Notes on Laws of the Inner Cosmos, Part III: The Law of Falling

Destruction is essential. Not of buildings and things but of all the psychological devices and defences, gods, beliefs, dependence on priests, experiences, knowledge and so on. Without destroying all these there cannot be creation. It's only in freedom that creation comes into being. Another cannot destroy these defences for you; you have to negate through your own self-knowing awareness.

Krishnamurti’s Notebook, p. 11

The law of falling appears at first to relate to the way in which the spaceship Karnak and its brethren move themselves and passengers about the cosmos; but what it actually describes in inner terms most likely relates to the way in which impressions flow into the body, where they end up, and how freedom from the ordinary action of associations allows the ship (i.e., a human Being) to move in the direction it requires.

Under ordinary circumstances, the law tells us, "everything existing in the world falls to the bottom." Gurdjieff goes on to tell us that the bottom is a stability, or, the lowest points of the regions of space where forces from all directions trend, and are concentrated. These regions are further defined as suns and planets.

Given Gurdjieff's proclivity for likening man's inward state to a cosmos, when he says that "everything when dropped into space, wherever it may be, tends to fall on one or another sun or on one or another planet,” we garner an image of impressions falling into our Being and being lawfully drawn into our various parts – that is, centers. Impressions of different kinds are perceived by different inner minds. 

Gurdjieff’s saint Venoma, in a flight of ingenuity, crafts a method of avoiding the atmospheres (attitudes or predispositions) of the various suns and planets, which otherwise influence the direction in which the impressions flow. The device he uses employs pulses of energy (described as Elekilpomagtistzen, some exotic form of electricity) to destroy the atmospheres (attitudes) around the planets, so that they can’t interfere with the direction of the ship. This is a colorful allegorical picture of using attention to overcome preconceived notions, associations, and attitudes. An indifference to attitude allows an aim and direction for the ship to be established.

What this allegory indicates is that we are by law predisposed to automatically inflect new impressions by association within the parts of our inward being as they already exist. The action of the law of falling is to create the known and to draw all new impressions into it as they arrive. 

The destruction of the known (the action of the Elekilpomagtistzen on the air, gas, fog, and so on of the planets) frees the ship, so to speak, of previous associations. This allows it to acquire an intentional direction not influenced by what is already present in us.

In this sense, we see that the law of falling actually involves what we already are and the way that, by the nature of our ”mechanical“ inner gravity, that automatically influences everything we encounter in such a way that it prevents a change of inner direction. In order to be free, we need to create the unknown: and in fact this is the essence of creation. 

Creation draws the unknown into Being. 

May your heart be close to God, 

and God close to your heart.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.