Food for the Moon

If you thought humanity was going to hell in a basket on Inauguration Day, you were pretty close.

I made a plan to turn off the news during the Trump inauguration,

But despite my attempt at news-zen, one egregious act after another popped onto my screens:

• Accelerate climate collapse

• Raise prices with a tariff war

• Rip off diabetics

• AWOL the next pandemic response

• Release 1500 violent felons into the streets

• Kill the aspirations of migrants and dreamers

• Hollow out Federal agencies

• Vilify trans and people of diversity

• And all this is before he sends the military to raid falafel stands.

When the world’s wealthiest man gave the Nazi salute, I realized garden-variety disgust would not get us through the next four years — or four days. We needed a cosmic shift in perspective.

World’s richest man gives an on-brand salute at Trump’s inauguration. Moon added.

Four words popped into my brain:

FOOD FOR THE MOON.

If you follow Gurdjieff, this is a core concept. I’m less a follower than “Gurdjieff-curious.” When I was a young Sufi, “food for the moon” helped explain every corner of humanity that darkened the New Age.

Here’s the full context: “Gurdjieff warned his students that the failure to develop one's essence would lead one to a harsh ending; he said that a man who fails to develop his soul would die like a dog and become food for the Moon.”¹

Since you’ve come this far, you have to decide whether to take Food for the Moon literally or as a metaphor. I recommend both.

For a starting point, the Moon is our offspring.

It was formed 4.5 billion years ago during a collision between the Earth and another small planet. The impact debris collected in an orbit around Earth to form the Moon. The moon has the power to lift vast bodies of water — including the 75 percent water in the human brain. The moon rotates in perfect synchrony with the Earth (which gives us its light and dark sides). The lunar cycle corresponds with menstrual cycles, planting times, and important events in all religions. Science doesn’t buy the correlation, but the word “lunatic” comes from the Latin word for moon.

Science sees the moon as a big dead rock, but from the cosmic perspective, the deep symbiosis between Earth and the Moon affects every aspect of life. A helpful picture is to see the Moon-Earth combo as a mechanical apparatus, like a pocket watch with visible gears. Teeny tiny Toro makes up a third gear, but no one talks about it.

Moon and Earth: a mechanical dance

In the first century, Pliny the Roman Elder recognized this symbiosis, stating:

The Moon “replenishes the Earth; when she approaches it, she fills all the bodies, and when she recedes, she empties them… even the blood of men grows and diminishes ·with the light of the moon, and leaves and herbage also feel the same influence, since the lunar energy penetrates all things."

A key Gurdjieff precept is that humans are fundamentally mechanical beings trapped in unconscious patterns:

Man is basically a machine, who merely responds to his environment, and we are mistaken to think that we possess an ego, an individual 'I'… Without self-knowledge, without understanding the workings and functions of his machine, man cannot be free, he cannot govern himself, and he will always remain a slave. ~ GI Gurdjieff

Gurdjieff goes further to describe the moment we seem to be in:

In times of “mass madness”, such as revolutions and wars, “men seem to lose even the small amount of common sense they had and turn into complete automatons, giving themselves over to wholesale destruction in vast numbers” and as a result, “enormous quantities of knowledge remain… unclaimed and can be distributed among those who realize its value.”

But what does the Moon have to do with the all-dark Executive Orders?

For a start, the EOs will inflict a lot of pain — for dreamers, migrants, people losing homes from climate events or dying from the next pandemic, and anyone who relies on the social safety net. Energy prices will go up, and the rule of law will become corrupted. Trans people will experience public shaming.

Welcome to Walmart, where tariffs bust your budget every day.

The Walton family will not be swallowing your tariffs.

Pain and suffering are facts of life and the measure of one’s karmic burden.

We experience different kinds of pain — medical, financial, psychological, and lovelorn. Our national experience celebrates personal freedom, but disasters shatter that illusion and bring us back to the mutuality of community.

As I shepherded Karen on a ten-year healing journey, her level of pain created deep questions about why we’re here. I came to the conclusion that disease is ultimately a healing event. Reshad Feild used to say, “Pain is the calling card to yourself.” As an esoteric healer, he characterized the healing process as the “Triple R Ranch:” Recognition, Redemption, and Resurrection. Pain brings an imbalance to our awareness — that’s Recognition. Redemption releases the pattern, and Resurrection is a state of freedom — free from identification.

The Triple R Ranch is characterized by “conscious suffering,” so instead, we use psychotropic drugs to manage pain and stressors, including anti-anxiety medications, stimulants, antipsychotics, and mood stabilizers ($110 billion), and NSAIDs and opioids to manage physical pain ($18 billion). The human experience has become intolerable in its natural organic state, so it must be dulled. Thank goodness we don’t have to “bite a bullet” for surgical pain, but that’s a lot of drugs. Our new President promised a dose of “MAGA” with the drug of choice in movies — “the suspension of disbelief.”

When the psyche becomes inflamed (and lacks a composter), it feeds the Moon.

Say what? We understand digestion and respiration but don’t give much thought to what happens when the psychic dump collects in the shadow, i.e., the dark side of our Moon.

Pink Floyd captured this concept fifty years ago. Their landmark album includes themes of conflict, greed, time, death, and insanity — the last inspired in part by founding member Syd Barrett's deteriorating mental state.

Syd Barrett offers the perfect segue to the world’s wealthiest man:

When I saw this video of Musk at the nation’s Capitol, my first thought was, “What is this man on?” His drug use was well-documented in the Wall Street Journal:

Wall Street Journal’s Kate Linebaugh: “Musk has also said he has a prescription for ketamine, a psychedelic-like drug, and a Wall Street Journal investigation in January found that Musk has used LSD, cocaine, ecstasy, and psychedelic mushrooms often at private parties around the world. The reporting team found that Musk has consumed drugs with multiple current or former members of Tesla's board.”²

And then there’s Trump. According to Noel Casler, who worked directly with Trump on the set of The Apprentice:

“He snorts Adderall as his maintenance high. When he gets too wired, this is tempered with benzodiazepines. There’s also a robust use of cocaine and methamphetamine in the Trump orbit, and I’ll leave it at that….NYC is also full of folks with anecdotes of Trump’s drug use. They come up to me and share stories all the time. Look into the Dr. Bornstein stuff if you want to know more, and ask yourself why Trump sent [his bodyguard] Keith Schiller to strong-arm the doctor and steal his medical records shortly after being elected POTUS.”

Psychotropic substances are designed to “dull” the feeling part of our human nature. For tyrants and autocrats with a penchant for inflicting pain on others, mood enhancers are part of the package.

The book Drunk on Genocide: Alcohol and Mass Murder in Nazi Germany documented how the Nazis used alcohol to conduct violence and atrocity:

Adolf Eichmann remembered that it was the first time he had seen [Reinhardt Heydrich, one of the darkest figures within the Nazi regime] “take any alcoholic drink in years,” but it would not be the last time, as at some point in the following months he joined Heydrich for a “friendly get-together of the Security Service [SD] where . . . we sang a song, we drank, we climbed up on a chair and drank again, and then onto the table and down again, and so on—a type of merrymaking I had not known.” The picture of Heydrich and Eichmann, the key agents of annihilation, drinking, singing, and celebrating their work while standing on a table provides a vivid image of one way in which alcohol and celebratory ritual became incorporated into the process of mass murder by the perpetrators as they rejoiced in their accomplishments.

The dulling of psychic pain provides food for the moon. Shopping, porn, entertainment, social media, and the trappings of modern life divert our awareness from the fact of our existence. Distractions allow us to avoid the conscious suffering needed for soul growth.

I took my last toke of marijuana 50 years ago. Newly transplanted to California, away from friends, and suddenly living with my parents, I suffered from immense dislocation and loneliness. When I took that puff, I realized I was blunting my ability to feel the pain of living. I used the word “shunt” at the time (which means “divert”) to describe how the pot experience diverted my feeling energy. Diverted where? I don’t know (somewhere in my nervous system?) Maybe the moon.

Jung had a few words about this:

By not being aware of having a shadow, you declare a part of your personality to be non-existent." ~ Carl Jung

Cue the picture of Musk prancing on the campaign stage:

Shadow President aloft

Jung went further:

Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual's conscious life, the blacker and denser it is." This essentially means that the more we repress our negative aspects, the more powerful and potentially destructive they become in our unconscious.
~ Carl Jung

Is there hope for humanity?

Gurdjieff teaching

Everything living on the Earth, people, animals, and plants, is food for the moon .... All movements, actions, and manifestations of people, animals, and plants depend upon the moon and are controlled by the moon... The mechanical part of our life depends upon the moon and is subject to the moon. If we develop consciousness and will in ourselves and subject our mechanical life and all our mechanical manifestations to them, we shall escape from the power of the moon. ~ G. I. Gurdjieff

Trump oddly inserted “American carnage” into his first inaugural address.

This was comically followed by Kellyanne Conway “throwing some mean punches” at the Inaugural Ball.

When Trump spoke those words, my cosmic view expanded, and not in a good way. Just two weeks earlier, Barack and Michelle Obama had joyously hosted the cast of Hamilton in the East Room — and now, boom, Trump changed the channel to carnage. This week, a similar swish-pan took us from Biden’s patriotic values to a massive grift operation.

Anand Giridharadas

The Trump years were not the launch of a new era. Author Anand Giridharadas described it as a convulsive backlash against the future – a temporary recoil against the storyline of the dramatic universe:

[The Trump era] is not the engine of history. It is the revolt against the engine of history... We are living through a revolt against the future. The future will prevail.

Prevail, yes, but hold your hat. The Greek philosopher Heraclitus said, “Character is destiny.” In this way, the J6 insurrection played out from the seed impulse — Trump’s obsession with carnage. Yesterday’s second inaugural was darker and more messianic.

In Greek mythology, upon death, the soul and psyche first go to the moon and then go to the underworld, where there is a second death and a separation. The soul then goes to the Moon, and the psyche to the sun. I might quarrel with the terms, but like a roast chicken, we have dark parts and light. The universe recycles anything of value and sends the rest to feed the moon. A perfect analogy is the deep geological Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository.

Stick your psychic debris in there, please.

We presume we’re at the top of the food chain...

…but not if we’re food for the Moon. When I was a young Sufi, we read this prayer before meals:

All life is one and everything that lives is Holy Plants, Animals, and Man
All must eat to live and nourish one another
We bless the lives that have died to give us food
Let us eat consciously, resolving by our work
To pay the debt of our existence.
~ J.G. Bennett

Bennett made it clear that there is no free lunch in this life. We must pay the debt of our existence lest we become food for the Moon.

Rumi understood our Moon parts:

“There is a moon inside every human being. Learn to be companions with it.” ~ Rumi

Thank you, Rumi; I needed that. With Gurdjieff giving the Moon a bad rap, I called Nicoli Bailey, my West Coast astrologer friend, for perspective.

Bruce: “Nicoli, you have kept my feet planted through the archetypal slog we humans face. What’s your take on Food for the Moon?”

Nicoli: “For starters, you have to make your moon your friend because, whether you like it or not, you're a human being. We’re always going to turn toward our basic, instinctive self, which is our Moon. It’s our first language.”

Bruce: “Moon versus Sun — is there a conflict?”

Nicoli: “We are here to develop consciously– which is our Sun. In all deference to Gurdjieff, we should not discount our Moon. Some people live in that instinctive place all the time, and here, Gurdjieff is absolutely correct; it is mechanical and reactive. But if we are not developing towards our conscious, sovereign self, which is our Sun, then you won’t grow; you become food for the Moon.”

Bruce: “When I met Karen, I found her inside my heart. She was my living Moon.”

Nicoli: “Carl Jung said if someone's Moon is where someone's Sun is and vice versa, they understand each other.”

Bruce: “My Sun was in Sag and Moon in Scorpio, and she…”

Nicoli: “…was vice versa. Her Sun was in Scorpio, and Moon in Sag.”

Bruce: “This explains the depth of my muddle without her, but I’m learning to integrate my male and female — not by choice. For the last two years, I have yet to find a woman my age interested in relationships — not just with me — at all. Presumably, they are protecting the Moon of their being, and I don’t blame them.”

Nicoli: “Muddle is a great word to describe our Moon, and you’re muddling beautifully.”

Bruce: “Thank you.”

---

I considered Gurdjieff’s grim picture of humanity and how he was forced to work through the chaos and carnage of the Russian Revolution and World Wars I and II. But it didn’t stop him.

I spent the last 12 months working day and night to elect Democrats and prevent the carnage of Trump 2.0. I took a gamble but didn’t understand that right now, the American psyche needs to feed the Moon.

In the last 48 hours, I have returned to the trenches — to what our former Congressman John Lewis called “good trouble.” I’m helping to launch a project to develop the next generation of young leaders:

Hang on for the ride, but be steadfast. Like these kids, hold the future in your heart. If you remain open and alive, your psyche won’t become food for the Moon.

1. https://themarypoppinseffect.com/2018/05/28/pamela-l-travers-gurdjieff-and-the-father-figure-connection

2. https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/the-journal/money-drugs-elon-musk-and-tesla-board/1a07a8f7-6b8e-4b46-9007-537dfc6720b3