Another month, another book about “cosmic ordering”. Another text telling us, at inordinate length, how to “ask the universe for everything we’ve ever wanted”.

If Jonathan Cainer’s book was just like that I wouldn’t be reviewing it here. Unusually for a psychological can-do book of this genre, Cainer is more concerned with some genuine spiritual principles, and the book is full of insights and intuitions that continue to strike chords as the text progresses.

Jonathan Cainer is an astrologer who writes a column for the UK Daily Mail and a number of websites. His work is often described as “spookily accurate” even though the most people read are their Sun sign forecasts which can be said to describe one-twelfth of the population. Spookily accurate, however, is how I would describe Cosmic Ordering — how to make your dreams come true. Don’t let the subtitle put you off, it was probably concocted by the marketing folk over at Collins, the publisher.

Where this book differs from the ones we’ve seen before, is that Cainer puts himself in the role of the “force” or “entity” — call it what you will — that fulfils your cosmic orders (for want of a better phrase).

At first I thought, “he can’t possible keep this up” — playing “God” is a difficult enough task even for God. But somehow he pulls it off. There’s a feeling of genuineness about the writing and a depth of nuance that prevents it becoming yet another get-rich-quick slim volume. Here’s a small sample of the text:

There is another factor that can come into play here too. No matter how many chances I put before you, you have to seize them and make them work. That requires a degree of level-headedness on your part, but passion and perspective are like sunshine and starlight — you rarely see both at the same time. As soon as you have a lot of one, the other vanishes.

This book is now at half-price at Amazon.co.uk (£3.99/$7.38). Well worth the entry fee for an interesting read whether you believe in ordering from the cosmos or not.

Many people regard the summer solstice as having a spiritual significance, as indeed it has for many religions. Midsummer Day has been a cause for celebration as far back as the building of Stonehenge, some 5000 years ago.

Yet, it’s often tinged with sadness. As the ancient Chinese used to say, “On Midsummer Day, winter is born.”

Strangely, here in England the birds stop singing, usually because they’ve finished nesting. But it all adds to the slight sense of foreboding we feel when the top of the curve is reached, and the rest is all downhill. It’s a little like reaching the age of 40.

Again, the ancients had a cure: “Live in the moment. Take no heed of the morrow.” That may have been possible then, but it’s not so easy nowadays when we’re urged to plan for our pensions in our early twenties — or face “Pensioner Poverty”.

Before I depress you all, let me tell you Adelle has got a much more cheerful piece on the solstice over at Spirit of Place.

British astrolger, Jonathan Cainer, has asked for help in writing a book on Cosmic Ordering. He writes:

“I intend to start writing a book about ‘Cosmic Ordering’. Now that people all over the world are talking about this topic, I feel it’s important to say all I know about how it works and how it should best be used. I’d also like to include some true stories. Have you ever consciously ‘asked the universe’ for something? How did you do it? And when? What result did you get? If you’ve got a tale to share please drop me a line jon@bubble.com. If you can remember any exact dates and times of asking and/or receiving, that would help the astrological side of my research all the more… though I am still keen to hear from you even if you can’t recall such information.”

Read about Cosmic Ordering here and here. Read my own experience here.

Here is the first in a daily series of five posts from my book, Teachers of Enlightenment. The subject matter speaks for itself, so without further ado, here’s number one :

Georges Gurdjieff (died 1949) was a one-off’s one-off. A spiritual master at the high-end of the second tier, he combined “crazy wisdom” with truly magnificent insights into the human condition.

His work covered a great range of topics but, since this blog is mainly concerned with Enlightenment, we won’t delve too deeply into his arcane cosmology. For our purposes he is best recognized for his thoughts on personality and essence, and a close examination of consciousness, which included his famous analysis of self-remembering.

“There are four states of consciousness possible for man,” he told his students. “But ordinary man … lives in the two lowest states of consciousness only.” The vast majority of people live out their lives as habitual sleepwalkers, separated from any real awareness of reality by a massively tangled undergrowth of received beliefs, malign conditioning, and crippling distortions in the workings of the mind. We are unaware of who and what we are, and many of us can best be described as “the living dead”.

The two higher states of consciousness represent the turning points of his whole system. The third state is that of “self-remembering”. Humans are mostly caught up in a stream of happenings which bear them along in life and over which they have no control. They forget their own sense of being and become slaves to the flow of life, their own consciousness fractured into bits as if they were many individuals, not one. By the simple act of remembering oneself at all times, one can begin to unify it into a real conscious individual. This state is so similar to the Buddhist practice of “mindfulness” that it’s clearly derived from it.

The fourth level is that of “objective consciousness”. In this state, says Gurdjieff, we “can see things as they are.” All religions describe “a state of consciousness of this kind which is called Enlightenment …” We have to live in the condition of self-remembering (the third level) in order to arrive at the fourth state of “seeing things as they are”. This is the practice, Gurdjieff’s celebrated “Work”.

The third state, then, is mindfulness successfully acquired. It mirrors the “bliss” state which I wrote about in the post, Preludes to Enlightenment. This state causes the “self” to glow in such a way that self-remembering is a natural condition of its presence. The bliss state is self-remembering. Self-remembering is bliss.

The fourth state of Objective Consciousness, or “seeing things as they are” is the condition of nirvanic experience. Nirvana is nothing more than observing the “isness” of things. To see the world, and oneself, in its raw essence, without the interference of the comparing intellect and the running commentary of the idiot mind, is Enlightenment. Of course, in nirvanic experience we have to leave our body in order to sample this seeing, the sheer weight of conditioning is so great. Enlightenment is when the Suprapersonal “essence” wipes out our karmic traces (conditioning) and allows us to live in the body AND Nirvana simultaneously, so that Samsara and Nirvana are seen to be one. This is the sole aim of the spiritual life. See post, Nirvana and Nirvanic Experience.

Until we give up the shattered mental environment we normally inhabit in favour of our Suprapersonal essence, we will always live within the orbit of birth and death, suffering and loss. Jesus’s much misinterpreted maxim, “You must first lose your life in order to gain it” now becomes explicable.

Gurdjieff’s related insight that we are split between “personality and essence” throws yet more light on this process. Our essence is the level of contact we have with our own Suprapersonal nature. Personality is the extent to which we remain slaves to external influences that mask and even obliterate the person we really are.

We can see that the author of The Book of Privy Counsel, Gurdjieff, the Buddha, and the real Jesus, were all saying much the same thing. That we must give up being mesmerized by the ego (personality) if we are to develop into true spiritual beings. Only our own essence, the Suprapersonal, can wipe out the clinging legacy of wrong-headedness and bear us to our posthuman destination. Gurdjieff deserves our thanks for reformulating this process in the language of the modern era.

The second post in this daily series will be about Teachers of Enlightenment in general.

Check out the best price for “Psychological Commentaries on the Teachings of Gurdjieff“.