A whole Sensation of myself part 2
The experience the young Gurdjieff had at the artillery range speaks as to having been shifted into a higher state of consciousness. If we take his own teaching regarding his inner activity, then this experience, perhaps his first of this intensity and duration, was a connection with the higher emotional center. “…soon the intensity of feeling [emphasis added] which flooded through me, and the force of logical confrontation of my thought increased to such an extant that, at each moment, I thought and experienced more than an entire twelvemonth.” Note two things: first he uses the word feelings not emotions, this is not a minor distinction for they are not synonymous. Feelings are of a much higher level of vibration. Nor are feelings the same as sensation as he goes to great lengths to emphasize later in life. In truth we are dealing with two experiences that are not typically cognized in the waking state/fictitious consciousness that we typically live in: real feelings and what we have named “sensation” Second: what he thought and experienced was sped up many-fold as he says
Ouspensky writing in The Psychology of the Possible Evolution of Man says the centers operate at different speeds. The intellectual is the slowest; the instinctual moving center operates 30,000 times faster than the intellectual and the emotional center operates 30,000 times faster than the Instinctual moving center. These ratios are valid if the centers are operating with the proper “hydrogens” In the case of the emotional center this would be hydrogen 12 and if operating at that speed it could become connected with the higher emotional center. These speeds are such that we are really speaking of a different time; where in, as Gurdjieff notes in his experience, a single moment could be equal to a year.
Getting back to the question as what the experience on the artillery range represents one must look at several facts we have been given and what may be represented by the story. We don’t really know Gurdjieff’s age but it is implied he is in his early teenage years 14ish is my guess. This age for boys is typically one of unbridled and poorly understood sexual desire, a desire resultant of the natural processes by which physical food is converted to hydrogen SI 12. Taken literally, the story is based upon an absurd notion of winning the attention of young girl in a sort of duel to determine who is left alive to pursue her affections. But when the story is looked at from a sexual point of view, we have Gurdjieff in the throes of hot youth as a 14ish adolescent. He has been schooled by his tutor Dean Borsh that he must not give into these desires before he has reached the age of maturity, which Borsh states as between the age of 20-23 for men. So, we have him sheltering in a shell crater from the “explosions” occurring all around, but not directly impacting him. What the “explosions” all around him represent is key. What we are being given is that as a result of his abstinence, that is the avoidance of “explosions” as a youth, he came to, perhaps from a shock, a high state at an early age.
Open to Openness 