Trees have an important role in maintaining what Gurdjieff calls organic life on earth. They are briefly examined here as a source of ongoing energetic contribution to the earth. They have been deeply symbolic to older cultures that view nature as a sacred trust. Gurdjieff presented the concept of organic life on earth as the planet’s “organ of perception” (1) with all occurrences on earth creating radiations that are needed by the sun, moon, and planets. Likewise organic life on earth receives influences from the sun, moon, and planets all the time.
“Organic life is an indispensable link in the chain of worlds which cannot exist without it, just as it cannot exist without them.” (2) The concept also includes the idea of growth, of evolution and involution. Organic life on earth supports one-, two-, and three-brained beings (us), a hierarchy of life according to the roles each brain system fulfills. Every role is necessary to life.
It is telling that what appears to be a mute, immobile, expendable plant fulfills its functions, surmounting myriad obstacles, while we find it so difficult to fill our destiny, or, if you will, our contribution.
In All and Everything (3), Gurdjieff speaks of reciprocal feeding of everything in the Universe, the constant motion that allows the Universe to exist: … the beautiful and simple Ansanbuliazar, that is, “everything issuing from everything and again entering into everything.” (4) The creative force, through differentiation and disruption, assists growth. Likewise, the involutionary direction completes the pair, “and again entering into everything.”
As members of organic life, trees fund the atmosphere so that we can breathe; they provide many protections. How we treat them reflects our ignorance. It is telling that what appears to be a mute, immobile, expendable plant fulfills its functions, surmounting myriad obstacles, while we find it so difficult to fill our destiny, or, if you will, our contribution. The trees adapt so intelligently. If we just know a bit more, we might be filled with wonder for the forest.
From ancient times, the tree has symbolized the uniter of heaven and earth. Once earth became an oxygenated planet, trees developed into intermediaries for organic life on earth by supporting the elemental composition of air that humans and animals breathe. The beautiful symmetry of the tree that humans find so compelling is the fractal vitality of branches reaching into the sky mirrored by spreading roots below ground. A tree is a system that receives light from the sun and feeds other trees and fungi, holds and aerates the soil, and supports birds, insects, and animals. In death trees become food for many organisms as they change back into soil. Trees are also major factors in the oceans’ healthy functioning by providing necessary minerals.
You must remember that there is nothing dead or inanimate in nature. Everything in its own way is alive, everything is intelligent and conscious.
The cycles embody the process of reciprocal feeding. And there is, too, this image of alignment, much as we humans are meant to exemplify, the standing between two realms. Taking in this impression of a tree’s teeming life with its largely invisible processes, what occurs underground, in the air, and at the border of land and sea, we are confronted with the fact of mighty capacity within an immobile being. All this functioning by this one organism for the sake of the planet might make us wonder what we are doing for the earth.
In In Search of the Miraculous, Ouspensky quotes Gurdjieff:
“We must now realize that the density of vibrations and the density of matter express many other properties of matter. For instance, till now we have said nothing about the intelligence or the consciousness of matter. Meanwhile the speed of vibrations of a matter shows the degree of intelligence of the given matter. You must remember that there is nothing dead or inanimate in nature. Everything in its own way is alive, everything is intelligent and conscious. Only this consciousness and intelligence is expressed in a different way on different levels of being -- that, is, on different scales. But you must understand once and for all that nothing is dead or inanimate in nature, there are simply different degrees of animation and different scales.“ (5)
And this from Gurdjieff’s All and Everything:
“It is most wisely foreseen by Him that Nature should adapt the difference of exterior form of beings in accordance with those conditions and circumstances under which the process of existence of various forms of life are pre-ordained to flow …
“If it occurred to you to go and jump into the water you would instantly choke and drop to the bottom and become hors d’oeuvre for those same fishes, who, in that sphere, proper for them, would naturally be infinitely stronger than you.
“A very good example for the clarification of this is your ‘own-donkey’ now standing tied up in your stable.
“Even as regards this own-donkey of yours, you abuse the possibilities given you by our Common Creator since if this donkey is now compelled to stand unwillingly in your stable, it does so only because it is created two-brained; and this again is because such an organization of the whole of its presence is necessary for the common-cosmic existence upon planets." (6)
... in order to receive the finer, we have to provide our own organism as sensitive, finer.
In these two passages we sense how Gurdjieff’s organic life is organized and functions, and the human’s role in it. The first passage from Ouspensky’s In Search of the Miraculous echoes ancient animist ways still practiced by some traditions, many of which Western civilization has decimated. But it also contains his science of vibrations, noting that finer vibrations are denser. We might say that a teaspoon is worth forty buckets.
These finer vibrations are what might come down to us from above if we are sensitive and receptive. It is an example of reciprocal feeding; in order to receive the finer, we have to provide our own organism as sensitive, finer. And the word “scale” is very important, what we strive for on a higher level than we are.
Yet he also indicates the mutuality of relationship: that everything is alive, intelligent, and conscious. It is very much like the concept offered by scientists James Lovelock’s and Lyn Margulis’s Gaia:
“The Gaia hypothesis … proposes that living organisms interact with their inorganic surroundings on Earth to form a synergistic and self-regulating, complex system that helps to maintain and perpetuate the conditions for life on the planet. …The Gaia hypothesis was initially criticized for being teleological and against the principles of natural selection.” [Even with later additions,] the Gaia hypothesis continues to attract criticism.” (7)
We can see that Gurdjieff’s organic life and the Gaia hypothesis both propose an interconnected, vibrant universe in constant motion, in constant invention and adaptation. No member of the biosphere is insignificant; each has an important part in the whole. It does matter that a species goes extinct. As well, nature adapts. But we already encounter tipping points. Entire microsystems disappear.
We can see that Gurdjieff’s organic life and the Gaia hypothesis both propose an interconnected, vibrant universe in constant motion, in constant invention and adaptation.
But to see how individual roles are fulfilled, let’s return to the trees.
In Ben Rawlence’s book, Treeline: the Last Forest and the Future of Life on Earth, the author visits the biochemist and botanist Diana Beresford Kroeger in Ontario where she and her husband have made an arboretum on their land with tree species from all over North America. She is a renowned scientist who was raised in Ireland under the ancient Brehon laws. She talks of the boreal, or very northern, forests as being the most adaptable and recoverable biome and says the balsam poplar is the anchor of the Canadian boreal forest. It is a sacred tree for the First Nations peoples, “and yields a strong medicine, the strongest of all the northern tree species … the most powerful because it is extreme conditions, drought, and cold that cause the trees to produce these chemicals for their own protection.” (8)
The cracks in the bark funnel water to the roots. Its shade protects the understory. Kroeger has studied how the buds on the female balsam warm in the spring, melting the resin around the bud. The resin molecules then launch into the air as esters and terpenoids. “These are aerosols, and this flush of tons of oleoresin into the atmosphere from millions of poplars of the boreal every spring, acts like a health shield for all life on the planet. The aerosols, she has discovered, are expectorant, anti-inflammatory, anti-bacterial, and antifungal. The oleoresins contain [chemicals], which are essential for human brain, liver, and glandular development. They are the building blocks of the brain and form the brown fat in the body, essential for humans to withstand cold by shivering. The shiver reflex metabolizes fat as fuel. The tree that has learned to withstand cold helps us to survive in the same conditions.” (9) These trees also produce a chemical that aids the heart and cleans the arteries, that aid female fertility, and reduces blood pressure. The Cree have long used the sap to treat diabetes. (10)
... we are loved by the trees or, to speak less provocatively, we are well protected, literally granted immunity from our own ills.
This brings to mind the recently adopted custom in Japan of “forest bathing” to relieve stress. So, in a sense, though we are not anthropomorphizing here, we are loved by the trees or, to speak less provocatively, we are well protected, literally granted immunity from our own ills. It should be noted that both Ms. Beresford and another Canadian scientist, Susan Simard, who wrote Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest, stress the importance of the mother tree, or oldest tree member of a forest, for passing on that “epigenetic” knowledge that will let younger trees identify invasive diseases and other threats. While Simard apparently coined this term “Mother Tree,” it is in dispute amongst scientists; however, the value of the older trees in the forest cannot be easily disputed. They foster the growth of the younger trees through neural networks that in image are so much like the human neural network that the similarity can shock us into relationship.
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1 Ouspensky, P.D., In Search of the Miraculous, 138
2 Ouspensky, 305
3 Gurdjieff, G.I., All and Everything, Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson, “The
Arch Absurd,” 1950 edition, 137
4 Gurdjieff, “The Holy Planet Purgatory,” 761
5 Ouspensky, 317
6 Gurdjieff, “Beelzebub’s Second Descent on Earth,” 193-195
7 The Gaia hypothesis/WIKIPEDIA
8 Rawlence, Ben, The Treeline: The Last Forest and the Future of Life on Earth,
178-183
9 Rawlence, 182-183
10 Rawlence, 183