The Moon and the Magnetotail
The Earth’s magnetosphere, illustrated above, shields the Earth’s atmosphere and biological life from the impact of the solar wind, solar radiation, and cosmic rays. The boundary and the outermost layer of the magnetosphere meet the solar wind head-on, deflecting it around the Earth and slowing it down.
The region between the bow shock and the magnetopause is called the magnetosheath. It consists primarily of solar wind intermixed with small amounts of magnetosphere plasma (charged particles). In this region, the direction and magnitude of the magnetic field vary erratically.
The magnetopause is the magnetosphere’s boundary, where the repellant pressure from the Earth’s magnetic field balances the incoming solar wind pressure. It changes size and shape with the fluctuation in the solar wind pressure. Some solar wind penetrates the magnetopause at the points labeled “cusp,” descending into the Earth’s atmosphere near the poles. The release of energy causes the phenomena known as the northern lights and the southern lights.
The magnetosphere is not spherical; rather, it is a very elongated malformed spheroid extending out in the opposite direction to the Sun. Earth’s Sun-facing bow shock is a mere 56,000 miles from Earth and about 11 miles thick. The magnetopause behind it is just a few hundred miles above Earth’s surface. However, on Earth’s nightside, the magnetotail extends 3,900,000 miles from Earth, a distance that is roughly 15 times as great as the orbit of the Moon.
Within it, extending in the same direction, is a plasma sheet, a denser and hotter plasma region than is present in the other regions of the magnetotail. The orbit of the Moon passes through this plasma sheet.
The local magnetic field of the Moon is extremely weak. The detected magnetization is almost entirely crustal in origin. Large impact events may generate local magnetic fields. The largest crustal magnetizations are near the antipodes of the moon’s “giant impact basins.” Their formation may be the cause of those magnetic fields.
Food for the Moon
It is clear that if organic life feeds the Moon, it must do so, physically, by sending it plasma—substances with the density of H96, H48, and H24. Such substances could conceivably find their way to the Moon by electromagnetic attraction.
We can think in the following way. When a man or other animal dies, its corpse begins to behave differently at the microbiological level. The immune system, which had previously governed the microbiological world, has vanished. The corpse becomes local food and gradually releases various useful substances into the environment that can be nutrients for other life-forms.
However, while alive, the being also used and maintained a quantity of higher Hydrogens. H96 is the energy of the immune system, and more vivifying Hydrogens (H48, H24 and H12) are the substances of the psyche.
In respect of man, we can think of personality, which includes H48 and H24, as food for the Moon. The personality forms through imitation, education, movies, radio, and books, all the hypnotic influences of life. They create the mechanical backbone of the personality, furnishing different behaviors for different situations, evoked by everyday impressions and frequently repeated. The personality’s role is to shield essence as a kind of skin.
In In Search of the Miraculous, (p85) Gurdjieff connects the Moon’s feeding to the death of organic life. Everything living provides some of the energy that animated it in life to the Moon. He refers to this energy as the “souls” of living things, attracted to the Moon as if by an electromagnet. In respect of men, he suggests that even a certain amount of consciousness and memory goes to the Moon where it finds itself under ninety-six orders of Laws, in the conditions of mineral life, from which there is no escape except by the evolution of the Moon itself. In some way, personality and some of the structures that support it go to the Moon.
The Electrical Path
The outermost layer of the Earth’s atmosphere, the exosphere, consists entirely of ions (i.e. plasma) loosely held in place by gravity. Below is the thermosphere, a hot layer of ionized gas where atmospheric gases encounter solar radiation (X-rays and ultraviolet rays) and become ionized. Part of the thermosphere is fully ionized and is called the ionosphere and it is the lower boundary of the magnetosphere.
The ionosphere tends towards having a neutral charge. Below that layer, the atmosphere carries a positive charge surrounding the negatively charged Earth which has a net negative charge of about half a million coulombs. There is an electrical gradient from the surface into the air, which averages out at about 100 volts per meter. The total potential difference from the Earth’s surface to the top of the atmosphere is about 300,000 to 400,000 volts.
As we are negatively charged, we can assume that the residues of a man at death are negatively charged and thus gradually rise up through the atmosphere. If there is a feeding process between the Earth and the Moon, there will be a connecting structure roughly corresponding to a placenta through which nutrients pass. The nutrients coming from organic life must comprise substances that correspond to Hydrogens H96 or higher. Hydrogens denser than that would stay close to the surface by gravity alone.
It is likely then that the “placenta” between Earth and Moon is the Earth’s Magnetotail. Personality and essence are constructed from very rarefied materials, and they disconnect from the bodies of men or animals at death. Such materials, less dense than the air, will naturally rise upwards. They carry a negative charge, as does the Earth’s surface. Retaining their negative charge, such substances may rise to the top of the ionosphere and enter the magnetosphere.
The Earth’s magnetotail extends far beyond the orbit of the Moon. The Moon passes through it, spending about six days in every lunar month inside it.
The electrical state of the Moon varies according to its orbital position. When it is outside the Earth’s magnetotail, the weak magnetosphere bestowed upon it by the solar wind insulates it. We suspect that the protection this affords the Moon is critical to it retaining its negative charge. If it were directly exposed to the solar wind, it would become electrically neutral from the influence of positive ions.
When the Moon enters the magnetotail, the solar wind deflects away, and the plasma sheet within the Earth’s magnetotail takes over. The plasma sheet is in a constant state of motion and hotter (i.e., more energetic) than the solar wind. During the six days as the Moon passes through the magnetotail, the magnetosphere’s plasma sheet sweeps across it many times, with encounters lasting anywhere from minutes to hours or even days. Electrons pepper the Moon’s surface, increasing the Moon’s negative charge. On the Moon’s Sun-facing side, the sunlight counteracts this. Photons of ultraviolet light displace electrons from the surface. Thus the nightside of the Moon is negatively charged compared to the dayside.
NASA’s Lunar Prospector spacecraft, which orbited the Moon in 1998-99, gathered the best data we currently have about magnetotail crossings. During some crossings, it detected significant changes in the lunar nightside voltage, typically rising from -200 V to -1000 V. In 2017* Japanese researchers, analyzing data from Japan’s Moon-orbiting Kaguya spacecraft, reported that oxygen ions from the Earth’s atmosphere made their way to the surface of the Moon during the Moon’s passage through the magnetotail.
The passage of negatively charged plasma from the Earth to the Moon is thus well established. Gurdjieff said that the Moon was a large electromagnet for organic life. It is during the Moon’s passage through the magnetotail that it behaves as an electromagnet and, presumably, feeds. Outside the magnetotail, under the solar wind’s direct influence, it will not attract anything from the Earth.