Part of the Casswiki article series Fourth Way
Strategic enclosure is a practice that should be engaged in by every seeker of truth. It has both an external and an internal aspect. The external aspect is a kind of “strategic silence”, employed in order to preserve the opportunity for further work. The internal aspect concerns how to maintain an inner (psychological) environment that works to one’s benefit rather than detriment.
Attack and the General Law
In terms of the General Law, having information that could threaten the status quo marks one out as a ‘threat to the system’. In an attempt to neutralize the threat, the General Law responds – through those people close to the seeker, through other aspects of his/her environment, and/or through the seeker’s own mind. If and where it strikes, and the impact, depends on how prepared the seeker is.
Preparation consists in gaining knowledge, maintaining awareness, and achieving self-mastery. If the seeker discerns the nature of each situation, and is able to respond in a way appropriate to it, he or she can avert many potential attacks – and minimize the damage from the rest.
External aspect
A person learning about the Fourth Way will find that most other people are not ready to hear about it. The same goes in general for any information that would clash with the worldview of the person spoken with. For example, anything ‘controversial’ concerning politics or our civilization, diet or health, science or technology. While different people are open-minded about different things, for most, there are certain areas where they are simply not able to consider new information that conflicts with their beliefs. And if one would try to force them, then they would react defensively or even offensively in order to preserve their worldview.
A basic and important part of what one needs to know and apply to ward off attack is strategic silence. Many have learned of its importance the hard way: when the person(s) they speak with hear something they consider “crazy”, loathsome, or otherwise concerning or offensive, the reaction can be quite detrimental. In any case, the word may also spread, with negative consequences. Suddenly, it has become “known” that you’ve become a “crazy conspiracy theorist”; or that you must have suffered a “breakdown”; or, when you eliminate gluten and carbs from your diet, that you have an “eating disorder”; or perhaps, if you mention being part of an online community in connection with something controversial, that you’ve “joined a cult”.
Such reactions are actually common, and not merely theoretical examples. But it’s not only safer to respect others’ worldviews – it’s also best for further reasons. Trying to convince someone who’s not willing to listen is an attempt to dominate that person – which is quite the opposite of external considering.
External considering is taking the needs of all into account in order to make things easy both for ourselves and for others. The above makes it clear that, for people not engaged in The Work, their needs usually include the need not to have their worldview questioned. It also makes clear that, in order to remain decent, many people need to remain ignorant of what you actually think. As George Gurdjieff said, “sincerity with everyone is weakness.”
Internal aspect
The inner aspect of strategic enclosure entails several ideas and practices. These essentially concern gaining an objective view of reality, and self-mastery. One must discern between the influences of illusion and the influences that lead to understanding of reality. (See A, B, and C influences.) The part of the self which is aligned with the latter must remain in charge, regardless of any and all ‘A’ influences (influences of illusion) which exert pressure, be they inner and/or outer.
Since ‘A’ influences are much stronger than the influences which lead toward objectivity, the seeker on the Way must conserve energy. They must master ‘A’ influences by first identifying them, then understanding how they influence life and learning to work while immersed in them. This requires ‘non-identification’, or as Gurdjieff called it, “separating ‘I’ from ‘it.’“
’A’ influences include a variety of social, cultural, and biological forces – and in turn also inner psychological forces. By not identifying with them, and creating an inner enclosure from which to observe them ‘at a distance’ (i.e., ‘I’ observing ‘it’, as if in another person), one can avoid being swept along by them. But to do this requires a degree of self-awareness or self-remembering, being ‘present’ in oneself.
If the seeker forgets him- or herself – identifying with the dynamics of the exterior world or his/her own machine – then his or her guard is down, so to speak. Acting mechanically and automatically, the seeker not only wastes energy, but may end up bringing troubles into his or her life. The stronger the waking sleep or confluence, the more energy is wasted and the greater the ‘opening’ for attack. The General Law is quick to react.
By contrast, a state of self-awareness free from identification allows the seeker to always practice external considering, saving enough energy for The Work while keeping the General Law at bay and making life easy on those around him or her.
Laura Knight-Jadczyk gives a more extensive description of the inner aspect of strategic enclosure in part of her article series “Jupiter, Nostradamus, Edgar Cayce, and the Return of the Mongols”[1]:
At the particular stage of existence in which man finds himself, he is equally “receptive” toward the Two primary Faces of God: Being and Non-being. The Shaykh Ibn al-Arabi] tells us that whatever property, or trait, any human being ultimately “chooses” is what it originally possessed in its state of immutability. And this leads us to the idea of the Two Races. Adamic man (who has higher centers, even if they are disconnected from consciousness), and pre-Adamic man. Creative or “Radiant”, and Entropic, respectively.
[…] In the first place, the Radiant individual who is in this world as a consequence of the “Fall” should never forget that they only temporarily occupy a territory in the domain of the Lords of Entropy. This sets them apart from all the peoples allied to Thought Centers of Non-being who embrace the concept of ownership of the land. […]
The Creative Hyperdimensional Wisdom teaches that if man deems himself “owner of the land,” the Powers of Matter can emerge from the land and engulf him, “integrating him to the context and turning him into an object of the Gods”. Attachment to the land and the misguided belief of “freedom” and “peace” within the limits of property render man defenseless against the Power of Illusion of the Thought Center of Non-being. In such a state, man has even greater difficulty conceiving of the necessity to escape from the material prison because he is constantly struggling to preserve those feelings of “freedom” and “peace”. The same principle applies to nationalities and similar attachments to artificial or subjective constructs. [I.e. it applies to attachment to any ‘A’ influences.]
[…] Those who are familiar with the Parable of the Prodigal Son can understand that the realization alone that one is “in the pigsty of the foreign country” would serve to produce the state of alert, the condition for the “journey home.” This is crucial since, in the story of the Prodigal son, we also see that when the son went to the “resident of the foreign land” to ask for help, he was sent to live and feed with the pigs. This exemplifies that principle that the Radiant being must understand at all times that the Lords of Entropy – the Powers That Be in this reality – will always try to reclaim them as servants. Additionally, belief in the ownership of the land, belief in “being at home” in this world, or being “in charge” of this world, can give a false sense of security to the Radiant being leading them to lower their guard and succumb to the Power of Illusion.
With this in mind, the Radiant being should then create an “Enclosure” around their “being.”
The forces of entropy which govern this reality at present, are much stronger than the powers of resistance of the individual Radiant being. This fact leads us to consider the principle of the enclosure as a psychological policy, in relation to ourselves and to the exterior world, which will allow us to compensate for our lack of strength and available reserves by an appropriate strategy.
Because of millennia of cultural and religious conditioning, everything about us is limited, beginning with our nervous resistance. The rule which can be deduced from this is that we must – as much as possible – work silently so as not to draw increased attention and pressure upon ourselves while working on the process of awakening and assimilating knowledge and interior force that can restore us to the Edenic condition. This is true for the average Radiant being, because if he attracts the attention of what Mouravieff calls the General Law that mechanically rules this reality, he will be lost, as the reaction of the ‘World’ against him will be extreme.
What the Radiant being must do is to consciously master the material that is part of his interior world – his Belief Centers – by gaining sufficient knowledge to be able to exercise perspicacity and SEEing. This enables him to divide that which he perceives and to choose that which is assimilated, or “enters within” his “strategic enclosure.” This allows him to accumulate force and put it in reserve. When the false beliefs, the illusions of this world, no longer have any part within the Radiant Being, then he will be able to step out of the flow of Linear Time.
The principle of the strategic enclosure is, then, that the individual or group must initially work silently to create this enclosure, without drawing the attention of the forces of life of this world to himself. These forces are systematically hostile to anyone who persistently searches for the Truth.
There are two parts to the Strategic Enclosure: The first is to shelter oneself physically from the harmful influence of the ‘World’ as much as possible. Gurdjieff referred to this as the activity of the “sly man.” Unfortunately, this has often been twisted to mean the “monastic life” or “withdrawal from the world” which is an essentially useless approach when the thing that needs most to be learned is the objective truth of the reality in which we live.
The second part of the Strategic Enclosure is that the shelter must be built in his inner world. Mouravieff writes that “The picturesque language of the Tradition says that man must build a cage in himself. This must be provided with all means of connection with and direction of the centres. It must also be solid enough to effectively resist all rebellions of the little ‘I’s, singly or ‘federated’. This construction takes time. To play its role as an organ of direction, it must be continually enlarged, improved and perfected.”
In other words, the Strategic Enclosure is an allegory that refers to an ontological state where the individual basically declares his independence from the Law of Entropy that seems to govern the Material Universe. Using the concepts explained by Mouravieff, this state could also be described as a manifestation of a resolution to shut oneself up to the influences of illusion and instead open only to those influences that lead one to objectivity.
The Creative Hyperdimensional Wisdom claimed that once having “enclosed the land occupied,” the people then could cultivate it and make it produce fruits. This, again, must be understood allegorically – even if the end result may be quite material. This is also reflected in alchemical metaphors as well as in one of the most famous examples given by Jesus: the miracle of the loaves and fishes which is merely an example of the fact that Jesus was a master of the Creative Hyperdimensional Wisdom which had expressed this principle in many other allegories including that of the Head of Bran and the Cauldron of Regeneration.
The principle of the Strategic Wall is, in its more immediate meaning, the practical application of the principle of Enclosure, however the fact that there are different manifestations of this strategic wall depending on the realm to which it is applied is made clear by the fact that there are many worlds where the Spirit remains captive and in each one of them the principle of the Strategic Wall supposes a different manifestation.
It could be said that, in the physical world the correct application might lead to construction of a Stone Wall, but one must understand that the definition of a “Stone Wall”, as manifested in the physical realm, should not be constricted to the idea of a spatially closed wall. There are obviously many principles that belong to “Lithic Wisdom”, which suggest that that a “stone wall” is related to the emplacement of megaliths in very specific layouts for the purpose of creating a grid that may have served, as one of its purposes, to protect the enclosed space from the influence of the Entropic Principle.
The Strategic Enclosure, then, aims at the innermost part of each man, creating a space in which awakening can take place. This awakening calls to them, and through their blood connections it calls to all others who are of the Radiant lineage, to cease their march along the “evolutionary” or “progressive” path of History and to rebel against the Laws of Entropy that reduce all to primal matter. Awakening induces the Radiant ones to take a leap in the opposite direction and transmute man’s “animal tendencies” little ‘I’s programs of Gurdjieff, the predator of Don Juan, the confluencewith the General Law of Mouravieff] and claim back their divine Hyperdimensional nature.
See also
- General Law
- confluence
- External vs. internal considering
- A, B, and C influences
- Law of Three
- Discernment
- Objectivity