Exercise 3
Ultimate Detachment

Contents List:

Preparation
Procedure
Music of the Spheres
Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson
The Law of Falling
Newtonian Gravitation
Detachment from Earth
Love
Cosmology

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Exercises
"Campus"

Preparation

Select a time when you feel tranquil and have no pressing worldly concerns. Find a quiet spot, indoors or out, where you are unlikely to be disturbed.

Procedure

Imagine yourself leaving the Earth, rising higher and higher through the Solar System, and eventually floating in inter-galactic space beyond the Milky Way.

Then contemplate the nature of the Universe with the aid of the following references.

Music of the Spheres

In writing his book with the above title, Guy Murchie imagines himself in a spaceship suspended high above the Earth; he is thus enabled to take a relatively "detached" impersonal view of cosmological science.

Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson

Here, author G I Gurdjieff imagines a super-human Beelzebub travelling in an inter-galactic space-ship in company with his grandson, to whom he relates not only his elevated "understanding" of the working of the Universe but also his "experiences" of the strange foibles of the human beings who live on the tiny planet Earth.

The Law of Falling

In the above book, Gurdjieff attributes the formulation of this law to a Saint Venoma, who expressed it as follows:
"Everything existing in the World [i.e., the Universe. — Ed.] falls to the bottom. And the bottom for any part of the Universe is its nearest "stability", and this "stability" is the place or point upon which all the lines of force arriving from all directions converge.

"The centres of all suns and of all the planets of our Universe are just such points of "stability". They are the lowest points of those regions of space upon which forces from all directions of the given part of the Universe definitely tend and where they are concentrated. In these points there is also concentrated the equilibrium which enables suns and planets to maintain their position.

Everything dropped into space, wherever it may be, tends to fall on one or another sun or on one or another planet, according to which sun or planet the part of space where the object is dropped belongs, each sun or planet being for the given sphere the "stability" or bottom."

Newtonian Gravitation

In A New Model of the Universe, P D Ouspensky writes:

"The law of universal gravitation was stated by Newton in his book, Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, which was published in London in 1687. From the beginning, this law received two formulations, one scientific and the other popular.

"The scientific formulation is:

" 'There are observed phenomena between two bodies in space which can be described by presuming that two bodies attract one another with a force directly proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance separating them.'

"The popular formulation is:

" 'Two bodies attract one another with a force directly proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance separating them.'

"In this second formulation the fact is entirely forgotten that the force of attraction is merely a fictitious quantity accepted only for a convenient description of phenomena. The force of attraction is regarded as really existing both between the Sun and the Earth and between the Earth and a falling stone.

"Prof. Chwolson writes in his Text-book of Physics:

" 'The tremendous development of celestial mechanics, entirely based on the law of universal gravitation taken as a fact, made scientists forget the purely descriptive character of this law and see in it the final formulation of an actually existent physical phenomenon.'

"What is important in Newton's law is that it gives a very simple mathematical formulation which can be applied throughout the Universe and on the basis of which it is possible to calculate all movements, in particular the movements of celestial bodies, with astonishing accuracy. Newton certainly never established it as a fact that bodies are actually attracted by one another, nor did he establish why they are attracted or through the mediation of what."

Detachment from Earth"

In your imaginary detachment, when you are all alone in the infinite space of the Universe, compare Saint Venoma's understanding of "falling" with that of Sir Isaac Newton. Then contemplate your own understanding of gravitation.

Love

Finally, ponder the words of St Paul in The Epistle to the Ephesians, chapter 3, verses 18 and 19:

"That ye, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all saints what is the breadth and length and depth and height; and to know the love of Christ, which passeth knowledge, that ye may be filled with all the fulness of God."

Cosmology

Performance of this exercise is excellent preparation for a deeper study of cosmology. Please see, e.g., Towards a Unified Cosmology by Prof. Reginald O Kapp.

The introduction of this Exercise need not inhibit the continued practice of Exercises 1 and 2.