SOUL FOOD
SOUL FOOD
Impressions are food. What we eat, what we read, how we move, our emotions and those we encounter, all of these the lower centers consume. Some impressions are more easily digested. Others are too toxic for the machine and are rejected. Each impression carries an energy, in system language a hydrogen, that the lower centers consume. The more refined the hydrogen, the more intelligence, the more consciousness, it possesses. We can observe this quite easily. Look at your desktop or laptop computer. Now look at the accompanying image. Which one elicits a more positive emotion?
The centers receive impressions all at the same time, not simply each center receiving an impression singly. For example a meal with family or friends. There’s the food on the table, the flowers and candles, the conversation, the room in which the meal is served, the dinner service, the aroma of the food, the taste, the texture, and so on and so forth. All these impressions are received by each of the four lower centers simultaneously, and so it is that an experience is created. Because imagination and identification is the natural state of the four lower centers, all impressions that the machine receives and generates are, for the most part, received and created unconsciously.
When third eye is present, when we remember ourselves, we are able to observe the machine and it’s externals. Through repeated moments of consciousness we begin to discern the quality of hydrogens of any given impression. George Gurdjieff, with his inimitable sense of practical humor, in his explanation of hydrogens to Peter Ouspensky, observed that a baked potato is more intelligent that a raw potato, because a cooked potato serves as food for us, whereas we cannot eat, let alone digest, a raw potato.
When we speak about conscious hydrogens we refer to the energy of higher emotional and higher intellectual centers. In works of art produced by individuals who have fully functioning higher centers, the same is produced in us. Indeed these impressions are soul food. How to access higher centers, and experience conscious impressions? We prepare ourselves to receive inconspicuous wordless presence through the non-expression of negative emotions, self-remembering and transforming suffering.
The food you feed your soul must be supreme.
~ Pindar
Last Judgement, detail, Fra Angelico
Museo di San Marco, Florence, Italy
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