Food for thought…JG Bennett
LA. SALVATION IN WORLD 24 (PLANETARY WORLD)
In this stage we fulfil our own Destiny. This is not in time, but in eternity. We become eternally ourselves. We are liberated from accident. This is the realm of super effort. The essence must be freed from illusions of time and space: life on Earth as necessary activity only.
Immortality begins here through the formation of what Gurdjieff called the “second body”: the flowering of inward life.
True self-consciousness is obtained and awakening of the higher emotional centre. There is not only “being” but “doing.” We accomplish the task we were given to do. The Planetary World is the world of the “individual self.” In this world I seek my own perfection: everything that purifies my being and everything that liberates my will. But above all, we enter “eternity.” This is not the world of space and time. “Everything that comes into existence carries within it the seeds of its own dissolution,” said the Gautama Buddha. Such is the law of space and time. But not the law of eternity.
The Planetary World is also the world of the union of essences. Here is the true marriage, true friendship that is not subject to change.
Therefore, salvation in the planetary world means the eternal possession of:
1. Ourselves
2. Our true relationship
3. The task we are fated to accomplish.
The man who fulfils this stage is Man Number 5:
He has secured his eternal salvation.
He exists beyond time and space.
He has knowledge of immortality.
He lives in his awakened essence.
He fulfils his own fate.
He creates and has created his own being -his own self.
He knows the Self above himself but has not united with it.
This is “the third awakening.” The eternal self comes to conscious birth. The essence awakens and becomes active. Permanent “I” begins to dominate. The physical body and its senses and modes of cognition are no longer the only part which he can control. He FEELS himself in eternity. The sacrifices of the previous stage bear fruit. The dark night of the soul is seen as the dawn of the light of eternity.
-J.G. Bennett, The Way to Be Free: Talks and Conversations with Students, compiled and edited by Anthony Blake, (BennettBooks, Santa Fe, New Mexico, 2006) p. 123-124.
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