Zen, Yoga, Gurdjieff- perspectives on inner work: The Holy Planet Purgatory and its Denizens

I was asked some months ago to make some commentaries on Gurdjieff’s well-known and complex chapter in Beelzebub’s Tales to his Grandson, The Holy Planet Purgatory.

The chapter is a fascinating excursion into many ancient ideas, including understandings drawn from the yogic and Christian traditions,about the nature of our inner organization. But I’d like to speak about it in more general terms without focusing on attempts to interpret Gurdjieff’s idiosyncratic parables.

We are generally unable to understand how the entirety of all the impressions that fall into us over the course of a lifetime form a single whole. It appears to us, from the perspective of our intellect and the way it functions, as though memory and the collected impressions of Being are largely a function of thought; we remember all the stuff that has happened to us, putting it in very gross terms.

Yet the Body of Sensation and the Body of Feeling have equally powerful memory that functions a bit differently than the memory of thought. Collectively, all three of these Bodies— which are metaphysical bodies of memory, in the sense of their collected and intimately shared remembrance of the past — merge during the course of a lifetime, whether consciously or unconsciously.

All of the impressions that we form in us function in exactly the same way that hyphae function in mycelium, growing fine threads that connect the entire presence of Being together. One’s Presence gradually forms as a real thing with a quality corresponding to the density and relationship of these threads. This is not a subjective opinion about the matter, but a fact. If you really want to know how Being functions —an understanding that can only be acquired by coming into a strong relationship with this function — you cannot do it without understanding this simple fact.

What the fact tells you is that the formation of Being, which is ultimately a metaphysical entity, is mirrored by the way that physical processes form entities. This is no great surprise, but it takes some experience and some thought to understand it properly.

I’m sure by now you are asking yourself what this has to do with Gurdjieff’s concept of Purgatory.

It is in fact essential to understanding his view of the human soul. Being forms, inevitably, with the sum total of all the impressions that fall into a creature. In the case of human beings, those impressions form a quality and a level of Being different, for example, than that of a snail. But there are correspondences within human beings as well; and all of the traditions of totemic animals and their relationship to human beings come out of native traditions which recognized the correspondence between various levels of Being within humanity. Some people are more like snails; others are wolves. Some very few become actual human beings.

The sum total of impressions form a single whole thing. There is not a single impression that falls into a creature during its lifetime that can be erased from the manuscript that is written in the molecules of the organism. Even the things which are forgotten by the conscious mind, as in the case of humans, are essentially indelible. This means that all of the evil one encounters as impressions in a lifetime is just as present in Being as all of the good. This is one of the secret meanings of the otherwise rather average saying, “with much good comes much bad,” which I have heard bandied about as an adage during my entire near – lifetime career in the Gurdjieff work.

The point is that the good and the bad are both external and internal; and for the growth of the soul, the external bad — which appears to be the great enemy, because when it threatens, it sometimes threatens our biological existence — is by far the lesser of the two evils. It is the internal bad, the internal evil, that we must be on our guard for, because whether we like it or not, and no matter how many prayers we turn towards it, it is an indelible and permanent part of our Being in the same way that all the other impressions we have encountered are. The dense matter of “roots” that connects all the parts of our Being connects and integrates these parts as well; and they have their own influence on the way that the web or network of inner connections functions.

When Gurdjieff explained to his readers that no matter what souls did, they ended up developing in such a way that there was an imperfection or flaw in them that prevented them from entering directly into God’s presence (the Kingdom of Heaven) he was referring to the indelible quality of the impressions we ingest. We cannot help, given the way the quality of our Being is assembled from impressions, from having the bad in us as well as the good; one could put it in technological terms and say that evil is built into our infrastructure by the nature of our impressions. The only way that we can manage it is by making sure that the wholeness of our Being contains and has a conscious authority regarding that part; there is a great risk in every human being that it will work the other way around (that the bad will instead assert an unconscious authority), and you can see that at work in the world without even trying.

The Holy Planet Purgatory, in other words, is where we find ourselves after a lifetime of inner work, when we discover that we have within us that exact place, that planet, which is a place of astonishing beauty and great glory, formed of this impossibly dense and magnificent collection of a lifetime of impressions. In there lurk the demons as well as the angels.

If one’s inner work matures in any sense, one begins quite actively to live in this planet, rather than seeing it as an allegorical presentation. And one acquires, accordingly, the capacity to occasionally sense the glimpses of God which Gurdjieff mentions in his chapter. (I have taken to calling this capacity the capacity for seeing The Perfection.)

There is a need to become responsible for this environment. It is not an environment one comes to or has an understanding of early in life. Many different parts of ourselves need to be knit together into a different kind of fabric in order to sense the existence of this planet in us. Along the way, we learn about qualities such as Mercy and Grace which Gurdjieff doesn’t talk about so much.

Instead, he uses the word consciousness, which is actually the same thing.

Without a willingness to sense and come to terms with the whole of one’s life, attempting to understand the material in the chapter The Holy Planet Purgatory is a waste of time. No technical understanding of how things are put together will drive this car. Focusing on the technical aspects of the chapter is to assign oneself the role of a mechanic. Indeed, every instrument of technology needs mechanics who understand it and are interested in it; but the point of the car is not to have mechanics or garages.

Ultimately, every car is there to be driven by a driver.

This is an action of responsibility; and in the analogy drawn here, it is a responsibility towards the whole of one’s life in a comprehensive way that emerges organically from the entire organism.

I shall think some more on this and perhaps write a bit of additional material later on.

Ponder that for a while.

May you be well within today.

Lee