the deep question of energy is—for what is it being used?

Gurdjieff-Legacy | Images of God - Though very far removed from the Most Holy Sun Absolute, we human beings represent in our world the acme of creation—"We are images of God," said Gurdjieff. We are three-brained beings, that is, beings who have intellectual, feeling, and instinctive brains. Two-brained beings are animals; one-brained are insects. Not having a third brain, two- and one-brained beings live mechanical lives. They are what they are and cannot be or do otherwise. A lion is a lion is a lion. A snake, a snake. A bee, a bee. Because we are three-brained beings, we have the possibility of self-consciousness, will and reason, of being capable of transforming ourselves from mechanical to conscious beings. We are then beings of great possibility in which bodies other than the physical are formed leading to immortality within the solar system.

Being-Partkdolg-Duty - We receive the Omnipresent-Active-Element-Okidanokh through the three foods: physical food (which is dead) and air and impressions. We receive this energy and transmit it simply by living. But we do so mechanically. That is, we eat, breathe, and see and feel automatically, only occasionally aware of the intake of these foods. It is only when we practice being-Partkdolg-duty, aligning ourselves in a triadic configuration, that the Okidanokh contained in these foods undergoes Djartklom, a dividing of Okidanokh into three forces, active, passive, reconciling, which then blend and nourish and coat our three brains, intellectual, feeling, and instinctive, mixing with "kindred-vibrations" which are localized in the corresponding brain. These blendings are known as "being-Impulsakri" and it is the quality of these that allows the self-perfecting and coating of the various bodies. If we do not practice being-Partkdolg-duty, then there is no Djartklom (except when Great Nature needs it), and of the three brains, only the denying-brain in the spine is fed. Hence, if there is no conscious work, then the older one becomes, the more denying, the less conscious.

Being energy systems, we absorb and refine energy from lower levels to higher, for example, the eating and transformation of physical food. In maintaining ourselves, energy is used in four different ways. We use it biologically to support the various bodily functions, such as the respiratory system. We use it mechanically to run, climb, lift. We use it psychically or mentally to associate, daydream or think. And, engaged in self-transformation, we use energy to consciously inhabit ourselves and to observe what is present as impartially as possible. These direct impressions, undiluted by personalization, transform themselves to higher and higher levels. (It is all one energy, of course, but of different potencies—the energy it takes to run a race is not the same as that needed to solve a chess problem, or to self-remember.)

At a young age Gurdjieff came to what he termed "the full sensation of myself." That is, he came to the full expression of the energy of consciousness. Observing people's suffering and delusion, self-love and vanity, hatred and violence, the question arose in him: "What is the sense and significance of life on earth, and human beings in particular?" The answers of religion and science he found inadequate. He came to intuit that the ancient wisdom societies had discovered the answer. After making many journeys into remote and dangerous areas, he finally discovered in Egypt an ancient, esoteric teaching which he called "The Fourth Way." He said he was initiated four times into the sacred Egyptian mysteries, in which he says "The Christian church, the Christian form of worship, was not invented by the fathers of the church. It was all taken in a ready-made form from Egypt, only not from the Egypt we know but from one which we do not know. This Egypt was in the same place as the other but it existed much earlier. It will seem strange to many people when I say that this prehistoric Egypt was Christian many thousands of years before the birth of Christ, that is to say, that its religion was composed of the same principles and ideas that constitute true Christianity." Over time elements of this seminal and sacred teaching had migrated northward and so Gurdjieff made a second journey to the Hindu Kush, Siberia and Tibet. This is where the confusion began with people believing that these areas were the teaching's origin and not Egypt.