Trust is quite difficult

One of my best and most dearly beloved friends asked me this morning, “What does God want from us?”

This might seem like a tricky question, because it looks so open-ended. Yet I am quite sure that God wants us to trust Him; and this is the first and only thing He wants from us. Everything else follows quite naturally if we only render to God this one true inner action.

For some reason, which is not clear to me inwardly, I am a distrustful creature, despite the fact that God has seen fit to bless me with His presence on an almost continuous basis. There is never a day that He is not present within me in one way or another; and in fact one would have to say that I am shamed by it, because still I don’t trust Him, and still I disobey.

Despite this, Grace flows abundantly throughout me; and this isn’t a Grace that does anything more than bring me to an organic sense of how extraordinary God’s Love is and how wonderful He is and how truly miraculous and perfect every single instant of His creation is.

Yet I don’t trust Him. And if Grace can flow this abundantly and trust is still not present, then the question of trust must fundamentally define the chasm that lies between us and God’s Love.

Another friend of mine said that God wants contrition, humility, chastity, and so on from us… and I think this is perhaps true.

Yet these conditions would be natural and reflexive if I trusted. They might not even be necessary; because within Grace, contrition, humility, and chastity cease to be meaningful. Each one of these is a condition that needs to be imposed because of my lack of trust. Once I trust, God is ever present; and the only thing that I quite definitely feel when God is present is the sorrow of his everlasting Love, which is both perfect and joyful and anguishing and lies beyond all human understanding — yet it lights up the soul with a gentle and brilliant fire that in one instant can sense and see and feel all the truth in the world.

Each one of us already lives in eternity. The amount of Grace that has been invested in a single life, even that of a bacteria, is already beyond any measurement; this is what Christ was trying to explain when He spoke of the lilies of the field. One moment of human life with all that flows through it is already more glorious than that; and each one of us has been vouchsafed that experience—which we casually discard as though it were unimportant.

We fundamentally misunderstand what God is and what the Kingdom of Heaven is. We do have the Kingdom of Heaven within us; and it might be said that God wants nothing “from” us. He does not want anything from us, but rather, He wishes to give to us. He would willingly give us the keys to the Kingdom of Heaven at any time, because what He wishes for is to immerse us in His Love so that we can share His Being. Within this lies greater glory in any moment than what mankind can create with whole civilizations.

But, strangely, we don’t seem to want His Love… we love ourselves too much. And it is excruciatingly unclear to us how different His Love is from our own.

I am pressed to understand all of what we do from this question of trust. What of the exercises? What of all the “efforts” and the earnestness, the false sincerity—and of course its real counterpart, just as much of us—the maneuvering and positioning, our confident misunderstanding?

What good does any of this do if we do not first trust?

Hosanna.

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.

Why everything always happens now

There is a large building. It has many companions, but it never speaks to them. All of them do the same thing over and over again in silence.

Bridges lead to and from the large building, passing over streets too busy to accommodate pedestrians. The bridges are covered with steel and glass so that the weather will leave them alone. People rush back and forth across every bridge in and out of the building. Each of the people is very important, with essential tasks to be done. Few of them know one another. Each one of them is on a mission from God, but they never discuss their missions with one another, and each one of them assumes their mission is much more important than the missions other people have.

Inside of the building is an elevator that moves up and down through time. The elevator stops in different centuries on every floor. The passengers do not know this; they forget which century they are in from floor to floor and whatever floor they get out on, they assume it is the century they belong in. Everything in each century on each floor arranges itself to accommodate the visitors flawlessly. Because the passengers are forever forgetting where they came from, who they are, and where they are going to, they always feel they are in exactly the right place, doing exactly the right thing. Even when things feel wrong to them they assume this is normal.

There are two old men in the building, one in the basement and one on the top floor. Each one of them is in charge of a coterie of angels, who take care of changing the centuries. Each century is like a spark plug that triggers an avalanche of events the moment it is invoked. One angel is in charge of the Middle Ages; another one the 20th century; and so on. The angels in charge of centuries with pyramid builders, Jesus and Buddha, and so on are a bit full of themselves. So many other centuries depend on them, they think, not realizing that without the other centuries no one would care about their century at all.

Occasionally a fellow angel reminds them of this and they become depressed. This is problematic, because a depressed angel can ruin the mood of a whole century for as much as a century at a time. When this happens, the people moving in and out of the century through the elevator also come out depressed, and the depression can quickly spread through the whole building. For this reason the old men at the bottom and the top of the building have asked the angels not to speak to one another much, and frequently make them take their meals separately and sleep on different floors, even though angels naturally prefer to congregate together and suffer when they are separated in this way.

The old men on the bottom and top floors of the building sometimes wonder whether every building has a similar arrangement, but they are not allowed to travel to other buildings. Only the visitors are allowed to do this. For this reason they frequently eavesdrop on the conversations between visitors, even though this is strictly forbidden and a violation of the trust placed in them. It is furthermore a waste of time, because the visitor’s memories of other buildings— as with other centuries — is grotesquely inaccurate, and no one can possibly assemble a picture of anything that is actually going on using this hearsay.

 The angels realize that the two old men have become weak custodians. They hold weekly therapy sessions together and try to boost the morale of their depressed brethren, even though they themselves are responsible for the problem in the first place. Angel therapy, it turns out, is a very complicated subject. They all do much better when they band together and sing hosannas, which they do frequently. When they get drunk they reminisce about the good old days when they were allowed to do annunciations, appear to people in dreams and wrestle them, and so on. This is forbidden now because angelic visitations had so many unpredictable results. Every once in a while an angel breaks the rules and sneaks a little bit of angel material into a human here and there. Because of the general confusion between the centuries, the self-important people, and the milling about in the building, it usually goes unnoticed, but if an angel is caught, they are sent to the basement for a month, during which their century is neglected. Centuries have been known to run down in a perfectly awful way during such periods, but rules are rules. There is nothing to be done about it. The angel that caused the second world war in this way was banished and sent to another building, presumably a much smaller one where he or she could do less harm. Again, no one knows because the buildings are not allowed to speak to one another.

It is said that there are buildings where all the centuries play out differently. It is probably true, because each building is part of a huge experiment attempting to make everything that can possibly happen all happen at once. God has been working on this for all of eternity, because it is theoretically possible given that He is God. Nonetheless, the fact that it is theoretically possible does not mean that it is easy to do, and the act of creation, along with its endless maintenance, has turned out to be a very time-consuming task. It has, in point of fact, used up 100% of all the time that it will ever be possible to create; and so while God tries to do everything all at once, He forever labors under a condition where there is no additional time to do it.

 This is why everything always happens now.

Hosanna.

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.

Shades of Oblivion— a discourse on Gurdjieff’s fundamental Humanism, part II

Gurdjieff fully understood the very personal, non-obliterating role of suffering and how integral it is to spiritual development. True contact with the higher centers will make this matter much clearer, but it comes at tremendous cost. Only those I know who have suffered the most—in what are almost intolerable conditions which destroy the existing inner world—begin to grasp this matter in its entirety. Whether I like them or not, these people are true brothers and sisters in the inner work we seek to represent.

The Christian masters of the Middle Ages understood this matter better, perhaps, than anyone since in the western world. Speaking in a language we no longer fully (or in many cases even partially) understand, they described the necessary state as an awareness of sin.

This word used to mean something quite different than it does today and, once again, one could write an entire book about it. (The word is not derived from action or attachment in the outer world but applies in its esoteric sense exclusively to inner contradictions.) Gurdjieff, through his understanding of remorse of conscience and intentional suffering, more properly represents the question in front of us than any philosophy, whether theoretical or practical, of obliteration. Viewed from this perspective, liberation philosophies and doctrines of obliteration of Self are a cop-out.

A decent analogy of mankind’s position in regard to the question of bliss is one of a parent owning a candy store. With the trusting parent in absentia, the child is left in charge of the sweets; but instead of respectfully guarding the wares, he or she begins to eat the sweets, not realizing that as tantalizing as they are, they are not meant for them.

There are fairy tales about such things, such as Hansel and Gretel and the gingerbread house. In that case we see that Hansel and Gretel very nearly become food for the house of bliss, rather than the other way around.  It is their very unawareness, their naiveté itself (the obliteration), that presents the danger. Lost and unconscious, they stumble across inner treasures; not knowing their right place or value, they enter the house (fully identify with its nature.) Tellingly, in this case, the ginger in the house is a spice from the east. The fairy tale may thus—at its root, pun intended— represent an esoteric warning against various naive forms of eastern liberation philosophy.

We can see the inherent danger in adopting philosophies or practices of oblivion; the annihilation (the making-into-nothingness) of the ego is not an answer. The ego exists to offer the opportunity to suffer it; extinguishment removes the source of conflict from which true suffering arises. Again, the metaphysical laws and reasonings behind this are complex; but the fact itself is rather simple. One doesn’t need to know how all the gears work to know that the hands of the clock show us the time.

This leads me to the second question on the table in my discourse, which is the value of wordlessness. It follows on the philosophy of obliteration, since obliteration dovetails quite neatly into the evaporation of awareness, rationality, and everything they represent—including the words to describe them.

It’s quite true that there is a place beyond words available to consciousness. As I have pointed out many times before, however, it is not just the metaphysically endowed (“higher”) states of awareness without words which we seek to encounter. There are awarenesses without words right next to us, so proximate in consciousness that we routinely take them for granted and ignore them; and these are the “places” (minds) without words that actually matter in the cultivation of our inner metaphysics, in the balancing of the centers Gurdjieff described as necessary in order to usefully receive higher states.

These two “wordless minds” are the intelligence of the body (sensation) and the intelligence of emotion (feeling.) Both are fully functioning fractions of our summary intelligence, ignored and suborned by the intellect in its prosecution of our rational (i.e., calculated) agendas. Yet these two wordless intelligences lie within our purview, not in some imaginary realm of better purity.

I would like you, for a moment, to imagine an idealized “world without words” in which all of the denizens never speak a single word to one another. I think we can agree that this world describes the world not of mankind, but of animals; and even they have languages, so perhaps we do not reach low enough down the scale when we say that. The point, i think, is that everything that human beings are, enlightened or otherwise, depends on the language we so eagerly banish when we try to speak about higher states of Being.

Without language—without words— there is no art, no culture, no architecture, tradition, science, or society. Humanity as we know it ceases to exist—a welcome development, perhaps, for the proponents of oblivion, but clearly insufficient as either a condition, cause or objective of human existence. So these philosophies of oblivion, experiential or otherwise, are essentially inhuman.

They contradict the tradition of God as a person, of mankind as a microcosmic expression of God, and the entire nature of existence itself as it manifests in the juxtaposition of God and man. They are, in other words, so apophatic that they do away not only with the signs of man and God, but with man and God itself. The idea, once examined with intensity, is so profoundly and essentially stupid it would not be worth examining, but for the blithely unexamined Very Important Sounding things said in its name.

We are thinking creatures; it is part of our nature, and we deny it at our peril. God is, as well, a thinking nature-above-creation, a pre-existing thought before thinking. Our spiritual development does not, in other words, excuse us from thinking in an invitation to infinite realms of divine and nihilistic thoughtlessness; it requires an intensification of attention and thought, which is precisely what Gurdjieff brought, over and over again, to his pupils—and in his metaphysics and mythology. There are no realms of inattentive bliss mapped out in Beelzebub’s cosmos; even purgatory (which would seem to be the most likely candidate) is a place of contemplation intensified to the level of the intolerable. Gurdjieff’s famous aphorism, “If you have not by nature a critical mind your staying here is useless,” sums it all up; but all his aphorisms are directed at an intensification of intelligence that requires words.

Pretending that we can do without them is a form of rank sophistry; and yet one hears such talk quite often.

Yes; there are wordless places; yes, perhaps from time to time we touch them (or, more properly, they touch us.) Yet this is of no use in the enterprise of relationship, which demands that we do much more than just sense—or just feel—or just think. There is thought without thought; there is thought within thought; and there are parts that think without words, yet express in their own language nonetheless.

We should stop acting surprised about this. It is not the territory we stake out; it is the life we inhabit.

Let us stop speaking about the silence. Let us speak as we speak; and be silent as we may be silent; but in either case, let us be as we be, not as declarative shades of oblivion or wordlessness would have us be.
  
Hosanna.

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.

Shades of Oblivion— a discourse on Gurdjieff’s fundamental Humanism, part I

oblivion | əˈblivēən |

noun

1 the state of being unaware or unconscious of what is happening: they drank themselves into oblivion.

• the state of being forgotten, especially by the public: his name will fade into oblivion.

A friend recently described oblivion as being a “true state of Godness,” as described by the Upanishads, Buddhists, and even Gurdjieff (although it is entirely unclear to me which references, if any, he read into that statement.) 

It seems worthwhile to examine this question. 

First of all, it’s quite clear that the word itself means a state of forgetting, of unconsciousness. It seems a difficult reach to in any way recast Gurdjieff’s question of higher consciousness into territory explicitly defined as a lack of consciousness; so the use of the word appears to be  categorically and definitively incorrect in this case. It does, however, sound very important; and people who have had experiences of divinity (or what they are at least convinced are experiences of divinity) are prone to proclamations about it. The impulse to seize on words (usually intentionally vague ones)  that sound important to describe such states—especially if they are words that imply the annihilation of words—is nearly irresistible. 

The facts—that the impulse is almost certainly misguided, that the situation is complex, that there are many higher states of consciousness—are abandoned in favor of a kind of apocalyptic, apophatic evangelism. This is often accompanied by an attitude that implies the speaker knows far more than those around them about the matter. It’s an intelligibly, deeply manipulative technique; how can one possibly argue with those who use words to proclaim words have no value? They have already occupied all the available territory with a smugly preemptory lie. The method has been used by countless bogus gurus, and will no doubt continue as a highly effective weapon in their arsenal.

Words that sound important are often incorrect, or at least used incorrectly; and this isn’t just because the higher is undefinable or exists in a state without words. I’m personally and intimately familiar with a range of states of bona fide religious ecstasy, and I’m careful not to speak about them too much—or to misrepresent them. To do so is to risk misleading others; of even more concern is the fact that such states are sacred states which as Ravi Ravindra once said to us, do not fare well under the cold light of analysis. 

My intimacy with the questions of religious ecstasy and enlightenment states has persisted for many years. I treat them with suspicion, as befits a sober alcoholic. Perhaps it’s only a sober alcoholic or recovering addict who can, in full measure, appreciate not just the bliss of religious ecstasy but also its deceptions. The situation is too complex to explain—it would take an extended and rather boring discourse in metaphysics to fully cover it. Even if I did so, it would only produce a theoretical understandings of the question in the reader.

I am left, then, to offer a few observations on the matter that derive from a summary of experience, rather than deconstructed philosophical details. My own path, which highlighted the differences between drugs, alcohol, religious ecstasy and various states of enlightenment—along with the irrevocable obligations human life entails—has supplied a portfolio of propositions which may be worth examining.

First of all, the aim of spiritual work is not oblivion—or bliss. 

"If we could connect the centers of our ordinary consciousness with the higher thinking center deliberately and at will, it would be of no use to us whatever in our present general state. In most cases where accidental contact with the higher thinking center takes place a man becomes unconscious. The mind refuses to take in the flood of thoughts, emotions, images, and ideas which suddenly burst into it. And instead of a vivid thought, or a vivid emotion, there results, on the contrary, a complete blank, a state of unconsciousness. The memory retains only the first moment when the flood rushed in on the mind and the last moment when the flood was receding and consciousness returned. But even these moments are so full of unusual shades and colors that there is nothing with which to compare them among the ordinary sensations of life. This is usually all that remains from so-called 'mystical' and 'ecstatic' experiences, which represent a temporary connection with a higher center.

Only very seldom does it happen that a mind which has been better prepared succeeds in grasping and remembering something of what was felt and understood at the moment of ecstasy. But even in these cases the thinking, the moving, and the emotional centers remember and transmit everything in their own way, translate absolutely new and never previously experienced sensations into the language of usual everyday sensations, transmit in worldly three-dimensional forms things which pass completely beyond the limits of worldly measurements; in this way, of course, they entirely distort every trace of what remains in the memory of these unusual experiences. Our ordinary centers, in transmitting the impressions of the higher centers, may be compared to a blind man speaking of colors, or to a deaf man speaking of music."

Gurdjieff, as told to Ouspensky in In Search of the Miraculous, p. 195.

 We won’t spend time deconstructing this quote—it does a very nice job indeed of speaking for itself. The point is that misunderstandings of Godhood, God-consciousness and the like existing as states of oblivion derive almost exclusively from contacts with higher centers of the kind Gurdjieff describes here. 

There are yogic exercises that can produce such states, and to an aficionado they would be not only known but reliably reproducible. Persons who instruct on such states—or even produce them in other persons—without precisely understanding their nature can form whole cults and movements, as did Osho. The fact that such states are ultimately partial—and sometimes destructive—is as forgotten as the rest of the path, once such energies become regular food for a person. 

Per Gurdjieff’s teaching, whether one likes him or not, true contact with higher centers comes without oblivion; and only those who have undergone such experiences understand what this means. It does not at all mean what folks think it does; suffice it to say that the knowledge gained, the information imparted and the state experienced do not in any way, shape or form, lighten inner burdens. 

Instead they intensify them.  

Gurdjieff was certainly aware of this. The fact that even the Gurdjieff work has produced bacterial strains inside its petri dish that don’t grasp the essential question here— that believe in the doctrines of oblivion—is interesting. Many student of Gurdjieff’s methods have mixed works to come up with such understandings—and we can probably assign some responsibility for this migration of influence to Jeanne Salzmann’s adoption of Zen techniques after William Segal introduced her to Zen masters in Japan. It’s produced a clear, lasting change in direction which does not, in its particulars, wholly agree with Gurdjieff’s essentially Eastern Orthodox roots, or the specific intention and direction of his work as it was designed and in line with what it was meant to produce.

This is not to say that the direction the Gurdjieff work has taken is wrong, or bad, or what have you. My point is that Gurdjieff had a specific and very focused aim which is best understood (at least from a conceptual perspective) through close and repeated reading of Beelzebub’s Tales. It did not aim for oblivion or self-obliteration. It didn’t include Zen techniques. And it didn’t present Buddhism (presuming it did at all) in anything like the form it’s understood in today. It was, when he brought it, esoteric Christianity. 

Hosanna.

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.

men of good will

I’ve risen this morning and I’m looking out over Pudong and Shanghai, with the sun in my eyes.

We don’t really appreciate the whole value of life most of the time. Our organism just isn’t aligned organically in such a way. Yet when we are open, and the Perfection can flow into us — even in the smallest amount — God's Grace is so abundantly evident, it seems impossible to deny it.

The most exact interpretation we know of what was said to the shepherds by the choir of angels after the birth of Christ is, “Peace on earth to men of good will.” The word will, in this context, clearly means intentions. The two associations in spiritual literature that immediately come to mind are Gurdjieff’s obyvatel, the common man who simply does his duty and fulfills his responsibilities— and in pairing this concept with the biblical shepherds in the field— those who watch their flock, or, observe themselves — we see quite clearly where his meaning came from. It is an ancient idea: the simplest of us, with good intentions may be more aligned with God’s will than any other.

The other spiritual source is that of Swedenborg, who said that a human being’s eligibility for heaven or hell is determined by their intentions. This idea is essential to any legitimate self-examination.

What are our intentions? We need to look at this quite carefully. Mindfulness, measured in any spiritual discipline, is all about this question.

If we are simple, if we attend to our responsibilities, and we have a loving attention, we don’t need to be power brokers. We could occupy the lowest rung of the socioeconomic ladder and still find peace on earth — because that peace comes from our relationship with God—our good intentions, our willingness to attend to our responsibilities, no matter how basic they may seem—and an intelligent, intentional love for others.

Having spent the greater part of my life deeply immersed in metaphysics, which are much too complex for the average person to be interested in — let alone comprehend, which is difficult for even the most skilled of us who are — I must say that the great joy of God’s Grace and Presence does not lie in the intelligence, although it may be found there. Not, at least, in the intelligence of the mind. It is a whole thing that is given to us through Grace, that includes all of our Being. In point of fact it is our Being itself — all of us — that finds this peace in the midst of our ordinary suffering of being alive and trying to discover what we are.

A very good friend of mine, a woman who has always had an inner touch of the honorable to me, told me recently that she was retiring. She said she hopes she can use the time she has left in life to "figure out what she wants to be when she grows up.”

I know the feeling; it is a moment, here in the afternoon of existence, where real humility begins to emerge from the fog that life creates around me.

If I can sit here in the morning with the sun shining and a cup of coffee in front of me, and simply relax and allow the gratitude for my life and God’s Grace to flow into me, then—in accepting His goodness and the eternal perfection of this moment—I have already served better than when I climb the tall mountains, whether in reality or my imagination.

As I so often remind myself when I write these morning missives, I hope I can keep a bit of this in me as I go out into life today and remember to exercise just a little more tenderness and attentiveness to those around me; to remember that love penetrates everything, that there is no other “answer" to life, and that it is my responsibility to attempt — even though I am unable — to counter every cruelty that arises with an effort to represent God and all His goodness here on this planet.

It is much too tall an order, of course, for any ordinary mortals; yet we are offered Grace, and the opportunity to try, and if we give it a shot, and support one another, maybe we can actually create better conditions for the love to grow. Not some naïve love, mind you, that we will sing pop songs about, but a solid, grounded love that begins in our organism and is offered in humility, with a sense of the peace available to us if we make an effort on behalf of what is real.

In the biblical story, much is made of Mary’s annunciation by the angel Gabriel — and of course this is an extraordinarily important story. But the annunciation of the shepherds is equally important, because for those of us who are not the blessed virgin, the idea that we are also vessels, and that the peace of God, which passes all understanding, may find a place within us, is a vital idea.

We are invited to participate in this peace; so may it bless each one of you, and all of us, as we go forth into life in this day.

Hosanna.

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.

Memory and Hope, part II

Capital from Basilica of Sainte-Marie-Madeleine 

Vezelay, France

This question of my position in time — defined by memory and hope, which represent the past and the future in my psyche — is one of attitude. That is to say, understanding that the present is a fulcrum upon which memory and hope are balanced, and against which they leverage one another within me actively at this moment, is critical to seeing that my attitude is what makes the wholeness of my understanding of life and time.

My attitude is the position in which the fulcrum finds itself.

The relative length of the arms of hope and memory are determined by where my attitude lies. Now, attitude has multiple meanings. First of all, it can mean a physical posture of the body proper to or implying an action or mental state. Secondly, it can mean a habit or settled way of acting. Third, it can mean a position which is intentionally adopted.

The first definition implies a simple fact: this is my attitude. The second definition describes my habit: I build my identity through sameness, so consistent attitudes create my identity. For example, my politics are always this way or that way. Third, the attitude of intention — which is the most critical of all the attitudes, because it is only with an attitude of intention that I can determine where the fulcrum lies within me in regard to memory and hope.

The word attitude has its deep origins— germane to the theme of this essay, a memory of itself — in a Latin word meaning fitted or joined. Generally speaking, the implication is that attitude involves having something correctly positioned. Yet of course this is quite difficult; after all, both memory and hope jockey for position to position the inner fulcrum of now in their own favor.

Think about this. Intention must be properly fitted into my life. (This, by the way, is precisely how Emmanuel Swedenborg described the essential need for a proper intention.)

It’s why it is so important to have an awareness, an identity—what Gurdjieff called “I”—that can resist the subjective stress and temptation of memory and hope. These incubi  do not actually exist except as phantoms that attempts to exercise an influence on the now — in their perpetual action on the position of the fulcrum of my attitude.

My attitude, my fitness, my position all ought to be rooted in the now — and derive their essential intelligence from this impression of now. In a certain sense, only after that should they allow the participation of memory and hope, who have useful roles as servants but often make poor masters. If there is a master in the household, he has to exercise his authority now, using an awareness and intelligence that is not determined by the servants.

Hosanna.

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.

Memory and Hope, part I

I’m collecting and writing some essays and observations about the nature of time and our experience of it.

This morning, while I was thinking about events of the deep past, it occurred to me that once now is gone, what takes place in now is just as distant and missing if it happened 10 seconds ago as if it happened 10,000 years ago. This is not to say that the results of the immediate past are not more proximate; but what took place is just as definitively and equally over, no matter when it took place. So any measurement of distance in time that attempts to comprehend the past — or, for that matter, the future — is always 100% removed, that is, it is infinitely and eternally distant whether it took place before or will take place later.

This seems interesting, because our experience of the passage of time suggests to us, artificially, that that which will take place pretty soon or which just took place a little while ago is quite close to us. (“Soon,” a Germanic word, actually means “at once,” or “immediately.” So it carries the sense of the now, not “in a little while.”) We develop impatience when things don’t happen quickly enough; and much of our inner agitation also develops in relationship to events in time: either that which already happened, and can never be changed (already distressing, in many cases) or things which might happen, and would be bad.

I bring this up just to point out that we don’t at all understand our relationship to this entity we call “time.” We are always here. There isn’t any other location except in what Meister Eckhart called “eternity,” which is forever infinitely distant (boundless, without limit.) Hence our experience of the now becomes critical; everything depends on it. The now is a fulcrum on which the inner levers of our future and our past are perched; but it’s up to us to determine which of those levers is longer and, thus, can provide the most support for the weight our Being must carry.

There are times, then, when the arm of the past (memory) is long and has power and can be used to support the future; this can be good or bad, depending on whether or not this long past within us is perceived as a burden or a blessing. At other times, the arm of the future seems longer (hope) and it can leverage the past in unexpected ways.

This is why it is said, use the present to repair the past and prepare the future.

That information is practical and useful; yet the understanding of how absolutely distant events actually are before or after they take place, well, this is somehow interesting. It places all past and future events in exactly the same place, which is not now. That place, in a certain sense, has a value of zero; and our awareness places us here, where the value is always 100%.

These are my thoughts this morning.Hosanna.

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.

My mind is not the leader

This capital from the cathedral of St. Lazare in Autun 

has many extraordinary esoteric teachings embodied 

in what at first appears to be a fairly simple image.

March 23.

Underneath all of my talk about efforts and my apparent sincerity about making them lies a sneaky wish to get something through my efforts.

I want to make efforts for myself, because I can then “develop” or "evolve," or become "more spiritual." I don’t clearly see that it's necessary to make efforts for the sake of the efforts themselves, because it is right.

My intellectual mind thinks it knows what is right, but it really has no idea. It establishes a series of nearly aimless and random goals that wander in multiple directions, instead of collecting itself and focusing on an understanding that emanates from a deeper place in Being. The only way that the mind can do this is by ceasing its incessant reliance on the intellect alone, and discovering the organic and feeling natures of the mind, which need to participate.

Sensation, once again, isn’t the leader. It has a powerful effect and is actually much stronger than the mind; but its intelligence is related to functions quite different than any executive faculty that plans and sees with any extended associative powers. And feeling isn’t the leader, either. It has capacity that lie well beyond imagination of either other intelligence in me, but alone it is weak and can’t plan anything. Yet it alone has the true capacity to receive; the other parts are merely structural supports in that action.

If I want to sense what is right I have to feel it and sense it, not just think it. And my effort has to emanate from an organic, in fact instinctive sense of what is right.

It has to begin there without any pretensions whatsoever that it can do anything or acquire anything or that I deserve anything. Or that I have capabilities, and so on. My effort has to begin with an organic sense of what is right.

There is nothing here for me. I offer myself.

That sense of what is right is centered around an embodiment of the sacred. It is right to embody the sacred, to hold myself to the highest possible standard and act as a representative of the sacred in the best way that I can — again, without pretensions, without this stupid idea that I am better than others which I carry around so much, without any illusions that I know better than others how to do anything. No, I must just center this sense of doing what is right within myself, organically, and embody God and the commandment of Christ to love one another as I have loved you as best I am able.

This is a path that presents the first step towards a real inner humility, because it is absolutely true that if I begin here, exactly as I have just described it, I will infallibly see how helpless I am and how little love I have. 

Yet I must keep putting one foot in front of the other in this effort and attempting to embody what is right through effort alone — effort to respect and represent this sacred force that creates life and which has given me a life.

Hosanna.

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.

Where I actually am

March 18.

I want to begin this morning from where I actually am. Here in this body.

As I examine my life, I can see that I don’t understand anywhere near what I usually think I understand. I need to become much closer to myself in order to understand anything at all; and the outside world puts so many demands on me that I often forget the intimacy that’s necessary in order to be something more than just a set of reactions to what’s around me.

This morning I woke up very early and lay in bed, fully engaged with the sensation of myself and nothing more. There is a sacred energy that creates life and being and manifests in every cell of the body; and sometimes, in the morning, before anything else happens, it’s possible to live there and sense the breathing and sense that energy.

At times like this, mortality is more apparent that at other times. There is a sense that one could die at any moment; and then what? Have I lived honorably? Have I attended to my responsibilities? Do I truly care about anyone besides myself?

I need to ask these questions constantly, but especially when it is dark and things are very quiet and I can form a relationship with myself that is the specific and doesn’t make all the assumptions I make after I get up out of bed and start pushing through life like a bulldozer.

I keep centering my life again and again back on the inner questions raised by this more inwardly intelligent relationship. There truly is a cloud of unknowing that exists between me and God; I press against it with prayer, but perhaps I don’t even understand how to do this. I have to learn how to pray over and over again, almost every day, even though some might think I was some kind of expert at it. Spiritual regeneration requires a perpetual effort of renewal; yet my identity wants everything to remain the same, over and over. That, of course, is the original meaning of the Latin root of the word identity.

If I think that doing the same things over and over the same way creates my Being, then I haven’t honored my life. Something new must happen in me; and it demands a much more intimate and attentive examination of this energy which fills my body.

It is what gives me life; perhaps I can learn to respect it.

Hosanna.

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.

The Starry World of Our Desires, Part IX

Sénanque

This is a subtle point worthy of more examination.

What I do not wish for — what I don’t care about, don’t see, or have little or no concern over — represents a vast, in fact unimaginably vast, piece of territory, because I am in a state of objective anguish, or narrowness.

This very narrowness is created by my desires; and, in a nod to contemporary (if not Gurdjieffian) Buddhist philosophy, my suffering is created by my desire. It arises from my limitations, my inability; and all of those things arise, in turn, from my egoistic refusal to engage in community and to go beyond my own desire.

The action of outer considering and intentional suffering are both practical undertakings that attempt to help me move past the limitations of my own desire. Yet, paradoxically, I have to desire those things in order to work on them; so there is a need for certain transformation of existing desire, insofar as that is possible. Anyone who is attempted to work on this knows how extraordinarily difficult it is, and how resistant we actually are to change. In our imagination, we have a range of capabilities that can be deployed to change our inner desire; yet in reality, we usually fail. Most readers will know that I struggled with alcoholism and became sober; there is an example of a real change in desire, but the cost was quite frankly staggering, and a relatively small percentage of alcoholics are ever willing to pay it. I also recently had an exchange with a dear friend who is in love with an alcoholic, an extremely destructive relationship which they have cut off for a long time now, but cannot let go of. Their desire keeps turning them obsessively back towards the situation, even though they have no contact with this destructive and objectively tragic individual and that person's own struggle with their desire.

The point is that this individual is very nearly unable to make any change in the state of their desire; it is a fixed entity, and keeps forcibly turning this person back towards the desire itself. Desire, in other words, acquires its own impetus and a tremendous amount of force, and will do almost anything to keep itself alive — even kill the individual it arises in, which is how addiction often works out.

Now, we usually think of desire in limited and benign terms, emasculating it so that we can grasp it and preserve the illusion that we have some control over it. But if we understand that it is the force that ultimately leads, among other things, to suicide if and when it happens illustrates the unusual nature of the beast and the danger it presents. It relates to the idea of the monsters in us. (See An Organic Sense of Being.) Our desires don’t just limit what is possible for us; they enforce it. There is, in other words, an active quality to desire that causes it to function in an exclusively selfish manner, drawing the whole universe in around it. It manages to do this while at the same time remaining almost completely invisible, because I am identified with it — I have formed myself in conjunction with desire. While I may manage, if I see its destructive forces, to imagine myself outside its range, to practically place myself outside its range is an extraordinarily difficult action requiring a superhuman feat of will. That superhuman feat of will involves the action of all three centers.

 In a certain sense, we might say that Gurdjieff’s fourth way has always, in its own way, had the aim  of helping a human being overcome the limitations of their desire and finding their way to non-desire.

 The situation reminds me of the remark one of Gurdjieff’s followers once made about his work: that he was trying to change the stars people were born under. He was, in other words, trying to reverse the situation where we are under the stellar influences of the male, the brother, the literal part the part that consists of earthly desire; and make no mistake about it, those are also stellar influences. What he wanted us to do was come under the stellar influences of the sister, the higher, which must lawfully blend with the stellar influences of the brother, but on an equal footing — which is almost never possible when the desires of the brother  prevail.

Although this set of essays has been titled, collectively, the starry world of our desire, its nucleus is this question of limitation, and humility. If I see where I am, if I acquire a real humility, I begin to acknowledge these limitations. I begin to see how they emerge from my desire; and I begin, perhaps, to see how my non-desire — that which is not me, that which represents the unselfish side of being, has the potential to move beyond the limitations.

To go beyond the limitations the meaning of both true suffering — what Gurdjieff called intentional suffering — and love, which only arises as a result of the experience of intentional suffering.

For each individual who arises and has being of any kind, a universe arises with them. This is equally true for a gnat and an elephant, a human or a devil or an angel. That universe is a starry world that represents the entire sum of their being, on whatever level it is lived; and it always stands as a fragment of the great world of manifestation that represents the thought of God. We find ourselves on the razor’s edge between the worlds of our own desire and God’s desire; between the descending forces on the right side of the enneagram and the ascending forces on the left one.

We inhabit a metaphysical circulatory system; and the symmetry gives us insight into the nature of being. Both are lower and our higher nature are constricted by law, which takes on (both in the diagram and according to the lawful force arrangements of the cosmos) an identical geometric form — hence the reflection of the diagram along its vertical axis, so that the left and right sides mirror one another. The law of seven can also thus be referred to as the law of symmetry; and indeed, this was one of its names in ancient times, although that is now forgotten. The point is that there is a balance between the ascending and descending forces; they are mutually dependent, and just as our desires inhabit the descending arc, our non-desires populate the ascending one.

Hosanna.

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.

The Starry World of Our Desire, Part VIII

Sénanque

There are times when a single observation within one’s range of perceptions and understanding opens up an entire world of inquiry.

This happened to me last night according to the arrival of a single phrase:

“I can only work within my own limitations.”

The word limit comes from Latin līmitāre, which means boundary or threshold. It also carries the connotation determine. This is because the idea of boundary has an implicit meaning of recognition; when we limit, or establish a boundary, we recognize the point beyond which we are unable to go.

Well, it is implicit and explicit that there are places we are unable to go. However, in my imagination, I am constantly expanding what is possible for me well beyond my own limitations. Every one of us, I think, secretly believes that we have power and control over one thing or another, no matter how humbly we bow our heads when life meets us. This is one of the deficits that the evil commanding ego exploits over and over again.

My own limitations. 

Well, life sets limitations: and the place we are in the universe makes it quite clear that we are, as Margaret Flinsch once said to a group of us, “tiny little creatures.” We are really, as individuals, no more significant than bacteria — and perhaps even less so, seeing that bacteria outnumber us so decisively on this planet, and play a so much larger role than we do on populations, faith, and destinies. It is a sobering thought if one chooses to absorb it.

Yet we are interested in these ideas not from the cosmological point of view, fascinating though it may be, but from the point of view of our inner nature. And the phrase that came to me spoke to me of my own limitations — not the ones set for me by God or the cosmos.

This led me, of an instant, to ponder the nature of my own limitations. And it immediately came to me that my own limitations lie within the range of my desire.

My desires are egoistic. They ought to be things of the stars, derived from cosmic influences and the level above me; but they are not. And my desires draw rigid boundaries around me, because I never go outside of them to consider the desires of others, of the community, or to in any real and organic way consider the desire of God. This despite the fact that the desire of God is often active in me in such a way that I can see not only its sacred nature, but the difference between God’s desire and my own, and my resistance to it. This is a contradiction one must learn to live with on a daily basis if one wishes to establish anything real in oneself.

This boundary in me, which is not merely conceptual but actually, physically, emotionally, and intellectually in existence, is defined by my own desire and my earthly wishes. Many of the components that these boundaries are formed by are all-too-familiar to any of us who think about it. Money, power, sex, food: almost everything revolves around these forces. Last night, I jokingly pointed out to a male friend of mine that for males, the two great questions that need to be answered in life represent the contradiction between the sacred and profane that we embody (our higher and lower nature.) Those two great questions are, How much should I pray? And, how many women should I have sex with?  I will leave it to the (male) reader to illustrate for themselves, within themselves, exactly where the dividing line between these priorities lies; but I think the dilemma is obvious. The irony is equally self-evident; and if we believe that we do not live between these contradictions, we are imagining things.

I draw these boundaries within myself through the action of my desire. They limit everything that is possible for me in exactly the same way that my postures, thoughts, and emotions are limited by the repertoire I developed when young (I refer readers back once again to the stop exercise material.) My desires determine how I can work, when I can work, and everything I can achieve and work; they draw a circle around me that limits how far I can go. Egoism is the force and the power that holds that boundary in place, because it is in concert and partnership with desire.

Perhaps this helps readers gain a new insight on Gurdjieff’s contention that a man must learn to allow his non-desires to prevail over his desires. My non-desires, you see, live beyond the scope of my own limitations, which are defined by my desire.

Hosanna.

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.