system, which creates the sensations pleasant or unpleasant for the person by means of endorphine-enkephaline mechanism (various hormones), which is perceived by the consciousness (I want or I do not want) and leads to actions afterwards...
The consciousness associates the appeared sensation with its existing list of values. For example, there was a sensation of discomfort – the human consciousness starts “to remember” immediately its freshest and significant discomfort event and associates the incoming signal with this event. Frequently, it is a mistake because incoming signal was not connected with the given event at all. The person possessing good intuition will understand the reason of the appeared discomfort immediately.
Here we collide with two mechanisms of work of human consciousness - with left-hemispheric Mind (logic) and right-hemispheric Intuition.
The person is connected by the right hemisphere (Subconsciousness) in the System – the Planetary consciousness. Therefore, by means of the right hemisphere man has access to the system information – to the consciousness of the planet. The information which we call intuitive comes exactly from there. It is the information that was read directly from the planetary consciousness. And as the planetary consciousness plans the future actions (exactly as man plans his future actions), the future possible events are always present in the consciousness of the planet. It is only necessary to consider, that any future is probabilistic. Any person who is planning tomorrow knows that there is always a small probability exists, that something will happen at the last minute and will change his plans. But, nevertheless, with the big percent of probability, he will do tomorrow just that was planned.
Intuition works well when people have the working right hemisphere. For example, lefthanders are the good example – as the good possession of a left hand indicates the working right hemisphere. The work of the right hemisphere can be compared to the Locator which reads out the remote future events from the planetary consciousness. Intuition is not crossed at all with the mind and logic – the functions of consciousness and the left (personality) cerebral hemisphere.
Mind is a “computer”. It constantly processes the information entered into it – on the basis of the acquired algorithms during many lives. If the acquired algorithms are not the optimum or the entered information is insufficient, mind will give out the wrong result.
Modern society stimulates the acquiring of the personal consciousness, mind and logic. But it does not stimulate the acquiring of the right-side heuristic thinking and intuition at all – up to that that retrains lefthanders, forbidding them to write by the left hand, suppressing the work of the right cerebral hemisphere thereby.
People who are working with esoteric practices are tending first of all to develop the work of own right cerebral hemisphere and to establish the conscious contact with the System.
Human existence (actions, deeds, decisions) is the latest phase of the obeying of the signal came from the System (egregors) by the person. Therefore on the one hand the existence reflects consciousness, and on the other hand it’s impossible to change consciousness without that it was not reflected on the existence.
Let us cite the citation from the P.D. Ouspensky’s book about G.I. Gurdjieff's doctrine on this theme:
“In almost every one of his lectures G. reverted to a theme which he evidently considered to be of the utmost importance but which was very difficult for many of us to assimilate.
There are, he said, two lines along which man's development proceeds, the line of knowledge and the line of being. In right evolution the line of knowledge and the line of being develop simultaneously, parallel to, and helping one another. But if the line of knowledge gets too far ahead of the line of being, or if the line of being gets ahead of the line of knowledge, man's development goes wrong, and sooner or later it must come to a standstill.
People understand what “knowledge” means. And they understand the possibility of different levels of knowledge. They understand that knowledge may be lesser or greater, that is to say, of one quality or of another quality. But they do not understand this in relation to 'being.' 'Being,' for them, means simply “existence” to which is opposed just 'non-existence.' They do not understand that being or existence may be of very different levels and categories. Take for instance the being of a mineral and of a plant. It is a different being. The being of a plant and of an animal is again a different being. The being of an animal and of a man is a different being. But the being of two people can differ from one another more than the being of a mineral and of an animal. This is exactly what people do not understand. And they do not understand that knowledge depends on being. Not only do they not understand this latter but they definitely do not wish to understand it. And especially in Western culture it is considered that a man may possess great knowledge, for example he may be an able scientist, make discoveries, advance science, and at the same time he may be, and has the right to be, a petty, egoistic, cavilling, mean, envious, vain, naive, and absent minded man. It seems to be considered here that a professor must always forget his umbrella everywhere.
And yet it is his being. And people think that his knowledge does not depend on his being. People of Western culture put great value on the level of a man's knowledge but they do not value the level of a man's being and are not ashamed of the low level of their own being. They do not even understand what it means. And they do not understand that a man's knowledge depends on the level of his being.
If knowledge gets far ahead of being, it becomes theoretical and abstract and inapplicable to life, or actually harmful, because instead of serving life and helping people the better to struggle with the difficulties they meet, it begins to complicate man's life, brings new difficulties into it, new troubles and calamities which were not there before.
The reason for this is that knowledge which is not in accordance with being cannot be large enough for, or sufficiently suited to, man's real needs. It will always be a knowledge of one thing together with ignorance of another thing; a knowledge of the detail without a knowledge of the whole; a knowledge of the form without a knowledge of the essence.
Such preponderance of knowledge over being is observed in present-day culture. The idea of the value and importance of the level of being is completely forgotten. And it is forgotten that the level of knowledge is determined by the level of being. Actually at a given level of being the possibilities of knowledge are limited and finite. Within the limits of a given being the quality of knowledge cannot be changed, and the accumulation of information of one and the same nature, within already known limits, alone is possible. A change in the nature of knowledge is possible only with a change in the nature of being.
Taken in itself, a man's being has many different sides. The most characteristic feature of a modem man is the absence of unity in him and, further, the absence in him of even traces of those properties which he most likes to ascribe to himself, that is, 'lucid consciousness,' 'free will,' a 'permanent ego or I,' and the 'ability to do.' It may surprise you if I say that the chief feature of a modem man's being which explains everything else that is lacking in him is sleep.
A modern man lives in sleep, in sleep he is born and in sleep he dies. About sleep, its significance and its role in life, we will speak later. But at present just think of one thing, what knowledge can a sleeping man have? And if you think about it and at the same time remember that sleep is the chief feature of our being, it will at once become clear to you that if a man really wants knowledge, he must first of all think about how to wake, that is, about how to change his being.
Exteriorly man's being has many different sides: activity or passivity; truthfulness or a tendency to lie; sincerity or insincerity; courage, cowardice; self control, profligacy; irritability, egoism, readiness for self-sacrifice, pride, vanity, conceit, industry, laziness, morality, depravity; all these and much more besides make up the being of man.
But all this is entirely mechanical in man. If he lies it means that he cannot help lying. If he tells the truth it means that he cannot help telling the truth, and so it is with everything. Everything happens, a man can do nothing either in himself or outside himself.
But of course there are limits and bounds. Generally speaking, the being of a modem man is of very inferior quality. But it can be of such bad quality that no change is possible. This must always be remembered. People whose being can still be changed are very lucky. But there are people who are definitely diseased, broken machines with whom nothing can be done. And such people are in the majority. If you think of this you will understand why only few can receive real knowledge. Their being prevents it.
Generally speaking, the balance between knowledge and being is even more important than a separate development of either one or the other. And a separate development of knowledge or of being is not desirable in any way. Although it is precisely this one-sided development that often seems particularly attractive to people.
If knowledge outweighs being a man knows but has no power to do. It is useless knowledge. On the other hand if being outweighs knowledge a man has the power to do, but does not know, that is, he can do something but does not know what to do. The being he has acquired becomes aimless and efforts made to attain it prove to be useless.
In the history of humanity there are known many examples when entire civilizations have perished because knowledge outweighed being or being outweighed knowledge.”
P. D. OUSPENSKY “In search of the miraculous”
