SCALE: As above, so below -- 1
- Rhonda Smith
- 2 days ago
- 8 min read
To listen to God in silence is not to hear a voice from above.
It is to feel a resonance within
as if something vast is remembering itself through you.
Meister Eckhart
Scale is comparison of sizes. It is the idea of something immensely larger than us or intensely smaller, using ourselves as the reference point. Were it not for scale as an ordering of phenomenon, our minds might be flooded by confusion about a lack of place. Yet, as well as position, scale indicates movement in a constant telescoping, that is, ongoing exchange. It is reciprocal feeding. Gurdjieff calls it the “ansanbuliazar”—“Everything issuing from everything and again entering into everything.” 1
Gurdjieff’s book, All and Everything, Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson, is SCALE in all caps. It is written from the viewpoint of a distant planetarian who is watching humans on Earth, those ill-gotten “slugs,” creatures who cause strange puffs of smoke to arise, which we later understand is the smoke from the guns of humans shooting each other (a weeping point in the book). Seeing Earth from afar, we are put immediately at the observer’s distance. We learn that Earth is that point farthest in our universe from the Absolute. (We feel some despair on hearing this.) And in this grand, complex scale of the book, every cosmic law is described along with all functionings of human life, malodious or of the highest goodness.
All and Everything functions also on another level, in which many of the described cosmic laws and events can be taken as analogy for my individual development. If there is understanding to be had, it is by deep decoding, meaning I must live my experience fully to understand—all centers present. It is necessary to comprehend this collapsing and expanding of scales as the opportunity for analogy to myself. For example, there is the cosmic Ray of Creation; might it also be understood as a map of how I am made? None of my understanding will come quickly; the pace reflects my slow and labored evolving.
If there is understanding to be had, it is by deep decoding, meaning I must live my experience fully to understand—all centers present.
And then we have one more scale: simple, a fable. It works much better than if this were written as a physics textbook. We readers are like the cinema goers of old (Cinema Paradiso) who practically riot when the celluloid film breaks and who won’t leave until it is repaired. We must have the end of the story; the pull of the unknown is a basic human functioning [shared with cats].
What we have in All and Everything is like the enneagram’s three octaves. Because of this structure of different scales, we can find entry points to understanding, even into parts that seem far too opaque at first. The book repeatedly touches all our parts. We begin to comprehend that Beelzebub’s Tales will open further the gaps in our understanding. It is akin to when we open the windows after a long winter and are overwhelmed by letting in air and light.
We can examine two ideas of scale in Gurdjieff’s teaching. One is the Ray of Creation. The other is of microbes in a glass of water. (Later, we will look at microbes in our gut.)
First, the most fundamental idea of scale is “As above, so below,” which holds a consecrated position in terms of the processes to which we belong. And in this phrase, which includes reciprocity, reception, emanations, evolution, involution, and creation, we encounter scale. Can there be in us a drop of a drop of the Divine? It is the whole reason to expand our personal orbit.
How to realize that within me might be anything resembling a touch of the Divine.
Gurdjieff expresses scale in many ways.
“You must above all remember that, although after the consequences of the properties of the organ kundabuffer had begun to be crystallized in them, their Reason became quite automatic, nevertheless the presence of each one of them has always contained the germ of all the possibilities for the crystallization, of corresponding being-data which could later serve for the engendering and functioning of Objective Reason—that Reason which should be in the common presence of three-brained beings of all natures and all external forms, and is none other than the ‘representative of the Very Essence of Divinity.” 2
“… (T)hat is, beings having in their presences every possibility for becoming particles of a part of Divinity.” 3
“Later, when everything had been worked out and organized with the participation of these brethren of the former Tchaftantoori Brotherhood, the Very Saintly Ashiata Shiemash sent these same brethren to various places and entrusted them, under his general guidance, with the task of spreading the idea that in the ‘subconscious’ of all men there are crystallized and always present the data manifested from Above for engendering in them the divine impulse of genuine Conscience; and that only he who acquires the ‘ableness’ to let the action of these data participate in the functioning of that consciousness in which he passes his everyday existence has, in an objective sense, the honest right to be called and really to be a genuine son of our Common Father Creator of all that exists.” 4
And Jeanne de Salzmann in The Reality of Being, “My True Nature”:
“I want to know what I really am in my true nature, my very essence, in which all my possibilities are contained. I wish to return to the source of what is, of the only reality of the 'self.' The self belongs to the Absolute. I cannot exist outside the Absolute, outside the Self of the Absolute. And yet I consider myself outside the Absolute, and I address it as outside me. I confuse the true self with the body and its functions. But the true self is like space—unattached, pure, infinite.” 5
Yet we are given a gift, our birthright to become conscious beings, to have a whole I. I AM. It is what melds us to the Ray and brings us into this grand scale.
How to realize that within me might be anything resembling a touch of the Divine. When we study the Ray of Creation, for instance, we realize that emanations from the Divine Source spread out in ever larger circles. We see how impulse and materiality flow, but on our end of the universe, we are very distant from this original stream. Yet we are given a gift, our birthright to become conscious beings, to have a whole I. I AM. It is what melds us to the Ray and brings us into this grand scale. We have unrealized possibility. In the diagram of the Ray, humans transect the vertical line with a lateral octave, integral to the functioning of organic life on Earth.
"And so, only he, who consciously assists the process of this inner struggle and consciously assists the 'nondesires' to predominate over the desires, behaves just in accordance with the essence of our COMMON FATHER CREATOR HIMSELF; whereas he who with his consciousness assists the contrary, only increases HIS SORROW.6
As shown in the diagram of the Ray of Creation, there is a movement from Do to Do, as realized on different scales of existence. The later Do emerges from the previous one. Energy and material find form. We can look for understanding in one of the greatest of life’s creations—the seed—which contains the beginning and the end, the potential energy and the to-be-born material representation. Here, the entire cycle of life unfolds, but without the unknown details and vagaries of fate, the accidents to come. Germination times have included 1300 years for a sacred lotus seed, and so claimed, after 4000 years, a Turkish lentil sprouting.
Without knowing it, we have entered the cosmic scale by dint of our stunned recognition that life can be held in one form for so long before manifesting. When I absorb this passing action—from the Absolute, to All Worlds, from All Worlds to All Suns, and eventually to our Sun—I see that the growth of the Ray of Creation depends on organic life on Earth of which we are a part. Perhaps in letting this idea percolate into the sensitivity of our individual atmosphere, we perceive the touch of invisible hands.
In the Ray of Creation, Gurdjieff presents scale in this kind of spine of the cosmos. From P. D. Ouspensky’s In Search of the Miraculous, we hear Gurdjieff’s voice on the matter:
“The chain of worlds, the links of which are the Absolute, all worlds, all suns, our sun, the planets, the earth, and the moon, forms the ‘ray of creation’ in which we find ourselves. The ray of creation is for us the ‘world’ in the widest sense of the term. Of course, the ray of creation does not include the ‘world’ in the full sense of the term, since the Absolute gives birth to a number, perhaps to an infinite number, of different worlds, each of which begins a new and separate ray of creation ... (Our Milky Way) consists of a number of suns, but of this number we select one sun which is nearest to us, upon which we immediately depend, and in which we live and move and have our being.
"Each of the other suns means a new breaking up of the ray, but we cannot study these rays in the same way as our ray. Further, within the solar system the planetary world is nearer to us than the sun itself, and within the planetary world, the nearest of all to us is the earth, the planet on which we live. We have no need to study other planets in the same way as we study the earth. It is sufficient for us to take them all together, that is to say, on a considerably smaller scale than we take the earth.
“The number of forces in each world, 1, 3, 6, 12, and so on, indicates the number of laws to which the given world is subject.
“The fewer laws there are in a given world, the nearer it is to the will of the Absolute; the more laws there are in a given world, the greater the mechanicalness, the farther it is from the will of the Absolute. We live in a world subject to forty-eight orders of laws, that is to say, very far from the will of the Absolute and in a very remote and dark corner of the universe. In this way the ray of creation helps us to determine and to realize our place in the world.” 7
Can we consider that a Ray of Creation also lives inside us, or that our various parts can be analogous to the Ray? The central question that comes to mind is What is our sun and what is our moon? Especially when we think of the moon as the growing end of the Ray and at the same time the voracious eater. Gurdjieff speaks of the planets and moon as living beings. “The intelligence of the sun is divine, but the earth can become the same, …[though it is] not guaranteed.” 8
Can we follow this on our own level as the search for a conscious life?
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1 Gurdjieff, G. I. All and Everything, Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson, “The Holy Planet Purgatory” (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1950), 761.
2 Gurdjieff, 815.
3 Gurdjieff, 452
4 Gurdjieff, 368
5 de Salzmann, Jeanne, The Reality of Being: The Fourth Way of Gurdjieff (Boulder: Shambhala, 2011), 172.
6 Gurdjieff, 372-373
7 Ouspensky, P.D., In Search of the Miraculous (New York: Harcourt, Inc., 1949), 80-81.
8 Ouspensky, 25.