Notes on Laws of the Inner Cosmos, Part VII: Reciprocal Feeding

Ramses II making an offering to Isis

The Louvre

Inscription reads, Isis the mother of God, mistress of the sky and Egypt.

.…all the results of the ‘evolution’ and ‘involution’ of these active elements, actualizing the Trogoautoegocratic principle of existence of everything existing in the Universe by means of reciprocal feeding and maintaining each other’s existence, produce the said common-cosmic process ‘Iraniranumange’, or, as I have already said, what objective science calls ‘common-cosmic-exchange-of-substances.

—Beelzebub’s Tales, P. 760

Gurdjieff called this law the World-Law of Reciprocal Feeding of Everything Existing— quite a mouthful.

“Everything existing” has both metaphysical and physical connotations. The physical and metaphysical themselves are reciprocally feeding entities. They not only depend on one another for existence; they also feed on one another. In this sense a Being under this law—"everything existing"—needs to make a choice between allowing the physical to feed on the metaphysical, or the metaphysical to feed on the physical. This can also be construed as the choice between feeding one's self by the spiritual (what flows inwards into Being inside) or the natural (what flows into Being from outside.) According to Gurdjieff, in life there is only just so much food, or energy, to go around. One has to choose how to use it.

In the correct ordering of things, the natural is food for the spiritual. Gurdjieff’s taking in of impressions is the action of the natural feeding the spiritual; the natural in this case is the impressions we take in. 

The converse possibility of the spiritual feeding the natural has a negative context when considered from the action of the law in an individual’s personal inner state. When the natural feeds on the spiritual, it's a form of vampirism: a lower creature feeding on the blood, the hanbledzoin, of the soul. It enslaves it, parasitizes it, and can even extinguish it. When the natural feeds itself on the spiritual the spiritual is progressively starved; it grows thin and weak. This creates, in human beings, weakness and an even greater-than-usual disposition towards evil. In very broad terms this is what the Christian tradition refers to as sin. One notes here that the classic inversion of that state is asceticism, where the natural is starved in order to feed the spiritual. 

This brings us to a conceptual bridge between our microcosmic and macrocosmic natures.  Our molecules feed our being just as we feed our molecules; the bridge between molecular consciousness and human consciousness is mediated by organic sensation, which acts as a reciprocal food affecting both the macro- and micro- inner cosmoses of a human being. We can thus understand sensation—which accumulates and acquires organic properties by the concentration of materials “in orbit” in the psyche and body—as a function of the coalescing of the “moon,” or, gravitational stabilizer of inner Being. This relies on further reciprocal feeding to continue the spiritual development of an individual.

Examining this in practical terms involves seeing everything as food of one kind or another; and indeed, the law of reciprocal feeding is the shorthand summary of the entire chapter in In Search of the Miraculous in which Gurdjieff describes not one, but three kinds of human food—ordinary food, air, and impressions. 

Yet these are the mere outward manifestations of the process of eating and digestion. Inner reciprocal feeding involves the “exchange of substances” which Gurdjieff discusses in so many ways in Beelzebub’s Tales. We are, to the last man and woman, perpetually engaged in this molecular activity, yet remain barely aware of it in the course of day to day living. Were we better aware of the way in which we feed ourselves inwardly, we might be horrified by our usual activities.

The idea of eating as a sacred activity is an ancient one; religious rituals commonly center around meals, as exemplified by the holy communion of the Christian church. Gurdjieff held eating ordinary food to be an exceptionally sacred act, since, as he put it, every time one does it one puts oneself into direct, immediate, and physical touch with the processes that support the universe. There are many stories about the prodigious meals and endless toasts to idiots at Gurdjieff’s apartment in Paris. 

At such meals, two salient features are gathering together and recognition. These can be taken as outward correspondences to inward conditions: we gather our attention and we see ourselves. We concentrate our force and acknowledge our existence. These actions are of themselves the feeding of the soul, the concentration of the inward parts of ourselves. Meals represent a participation in sacred and universal cosmic processes to the extent that these two forces of gathering together and recognition are active. They’re forces of relationship, and the sacred is built of relationship and the meaning it imparts. 

Because the universe is a fractal structure, any fragment of this meaning is equal to the meaning of the entire cosmos. 

There’s a mystery encoded in the action of reciprocal feeding; we approach it inwardly as we work to see how the various parts of our psyche and our soul feed one another. Left to itself, this work is passive and automatic; but if we make an effort to actively participate in an inward manner (“I am”) it serves in a different way. Reciprocal feeding acts on everything existing; in an inner sense, this means my entire Being is engaged, inwardly, in this action. In an allegorical sense, inwardly, there are meals of every kind. 

Gurdjieff’s Trogoautoegocratic process means, roughly speaking, automatically, I continually feed myself.

Inwardly, I feed myself. This is a never-ending process that appears to me to be “thinking,” but is actually the process of the ingestion of food.

Unaware, I eat anything that comes along. 

Aware, I decide whether I’ll eat what is good, or excrement. 

May your heart be close to God, 

and God close to your heart.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.