Solioonensius
How a cosmic tension causes earthlings to behave strangely in an election.
November 6, 2024 — If you woke up this morning in a state of utter disbelief and despair, you are not alone.
No rational explanation exists for why the majority of Americans would vote for a serial criminal accused of financial, sexual, and subversive acts and who promised to wreak havoc on the rule of law, our way of life, and our standing in the world.
But that’s what happened.
Something malfunctioned in our firmware that flipped the lever for fascism — despite the warnings from nearly every Trump Cabinet member and former military generals. This act of civic suicide is akin to a psychotic driver flooring the gas toward an embankment or a bridge.
Gurdjieff saw this circuit malfunction as a reaction to planetary tension.
George Gurdjieff (1867 – 1949) was a philosopher, mystic, and spiritual teacher who saw the whole of life as an expression of cosmic energies. At certain times, these energies increase due to the movement of planetary bodies. These times of increased cosmic energy open the door for creative leaps in how we cooperate with each other and the planet.
But increased energy can also make one wiggy. Half a million kids coexisted peacefully at Woodstock 1969, while Woodstock 1999 devolved into violence and mayhem.
Gurdjieff called this phenomenon Solioonensius.
Solioonensius is a cosmic law that describes the electromagnetic tension of the worlds. Some people make great spiritual strides, while at the same moment, others freak out in anger, feeling their way of life slipping away.
JG Bennett was a major proponent of Gurdjieff’s work. I consider him my philosophic mentor. He died practically the day I encountered the Work, so we never met, but I studied with his students.
On May 16, 1970, Bennett spoke presciently to the circumstances we face now over 50 years later. At the time of this talk, the shootings at Kent State had just occurred. The nation was convulsed in tension and generational conflict. I was a student at the University of Illinois, where riots, firebombs, and marches ruled the day.
Bennett asked his young audience to avoid getting locked in blame and to see the people carrying out these atrocities as unconsciously in the grip of larger forces amid a cosmic shift — as if machines.
Courtesy of the JG Bennett Foundation:
“Only those who have attained an inner freedom through work can pass safely through this kind of crisis.”
J.G. Bennett: “Now, the last thing that I wish to say, the last thing that I spoke of at the meeting, was mainly in connection with the world situation and the present state of tension that is growing in the United States.
We must not have any attitude of blame towards people for what is occurring; this is a cosmic event. This is what Gurdjieff called Solioonensius, a state of tension when people - all people - become intensely dissatisfied with the situation in which they find themselves, and they react to this state of dissatisfaction differently.
Here is what is the right and wrong of it. Those who are wise and understand this know that this force that is developed of dissatisfaction can be converted. It can be converted into dissatisfaction with oneself and a wish to change and to work on oneself. It is the greatest and most powerful force that one can have. It is the realization that only those who have attained to an inner freedom through work can pass safely through this kind of crisis.
As was amply proved during the great revolutions like the Russian Revolution and elsewhere, this is the path of wisdom in front of this. Other people project the causes outside of themselves, and then you have this sort of tension between races, between generations, between classes, between people who want to change things one way, and people who want to preserve things in another way.
All these tensions result in people blaming others, and when things go wrong, this becomes acute and ultimately threatens violence and disaster.
This is happening all over the world, but it is most intense in the United States because the United States is the key to the solution of it all. However, this does not mean that the people in power in the United States can do something. In fact, it has now become terrifyingly evident that really no one is in power, that events have taken charge. Neither the president, not the Senate, nor congress, nor big business, nor wise people, nor leaders of this or that movement. None of them are in charge of the situation. They are all reacting to this state of tension.
This does inevitably occur periodically in the life of man, and it is a part of the general condition of the existence of life on the Earth. It is because of this that we have to work, especially nowadays, at this time, and one part of our work is as far as possible removing from ourselves, even in our thoughts, criticism and hostility to people whose behavior we may disapprove of. We need to constantly look upon these people as helpless, not as hostile, as machines, not as evil men – really as victims and not as persecutors. And this is irrespective of what they may be doing.
Even the most dreadful things are not done intentionally or from the desire for evil.
They are either done through a mistaken hope for good or simply helplessness. This helplessness of man is something that people cannot bear to face up to. It is much easier, or much more satisfying to our vanity as human beings to think that things go wrong because of bad will, and things go wrong because man is helpless. But there is nothing really to fear or to be ashamed of in this because this is what we have to work ourselves out of.
For those of you who are in America at the present time, this is a very great opportunity. Even if the smallest number of people can manage to preserve a constant state of compassion and abstain from criticism. This does not mean putting away one’s critical faculty, which is quite a different thing; it does not mean not seeing that mistakes are made. All this we have to do. It is to not criticize people for doing what they can’t help doing; not to find fault where people are being carried along by a stream without any possibility of changing the course of events.
I have complete conviction that there is a higher power working in human life at this time.
If the course of events is to be changed, as I believe it will, and I am not a pessimist, not an alarmist about the situation; in fact I am more optimistic than almost anyone can be because I have complete conviction that there is a higher power working in human life at this time, with far greater wisdom and far greater resources than we have any notion of. But this confidence does not mean that I think that human beings can help and put the situation right. And as I have said over and over again in the past year or two, our task is, to my mind perfectly clear: to do everything we can to make ourselves into instruments for the higher wisdom channels through which this wisdom can flow, putting aside our worn wisdom, putting aside any belief in our own powers, to allow the higher power to work through us. Perhaps very wonderful things will happen.
So, this is the message that I have given again. Perhaps there is greater urgency just now because perhaps the period of maximum tension is now approaching, and it will be very, very alarming for quite some time to come. After a few months, not before, I will go on with further stages of this exercise, and you will see their relevance to the problems we have been talking about.
