LIFE

Greg W. Goodwin

Organic life on the planet Earth is a

thin film of sensitive organic material
coating the otherwise bare mineral and
liquid laden surface of our planet. This
organic film is responsive to light and heat
from the sun and it is psychologically
responsive to the fluctuation of solar
radiation emitted by the sun. Organic life
is also responsive to the gravitational pull
of the moon, having gradually developed
under the influence of the evolving
gravitation of the moon. The organic film
of life is responsive to the light and
electromagnetic influences from the star
constellations and it is responsive to the
electromagnetic radiation from the other
planets of this solar system. Each of these
distant forces: sun, moon, stars and
planets sets in motion different external
phenomena and changing internal
psychological activities within the world of
this thin film of organic cellular
machinery developed by Nature. Nothing
happens on a general scale or on an
overtly widespread range around this
planet that is not an automatic mass
reaction to the initial stimulation of
invisible stellar and planetary influences.
Such a statement must seem to the modern
rationalist an archaic, simplistic
superstition, but within the reality as
witnessed by the understanding of the
Fourth Way system of psychological
evolution such a statement is a verifiable
certainty.
 Such a world-view is difficult to
verify in that a realization of this strange
actuality depends on the ability to raise the
usually low level of consciousness within
the observer in conjunction with at least a
decade long period of observation in
relation to studying planetary movements
and witnessing the corresponding general
human activity, while at the same time
examining the ever-changing moods and
states of the human machine from a
carefully maintained separate
psychological standard of internal
normality. Even then such a realization is
impossible to prove to anyone incapable of
perceiving the functioning of the organic
devices of awareness from an objective
psychological distance.

The value of such a perspective is

that it is in fact an objective view of
ourselves and our world. To witness the
world in this way, to see directly from day-
to-day that the world reacts in kind to
certain planetary events, is to witness
reality from a higher state of
consciousness than the world-view that
presumes actions and activities are
entirely random and arbitrary. Some
events are certainly random and
arbitrary, but the general trends are
created by the motions of the surrounding
worlds and this fact is evident if the
witness can bring himself to a higher state
of awareness and look into events using
the wisdom of objective knowledge. The
plants, people and animals living on this
world are involuntary receivers of energy
from the surrounding cosmos and are
remotely controlled by the mathematically
predictable motions of the surrounding
worlds in order to produce constantly
altering actions and materials on the
surface of this world. The phrase “As
above, so below” is in fact a near absolute
law that demands the living objects on the
earth conform to the electromagnetic
reality of objects moving through
surrounding space.

“At this moment I want you to

understand one thing: it is impossible to
become free from one influence without
becoming subject to another. The whole
thing, all work on oneself, consists in
choosing the influence to which you wish to
subject yourself, and actually falling under
this influence. And for this it is necessary to
know beforehand which influence is the
more profitable.” –G. I. Gurdjieff, In
Search of the Miraculous

Organic life on the planet Earth

serves as a shock on the scale of the
cosmos in the overlapping interval
between the sun and the earth, between
the earth and the moon and between the
planets of the solar system and the body of
the earth. Organic life on earth combines
the minerals of the earth with the light of
the sun to produce cellular life and then
assumes a variety of definite forms
through the invisible instructions radiated
as electromagnetic influences from the
planets. Organic life on earth absorbs the
impressions of existence on earth by virtue
of the light and heat from the sun. The sun
is the enabler of existence on this world
and everything living on earth directly or
indirectly feeds on the sun’s radiated fuel.
Human life-forms experience thoughts,
emotions and sensations generated by the
sun-enabled impressions and events of
their lives and digest these experiences
into their essences (essences that are
fashioned by the invisible instructions of
the planets), but these impressions and
events enter essence only after having been
filtered through the personality imposed
on each citizen by the surrounding social
order.

These human essences once filled

with a lifetime of experience and emotion
are shattered at the moment of death of
the body into the many fragmented pieces
that represent the lack of psychological
unity and internal corruption existing at
the heart of the typical human being and
these pieces of emotional experience are
then released to the gravitational vacuum
of the moon at the moment of death. The
rumor and legend throughout history of
an awaiting Hell, of a land of the dead, of a
Hades, an underworld where weak souls
lacking in integrity are drawn down into,
is no mere myth according to the theories
of the Fourth Way. In Egyptian
mythology, for instance, it is in the Hall of
Maat, the chamber of the two truths, one
truth representing order and one truth
representing justice, that the souls of the
dead are weighed against the mystical
feather of objective decency. If those newly
exited from life are found to be disordered
and unjust then their soul is eaten by
Ammit, the crocodile-headed prosecutor of
cosmic retribution. In Fourth Way terms
those lacking a coherent soul, lacking a
soul that can only be made coherent
through a lifetime of self-remembering
and the transformation of negativity into
non-identified states of consciousness, are
condemned by their own identification to
various positions in the cosmos depending
on the quality of their being and their
possibilities to evolve. Those that have
exhausted their possibilities to evolve are
condemned to the ultimate low-lying
region of the cosmos, the moon. In Fourth
Way theory the moon is a developing bud
at the tip of the branch of the Ray of
Creation and organic life on earth supplies
it with its nourishment as it develops into a
full-grown planet. The message in such a
world-view is clear: there is a limited
amount of time for an individual human to
accomplish an ultimate transformation
and the consequences of failing to
accomplish the task is complete
destruction of that particular singularity.

Nature -- the coating of organic,

cellular, biological mechanisms and their
artifacts on the surface of the planet earth
-- serves the solar system in the same way
that the stomach serves the body. Nature
is the digestive organ of the solar system.
The sun’s raw energy and the earth’s raw
materials are combined into living beings
by virtue of the energizing shock of
electromagnetic waves emanating from the
planets. These living beings eat and digest
one another, they reproduce, grow, they
destroy one another, suffer disease, they
alter the surface and the atmosphere of the
planet and transform mineral, light and
circumstance into psychic functioning.
This psychic functioning accumulates in
the creature essence of each organism and
is ultimately vacuumed up by the
gravitational force of the moon at death.
The moon accumulates this psychic
‘warmth’ over eons and potentially
eventually develops into a planet over a
vast expanse of time, according to the
theory of this system (which is entirely
contrary to modern scientific
understanding). In the view of 21th
century science the local universe is going
from hot to cold. In the view of current
scientific theory the heat of the sun and
the earth will gradually diminish. Even so,
in the view of the Fourth Way the universe
is growing and refining. The souls of one
level of existence are the food source, the
energizing sustenance, for the next level of
existence. There is a perpetual motion of
sorts that transforms lower energies into
higher energies and continuously
resupplies the ultimate point of creation
with near unlimited resources.

“This it is that replenishes the earth;

when she approaches it, she fills all bodies,
while, when she recedes, she empties them.”
-- Pliny the Elder (speaking of the moon),
Natural History

The common denominator in the

chemistry of organic life is water. A living
cell is approximately 70% water and
organic life is a cellular-based
phenomenon. Organic life on earth is in
fact a kind of living soup that is being
continuously pushed and pulled by the
tidal influence of the huge ghostly orb that
appears so large and unlikely against the
night sky. Not only are large bodies of
water affected by the phases of the moon,
but even the bodies of cells feel the
influence of the moon. Though restricted
in scale of perception in general, even
modern mankind has a limited capacity to
intuit the psychological relationship
between the earth and the moon and
subsequently names the naked and empty
features of that infant planet for seas,
signifying the jurisdiction exerted over the
organic moisture of life. What is not part
of common lore is the Fourth Way theory
that the moon’s ghost seas are filled with
the death tides of animal and failed human
souls.

The ancients understood the

relationship of the moon and the planets to
the earth’s life forms and in naming the
visible planets for gods, each
representative of a psychological
archetype, encoded esoteric and
psychological knowledge into the everyday
lexicon of modern culture in the guise of
the names of the days of the week. In the
business of everyday living the designation
of the days of the week have as their origin
the hidden esoteric idea that the planets of
the solar system, including the moon and
the sun, construct in the characters of
human beings the psychological
archetypes that produce the grand theater
of human interaction.

The celestial bodies of the solar

system in their movements relative to
earth are a vast clockwork that generates
various tensions as the planets pass one
another in their complicated interrelated
motions through space. This tension is
translated by organic life on earth into a
series of changing activities and general
moods. This is the function and history of
human civilization, to act out the interplay
of the planets, the stars, the asteroids, the
meteors and comets. History is war-torn
and bloody, it is periodically a plague-
infested disaster written by the planets for
the purposes of the moon.

Cyclically there is the pattern of a

buildup of the population of organic
material in a specific location and then
sudden destruction and elimination. Large
scale destruction happens on our planet, as
dramatically witnessed during the
advanced and “rational” age of the last
century, because the moon is hungry.
Mass extinctions or mass executions,
considered exceptional periods of
inexplicable madness by modern minds, is
a direct result of the metabolism of the
moon and planets calling for an influx of
souls. Mankind can no more rationally
control the eruption of war than it can end
earthquakes, hurricanes or volcanism.
Mankind exists primarily as a resource, as
a transforming medium, for “natural”
disasters. These are only disasters from
the point of view of mankind; from the
point of view of nature disasters are
necessary for the wellbeing of the moon.
Mankind in general cannot avoid
disasters, but an individual man can avoid
being caught up in the general laws that
rule over men as a whole. To accomplish
this evasion of the collective karma an
individual must stop thinking of himself as
part of organic life, as part of the local
social order. An individual has to single
himself out as an independent agent within
his own mind and heart through the
liberating psychological effects of self-
remembering. A would-be escapee has to
struggle to cease to believe in himself as an
integral part of the surrounding society
and its general interests in order to begin
to escape even the outlying negative
psychological influences of the moon.

Everything has a “cosmological

purpose.” If a man’s being rises in the Ray
of Creation then there is a cosmological
purpose at the service of such a rise, if his
being is consumed by a larger world
operating at an energy signature denser
and therefore below the level of organic
life on earth then there is a cosmological
purpose behind the decline. Whether a
man is sly enough to serve existence
voluntarily by resisting his own artificial
personality or ignorant enough to serve
existence involuntarily by indulging in
artificial personality he will wittingly or
unwittingly have to serve some
cosmological purpose. To the extent that a
citizen pursues exclusively materialistic
aims for exclusively materialistic reasons
-- health, security, wealth, pleasure,
amusement, novelty, vanity, pride, fame,
sex, power, etc. – then the citizen in
question must share the purely
materialistic fate of life in general. Those
living in the social order that are
interested in only the superficial material
aspects of life, or worse, those also
interested in certain obsessive
preoccupations such as drugs, abnormal
sex, extreme political and or religious
movements, extreme ideologies and or
obsessions with the fad movements of
popular culture, are forced by the power
of identification manifesting through their
false, socialized personality to live under
more psychological laws than is strictly
necessary and such a lifestyle will retard,
damage and even kill that part of them
that survives the death of the body, the
essence. It is in part the quality of the
essence of an individual that determines
what happens to the soul at the point of
death.

The Fourth Way’s theory is that the

average “A influence,” “formatory”
inhabitant of life has the fate that he is
‘food for the moon’. This is an
embarrassingly central issue of the Fourth
Way system. The educated rationalism of
the modern mind cannot help but find the
suggestion ludicrous. Indeed, the modern
“new age” minded individual finds it hard
to admit that there is any kind of
punishment for mere ignorance, there is a
faith that there are only benevolent forces
in the world and that eventually
everything will “equal out” to a positive
result. The Fourth Way system will never
become popular because it begins with the
insistence that the person reading about
these ideas is asleep, that he or she is
inherently unconscious and not only
ignorant but an actual liar. The system
goes on to explain that the penalty for
living in such an ignorant fashion is to be
devoured by that object of romantic
illumination that seems so familiar to the
sentimental. What’s worse is that this
system actively hopes to discourage those
approaching these ideas with a sense of
curiosity rather than encouraging them
simply because there is only so much
knowledge available and only when it is
concentrated in a few does it do anyone
any good.

According to the Fourth Way

system there are only two main yet
opposing paths available to those citizens
existing in the world of the global social
structure. The general direction for the
life-force of the biologically animated
inhabitants of earth, including the whole
of the human social order or what is
generally thought of as culture or
civilization, is as nourishment for the earth
and the moon. The earth eats the physical
bodies of organic life while the moon eats
their souls, according to the cosmological
theories of the Fourth Way. The many
intellectuals that are drawn to the seeming
complexities and intricacies of this system
of psychology soon fidget uncomfortably
under the pressure of this first and near
central proposition: that all of human life
can readily be divided into two rivers
flowing in opposite directions. The first
and general direction is the natural flow of
the diverse materials and energies
generated by the biomass of nature in its
journey along the path of least resistance.
The other exclusive option is toward the
possibility of relative immortality through
the development of an ethereal body, a
correctly crystallized soul, experiencing
permanent higher consciousness.

The general path for the majority is

that of tracking a downhill current flowing
naturally toward the methodical digestion
and growth of the whole of nature. The
sole opposing and exclusively ascending
path available to a limited number of
perceptive human beings is the escalating
struggle to follow the deliberate,
calculated resistance against the routine
instincts of nature. For modern humans
the psychological direction of the common
commotion as it is swept along by the near
irresistible river of gravity is the direction
of unreserved confidence in a prideful,
self-congratulatory false personality
acquired through imitation from the
general influences of the social order. Each
citizen’s own self-importance insures that
the descending tide will take him into the
current where the millions and even the
billions follow one another into oblivion.
This is the direction of psychological sleep,
of vain ignorance and clever self-
deception; it is the path of unwarranted
self-confidence. The opposing course of
higher consciousness and the possibility of
life beyond the death of the physical body
is the direction of inner psychological
awakening and esoteric work. This
exclusive opposition to the common
direction inevitably leads to the eventual
horrific discovery that there exists in the
minds and hearts of most inhabitants a
trance-state of life-long self-deception.
Self-satisfaction is always a sign of sleep in
the psychology of men, their belief in the
infallibility of their organic senses alone is
sheer ignorance. Self-satisfaction and
over-confidence are two of the many
certain indicators that an individual’s
psychology is following the way of least
resistance. The uncertain and
uncomfortable sense of self-doubt, if it is
met with an effort to not-identify, is the
beginning of the way of most resistance
against the self-hypnosis of typical life.

When the Fourth Way suggests that

those studying this system endeavor to
believe nothing then one of the first and
most difficult things to disbelieve is what a
man mistakes as himself: his own
personality, a personality that has
struggled for a lifetime to feel secure,
convincing itself of its legitimacy. There is
no legitimacy in adapting to a world of
false values based primarily on the
delusions of vanity.
 A typical citizen’s life is spent
wading through the insistently familiar
tide of life where everyone continually
insists that they understand what is
happening and why it is happening. The
usual level of optimism and positive
thinking are in no measure substitutes for
the intentional effort to become and
remain as conscious as possible as life
imposes its many experiences on the being
of the participant. In fact, enthusiasm and
cheerfulness can be effective buffers
against experiencing life intelligently,
much less consciously. Commonly what it
is that delights the lower emotions is
unsuspectingly an effective diversion
against facing oneself and the
presentations of life directly and fully. The
cheerful attitude and tendency to sweep
aside the serious side of life helps maintain
the level of emotional superficiality that
allows human beings to exist on this world
and never wonder about the fact that the
comfortable familiarity is continuously
and relentlessly whispering a faint
warning that the society one feels so at
home within is an illusion, an unreality
where something urgently vital is woefully
missing.

The actual reality of our existence is

that most human machines are an
inescapable part of the cosmic food chain
because they do not and in most cases
cannot remember themselves. If there is
any higher emotion circulating within the
lives of typical people then it is either
ineffectively philosophical, religious or
impractically fanciful. To escape the great
sinking river of unholy nature there has to
be a practical effort to wake up in the
midst of this sequential dream state.
Otherwise all the noble and fine ideas in
the universe are merely thoughts, empty
words and emotional fodder for the
grinding jaws of the awaiting demon,
Ammit. Rather than developing an
irrepressible cheerfulness the task in life is
to develop an irrepressible ability to bring
intelligence and an unidentified witness to
the fore permanently.

The psychological habits that insure

the fate of soul-dissolution at death are
habituated into each human creature and
insistently reinforced by the characteristic
substandard functioning of the
surrounding everyday culture. The human
machine is saturated in the inertia of
superficiality, stirred by the momentum of
lower emotional expectations, which
perpetuate the obligatory imitative
busywork that stimulates the kind of
reassuring agreements that create the
great cultural illusion that the mentality of
the majority is infallibly accurate. In truth
the vague but hypnotizing agreement
among the majority is exactly the
psychological device that gravity uses to
suck the souls out of humans into the
awaiting ghost seas of the moon.

There is predictably no persona

spontaneously occurring in the human
mind that comprehends the direction of an
ascending psychological endeavor, such is
the condition of an average citizen
conditioned by the ‘education’ of the social
structure that spawned him. Human
personality is designed within the mix of
culture to lie to itself and everyone else
and indeed the older the human machine
in question is then the bigger and more
complete are the lies. Citizens fall into the
mass-fate of life without any self-
questioning and if there is any interest in
something psychologically useful then they
turn to others for answers, never once
seeking within. The reason for such a
mind-set is that there is nothing within
other than personality, an acquired and
artificial self. Their essence is entirely
vacant.

Each human thing wants ego

recognition more than anything else in life
and this acquired taste for recognition
blinds the citizens to the mentality of the
mass-outlook. Men are blind to the
insignificance of their imitated activities
and motivations. Human machines live
their lives under the influence of the
moon; it is the moon that instigates the
superficial, imitative personality that rules
the modern world. Anything that happens
without resistance from and the aid of
deliberate intelligence is ruled over by the
psychological influence that the moon has
on the hearts and minds of men. That is
the central reality of life and a central
truth that few will ever suspect or verify.
Human perceptions about the conditions
of life are distorted by the psychological
falsifications created by a mass personality
that agrees with the automatic reactions of
culture and the purpose of this situation is
to ultimately satisfy the moon’s appetite.
Everything related to an ascending
psychological activity, everything
struggling against this appetite of nature,
must be learned. Those working on the
way of most resistance have to persist on
this way long enough not to be deceived by
the organic machine, they have to learn
not to be seduced by their insistent false
personality and thus fall back under the
moon’s influence.

Relevant quotes from “In Search of

the Miraculous”:

“Consider what the cultured

humanity of our time spends money on;
even leaving the war out, what commands
the highest price; where the biggest crowds
are. If we think for a moment about these
questions it becomes clear that humanity, as
it is now, with the interests it lives by,
cannot expect to have anything different
from what it has. But, as I have already
said, it cannot be otherwise. Imagine that
for the whole of mankind half a pound of
knowledge is allotted a year. If this
knowledge is distributed among everyone,
each will receive so little that he will remain
the fool he was. But, thanks to the fact that
very few want to have this knowledge, those
who take it are able to get, let us say, a
grain each, and acquire the possibility of
becoming more intelligent. All cannot
become intelligent even if they wish. And if
they did become intelligent it would not help
matters. There exists a general equilibrium
which cannot be upset.”

“There are periods in the life of

humanity, which generally coincide with
the beginning of the fall of cultures and
civilizations, when the masses irretrievably
lose their reason and begin to destroy
everything that has been created by
centuries and millenniums of culture. Such
periods of mass madness, often coinciding
with geological cataclysms, climatic
changes, and similar phenomena of a
planetary character, release a very great
quantity of the matter of knowledge. This,
in its turn, necessitates the work of
collecting this matter of knowledge which
would otherwise be lost. Thus the work of
collecting scattered matter of knowledge
frequently coincides with the beginning of
the destruction and fall of cultures and
civilizations.”

“Yes, that is because people believe in

progress and culture,” said G. “There is no
progress whatever. Everything is just the
same as it was thousands, and tens of
thousands, of years ago. The outward form
changes. The essence does not change.
Man remains just the same. ‘Civilized’ and
‘cultured’ people live with exactly the same
interests as the most ignorant savages.
Modern civilization is based on violence
and slavery and fine words. But all these
fine words about ‘progress’ and
‘civilization’ are merely words.”

“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.”

“Culture creates personality and is at

the same time the product and the result of
personality. We do not realize that the
whole of our life, all we call civilization, all
we call science, philosophy, art, and
politics, is created by people’s personality,
that is, by what is ‘not their own’ in them.”

“If we take an average cultured man,

we shall see that in the vast majority of
cases his personality is the active element in
him while his essence is the passive
element. The inner growth of a man cannot
begin so long as this order of things
remains unchanged. Personality must
become passive and essence must become
active. This can happen only if ‘buffers’ are
removed or weakened, because ‘buffers’ are
the chief weapon by the help of which
personality holds essence in subjection.”

“Contemporary culture requires

automatons. And people are undoubtedly
losing their acquired habits of
independence and turning into automatons,
into parts of machines. It is impossible to
say where is the end of all this and where
the way out—or whether there is an end
and a way out. One thing alone is certain,
that man’s slavery grows and increases.
Man is becoming a willing slave. He no
longer needs chains. He begins to grow
fond of his slavery, to be proud of it. And
this is the most terrible thing that can
happen to a man.”

-------------------------------------------------------
 -------------------------

COPYRIGHT © 1995 (updated 2008)

Greg W. Goodwin. All rights reserved.
COPYRIGHT © 2008 Greg W. Goodwin. All Rights Reserved.
Note: Please do not print a copy of this document (all or in part) or reproduce it in any way,
including reposting it in other locations on the Internet. All are violations of
international copyright laws.

November 11, 2008

Greg W. Goodwin
The Fourth Way
greg_w_goodwin@yahoo.com
YouTube Version of this essay
Discussion Group
http://ivanosokin.tripod.com/index.html
http://www.geocities.com/higheremotion/index.html