The Alignment of Truth and Being

The Organic Sense of Being.

One can never stop examining this quality, because without its whole and intelligent development, real Being isn’t possible. 

If it develops, Being ultimately arrives through feeling; and feeling manifests only in a balanced relationship between intelligence (not thinking, but active intelligence) and organic sensation.

The reason this is important is that truth can’t be sensed unless Being is unified. 

Truth is both dynamic and dimensional. It has elements of the physical, the intellectual, and the emotional, combined in an invisible and indivisible balance that extracts the wholeness of truth from every object, event, circumstance, and condition. 

Those of you who have been reading this space for a while can refer to my essays about The Perfection, which is about exactly this subject.

Truth, arising through and by these three conjunctive dimensions, exists in a fourth dimension of its own, through a complete and unique manifestation which can only be sensed by Being.

When I say sensed, I use the word in a comprehensive way which means the action of Being as understood within 

—An indelible stillness of the inner intellect, untouched by the world.

—the action of Being as understood by the molecular sense of Being, untouched by the world.

—the action of Being as understood through the organic development of Feeling, untouched by the world.

You can gather from this that there is a purity to this action which isn’t of the world, even though it’s in it.

 These qualities don’t develop all at once. A very fine level of vibration needs to be deposited throughout the organism over a very long period of time, many decades, and quite precisely between the various parts, in order for a harmonious vibration to slowly arise between them all. 

So the qualities I’m describing here — such as the indelible stillness of the inner intellect — begin to be sensed quite gradually, over time, and will generally appear as fleeting awarenesses for years before they establish themselves as more comprehensive entities. 

Impatience is not helpful in this matter.

 This action becomes important if we seek an alignment with truth, because truth cannot be sensed unless Being is aligned with it. 

Truth is never what we want it to be. It is what it is. 

The inward vibration of Being has to correspond to the rather complex vibrations of truth for the two to enter a reciprocal relationship. When this takes place, I see the difference between my inward and my outer parts, and I understand the difference between the outer parts, which must serve Caesar, and the inner parts, which must serve God. 

In both cases, my role as an intelligent being is to serve; do I understand this? And do I understand the difference between the outer and the inner?

I suppose one could ask why I should even wish for such an alignment; yet one cannot really know why one should have such a wish until the alignment exists. Until then, one works mostly in darkness, with a great deal of confusion about why one is doing anything at all in the first place. We set up a group of straw men during this period, ersatz beliefs which we think are the real thing. Ersatz truths which we think are the real thing. The chances of being deceived and misunderstanding everything during this process are, quite frankly, enormous; and although others may deceive us, it is much more likely we will deceive ourselves.

In the end, we are always responsible for everything.

Warm Regards,


Lee

Announcing the publication of 

The Reconstruction of the Soul

The Reconstruction of the Soul is a wide-ranging investigation of symbolism in High and Late Medieval art. It includes detailed analyses of the Unicorn Tapestries at the Cluny Museum and the Cloisters in New York, as well as detailed examinations of the mysterious, erotic and bizarre symbolism in The Cathedral of St. Lazare in Autun.

Along the way, it traces the roots of Western esoteric art from Babylon to ancient Greece, revealing traditions that are still alive today, some 3000 or more years later.

The material is illustrated with photographs taken by the author on location in France and New York, as well as source material from various museums.

It will appeal to anyone interested in the symbolic transmission of the world's Western esoteric heritage.

All funds from your purchase of this book will go to support the translation of important historical documents related to the Gurdjieff tradition.

The author is currently at work on a second volume which will explore even earlier (!) influences on esoteric art and practice. Anticipated publication of this follow-up work will be late 2019.

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.

A single quality

October 21

It’s a Sunday morning. My wife is out of town, and the house is quiet—aside from my grandfather clock, which is marking the half hour, as it has for more than 350 years.

Over the last week, I’ve worked with many people, both of those in groups interested in inner work, and those who are merely engaged in ordinary life and have few, if any, such thoughts. 

Regardless of the conditions, the requirement of the inner man is always the same: to maintain the inward attitude of containment, the stillness, the silence that is set apart from the ordinary functions necessary for life. To maintain the inward attitude of containment, and to refer to it first and always, as a precursor to outward life and the essential component from which all Being emanates.

Of course, this sounds like a tall order. I hear those around me, especially those who seek earnestly, complaining all the time that they can’t maintain this containment, that they forget themselves, that they only remember their inner work when they are around other people who have the same wish.

 To all of them, and to anyone who reads this, I would advise you to stop being foolish about this matter. The only person who can remember your inner work is yourself; and you must set yourself the task to remember it through all the parts of your being wherever you are. 

Forget about hoping that you will get to some special meeting or weekend of work and meditation where your inner work will suddenly be enlivened again. 

Come to believe in this moment that it’s this moment alone in which your work can be enlivened; and stake your life on it, as though you were an alcoholic who could only survive by moving from one moment to the next without a drink.

 Be generous in your efforts to help others work; and be generous to them in general. Act with love. But don’t rely on them to be the motive force for your work, or the support for it. Make them rather the aim of your work through an ongoing action of outer considering. Think on how they struggle and suffer; suffer on their behalf, and help them in their struggles; remember at the same time that your own struggles and suffering are yours to deal with.

Of course we will fail. This is helpful to my inner work. Failure teaches me new things. Success just makes me an idiot. 

…We are allowed to complain, but only in fair measure.

On this point of work, enough. On to the thought that drives this particular set of posts; and that is that life does not have many different qualities, as all of my outward parts would like me to believe. Life has a single aspect.

There is only one Being; and all of the aspects that I experience are simply reflections of that Being. Being is Being; and each action of being encompasses the entire universe.

Yesterday, I was on line at Costco buying groceries; and for a moment, as I looked at a woman — of course a complete stranger, everyone is — I saw how she contained the whole universe within herself, and became responsible for it in her Being, regardless of whether she had any conscious awareness of this or not. 

Everything is this way. One might say that the whole being of God was in a single drop of water; or in a flower. And indeed, Meister Eckhart says, 

if one were but to know a flower as it has being in God - that would be nobler than the whole world. 

—Meister Eckhart, The Complete Mystical Works, Sermon 82

  So no matter how many different things happen, they are all a part of this single aspect of Being. 

Gradually, the inward parts — as they unify — are able to take in being as a more and more comprehensive aspect, instead of fragments which appear to be different from one another. The more inner unity there is, the more it corresponds to outer unity. That is to say, there is an alignment that takes place between truth and being.

warm regards,

Lee

Announcing the publication of 

The Reconstruction of the Soul

The Reconstruction of the Soul is a wide-ranging investigation of symbolism in High and Late Medieval art. It includes detailed analyses of the Unicorn Tapestries at the Cluny Museum and the Cloisters in New York, as well as detailed examinations of the mysterious, erotic and bizarre symbolism in The Cathedral of St. Lazare in Autun.

Along the way, it traces the roots of Western esoteric art from Babylon to ancient Greece, revealing traditions that are still alive today, some 3000 or more years later.

The material is illustrated with photographs taken by the author on location in France and New York, as well as source material from various museums.

It will appeal to anyone interested in the symbolic transmission of the world's Western esoteric heritage.

All funds from your purchase of this book will go to support the translation of important historical documents related to the Gurdjieff tradition.

The author is currently at work on a second volume which will explore even earlier (!) influences on esoteric art and practice. Anticipated publication of this follow-up work will be late 2019.

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.

Be awake within sensation first

Christ, on the tympanum of St Foy in Conques

A master says nothing can move the heavens— meaning that that man is a heavenly man in whom all things are so little present that they do not move him. 

—Meister Eckhart, The Complete Mystical Works, Sermon 82

The principal obstacle to consciousness is the wandering mind. Everything that distracts from my concentration is my enemy. Yet I do not have to fight the distractions. I need to ignore them and not nourish them with my energy, my attention. 

—Jeanne de Salzmann, The Reality of Being, Page 83

 Now some people use up all the powers of the soul in the outer man. These are people who turn all their senses and their reason toward perishable goods, knowing nothing of the inner man. You should know that the outer man can be active while the inner man is completely free of this activity and unmoved.

—Meister Eckhart, The Complete Mystical Works, P 571  

So perhaps you have a question about turning thought; and perhaps you wonder about whether it is possible, as my wife asks, to “think, talk, and move while connected to sensation.”

Eckhart’s quote is quite exactly about this. It illustrates the fact that even in the middle ages, masters understood the nature of being and sensation, and the need for detachment (not disassociation!) from the thinking mind in order to manifest Being.

We need to be awake within our sensation first. 

It is the foundation of our individual (undivided) Being. Unless this comes before everything else, including our intellect—especially our intellect— we can’t retain anything. Energy may come and go, and our attention with it, but everything will be fleeting and the confusion will always return. 

Only an active sensation, a living sensation, can change this.

Too much energy goes in us in too many other directions, all of them dictated by the thinking. And we think—this is exactly the problem, we think— that we can figure this out. 

But we can’t. We cannot figure it out, and the turning of the mind is never going to. 

We need, rather, to sense our way to an inner intelligence, not think our way to it. In much the same way that Gurdjieff told his pupil, 

 …you do not know what you are looking for. You interest yourself in these questions without partaking of your instinct… your interior is never interested in these things for which we are working. Something in you remains apart, it looks. Another part in you does something else—you work without instinct. Everything works—head, feeling, except that which must. It has never done anything to change. 

—Wartime Meetings, meeting 32)

 Intelligence means understanding (the latin root) and we cannot understand with the mind; it’s too subjective, too undisciplined. Our instinct can, however, help us sense our way and feel our way towards it.

The capacity for this impulse is already here in us, right now. It isn’t somewhere else in the future, at some other time. It’s an inner capacity, never acquired or understood through external means. But instead of living it in every moment, always available, we theorize about it.

The mind can be quite alive and entirely present without being filled with turning thought; and even if the turning thoughts are present, they can be safely ignored. They don’t signify anything, no matter how much importance I assign to them, and are of very little use in even the most general of senses, let alone any specifics. 

The aim is to discover a living stillness within the mind which perceives within sensation. 

May God bless you on this special eve.

Warmly,

Lee

Announcing the publication of 

The Reconstruction of the Soul

The Reconstruction of the Soul is a wide-ranging investigation of symbolism in High and Late Medieval art. It includes detailed analyses of the Unicorn Tapestries at the Cluny Museum and the Cloisters in New York, as well as detailed examinations of the mysterious, erotic and bizarre symbolism in The Cathedral of St. Lazare in Autun.

Along the way, it traces the roots of Western esoteric art from Babylon to ancient Greece, revealing traditions that are still alive today, some 3000 or more years later.

The material is illustrated with photographs taken by the author on location in France and New York, as well as source material from various museums.

It will appeal to anyone interested in the symbolic transmission of the world's Western esoteric heritage.

All funds from your purchase of this book will go to support the translation of important historical documents related to the Gurdjieff tradition.

The author is currently at work on a second volume which will explore even earlier (!) influences on esoteric art and practice. Anticipated publication of this follow-up work will be late 2019.

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.

To Just Live

St. Foy, Conques 

Part of the difficulty of our inner search, I think, is the extraordinary number of attachments we form to our external lives. They create an enormous range of impulses and desires, all of which are inclined by impulse to live this way, that way, or the other way. In the end, I always want more than life, somehow; and I know this sounds contradictory, but there you are. I want the things of life; and there is no end to this wanting, because there is no end to the things. 

What I fail to want is life itself.

 Life is what quickens in me and gives me being. It’s life itself. Not the things of life. Life is an energy, a force, which my being ought to inhabit. If we speak about the law of reciprocal feeding in this context, perhaps we could suggest that my Being feeds life and life feeds my Being.

 All this takes place before there are any things, and the things ultimately don’t have anything to do with its action. 

Yet all of my attention is riveted on things, not Being.

 I don’t want to just live. Yet to just live would be exactly what’s necessary in order to acquire the sense of Being that I profess interest in. In an exquisite irony, even the sense of Being becomes a thing I want, instead of a simple action of just living.

 To just live is to be here. 

Not to be here in the mind, which thinks I am here. 

And not even to be here in the body, which senses that it is here. 

Not to be present in the emotions, which feel like I am here (and would probably rather be there, somewhere else, where things are better.) 

It is to be here in a whole way which involves a molecular sensation, an awakening of the intelligence of the body and the intelligence of the feeling, which join the intelligence of the mind to form a receptive state which just lives.

 Perhaps I think this is too idealized and practical for what we call the “real world” today; I don’t know. But even that is already intellectualizing it, because one should just live first, and discover what it means afterwards.

 There are no magical actions here. Ordinary being is quite prosaic and stands in suspension, awaiting the conditions of life. My outward parts will always have gears that turn in reaction to it; but the inward parts can form a more stable environment. 

In the end, this is only a place to begin, and nothing more. To just live. That can be, as you may see with some effort and some luck, quite sufficient of itself. Even a glimpse of the complications we inflict upon ourselves and one another from this perspective will do a great deal to explain the conditions we live in.

Regards,

Lee

Announcing the publication of 

The Reconstruction of the Soul

The Reconstruction of the Soul is a wide-ranging investigation of symbolism in High and Late Medieval art. It includes detailed analyses of the Unicorn Tapestries at the Cluny Museum and the Cloisters in New York, as well as detailed examinations of the mysterious, erotic and bizarre symbolism in The Cathedral of St. Lazare in Autun.

Along the way, it traces the roots of Western esoteric art from Babylon to ancient Greece, revealing traditions that are still alive today, some 3000 or more years later.

The material is illustrated with photographs taken by the author on location in France and New York, as well as source material from various museums.

It will appeal to anyone interested in the symbolic transmission of the world's Western esoteric heritage.

All funds from your purchase of this book will go to support the translation of important historical documents related to the Gurdjieff tradition.

The author is currently at work on a second volume which will explore even earlier (!) influences on esoteric art and practice. Anticipated publication of this follow-up work will be late 2019.

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.

An Objective Assistant

Observer, from the arch over the tympanum at St. Foy in Conques

 The action of my mind is perpetually confused and confusing; and I'm perpetually caught in it. 

If my inward observation of myself is sufficiently acute, eventually I realize several things. 

First of all, there's no sorting out this confusion. Its existence rests in the very nature of the intellect itself, and it propagates through its contact with the material world: objects, events, circumstances, and conditions. These forces will always be confusing. Any other belief I have regarding the matter is at best naive. At worst, it seduces me with the illusion of my own authority.

The second thing I realize is that there's little point in paying much attention to all of this. Not, that is, in terms of the question of living in the material world (an exercise I need to devote my left foot, but not much more, to) but in terms of an inward attention that can teach me anything about myself. My thoughts about myself will continue to be confused, disorganized, and unclear for as long as they revolve around my intellect, my psychology, and my opinions. Yet I very stubbornly insist on trying to "figure out" my inner work with this faculty.

I need to seek a relationship with a part of Being that has few such attachments. My organic sensation is that part.

The molecular sense of Being is objective. It receives life in exactly the way that life arises from it: without judgment, without attitude. Life flows into me in this place without judgment or attitude; and it also flows out of me without those two qualities. So I become freer of external circumstances and their confusion in direct proportion to the amount I invest in my objective assistant.

 Meister Eckhart makes a great deal of following God’s primary inclination; and God’s primary inclination is to Be. To allow Being to flow inwardly and outwardly without constant judgment and interference provides an objective perspective. Yet this can only be done using the sensory faculties which do not rely on the intellect, the mind, to accomplish their goals. In this sense the idea of “mindfulness” isn’t helpful, because it implies that we are going to think with careful attention and thereby understand. In point of fact, from the perspective of intellect, the objective is to not think— and yet have a careful attention — which is rooted in this “lower” level of molecular sensation, which is resident, inherent, receptive, and essential.

 Perhaps it’s important to examine this word “essential;” few people speak of essence from an essential nature. 

Essence has a certain rate of vibration. The experience of it is very closely related to molecular sensation and the intimacy of Being. Trying to understand essence without understanding the nature of its vibration, which has an independent intelligence, is impossible. We can’t understand essence with the thought or with the mind or with psychology. Essence must be understood from the rooted nature of self, with the help of the objective assistant.

 By myself, everything I take in is inflected by opinion. The development of a molecular sense of Being engenders a different mind, which equally receives and interprets life, but in an extra-ordinary way which is quite difficult to describe. In the first place, it is completely, utterly, and inherently active. Action is its reason for existing and Being. Yet at the same time, its action, which is intelligent in a new way that does not relate to the turning of thought, is an entirely passive, because it has an unfathomable capacity to receive life, in exactly the same way that its capacity to generate life is also unfathomable.

At the same time, in this active passivity, which can both receive and emanate life in equal measure, there are no opinions, no confusions. The molecular sensation of Being is incapable of lying, because the faculty has no tools with which that could be achieved. Hence its objectivity: I can rely on everything that is received and perceived by the molecular sensation of Being, because it is a fact, not born of me, but an emanated condition rooted on the one end in God, and on the other end in man. 

Warmly,

Lee

Announcing the publication of 

The Reconstruction of the Soul

The Reconstruction of the Soul is a wide-ranging investigation of symbolism in High and Late Medieval art. It includes detailed analyses of the Unicorn Tapestries at the Cluny Museum and the Cloisters in New York, as well as detailed examinations of the mysterious, erotic and bizarre symbolism in The Cathedral of St. Lazare in Autun.

Along the way, it traces the roots of Western esoteric art from Babylon to ancient Greece, revealing traditions that are still alive today, some 3000 or more years later.

The material is illustrated with photographs taken by the author on location in France and New York, as well as source material from various museums.

It will appeal to anyone interested in the symbolic transmission of the world's Western esoteric heritage.

All funds from your purchase of this book will go to support the translation of important historical documents related to the Gurdjieff tradition.

The author is currently at work on a second volume which will explore even earlier (!) influences on esoteric art and practice. Anticipated publication of this follow-up work will be late 2019.

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.

Confusion

St. Foy, Conques

Photo by the author

The illustration here is from the tympanum at the abbey church of St. Foy in Conques, France. Superficially, it’s a recapitulation of the last judgment, a common theme in medieval art. Much more could (and ought to) be said about this tympanum, which has some very ingenious features; but for today let’s just take note of the fact that it is divided into three levels, top to bottom, and that the left and right side depict heaven and hell. Let’s note, furthermore, that heaven and hell exist as a foundational level here; heaven is not ”above“ and hell “beneath.” They’re on the same level; and the entire rest of creation (Christ and the activity on the two higher levels) are solidly built upon this pair of contradictory impulses.

High Medieval art is never, esoterically, about locations other than the inner. This tympanum depicts what is taking place in us right now. It’s always thus; the esoteric Christian message is always direct towards the immediate question of what my state is now. Heavens and hells are not abstracted places of reward and punishment; they are inner states which I choose to participate in.

In the Tympanum at St. Foy, I can choose between the order of heaven or the chaos of hell; both are present in me. One has a sense of the sacred, the other is deeply entangled in the chaotic events of the physical and material world. Yet these two states in me are codependent and thus arranged on the same level. My only option is to become responsible for both of them. It’;s the inner physics of attraction that leads me towards heaven or hell; and this is a material, a foundational, action upon which, metaphorically, the kingdom of Christ (the next level up) is erected.

Now, we know from the sermons of Eckhart than medieval monastics were deeply engaged with the examination of such questions (more so, I'd say, than we are today) and so it’s no surprise to see such concerns carefully, if somewhat covertly, encoded in the tympanum of a medieval church. In medieval art, it’s the rule, not the exception. Yet it’s probably quite difficult for us to see how this relates to us as people, if at all.

The point here is that my psychological states, along with my intellect, are mired in this state of confusion represented by hell. It is chaotic, excited, and perversely attractive. It is, furthermore, so completely filled with activity that it distracts me from any possibility of organically sensing an order within myself. Clearly I could do better.

Yet I don’t.

The inner physics of attraction builds its church (its inner order) from the molecular sensation of my Being by gradually forming a center of gravity within me. This center of gravity creates a magnetic field around it: and in this way it’s quite identical to a planet. First gravity; then spin; then magnetism. I’m creating an inner solar system, if you will. This magnetism attracts substances (Gurdjieff’s arcane “chemical factory”) that concentrate within the body and gradually attract more particles, which collectively engender a capacity for Being. 

All of the obstacles of my own intellect, especially my impatience, at first stand between me and this action. My impatience especially is an enemy in this regard, because it is selfish (like the false or artificial center of gravity created by my psychology and personality) and ants everything immediately. It’s very clever at seizing absolutely everything thing it encounters and deciding that this, that or the other things represents a molecular sensation and an experience of Being, because, you see, I feel that I have to have it. 

I don’t see that this desire and this feeling themselves begin within and proceed out of my mind and its vanities, and thus make it from the start quite impossible for me to discover anything real. I've watched this process within myself and others for decades and it is a terrifically power pathology which one must forever remain on guard against.

Only patience and decades of work aimed at cultivating an inner vision attract enough particles to change the inner center of gravity; but if this can be effected the change creates an objective assistant.     

   
Warmly,

Lee

Announcing the publication of 

The Reconstruction of the Soul

The Reconstruction of the Soul is a wide-ranging investigation of symbolism in High and Late Medieval art. It includes detailed analyses of the Unicorn Tapestries at the Cluny Museum and the Cloisters in New York, as well as detailed examinations of the mysterious, erotic and bizarre symbolism in The Cathedral of St. Lazare in Autun.

Along the way, it traces the roots of Western esoteric art from Babylon to ancient Greece, revealing traditions that are still alive today, some 3000 or more years later.

The material is illustrated with photographs taken by the author on location in France and New York, as well as source material from various museums.

It will appeal to anyone interested in the symbolic transmission of the world's Western esoteric heritage.

All funds from your purchase of this book will go to support the translation of important historical documents related to the Gurdjieff tradition.

The author is currently at work on a second volume which will explore even earlier (!) influences on esoteric art and practice. Anticipated publication of this follow-up work will be late 2019.

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.

The Inner Physics of Attraction

A master says there is nothing so like God as being: insofar as it has being it is like God. A master says that being is so pure and so lofty that all that God is, is being. God knows nothing but being, He is conscious of nothing but being: being is His circumference. 

God loves nothing but His being, He thinks of nothing but His being. I say all creatures are one being. One master says that some creatures are so close to God and have pressed into themselves so much of the divine light that they give being to other creatures. 

That is not true, for being is so high, so pure and so akin to God that no one can give being save God alone in Himself. God's characteristic is being. A master says one creature can quite well give life to another. Therefore in being alone lies all that is at all. Being is the first name. 

Whatever is deficient is a falling away from being. Our whole life ought to be being. 

Meister Eckhart, The Complete Mystical Works, Sermon 82, page 404 (Trans. M. O’C Walshe.)

In examining this question of how I attract what's necessary to acquire a greater sense of presence and Being, I use the word intimate. This word comes from the Latin intimare, to impress or make familiar, which in its turn derives from intimus, inmost.

So I’m indicating a need to turn towards what is inmost in order to discover what attracts Being. Being is embedded deep without ourselves, inseparable from what we are. While the word molecular conveys a good bit of just how deep this experience of Being lies, it is only in the experience of Being itself that we can discover how deeply embedded it is. It lies at the root of creation and what is; no thing exists without first Being.

Being is, furthermore, a conscious principle; it is consciousness itself, yet even more; for consciousness does not exist without first Being, either. We approach here a mystery which you should resist trying to understand with the intellect alone. Eckhart touches on this as well in sermon 82 in his point about the contradictions of joy and sorrow; it’s required reading for those interested in the study of the subject. 

Intellect has contradiction inherent to it; Being does not. Yet one cannot just decide to banish contradiction and be rid of it. An intellectual resolution to our confusion about Being is what we so earnestly desire; and it’s this desire itself that collapses on us. We’re perpetually buried beneath it.

The intimate, organic, molecular sense of Being, which is emitted by the level “below” us, is actually a much finer and very high rate of vibration. Here, paradoxically, we discover that the level below us isn’t actually below us at all. If and when we acquire a sensation of it —a permanent sensation, I just emphasize—we discover it is a higher level than the one our conventional awareness rests in. It is more intimate; and it draws unto itself the intimacy that creates it. It has a natural, unmanned and organic ability to attract the substance of which it itself is made; and thus an accretion takes place in which sensation, organic and molecular sensation, needs no assistance to maintain itself. Because it arises from Being it already understands how to be fed from Being; the spring from which this water wells up is eternal, that is, it lies outside time—a subject Eckhart also covers in sermon 82. And since time is above all a subjective experience within us, we can understand here that Being comes into us, and exists within us, from outside time. The molecular sensation of Being is a resident or inherent state of this action.

Ah, well, we come back once again as to how one does this.  

How do I do it? 

What can be done?

There’s a certain magnetism that develops as the finer particles of Being are collected and deposited within the soul. Let us call it the inner physics of attraction. Everything from within me, all of my sensation or my inner life—which is not what I collect in my examinations of my outwardness—must be turned towards this inner physics of attraction. I first need to hear about it, study the ideas of it, of course: the intellect is the blade that cuts a path through the vines that obscure it inwardly.  But in the end I must understand it as a physical thing, not a mental one. 

Warmly,

Lee

Announcing the publication of 

The Reconstruction of the Soul

The Reconstruction of the Soul is a wide-ranging investigation of symbolism in High and Late Medieval art. It includes detailed analyses of the Unicorn Tapestries at the Cluny Museum and the Cloisters in New York, as well as detailed examinations of the mysterious, erotic and bizarre symbolism in The Cathedral of St. Lazare in Autun.

Along the way, it traces the roots of Western esoteric art from Babylon to ancient Greece, revealing traditions that are still alive today, some 3000 or more years later.

The material is illustrated with photographs taken by the author on location in France and New York, as well as source material from various museums.

It will appeal to anyone interested in the symbolic transmission of the world's Western esoteric heritage.

All funds from your purchase of this book will go to support the translation of important historical documents related to the Gurdjieff tradition.

The author is currently at work on a second volume which will explore even earlier (!) influences on esoteric art and practice. Anticipated publication of this follow-up work will be late 2019.

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.