A Detail of the Trogoautoegocrat, on Earth
When I first encountered the concept Trogoautoegocrat I thought of it simplistically. Sure, reciprocal feeding. Sure everything feeds on something. And that’s (maybe) how the whole universe works.
Bear and Salmon
The bear in the above photo eats many things, of course, but when the season of salmon run begins it goes fishing. Salmon migrate from the ocean water to fresh water—a neat biological trick in itself (how do they cope with osmotic change?)—so that they can spawn and then die. And as they die, they leave the next generation of salmon (the hatchlings) to float back down the river to the ocean.
In fresh water the hatchlings eat small insects such as mayflies, stoneflies, blackflies, and riffle beetles. Sometimes they eat small amphibians and small fish. When they get to the ocean they have grown. And they eat larger fish: capelin, herring, lanternfish and barracudina. They are also partial to krill and will not turn their nose up at squid or octopus, or even polychaete worms.
When they decide to spawn, they stop feeding completely and swim like mad (some for over 1000 miles) covering 30 miles a day) to return to the gravel beds of their birth. It seems strange that such a life-cycle is viable—but it’s more than viable—it works well.
We can be just as amazed by the bears. Bears can hibernate. They slow their metabolism down to the point where they rarely (or never) urinate or defecate for many months. They can lower their body temperature by 8-12 degrees, and survive on the very slow consumption of bodily fat. In Alaska, they can hibernate for as much as 7 months—the further south you go, the shorter the hibernation. Oddly bears kept in zoos do not hibernate, if you continue to provide them with food—which zoos tend to do because hibernation is not much of a spectator sport.
You do not need to do much digging to find anomalous behaviors by some species or other that surprises. Why don’t salmon just mate in the sea? If bears can hibernate why not all animals? …
The Traogoautoegocrat—World Maintenance.
In the most general sense, the Trogoautoegocrat is how the universe maintains itself through reciprocal feeding. Everything at every level is recycled. So when we consider nature from that perspective it makes more sense to think in terms of ecosystem behavior than individual species behavior. Nature creates and preserves the species it needs to maintain Earth’s ecosystem.
This concept throws light on the primary stupidity of Darwinism, which denies the idea of Nature as an organizing force. Instead, it substitutes a facile idea (the survival of the fittest) in an effort to explain how species evolve. Darwinism is guilty of ignoring the big picture. And it is a theory devoid of any proof whatsoever. Its proponents are masters of tautological pronouncements. A species exists because it survived!
The easiest way to get a firm understanding of the Trogoautoegocrat is to consider the human body. It too is an ecosystem. The more we gather data about it the more sophisticated we realize it is.
It eats, breathes and perceives. That sounds simple, but to maintain itself (in The Tales Gurdjieff uses the term “World Maintenance”) It has many circulations that enable the human being to exist. Food passes through the alimentary canal, fats move through the lymph system, and other nutrients are passed into the blood system, which also circulates oxygen and nitric oxide through the body. The endocrine system gives commands to the various organs to regulate their activity. Impressions circulate through the nervous system, producing thoughts and emotions—and sometimes even higher states.
At every point, substances arrive in approximately the right quantity in the right place for transformation to occur (by the law of three) to create higher substances and residues that are eventually excreted. All of this has to work precisely for a human being simply to function. Such a system is obviously intelligently organized. If any part of it fails the body becomes ill and may die.
That’s the Trogoautoegocrat.
An analogous system must be in place for every cosmos, whether a bee hive or a solar system or a bacterium. With cosmoses different from our own do not understand the details or even the timing involved in their world maintenance. We have too little data. Nevertheless, it is the same.
As Gurdjieff said, “God, Man and Microbe—all the same system.”
So bears and salmon are simply cells in the body of nature. It’s not so much that they have individually evolved to become what they are; they have simply taken their allotted place.
The same is true of Man.