The moon at present feeds on organic life, on humanity. Humanity is a part of organic life; this means that humanity is food for the moon. ~ G I Gurdjieff

In my long history of speaking to people about Gurdjieff’s ideas, the concept that at death men go to the moon or that the moon feeds on men after their death is one of the least popular. I have seen people who, when introduced to the system, latch onto this idea, and become obsessed to the point of rejecting the entire esoteric foundation of Gurdjieff’s rendering of the work because they cannot accept the picture of their self inhabiting a barren afterlife confined to the moon. To make matters worse many people inside the movement have replaced their religious idea of hell with the image of souls imprisoned on the moon. And statements like this from Gurdjieff himself seem to endorse this view.

The souls that go to the moon, possessing perhaps even a certain amount of consciousness and memory, find themselves there under ninety-six laws, in the conditions of mineral life, or to put it differently, in conditions from which there is no escape apart from a general evolution in immeasurably long planetary cycles. The moon is ‘at the extremity,’ at the end of the world; it is the ‘outer darkness’ of the Christian doctrine ‘where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. ~ Gurdjieff

I would say that the word soul is misleading in this context. According to the work, a soul is, to use Gurdjieff’s phrase, ‘a luxury.’ It is a focus, and eventually, a crystallization of energies. A soul is the result of specific work with attention and transformation. It is made up of matter (hydrogens) that belongs to the world of the sun (World 12), so a soul would not find itself on the moon because its energy or make-up belongs to a higher world. It is probably better to say that, under certain conditions, a man’s being can be food for the moon. In this context, we can define being as memories or identities that survive death.

Man as Microcosmos

In order to understand the theory of the moon’s role in conscious evolution, we first need to understand the idea that man is a microcosmos. Simply put the concept of man as a microcosmos means that man has the inner possibility of experiencing different worlds. The worlds that are possible for a man to inhabit are mirrored by five worlds that make up the energetic worlds that permeate the earth.

Human life, or being alive, can be seen as a force that holds together the five worlds into a single vessel.

At death the force that holds these worlds together is broken, and so it becomes possible for individual centers of identity, which are formed around the experience of each world, to exist without being bound to the others. The theory is that these energies or identities will be attracted to the source of their influence. In other words, an identity, if it is to have an existence after death, will be limited in scope (freedom of movement) to the world that corresponds to the energies in which the identity was focused or crystallized. The most limited world is the moon, and the least limited (most free) is the world of all suns (our galaxy).

World 96. World 96 functions with the energy (hydrogens) of the moon, and manifests as false personality. False personality is an accidental collection of I’s that are based on our upbringing, education, opinions, negative emotions, vices, and mechanical strengths and weaknesses. Opinions are a good example of a manifestation of false personality. If I express a liberal opinion, it is common for others to react by either expressing solidarity with my opinion or by expressing an opposing conservative opinion. Opinions are a learned response and express a superficial part of our being.

World 96 doesn’t only exist on the moon, it also exists here on earth. The ray of creation suggests that the moon is an undeveloped planet, a planet of stone and minerals without an overlay of organic life, world 24. It is in a lower place in the ray of creation than the earth. In Eastern esoterism, an identity that has exhausted its possibilities is returned to the world of stone and minerals (the geological world), which is represented as the lowest form in the evolution of consciousness; it is, in a word, sent back to the beginning of possible development. The theory from Gurdjieff is that the moon is essentially an unborn planet and that it needs to feed on energy produced on earth, in the same way an unborn child is nourished by its mother.

Aspects, or I’s, of false personality form an identity through repetition combined with negativity or suffering. The suffering can be real or imagined. Suffering and negativity intensify whatever is uppermost in our being at the moment we suffer, so opinions, when they are combined with anger, frustration, or pain, are strengthened. If these opinions are strengthened often enough, they will form an identity that becomes more and more the center of gravity of our reactions. In a real sense we become those opinions. At the far end of this process, it is possible for a group of false personality I’s to crystallize. What this means is that the person loses the possibility to experience higher worlds. Their whole experience, every waking moment, becomes caught in I’s based on misunderstanding and negativity. This is a very unfortunate situation for the individual because he will no longer be able to take part in basic human compensations like love, sympathy, and friendship, as these emotions require a working (or healthy) essence.

Personality is a necessary part of conscious evolution, but it is a poor haven for identity. Fortunately, wrong crystallization (crystallization of false personality) is not common because it requires a very narrow focus of experience as well as a near continual state of negativity. The process takes time and more often than not people die before crystallization is complete.

World 48. World 48 functions with the energy of the earth and is manifested in man as true personality. True personality is the antidote to false personality. It is made of I’s and attitudes, but it is formed with intention. It is said that true personality is designed to fail. What this means is that true personality, if it is formed correctly, does not create an identity for itself. It is made up of attitudes and knowledge that serve higher worlds, in particular worlds 12 and 6. True personality I’s are often simple. ‘This is identification.’ ‘This is imagination.’ ‘Remember yourself.’ ‘Be kind.’

Modern psychology practices are often an attempt to create a new personality that is based on positive qualities rather than on trauma and insufficiencies. The psychiatrist becomes the teacher and recommends attitudes and exercises that help the patient remove his identity from dangerous attitudes and negativity. The difference between psychoanalysis and the esoteric process of conscious evolution is where the new identity is ultimately placed. In psychoanalysis the new identity is a new personality (in fairness it may relate to essence); in conscious evolution, a new identity is built up in the higher emotional center.

Normally whatever residual I’s remain of true personality die with the body, and since true personality feeds the earth, you could say that those residuals feed the moon because man is a part of organic life, which feeds the moon on a cosmic scale; only, in this case, there should be no identity built up around the manifestation of true personality.

World 24: World 24 functions with the energy of all planets and is manifested in man as essence. Essence is mechanical like false personality, but unlike false personality, essence is what we are born with, not what we acquire through upbringing and education. One of the aspects of essence is our center of gravity, whether we are primarily instinctive/moving, emotional, or intellectual. Other qualities that also make up our essence are type, race, gender, and health (whether we are naturally healthy or sickly). Essence itself cannot crystallize because it has no natural focus or will, but it is not unusual for false personality to attach itself to an aspect of essence, like race or gender, and form an identity around that feature. The racist believes that he is better than people of other races, and his belief forces him to create an identity around his race. A man who hates or undervalues women creates an identity around his masculinity.

It is fairly common today among artists and activists to define themselves by a particular aspect of their essence, usually gender, race, or sexual preference. This does not lead to actual freedom but, as long as the identity is built on openness, not on hatred and fear, it can be liberating for someone whose essence has been discriminated against, neglected, or abused. Such identities are a societal antidote to racism and discrimination. But in the long run identification with aspects of essence is limiting simply because essence dies with the body and when being is reincarnated into another essence, that essence will inevitably have different qualities. When the evolution of consciousness moves in an upward direction, it always means that being attracts a wider and more diverse experience. In order for being to move toward the Absolute, which is everything, it must shed identities that limit experience.

You can say that the body feeds the earth after it dies and is returned to the soil, but the energies that make up essence feed the planetary system because it is those influences that form essence at birth and affect essence in life.

World 12. World 12 functions with the energy of the sun and is manifested in man through the higher emotional center. We all are born with a higher emotional center, but we are not born with a soul, or, more correctly, the experience of higher consciousness that fills out a soul. (A handful of great spiritual teachers are said to have been born with a fully functioning soul, but that is not what we are talking about here.) The best way to think about it is that the higher emotional center is the place where the soul can form. The soul is made up of molecular matter and possesses all the characteristics of that matter.

Imagine human consciousness endowed with the properties of matter in such a molecular state. It could then perform many of the miracles ascribed to magicians and would in fact possess the capacities often attributed to the soul after death. It could be present in many places simultaneously, it could pass through walls, it could assume different shapes, it could enter inside other men, be aware of what was happening in their various organs, and so on. Like the musk, it might ‘haunt’ a place for years; and were a molecular body of human size endowed with the pungency of mercaptan it could make its influence felt over an area equivalent to half a continent. ~ Rodney Collin

A crystallized soul is a soul that has no need to reincarnate in a physical body after death; it is a fully functioning vehicle with the capacity to process impressions and to connect and communicate with the being of others.

World 6. World 6 functions with the energy of our solar system and is manifested in man through the higher intellectual center. Though a man is born with a higher intellectual center, he is not born with a spirit. For most people, the higher intellectual center is only accessed during moments of trauma. This is so because it takes a shock powerful enough to stun all our normal reactions in order for the higher intellectual center to manifest. The out-of-body sense and the feeling of the slowing down of time during trauma is a result of the appearance of the higher intellectual center. If the being of a man is unprepared for the emergence of the higher intellectual center, he will either pass out or go into shock. In this case, the trauma will remain in higher centers and not imprint on essence or personality. This makes the later transformation of the trauma more difficult because it will need to be retrieved before it can be transformed, and the body will resist the process of retrieval because of the obvious associations with pain and grief. In cases of post-traumatic stress disorder essence, or the body, can be haunted by the memories of a trauma and react to associations that trigger the memory of the event, even when that trauma is buried.

For a man who pursues conscious evolution, the higher intellectual center represents ultimate freedom. It is also where real knowledge can be accessed, knowledge that is not hampered by the limitations of words or other forms. For ordinary people, the higher intellectual center is simply a receptacle for impressions that rise to a specific level of intensity. These impressions are not lost with the death of the body and affect later incarnations. For example, a man who actively participates in a war in one life, who has seen all the horrors of war and is ultimately killed in battle, may, because of the impressions produced in that life, be born into a life where violence makes him sick and despondent. Over many lives, the impressions stored in the higher intellectual center acquire mass and, after many incarnations, their totality will form a being that can survive on its own.

A crystallized spirit is far from us, but in theory, we can say that it can manifest separately from the soul.

False Identities after Death

Man does not just allow the impressions of his life to wash over and affect him. Personality selects certain impressions as more relevant than others and uses these impressions to create a picture of the world and its place in it, and if this picture gains enough strength through repeated identification, then a man can form an identity around it. The purpose of a limited identity is to keep out all the impressions that contradict its picture of itself and to support impressions that reinforce that picture. It is this mechanism that blinds men to obvious facts. When facts fall on an identity that lives in a world where those facts threaten its existence, it can disregard undeniable realities. This can be plainly observed in our public political life.

After death the remnants of each of the five inner worlds that make up our being will be attracted to the sphere in which they belong. In many cases, all this means is that the energy that is trapped in each inner world will be disbursed and will feed the sphere that matches its energy. But in other cases, a certain amount of focus or identity (consciousness and memory in its most basic sense) can build up to the point that it can have an existence for a time without the automatic focus of being set in a body.

Because the moon vibrates at the same rate as false personality, it is only an identity that has collected itself around opinions, prejudices, and weaknesses that can be trapped by the moon’s mass. An existence on the moon in such a form will vary depending on the strength of the identification with the vices and desires that supported the false personality of the individual during his life. The horror of this can be easily imagined: a man whose whole identity revolved around the acquisition of money and objects while here on earth will find his self disembodied and unable to communicate in a barren world where there can be no possessions.

Since the being of man does not change with state, those cravings which obsessed a man’s being in the physical world, whether for riches, comfort, women, food or drink, would still obsess him there (after death).~ Rodney Collin from The Theory of Eternal Life

In order to understand these theories better, I want to divide cravings into subtle desires, gross desires, and false desires.

Subtle desires are desires that long for astral existence. Such desires are often the result of seeing the limitations of having a physical body. The realization that life is uncertain, that pain and suffering are part of life, and that sickness and death are inevitable, can drive a search for a spiritual life. For such longings to be fulfilled, it is important that there is an initial experience (or experiences) of higher worlds. Without such experiences, our longings for higher worlds will invent heavens that cannot possibly exist or will mix gross longings with subtle desires and imagine earthly paradises.

Gross desires are physical desires; that is, all desires that lead to a happier and more pleasurable physical life. Desires for money, health, family, friends, comfort, or beautiful objects are gross desires.

False desires are perverted gross desires. They are desires that do not lead to a happier and more pleasurable physical life.  For instance, greed has nothing to do with the actual pleasures and joys of being human. Greed is a false pleasure, it is an acquisition of money or objects that is out of proportion to the needs and pleasures of our physical and emotional life. Nobody needs a billion dollars to be happy, healthy, and to find pleasure in the human experience. Greed is a desire rooted in an idea that is based on a misunderstanding, in this case, the idea is that if a little money brings happiness and comfort, then a great amount of money will bring a greater amount of comfort and happiness.

When we desire physical impressions at the time of our death, we are, after a time, reborn in a physical body in order to resolve or to continue our work with those impressions. It is our identification with physical impressions that draws us back to the physical. Being trapped in an existence on the moon is not the fate of ordinary people who still have the possibility of goodness and understanding. They cannot incarnate on the moon after death because they have not created a self that can survive the dispersion of their lives. Most people will have a mixture of different types of desires. And unless the desires and impressions from personality are crystallized, the desire for physical existence, which is known, drives them back to physical life. After their deaths what consciousness and memory remain is reincarnated in another physical life because physical life is the only life where the possibilities they possess can flourish.

The experience of an identity being attracted to the moon is a parallel experience to reincarnation, only, in this case, consciousness cannot be reborn as human because essence, which is the basis for all human experience, has been completely replaced by personality. All its desires are connected to World 96. Instead, consciousness is reborn in a lower geological world where it can be broken down into basic elements, which can, after a time, reenter the long cycle of evolution.

From the point of view of esoteric thought, hell is not a new life of punishment but is rather a part of a limited afterlife where the life just lived is reviewed at a rapid rate. The speed of seeing our life, if it is filled with painful contradictions, lies, acts of unkindness, greed, and lust will be unbearable. In life we sometimes have moments of conscience, where we see how, in a single moment of weakness, we acted in a way that we regret. Imagine that moment intensified by a hundred times and extended over a period of six weeks; this is the hell that is spoken of in esoteric sources. The opposite experience, heaven, is the reliving of a positive, kind life.

Every human being has the potential of full consciousness because we are born with higher centers, but at the same time, we remain focused in the physical world, not in astral or mental worlds, which are natural to higher centers. The reason for this is because of an accumulated body of impressions (sanskaras)—traumas, desires, pleasures—that are the result of previous lives rooted in the physical world. In religious terms, higher centers are part of the Absolute; they are a part of His being that he shares with us. Consciousness is separate, it is an accumulation of experiences. False desires cannot pervert higher centers because false desires exist in a world of delusion and entrance into higher worlds requires a being focused on spiritual realities.

In Gurdjieff’s system of esoterism, the question isn’t whether the energies we possess in World 96 will be attracted to the moon at death; they will; the real question is whether we have created a self that is tied to those energies. If we have, then that self will be part of the package that is delivered to the moon.

The Evolution of Love

The force that plays against the formation of false identities is love. If we remove sentimentality from the exercise of love, it becomes the capacity to know another’s being. Without love, or a longing for love, we would live in a world where everyone is locked in their own limited inner world with no hope to ever share an experience or truly know another.

Self-remembering and being present are important because they give us a foundational self that makes it possible for us to practice love without the loss of self.

When we create identities without the benefit of presence, we bundle our confidences and insecurities together into attitudes that separate us from others. I am this and you are not a part of it. We become strong in keeping people out. With presence we create a self that is focused enough in itself to know others without losing itself.

Presence not only allows us to know others; it also makes it possible for higher influences to use us to further their aims. Without presence it is difficult to recognize higher influences. The importance of serving higher influences cannot be overstated. When presence is selfish, when it feeds a self that is limited by the promise of personal gain, it will lack certain basic components that are essential for a balance between consciousnesses, unity, and will—all of which are needed to create a soul.

Strictly speaking, the evolution of love is based on forming finer and finer identities beginning with true personality and ending (for man) with the higher intellectual center. In true personality love is an idea; it is not realized in any form. Love in essence is love connected with the body. Sex, for the body, is the closest the body comes to the realization of love, but even that, if it is limited to essence, is subjected to the boundaries created by mechanical attraction. Love for family is also most often generated by essence. Families share a common physical origin; this does not lessen the importance of love shared among families, but the act of loving a stranger (or an enemy, as Christ recommended) is more difficult and therefore more spiritually significant.  Essence can sympathize with another’s state, but it cannot know it by direct experience. An identity formed around the higher emotional center can begin to know another from the inside. The finer material that is natural to the higher emotional center has properties that can pervade another. Still, it must be understood that the focus of attention of the higher emotional center is self-consciousness. At the same time, the capacity to know another exists at this level. It is only when the higher intellectual center functions that energy is fine enough to know another fully. It should be noted that the element of will cannot be separated from love. Without will, consciousness, the energy of love, would be indiscriminate; that is, it would drift like a cloud from object to object inhabiting each without an aim or direction.

I have set this down step by step in the order of the progression of love, but in actual experience, it is messier. It is common for us to jump through different levels during a single experience and to experience multiple levels in a single moment. For example, sex may feed the desires of essence and the sex center, but it may also inspire the higher emotional center to enlighten the encounter. We also must not discount the role of true personality. For instance, love that is not based on attraction will likely need to begin as an ideal, maybe the ideal will be to love humanity as a whole or simply to tolerate an individual who irritates us. The ideal cannot be realized by personality, but true personality can act as a temporary will or as a reminder of our longing for higher worlds.

What we need to ask ourselves now, while we are alive, is this: where am I placing my identity? Is it in my opinions and prejudices? Is it in experiences that can only be fed by physical gratification? If we are defining ourselves by the pain and pleasure of the body or by desires of like greed or anger, then any afterlife will be, at best, frustrating, and, at worse, a prison.

It is the nature of conscious evolution that identities will be formed and discarded when they are seen to be a limitation. The mystic experience is all about dissolving identities. We move on because the walls of false identities block the expansion of love.