Reading the Food Diagram pages in Ouspensky’s In Search of the Miraculous can be difficult. However, theoretical work lights the way for practical work. Practical work, in turn, helps to further decipher the theory. If the two don’t proceed together, work stops.

It’s also possible to learn something well enough to perform it, even if you don’t understand the details of the theory. Just as you can use an app in your phone even if you couldn’t design it and don’t know the detail of how it really works.

The Food Diagram tells us that the human being obtains energy in three forms: physical food, air, and impressions. (Impressions are everything that reach our senses: an image, smell, sound, and so on.) Of these three foods, the most important one for inner development is impressions.

A substance enters our body and meets a compatible substance already present in us. The meeting creates a third substance, whose density is intermediate between the first two. For example, physical food enters as Hydrogen 768, meets hydrogen 192 present in the body, and the result is a third hydrogen of intermediate value: 384. 

(Already difficult, isn’t it? What do these numbers represent, for example? )

But let’s think about how we subjectively perceive some phases of this process:

Impressions (such as looking at the road, wet by rain now) typically come in as Hydrogen 48. This is the level of neutral impressions. These are too low to be emotional, so the perception is merely factual: It’s raining. Normally this hydrogen stops here and does not go on to further refinement in the body.

However, if I can bring hydrogen 12 to the moment of receiving the impression, the alchemical process can continue (48, combining with 12, will produce 24).

But what does hydrogen 12 mean? And how do I bring it to the moment of reception?

Hydrogen 12 is the fuel with which the emotional center works, and the higher emotional center. Since it’s not mechanically produced by the body in sufficient quantity, I have to produce it through a conscious shock. This first conscious shock is called remembering yourself. To be present. 

I’m here watching the road. I’m no longer identified; I brought a special effort. I feel like I’m here, and at the same time I see the wet road. This state produces a particular emotional energy in me (hydrogen 12, exactly). I realize it because the initially trivial view of the shining wet road has become more beautiful, more vivid. The wet road has its own special beauty. The colors have changed. I look at them, enchanted. 

This charm is the hydrogen 12 in me. There can’t be a boring landscape for those who look from the point of view of the higher emotional center – or even just the ordinary emotional center.

The incessant attempt to repeat at every moment and every situation this practice of inserting hydrogen 12 upon receiving an impression is a fundamental part of school work.

It’s all here. If you haven’t tried it in practice, if you haven’t tasted it, no matter how many words you read, what I write won’t make sense. It will be just a fantasy. And this applies even more to the following lines.

This first conscious shock leads, after a series of transformations, to a relative accumulation of hydrogen 12 in the body. It depends on how often you succeed, how long these moments are prolonged, and how deep and intense the experience is. 

And here we have a problem. We are not used to this vivid energy in us. We want to get rid of it. Humans divest themselves of energy in laughter, tears, sex, intense imagination or, even more often, negativity. But if we get rid of it, all the previous work of accumulating it will be lost and we’ll be back where we started.

If the work of someone who is in a school (man No. 1, 2, and 3, in the process of becoming man No. 4) is learning to gather hydrogen 12, the work of those in a school for a long time (a mature man or woman no. 4 trying to become no. 5) is not to disperse this precious energy, but rather to make it fruitful.

And this refers to the second conscious shock, the transformation of negative emotions.

For this requires, first, the non-expression of negative emotions (which is not yet transformation). Much time must pass in this attempt, which is not easy. We will fail often and have many moments when we feel we can’t make it, or that this work is useless.

Both success and failure in attempts to not express negativity will tell us much about who we are. And they’ll probably destroy the positive idea we’ve made of ourselves. The imaginary picture, already affected by self-observation, now disintegrates. We see it’s not  true that we’re honest, honest, and fundamentally good. Much of me doesn’t want to know anything about waking up. I prefer vanity or my sense of justice to waking up. Or I’d rather save the world, or have lucid dreams; anything else.

If, however, the non-expression bears fruit, and you learn to stand up to pressure, you will witness as rare and great a phenomenon as the Northern Lights. Your transformed negative emotions will be able to give access to hydrogen 6, a huge energy source, and an understanding of a new, clear, never-experienced reality.

Almost always, the circumstances in which this happens are extremely unpleasant. Unbearable. Almost always, the beginning of transformation will appear to us as the intolerable requirement to give up what we feel is most precious. Is it possible that I have to abandon this? Isn’t there an alternative way to push away the bitter chalice?

And right there, in that moment, we face another reality. We find ourselves outside our machine, that foreign body that until a moment ago we called “me, myself.”

The machine is always there. Only, now we’re not the machine.

Sergio Antonio is a long-time student of the Fourth Way and leads discussion groups in Europe and Italy. His recently published writings on work in a school is on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Question-Presence-Work-Spiritual-School. For another article on octaves, see: https://fourthwaytoday.org/octaves-and-intervals/.