Some notes on sexuality, part IV

Capital from L'Abbaye Fontevraud

Photo by the author

A virgin who is a wife is free and unfettered by attachment; she is always as near to God as to herself. She brings forth many and big fruits, for they are neither more nor less than God Himself. This fruit and this birth that virgin bears who is a wife, bringing forth daily a hundred and a thousandfold! Numberless indeed are her labors begotten of the most noble ground or, to speak more truly, of the very ground where the Father ever begets His eternal Word: it is thence she becomes fruitful and shares in the procreation. 

—Meister Eckhart, Sermon 8

To examine sex from the perspective of its physical manifestation in me is insufficient. Sex plays a much greater role in the arising of Being in the first place; the very nature of God’s interaction with the soul is sexual.

This question was well understood and deeply examined by the monastic and mystery schools of the European Middle Ages (as well, of course,  as much earlier such schools); and the records of those investigations were subtly encoded in medieval iconography, which sets something of a world record for its ability to conceal questions of fecundity, insemination, gestation and birth in works of art, especially medieval statuary. As my own books on the subject (The Esoteric Bosch, Bosch Decoded and The Reconstruction of the Soul) note, medieval art was rife with sexual and procreative imagery, some of it quite obvious and direct. Much of it, on the other hand, was covert; only initiates fully understood it. The obvious, if not flagrant, tradition of depicting the Christ figure in the vaginal aperture of the mandorla is a classic example, as are the erect penises found on some gargoyles. The tradition of using floral and vegetal imagery to depict cosmological sexual interactions is only less obvious until is taught to recognize it—and they were cosmological, for sex was embedded at the root of creation.

The integration of this imagery into everyday religious practice in gothic cathedrals is striking. Given that any given gothic cathedral represents, in its symbolic entirety, the entire universe means that it (sex) could not be left out; but its nearly ubiquitous presence throughout the cathedral environment indicates how absolutely fundamental a force it was considered to be. The theme of the cathedral was creation and its relationship to God: first as a creation entire (the whole universe) and then the creation of the individual (the soul) as a procreative action—a sexual action, an engendering—on behalf of God. 

Meister Eckhart may not have written about sex “as such”, that is, in its ordinary man-to-woman physical context (daresay the inquisition would have gone worse for him had he done so) but his emphasis on the eternal fecundity of God, who (even now!) forever gives birth to creation, cannot be emphasized enough. He envisioned our spiritual life as a birth into Being, followed by a rebirth into God. His sermons remind us how central this understanding was to the core mystical tradition, even if from a medieval theological point of view sex “in the flesh” was considered by default to be problematically sinful. The idea that it was is, in my own eyes, doubtful. They weren’t prudes—we just see them through our own prudish lenses.

This leaves us, after these questions about medieval Christian mysteries are examined, with the question of the relationship right now between ordinary sexuality and the birth of Being. 

They are not separated,  either conceptually or physically.  

How do I experience that? And, perhaps more importantly, how can I come into a right relationship with it and make my peace with it?

There is an oddly sexual undercurrent to higher energy. Ordinary sex energy actually interferes with that current in the same way that ordinary thinking and emotion interfere with a sensation and feeling from the higher parts. This is why Gurdjieff frequently described ordinary sex (and its ultimate result, orgasm) as “blowing one’s nose.”  The discharge of ordinary sex energy frees up one’s inner life to allow a finer current to flow within. If this doesn’t take place, all kinds of trouble ensues, even in quite ordinary ways. Bottled up and mis-used sex energy is a source of great excess and violence; it doesn’t matter whether we paint this picture in Freudian or esoteric terms, the outcome is the same. Sex becomes explosive if it isn’t discharged. This is, I suspect, more true of males than females. 

It helps if I see this within myself. I consequently have a responsibility to attend to my sexual needs in an intelligent and non-destructive way. There’s no single answer to how to go about this, but the question needs to be there—along with a willingness to surrender any guilt about it. This may prove impossible, because of there’s one thing social forms seek to instill in humans above all others in regard to sexuality, it’s guilt. I doubt we can overcome this issue, inwardly or outwardly, by walking in any straight lines. It’s a maze with a Minotaur in it. 

Now that I’ve brought that analogy up, let me point out that perhaps the value of that myth is in its suggestion that I trace my sexuality and its nature back through its beginnings in a thread from my birth to where I am now. Seeing it in its wholeness is necessary. This is, of course, true for all of life experience; but I think we too often forget that our sexual nature ought to be continually pondered, along with all the other questions our life has raised. Instead, we avoid it... why? It is what gave us Being in the first place. 

My life is born, here and now, through an engendering of Being. In the most sacred moments, my higher parts can sense that. If my lower parts choose to see the world through an inferior lens of the same essential nature, I have to accept that and suffer it. 

May your heart be close to God, 

and God close to your heart.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.

Some notes on sexuality, part III

Capital from L'Abbaye Fontevraud

Photo by the author

What are the 'two sons' of the soul? 

St. Augustine speaks - and with him another, pagan master - of the two faces of the soul. The one is turned toward this world and the body; in this she works virtue, knowl­edge, and holy living. The other face is turned directly to God. There the divine light is without interruption, working within, even though she does not know it, because she is not at home. 

When the spark of intellect is taken barely in God, then the 'husband' is alive. Then the birth takes place, then the Son is born. This birth does not take place once a year or once a month or once a day, but all the time, that is, above time in the expanse where there is no here or now, nor nature nor thought. 

—Meister Eckhart, Sermon 31

Understanding how independently the rest of my Being’s sex functions becomes more possible if I see how preferential it is, and how distinctly it has formed its preferences independent of my own being. Before I’m aware of it, it has already made up its mind as far as what’s interesting; what body types, what facial features, and so on. It even has its own curiosity and experiments from time to time with attractions outside the normal range. It turns out sex has an intelligence fully capable of appreciating—and respecting—in ways that are hidden to the casual inner eye.

Why is this the case? I believe it’s because it has its own mind, much like the other parts. I’ve spent a number of years observing the fact that the feeling, the intellect, and the body are independent intelligences. It strikes me now that sex is another independent intelligence, although it’s far more automatized than the parts we think of as the three “principal” centers (intellect, emotional, and moving.) This explains, perhaps, why Gurdjieff separated consideration of instinct and sex from the action of the other three centers when it comes to day to day life. They’re too fundamental and too automatic to work directly with the “big three”, perhaps; yet that doesn’t explain why he told people that it’s important to work with their instinct. 

Why didn’t he say that about sex?

This idea of working with instinct implies a direct investment in that intuitive part of Being; yet we don’t hear him talking about working with sex, even though sex equally has its own intelligence and intuition—and powerful ones, too. (Remember how Gurdjieff told Ouspensky that if sex center in a person only worked with its own energy, that would be a big thing.) 

One might suppose this sexual part doesn’t comfortably fit into the development of our psychospiritual Being; yet that can’t be possible, because it’s such an integral part of it in the first place. 

That leaves me with a question of exactly where sex does fit in; it’s a troubling question without any obvious answers, which is probably why it has plagued Traditional religious authorities throughout history.

Approaching this, I ask myself exactly what my sexual intelligence consists of. There must be one; and I believe that I can and have sensed it as an undercurrent in my relationships with women. It I nforms (inwardly forms) a certain intelligent spiritual intimacy. The fact that I simply won’t have sex with the women I interact with doesn’t preclude a psychospiritual acknowledgement of their inherent sexuality; a respect for their sexual nature which gently and honorably pays it its due. This subliminal exchange ought, I think, to be an ordinary part of a healthy, adult exchange between the opposite sexes. That exchange takes place below the level of ordinary consciousness, as a textural platform that grounds the exchange in a certain truth. 

That truth is grounded in a finer and higher energy; although that energy seems to be driven by our coarse animal urges, it actually enters this level from a much higher place and actually has the potential to form a more human, more sacred respect for one another. 

Admittedly I am reaching, intuiting here; attempting to understand the experience of this undeniable energy, this irrevocable component of human Being, as an active and participating force in the world of interaction between men and women. In me. Not just as a crude force that thrusts me into the conflicts of desire, but into the temples of respect. 

I equate this with the observation I’ve had that my sexuality, as animal as it may appear, has a greater, even cosmic, scope to its nature. It’s all of womankind that’s significant in regard to this sacred force; sex is not about my microcosmic attraction to individual women, but to femininity itself. It’s the polarity that attracts, not the individual: man is drawn towards woman in a sexual way because of forces much larger than our individual impulses. In this context, my wish for sex—its driving force—is a wish for sex with all of womankind, not just woman. 

It’s a rather more religious and philosophically grounded version of Portnoy’s Complaint, if you will: one that examines the question not from a commonplace, but planetary perspective. The forces that drive my own (and every other man or woman’s) sexual impulse and experience aren’t just planetary, but solar. They come, in other words, from a level so high above me that I can at best barely taste the air they breathe. I ought to respect that; and that respect ought to first be engendered organically, then honored for its authority. 

Perhaps these ideas aren’t very new; I doubt it. Yet I find little discussion of the matter among those of us who have a wish for Being. Despite that, it ultimately needs to be examined; and if we attempt that alone, it’s not enough. Questions of this scale may have to begin within the individual, but the culmination of such studies has to be within the community. We can’t, I don’t think, begin to understand both the individual and collective failures of mankind to come to grips with  a right attitude towards and exercise of our sexuality towards one another without better understanding its relationship to Being; and obscuring that relationship in a shroud of tantric mystery is not enough. It has gone on too long; and the shroud itself has been, if I dare say so, far too male in the first place. 

Perhaps the ancient fertility cults and temples of the Goddesses come from a time when femininity was afforded a better—even primary—place in society. I can’t say. What I can say is that it’s all to evident it isn’t in a good place now. 

May your heart be close to God, 

and God close to your heart.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.

Some notes on sexuality, part II

Capital from L'Abbaye Fontevraud

Photo by the author

Now I say as I have often said before, that this eternal birth occurs in the soul precisely as it does in eternity, no more and no less, for it is one birth, and this birth occurs in the essence and ground of the soul… God is in all things as being, as activity, as power. 

But He is fe­cund in the soul alone, for though every creature is a vestige of God, the soul is the natural image of God. This image must be adorned and perfected in this birth. No creature but the soul alone is recep­tive to this act, this birth. 

Indeed, such perfection as enters the soul, whether it be divine undivided light, grace, or bliss, must enter the soul through this birth, and in no other way. Just await this birth within you, and you shall experience all good and all comfort, all happiness, all being and all truth. 

—Meister Eckhart, Sermon 2

I’ve been noticing on this trip that the question of sex instantly inserts itself into every woman I look at or have an interaction with. There’s a part of my male function that evaluates every woman first in terms of sex; it’s an entirely automatic reaction not under the control of my intellectual direction. It doesn’t matter what they look like. I’ve been watching this part in operation; it’s remarkably quick, inserting itself into the front of the impression so swiftly that it’s nearly impossible to get there first. Once it does that, it acts as though it owns the situation, filtering the rest of the exchange through that question. Even if I overcome it and “forget” it (and let’s be clear, it would prefer to be forgotten, so that it can function without being observed) it remains there as an undertone. It is, furthermore, very selective; for example, my sex-center interest is distinctly racist and edits women of color (but not asia women) right out of the picture. They don’t register; nor do, for example, underaged women, ever. And it’s safe to say that I have never looked at a man and seen this part which instantly propagates a sexual interest as functional. I don’t have explanations for this; but the preferences are, in my opinion, organic; that is, wherever they come from, they’re rooted deeply in instinct of one kind or another. There’s something of the essence in it.

This function isn’t attached to desire, either. Desire comes later. It exists almost independent of the emotional and feeling centers, functioning on its own. It occurs to me in realizing this that the sex center is fully capable of dictating its own terms in every single human being. It’s strong, it’s powerful, and it flexes its muscles mostly through moving center, directed as a form of innate sensation. 

While the conventional world of romance, wooing, marriage and family thinks of sex as largely connected to emotion, in males, I don’t think it functions this way. We indulge ourselves in false pictures that distract us and make us feel better. 

Sex is a wild card, an animal function, and like a grizzly bear it does, so to speak, whatever it wants. Perhaps this brings us a little closer to what Gurdjieff meant when he said that sex is a function. The word means an action or purpose natural or intended for a person or thing. The root of the word lies in the Latin functio— from fungi, to perform. It is, in other words, automatic: strangely, biologically mechanical, and in certain mysterious ways alien to an inner conscious Being. Its certainly strikes me that way as I watch it—as an alien. It is not “me;” but it is an inner force that has its way with me.

This may go along way to explaining the dysfunctional way in which male sexuality expresses itself in society at large; one of the difficulties we have is that we keep perceiving it as a controllable function, whereas it operates quite independently of the rational and feeling parts of Being. The mistake begins when we assume that sex is under our control. Really, from a functional point of view, it’s the other way around. 

Presuming that social forms can leash this beast is a huge mistake. The cultures that have put the tightest and most restrictive leashes on it – for example, Hindu and Muslim cultures —accidentally turn it into a violent weapon, tragically used almost exclusively against women. I think this illustrates the limits of trying to control the problem with mechanical “moral” solutions. All mechanical solutions turn out to be immoral in one way or the other. Prostitution, for example, which functions both as an acknowledgment of the basic facts of sex-as-function and a commercial enterprise, is far less immoral than the practice of honor killings in East Asian cultures. Yet prostitution, strangely enough, has a terrible reputation in those same countries where honor killing is considered not just acceptable, but necessary.

Again, I come back to the question of how this particular function exists in me. Examining the outer forms and the way that they dysfunctionally attempt to deal with it, it occurs to me that the only real way of dealing with sex is to see it from within. It can’t simply be banished; I have to acknowledge its existence and find a place for it along with the function of my other parts. 

If you’ll excuse the pun, they are unlikely to be good bedfellows; in order for sex to find a reasonable place within the context of feeling and intellectual centers, some difficult compromises have to be arrived at.

An additional note to readers:

A new series in the continuing essays on Metaphysical Humanism and the Laws of Being will start publishing in this space on January 11, 2020.

May your heart be close to God, 

and God close to your heart.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.

Some notes on sexuality, part I

Capital from L'Abbaye Fontevraud

Photo by the author

God is in all things as being, as activity, as power. But He is fe­cund in the soul alone, for though every creature is a vestige of God, the soul is the natural image of God. This image must be adorned and perfected in this birth. No creature but the soul alone is recep­tive to this act, this birth. 

Indeed, such perfection as enters the soul, whether it be divine undivided light, grace, or bliss, must enter the soul through this birth, and in no other way. Just await this birth within you, and you shall experience all good and all comfort, all happiness, all being and all truth. If you miss it, you will miss all good and blessedness. 

—Meister Eckhart, Sermon 2

Henri Trachol mentioned that travel through airports is a good time to study yourself. One is “in suspension,” so to speak, so one’s inward vision of oneself may achieve a clinical separation which is less available in the ordinary course of events. Of course this is an arguable proposition, but for myself I find it to be true, at least overall.

Foreign travel on business trips extends that separation; one lives in a bubble. China has consequently functioned, in my own case, as an inner laboratory for many years. Each trip seems to reveal some new aspect of my Being worth examination. 

This trip I’ve been noticing the action of sex center. Now, aside from blanket statements about sex center—which usually take the form of quotes from Gurdjieff and variations thereon—Gurdjieff people don’t seem to discuss it much. I can count on the fingers of one hand, for example, the number of times I’ve heard someone bring this subject up in over 30 years of working in Gurdjieff groups. The Buddhists don’t seem to discuss it much, either; nor do Christians, except (as is usually the case) when they are telling folks to abstain from it. 

As if.

This seems odd, because sex is a tremendously powerful force (arguable the most powerful force affecting the day to day operation of the human psyche) and it ought, in my opinion, to be given far more scrutiny within legitimate inner spiritual contexts. 

Sex, unlike other our unsexed features of the psyche, has two distinct manifestations, male and female, and despite the many intermediate flavors it may come in, it seems safe to say that men will never fundamentally understand sex from a woman’s point of view, and vice versa. This means we are, as sexes, doomed to never understand more than about 50% of the question. Confessing this deficiency, I’ll proceed to investigate the question from the male inner territory I'm familiar with, admitting that I can’t bring much of the woman’s point of view to it, aside from a certain intuition which has informed me from an early age. 

Let me explain that. Since I was very young, I’ve always found it much easier to form friendships with women than with men. I don’t know how to explain this other than to say that I always felt when I was growing up that men acted too much like children, and that men are basically crude; unrefined idiots of one kind or another (I suspect this is a new class of idiot, or, at least, one Gurdjieff forgot to mention.) I regret to report that recent experiences with men I’ve known for many decades, who are otherwise good friends, and even good men in so far as that is possible (there are limits to it) underscore the fact that men don’t change much over time. You would think we’d grow up, but for the most part we don’t. These particular pals—who are all, like me, in their 60s—act like little children when they get together, wisecracking and making inappropriate remarks about women and other people in general, and for the most part lacking the emotional gravity that’s needed to navigate life in an intelligent way.

Although during the course of these social events I quickly determined some strictly defined limits as to just how much time of this particular low-grade, adolescent male quality I prefer to spend with folk, I love these men anyway. But they-—I—can’t quite overcome being male; and that quality of being male, unless it undergoes a quite precise inner development, always has this unfortunate aspect to it. This is why I often tell younger women that they should wake up to the fact that they are superior to men, and that the emotional and intellectual future of the human race ought rightfully to be handed off to the women, who I feel sure would be doing a better job than we men are. 

Admittedly, this is a sexist point of view, but I stand by it. I think women are superior to men in most ways.

In reaching these conclusions, I’ve had to investigate my own maleness, and of course this particular aspect of my being is deeply rooted in my sexuality. Whether we like it or not, sex is the central motivating force and power in much of ordinary being, and its roots run so deep that it’s impossible to pull them up. They nourish the plant; and the plant needs all its roots. They can’t be pruned selectively in order to get a good tree. If that’s done, you end up with a bonsai tree; and while bonsai trees are aesthetically pleasing, they are weak, tiny things that can’t possibly fulfill the role that nature gave them, which is to grow large and strong and function in a forest community.

In other words, we absolutely need our sexuality; and yet it has a disturbing quality to it that seems to cast it in opposition to our spiritual nature and the nature of the soul.

On this trip, I’ve been reading Meister Eckhart, who is in my eyes still the nonpareil on matters of the soul and its development. (It may come as an insult to devotees of Gurdjieff’s writings, but in my estimation he can’t hold a match  to Eckhart, let alone a candle.) Even Eckhart does not mention sex directly, but only in terms of his perpetual theme of the rebirth of the soul in God.

When other Christian mystics (I’m mostly thinking of the women mystics here) mention it, it always appears in the form of lust, coarse bodily functions and desires, all of which are to be avoided at all costs. It is, in other words, somehow cast in the role of the enemy of God and spirituality. In traditional religions, everything of the flesh is suspect.

To be fair, not all medieval spiritual masters thought of it this way (for example, Robert of Arbrissel, who founded the important Cistercian Abbey of Fontevraud.) And we know quite well that not every religious discipline believes that extinguishing sex from the equation will have good results. There are, for example, Tantric practices that make it central, though we have to admit that within the traditions these are far from majority opinions.

None of this, however, is of much practical value in trying to examine the day-to-day function of sex within the psychospiritual context of my own, or another ordinary person’s, life. In order to do that there need to be some practical observations about its day-to-day functions; and this is what I’ve been coming up against in my own life on this particular trip.

An additional note to readers:

A new series in the continuing essays on Metaphysical Humanism and the Laws of Being will start publishing in this space on January 11, 2020.

May your heart be close to God, and God close to your heart.

Lee

Under Law

Dec. 19.

Today my sister would have turned 60. I'm filled with a deep grief. 

These are facts.

Some are aware that I’m working on a book about Metaphysical Humanism, which will, among other things, explore the metaphysical laws of the cosmos at some depth.

When Gurdjieff originally introduced to the idea of being "under" 48 laws to Ouspensky, he introduced a complex new cosmology unfamiliar to his contemporaries. The idea that we’re under 48 laws was presented as a burden; anyone who reads the material will come away with a bit of that impression.

I'd like you, however, to think about this a bit differently for a minute.

All of the laws that we are "under" are simply the natural conditions we inhabit. We aren't "under" anything. 

Rather, we embody all of the extant laws at the level we are on. 

Every law in question is a sacred law of creation; and it's our role to embody the laws of the level we live on. This means that we can live with honor under law, instead of seeing it as something that oppresses us. True, we may wish to come under the influence of one law or another more than we are now; yet we can’t do that without honoring all of the law as it is in the first place. 

Without respect for a given law, even the idea of getting free of that particular law is impossible. It may, in our eyes, be the most awful law in the whole world; yet we must respect it and work with it if we wish to come out from under its influence into a different one.

This idea has a great deal to do with obedience, which is an essential law of the angelic realms, most of which can be accurately identified. This since law is a reciprocal structure whose nature can be deduced by relationship and correspondence. (As you will eventually see.)

In any event, we embody the laws– all of them. Even, in our own way, the very highest laws. To ignore this is to live at our own peril. We’re representatives of the divine, and it’s our obligation and our duty to live within the law. It should not be seen as a burden, but, rather, a responsibility and an honor.

This is a particularly important time of year, because a great abundance of spiritual energy is conferred upon the planet between now and Christmas. If we embody the law and do our best to honor it through our spiritual senses, indispensable benefits may ensue.

We may even acquire a taste of true compassion and humility.

May your heart be close to God, 

and God close to your heart.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.

Laws of Being

Oct. 22, Hangzhou

I believe I’m immortal. 

Only by organic sensation of myself can I remember my mortality in any meaningful way. Yet that organic sensation is dependent on a certain kind of attention.

Without the attention, I forget that I am, and I forget that Being is my true center of gravity.

This morning (3:30 am) I'm in my hotel room in Hangzhou, wide awake in bed, studying the nature of the organic intelligence, which has been quite alive the last few mornings. 

This organic intelligence is truly the first important part of Being, since everything begins there; and the presence of God is always within it. When I am within the intelligence of my Being, God is never very far away. 

The inherent nature of this intelligence is that it receives; and what it receives before it receives any impressions of the outside world is the receiving of life itself. Life flows into us as a sacred energy; it has a quality that transcends the nature of ordinary existence, even though my ordinary existence is founded on it. To touch it from within, to breathe it in and out, to feel it coursing through one’s veins and enlivening the molecules of the body, is to know God not as some external force, not some abstract cosmic entity, but as who we are and what we are. The psychological, theological, and philosophical separation between God, Being, and this universe we live in dissolve in the midst of the actual manifestation of God’s presence within Being. 

Already this begins to sound psychological, theological, and philosophical; and I feel quite sure you may be taking it in that way. Yet rest assured that the presence of God is no such thing. It begins and ends with presence, not with theory; and as long as we are willing to begin and end with that same presence, we form a relationship with God that cannot be so easily disrupted.

There's a quietness within this receiving of life. It's utterly still, even though no other part of me is; and it has a depth of sensory capacity that exceeds my understanding. It has an understanding, in other words, of its own. Applying my own standards to it degrades its nature. It has an integrity that I lack.

This intelligence of presence that’s born within Being has ideas about the nature of life that I also don’t understand. I see that. 

I can see as I participate that it has a subtle capacity I’m unable to measure; it has wishes for my life that exceed my own ability to form a wish. I’m thereby required to trust it; and it engenders trust. At the same time, I begin to see how little of my ordinary self, with all its egoistic desires, can be trusted. 

Being has a law onto itself. All of the animal kingdom obeys that law, because it isn’t contaminated by the subjective opinions we humans occupy our experience of life with. We have, in most ways, removed ourselves from the rule of law and become lawless planetary beings, criminals. 

The nature of our criminality isn’t a human criminality, but a cosmological one. We have few understandings of laws of the cosmos or of nature except the mechanical ones, which we foolishly believe drive everything, as though cause and effect existed independent of intelligence and will. If we understood the law of Being correctly, we wouldn’t destroy everything around us in the way that mankind currently does. 

The difficulty is that no amount of philosophy or intellectualizing will bring me to a true inner understanding of that law. The only thing that can lead me to understand the law of Being — actually, the laws, because there are multiple laws, not just one — is a change in my actual inner state. Everything in my psychology has militated in such a way as to prevent this by all means possible. So although I dwell directly in the presence of the Lord, and have him as a direct neighbor in my Being, I often remain pathologically unable to sense His presence.

Organic intelligence, which can sense that presence, follows its own law. It doesn’t operate according to my whim, so — once again – I need to learn how to trust it. To allow it to exercise its intelligence according to its own understanding, which is superior to mine. If I trust, then it trusts me reciprocally, and I discover it has a greater power to inwardly form a connection to my ordinary being. 

A greater power than I thought; and I realize that I need to invest in this trust, because it’s the only thing that will bring me closer to this intimate inward relationship I wish to know so much more about.

As always, deepening this intimate relationship draws me deeper into the mystery of life and Being, and its fundamentally sacred nature.

A new series in the continuing essays on Metaphysical Humanism and the Laws of Being will start publishing in this space on January 11, 2020.

May your heart be close to God, 
and God close to your heart.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.