Chapter 3: Witnessing the Inner Astronomy
The words simply indicate as if Patanjali is talking in astrological or astronomical terms about the solar system. He is talking about your inner cosmos. Man is a whole system, and corresponding to everything outside, there exists something within man: man is almost a miniature universe.
Man can be divided into two types: the sun type and the moon type. The sun type is aggressive; the sun type is violent, outgoing, extrovert. The moon type is introvert, ingoing, nonaggressive, passive, receptive. Or you can call them yang and yin; or you can call them the male and the female. The male is outgoing, the female is ingoing. The male is positive; the female is negative. Their functioning is different because they function from different centers. The man functions from the sun center, the woman functions from the moon center.
So, in fact, when a man becomes mad he should not be called a lunatic. Only when a woman becomes mad, she should be called a lunatic; the word lunatic comes from lunar - moonstruck. When a man becomes mad he is sunstruck; he is not moonstruck, and when a man becomes mad he becomes aggressive, violent. When a woman becomes mad she goes simply crazy, eccentric.
When I use the words man and woman, I don’t mean exactly all men and all women, because there are men who are more feminine than male and there are women who are more male than feminine. So don’t get confused. A man can be moon-oriented and a woman can be sun-oriented; it depends from where their energy is getting its supply, from what source. The moon has no energy source of its own; it simply reflects the sun. It is a reflective mechanism, that’s why it is so cool. It transforms the energy from hot to cool. The woman also gets energy from the sex center, but it passes through the moon.
The moon is the hara. Just below the navel, two inches below the navel, there is a center; Japanese call it hara. Their word is perfect. That’s why they call suicide “hara-kiri” because the moon center is the center of death - just as the sun center is the center of life. All life comes from the sun; all death from the moon.
Gurdjieff used to say that man is food for the moon. In fact he was saying something very close to Patanjali - and he was one of the men who was very close, but in the West people could not understand what he meant. He used to say that everything is food for something else. Everything has to be food for something else in the ecology of existence. You eat something: you have to be eaten by something else, otherwise the continuity will be broken and the circle will be broken. Man eats fruit; fruits are eating the solar energy, the earth, the water. Man must be eaten in his own turn by something. Who eats man? Gurdjieff used to say that the moon eats man. He was a very eccentric man. His expressions are not scientific; his expressions are apparently very absurd. But if one goes deep in them, one will find pure diamonds there.
Now the first sutra: