Food For The Moon
This is one of the more troubling and less explained concepts of the 4th Way. In the 4th Way cosmology, creation proceeds outward and downward from a central point, called Sun Absolute. Creation passes through multiple levels, known as cosmoi or worlds and finally reaches the level corresponding to Earth. Due to special cosmic circumstance , organic life on Earth is necessary for receiving this energy of creation and transforming this into a form that is passed further along, to 'feed' the 'moon,' which is said to be growing. All this is seen as a natural process where organic Earth life, including man, performs a function in a cosmic organism, a little like bacteria perform a function in the human digestive system. The fact of mankind collectively being required to produce certain 'vibrations' or 'energies' for serving various cosmic purposes is stressed throughout Gurdjieff's Beelzebub's Tales. So called planetary influences cause mankind to fight wars and endure cataclysms so that a certain quota of energy release be fulfilled and the 'moon fed.'
Exactly what the moon represents is not described in much detail. The food in question is described as vibrations generated by intense human experience, for example the experience of violent death. While being food is inescapable, man may still modulate the quality of his contribution to the cosmic demand of vibrations. With man being less and less conscious, nature found it necessary to substitute quantity for quality of vibrations, thus leading to population explosion and increased incidence of natural catastrophy and war. From Beelzebub's Tales to his Grandson:
""And so, my dear Hassein, when it appeared that the instinctive need for conscious labor and intentional suffering in order to be able to take in and transmute in themselves the sacred substances Abrustdonis and Helkdonis and thereby to liberate the sacred Askokin for the maintenance of the Moon and Anulios had finally disappeared from the psyche of your favorites, then Great Nature Herself was constrained to adapt Herself to extract this sacred substance by other means, one of which is precisely that periodic terrifying process there of reciprocal destruction."
Gurdjieff is not alone in proposing that man feeds something else. In the following we will make a quick tour of various other sources' take on the matter:
In archaic Christianity, in the the Gospel of Thomas we have:
(60) They saw> a Samaritan carrying a lamb, who was going to Judaea. He said to his disciples: (What will) this man (do) with the lamb? They said to him: Kill it and eat it. He said to them: While it is alive he will not eat it, but (only) when he kills it (and) it becomes a corpse. They said to him: Otherwise he cannot do it. He said to them: You also, seek a place for yourselves in rest, that you may not become a corpse and be eaten.
This is at some variance with the theme of the good shepherd. This is understandable though, since the Nag Hammadi texts had not gone through the centuries of selective editing undergone by the rest of the Bible. Even so, this may be interpreted in countless allegoric ways. The core of the matter is that man is food only insofar he is "dead," which we may interpret asmechanical, without consciousness.
Castaneda, in his last book, The Active Side of Infinity, speaks of a cosmic predator that uses man as food: Man has a glowing coat of awareness which the predator eats, leaving just the bare minimum of "consciousness stuff" for mamn to remain physically alive. The predator "milks" man through arranging for constant trouble and crisis and senseless preoccupation, so as to generate flashes of awareness that it then proceeds to eat. "Seek a place for yourselves in rest in Thomas above means do not waste "soul stuff" for feeding the predator. In other words, do not react mechanically to whatever the world throws at you, or, yet in other words, "remember yourself."
Boris Mouravieff, drawing on Gurdjieff and possibly Eastern Orthodox monastic tradition, states the following:
"This task is crushing. Under normal conditions of peace, insufficient quantities of energy are transmitted to the Moon as a result of the work of human society and its surrounding fauna and flora. This necessitates interventions on the part of the Deuterocosmos, which provoke convulsions in the Tritocosmos. The aim of the latter is to increase the energy expended at this level, so as to ensure the nourishment and growth of that cosmic foetus that is the Tessaracosmos. This is, for example, the cosmic origin of wars and revolutions, of epidemics, and of all the other large-scale catastrophes that plague humanity. ... considerable conscious efforts must be made by exterior man on the esoteric plane before man can efficiently contribute as he must - by his own evolution - to the harmonious evolution of the System of Cosmoses."
The Gnostics, who also may have figured among Mouravieff's influences, maintained that the Earth and material creation in general were the product of an evil demiurge, chief of the "archons of darkness" or "princes of the air." Mouravieff calls this being or principle Absolute III and also indirectly identifies it as the Yahweh of the Old Testament, just as the Gnostics did. This Absolute III through various spirits plays humanity against itself as in a game of chess, with the effect of generating vibrations for "feeding the moon."
Various modern channeled sources speak of man being a source of psychic food for various beings. They speak of this as they would of eating bread, as a most obvious state of matters. We'll take Barbara Marciniak's Bringers of the Dawn as an example:
"Consciousness vibrates, or can be led to vibrate, at certain electromagnetic frequencies. Electromagnetic energies of consciousness can be influenced to vibrate in a certain way to create a source of food. Just as apples can he prepared and eaten in a variety of ways, consciousness can be prepared and ingested in a variety of ways. Some entities, in the process of their own evolution, began to discover that as they created life and put consciousness into things through modulating the frequencies of forms of consciousness, they could feed themselves; they could keep themselves in charge. They began to Figure out that this is how Prime Creator nourished itself. Prime Creator sends out others to create an electromagnetic frequency of consciousness as a food source for itself. The new owners of this planet had a different appetite and different preferences than the former owners. They nourished themselves with chaos and fear. These things fed them, stimulated them, and kept them in power. These new owners who came here 300,000 years ago are the magnificent beings spoken of in your Bible, in the Babylonian and Sumerian tablets, and in texts all over the world. They came to Earth and rearranged the native human species. They rearranged your DNA in order to have you broadcast within a certain limited frequency band whose frequency could feed them and keep them in power."
The idea is in no wise new, but Marciniak is rather more blunt in talking about matters where Jesus, the Gnostics, Gurdjieff, Mouravieff and even Castaneda found it necessary to tread somewhat carefully.
Also at the modern end, we have the UFO phenomenon. To make sense of the abduction phenomenon we cannot very well claim that this were scientific research. This sounds rather more like a systematic exploitation or breeding program. The phenomenon appears to be partly physical, yet not entirely so. Jacques Vallee states:
"The UFO Phenomenon exists. It has been with us throughout history. It is physical in nature and it remains unexplained in terms of contemporary science. It represents a level of consciousness that we have not yet recognized, and which is able to manipulate dimensions beyond time and space as we understand them."
As concerns the idea of man being psychic and sometimes physical food, the reader may read up on the abduction phenomenon. This is however extremely confused and we may only say that this is not so by chance.
The practice of sacrifice to various gods goes throughout all ages. The sacrifice phenomenon goes from having a religiously flavored way to eat meat to complicated and ritually strict forms of human sacrifice. In the latter category, the practices of the Aztecs are informative. In Aztec Warfare, Western Warfare Richard Koenigsberg documents how it was a declared purpose of warfare to procure sacrificial victims for feeding the Sun god. The Western powers of WWI engaged in the precisely same activity, however more hypocritically: The author argues that the nations competed in which would sacrifice more young men, so that their blood would nourish the greatness of the nation. The name of the would-be god is changed but the idea remains. The trench battles of WWI were militarily extremely inefficient and costly in casualties. The moon always makes a profit while the nations bleed. The Aztec's peculiarity was that this was openly recognized and they were willing participants in feeding a bloodthirsty god.
Even the most cursory review of diverse cultures and ages points to the theme of man being food. Indeed, this is hard to miss, once one looks. Still, this is the strictest taboo and object of denial, where materialistic man relegates this state of matters either into ignorant past or the fringe realm of cookery.
In modern popular culture we have new renditions of the theme, maybe best exemplified by the Matrix movies. This has a dual effect: On one hand, it creates an automatic association of the theme with the realm of science fiction, a time honored technique of dealing with anything troubling. On the other hand, it provides a modernized version of the ancient theme with at least a partly valid outline of the profile of the question. Thus, as with legend in general, these works speak at different levels to different audiences. Ignorance and denial cannot be overcome by force, thus for man to benefit from any such information there must exist a certain questing spirit. The impulse is generally beneficial but again can get diverted by too much identification with specifics of one story or hero.
The QFS understands that Gurdjieff in his day needed to have recourse to allegory and could not right out say that so-called aliens or 4th density service to self entities used humanity as a sort of natural resource, to be farmed and harvested and kept forever ignorant of their fate. The 'evil magician' parable in Ouspensky's In Search of the Miraculous comes very close to saying this explicitly, though. In present day popular culture, the Matrix movies are another well known allegory for the same.
What to do about it? Gurdjieff devotes a whole chapter of Beelzebub's Tales to the impossibility of any political solution to the scourge of war. History and present bear witness to the grim correctness of his views. Man should wake up and change. In Castaneda's words, man should no longer honor the contract binding him to the predator. But the predator is internal, as is Gurdjieff's mythical "organ kundabuffer." Such a revolution is in the first place internal, yet it does not necessarily take the form of political pacifism or any other ism. The Gnostics' denouncing of the human condition cost them dearly. Gurdjieff may have taken the lesson of history to heart and refrained from including evil demiurges or bloodthirsty intrusive aliens into his cosmogony because this would on one hand have invited even greater enmity against him and secondly would have diverted attention off the central aspect of the problem: The evolution of man. The situation is not seen as a moralistic punishment for a fall. It is seen as a natural consequence of a state of being, just as it is a natural consequence of being a rabbit to sometimes get eaten by a fox. Freedom exists only on a vertical axis, where man may evolve "being" and thus escape certain otherwise inevitable laws. We might speak of outgrowing a spiritual-ecological niche or of not being "dead," as in the parable of the Gospel of Thomas.
Humanity as a whole cannot escape but groups of individuals can become aware of this situation and find an escape. This is exceedingly rare and QFS understand such an escape to mean 'graduation to 4th density' or accomplishing the 'great work' of the alchemists.
Man's tendency to subjectivity and egocentrism serves to maintain this status quo.
Gurdjieff, as well as the Cassiopaeans, maintains that man was in its earliest history intentionally modified by other forces to become impervious to reality, for better to be used as a tool. The specifics of the stories differ but the common thread is man's subjectivity and wishful thinking being an outside imposition, first genetically, then culturally enforced.
See Evil Magician, Abduction, Fall, The, Predator's Mind, Gnosticism, Cosmoses.]
