imaginal causality can only be reliably read beginning at the level of witnessing selfhood and sooner or later demands that one join it at that level. The cost of admission to this new and more intense bandwidth of reality is ultimately your phenomenal self. Those things that you once thought were you—your history, your emotions, your

each realm comes under progressively more cosmic laws, i.e., constructal givens, that restrict its freedom and determine its outcomes. The higher “up” the ray, the fewer the cosmic laws.

When we collectively devolve, simply using our ambition and cleverness to live as successful lions, in that same downward spiral we fall

God speaks to man. Receiving and giving, man speaks to God. Just as man’s structure needs to be vivified by the infusion of finer vibrations, those very same vibrations require the mixing of coarse material for their maintenance.

since we are dealing with a realm that is causally dominant with respect to our own, a higher level of precision and tighter tolerances must necessarily pertain. Coloring outside the lines is permitted under the Law of Accident; not so under the Law of Fate. Higher standards across the board are required in consistency, obedience, clarity,

progressively denser and colder kingdoms emerging out of that initial fiery explosion of the divine will-to-form that sets the whole thing in motion.

Gurdjieff’s sweeping vision of a single, intricately interwoven cosmic “self-specifying system” in which everything has its unique role to play

a larger and more unboundaried selfhood, the “wave” form of oneself, as it were.

THERE’S AN OLD piece of Hasidic folklore that claims that our world at any point in time is held in its planetary orbit by thirty-six conscious human beings. They don’t know each other, and they don’t even know if they’re among the thirty-six. But the quality of their work, rising like incense into the earth’s atmosphere, creates around