Third Eye

For in and out, above, about, below, is nothing but a magic shadow-show, played in a box whose candle is the sun, round which we phantom figures come and go.

Omar Khayyam

Nature is a pageant of life-forms, an endless variety of riches in the ocean, sky and on the earth. The sun rise breaks one’s sleep, and the sunset invites one to presence, a lyrical wordless song at the day’s end. Yet nature is ultimately silent about itself, having neither the desire nor the voice for expression. Nature cannot describe itself. A rose does not call attention to its beauty or advertise its scent. Bees protect their hive but without a moral cause against the humans that thieve its honey. The calm depth or turbulent force of the ocean has no motive against humanity, merely moving under the influence of the moon. Human beings describe these phenomena in emotive terms because of the construct of human passions. Even when the human eye is able to see another scale beyond earth, where the deep ocean would fade compared to the fire of the sun, disappear like a drop in the craters of Mars, evaporate in the distance that the solar system travels through the universe, human emotion attempts to find meaning in these phenomena. Omar Khayyam has no illusions, writing that this, ‘inverted bowl we call the sky rolls on as impotently as you or I.’ The sky that hangs above us has no comment on humanity. It is an impersonal, vast, celestial backdrop. Seeing this, one understands that nature is a pageant for the human soul to witness.

This ability to be the witness, a conscious spectator, is the sole attribute that makes human beings a different order of creation. ‘Everything happens,’ Gurdjieff comments, meaning that human beings are part of the mechanical causality of the universe, until the human soul finds itself and begins to witness events with presence, without comment, judgment or anxiety. One leaves a mechanical scale for a conscious scale. Being present in the moment, being a witness of the second introduces one to all eternity. At any time, one can become all of time. In one moment, one becomes all moments.