A Planetary Sense of Being—Part I: The Cosmologically Magnetic Nature of Being

Christ, from the Tympanum at St. Foy in Conques

I wish to become conscious of my existence. If my attention is as usual, dispersed, I feel myself as a form, as matter, a person. When my attention becomes finer and my perception keener, I feel myself as a mass

of energy in movement, a body of energy. Currents of moving particles pass through me, whose movement does not stop. I sense myself no longer as matter with a solid form, but as energy animated by vibrations

that never cease. I feel this energy as if it were magnetized, drawn toward unknown ends. I try to observe this attraction pulling in different directions. I feel that there is no current that is my thought, nor any current that is my feeling, or my sensation, my movement. There is no such thing as each person's thought, each person's feeling. Rather, there is a current of force maintained in a certain sphere by what attracts it and makes it gravitate there. It is necessary to pass beyond.

Jeanne De Salzmann, The Reality of Being, p. 234

In The Sixth Sense, I explained at some length why organic sensation is the essential sixth sense that man needs to develop in order to create a foundation for spiritual being. Without it, the other five senses aren’t enough.

 This sixth sense binds us to the planet through a sensation of Being which is integrated with the magnetic fields of the earth itself. This in turn binds us to other essential magnetic fields that propagate throughout the solar system as the result of interactions between the planets – and of course our own moon — but more than anything else, the sun. A practical experience of this expands on the understanding of man’s place in the Ray of Creation based on Gurdjieff’s theories on the subject. 

After enough experience with sensation, lunar energy, and solar energy, and the way in which sensation integrates with these two influences on the surface of the planet within an individual being, a certain form of objective insight begins to develop. 

First of all, there’s no doubt that what Gurdjieff said about these matters to Ouspensky is true; and secondly, much of the crafted allegory in Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson could only come from a person with direct experience. 

We’re magnetic beings — in fact, electromagnetic beings. Everything that we experience, think, and do arises from electromagnetic fields; and to consider ourselves as being in any way separated from them, both those within ourselves, those on the planet, and those which spread throughout the solar system is fundamentally impossible. 

 What was not foreseen in Gurdjieff’s day was how quantum physics could affect our understanding of this. Some of the things that Gurdjieff said neatly dovetail into understandings that have recently emerged from quantum physics, such as the fact that emanations and radiation are different, and that  emanations propagate instantly.

 What the experiment at the link tells us, in essence, is that the universe at the quantum level is a single entity that doesn’t exist in time (it must be called eternal, Eckhart’s realm of God’s existence outside time) – everything in it is connected instantaneously, irrespective of distance. This is also, of course, supported by the phenomenon of quantum entanglement ( Einstein’s spooky action at a distance), in which particles separated by distance transmit information between each other instantaneously. 

 We emerge from and live within a quantum “soup.”  Although it manifests as separated states of Being, it’s actually a single state. Harmonic resonances across the entire range of energetic interactions are what determine the level of Being: how much awareness is manifest. 

Although awareness is manifest across the entire range of the system of Being (see my posts on metaphysical humanism) it concentrates in nodes across the spectrum.

Greater concentrations of vibration lead to  more intensified instances of Being through intelligent action.

 It’s difficult to understand why the universe is arranged this way, except to say that God created it. Yet we can understand some interesting things about our own nature from an examination of the way our sensation interacts with the foundational magnetism of the planet and the inspirational magnetism of the sun. We stand between the two; and of course this situation is variously alluded to in numerous ancient metaphysical systems. 

Without, however, understanding the organic sensation of Being from a direct and personal point of view, the question remains entirely theoretical.

All of the organisms on the earth are tied to its magnetic resonances. Intelligence in organic life (intelligence must be understood as not being limited to intellect alone)  arises from the magnetic resonance of their microscopic molecular arrangements, along with its interaction with the magnetic resonance of the planet, which takes place on a macroscopic scale. 

These microscopic interactions are so impossibly complex that they defy description; but  if you’re interested in a taste of it, read the article untangling the formation of DNA loops in the March 2019 issue of Scientific American. One can see the inherent workings of an extraordinary intelligence in the action of the DNA molecule; traditionally illustrations of it as spirals on a page are childishly simple and basically useless. DNA is still for the most part completely unfathomable; an organism in its own right, interactive, dynamic, and in constant movement.

 Remember that this extraordinary molecule-creature emerges from quantum fields of magnetic resonation just as much as all of the macroscopic entities (living beings) that it produces; and even though it exists entirely on the molecular scale, a phenomenal intelligence is embedded in it. That phenomenal intelligence, by the way, contains the entirety of expression of intelligence on the scales above it, which is another situation worth considering. This molecule is the package from which emerges all known forms of life, and all of the ways that it can experience and think. 

Every single potentiality that we see in the living world is encoded a priori in DNA itself. If one could truly read the molecule and understood it, one would see that it is a book in which everything that can ever happen in the world of organic life is already written. A true reading of that book would be able to predict every potentiality that organic life can realize in its current form, along with all of the things that it can think and do.

Part two of five of in this series will publish on May 30. 

Wishing the best for you on this day,

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.