Secrets of the Solar Cycle, Part IV: the Iota-in-Waiting

I suppose that the question of the solar cycles and the way they affect us seems quite theoretical. But humanity is perpetually under these influences. That is to say, from the moment you wake up in the morning to the moment you go to bed at night—and while you are asleep – these forces are working on you. There's nothing theoretical about it. The influences are ubiquitous.

Gurdjieff was well aware of this. He even described some supposedly physical maladies such as the flu to the action of cosmic influences; and for all we know there may be far more truth to this than our sciences currently recognize. Science is only capable of understanding the physical, yet so much of what affects us is metaphysical, and can't really be measured.

It's useful, in the morning, to sit quietly without any agenda – perhaps without even sitting in some special way, but just sitting in a chair in a quite ordinary manner – and relax all the parts of one's being, including the intellect and feeling, in such a way that one becomes softer and more receptive to higher influences. These influences can be more intimately experienced first thing in the morning before the inner engines start revving and deliver us to the compulsions and obsessions of ordinary life. 

At this moment, when we're still, we can better feel the influence of finer energies flowing into us. Those energies do not flow in just from the top of the head or into the chakras. 

These energies are fine; and the receiving part of our being is correspondingly fine. It is molecular in nature. So it is not our mind or our heart or our solar plexus that receives finer energy from solar and other astral influences; it is our molecules ourselves, which causes a correspondingly fine vibration to arise in the cells themselves. 

This is what is called sensation in the Gurdjieff work; and it has little or nothing to do with ordinary sensation as we experience it. It's associated with the formation of the astral body in the Gurdjieff work because it senses astral influences. These influences are much finer and have almost nothing to do with the day-to-day functional operation of the physical body. They’re meant exclusively for the development of spiritual Being. 

The entire point of the Fourth Way is to awaken the capacity for sensing these influences much more deeply and take them into the body.

In this work, one has to grow one’s own Being. No one else can grow it for you; and you cannot grow anyone else's. Gurdjieff's comment about becoming a conscious egoist relates to this fact. One needs to become a unique iota-in-waiting, prepared to receive a fine or influence.

How do I become such a thing?

Still within — active without. 

Don't get them mixed up.

Go. and sense, and be well.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.