Love and Freedom, Part I

The word free is originally from a Sanskrit root, pri, meaning love.

I hear folks talk about freedom all the time; we look at ourselves and our inner work and we proclaim it’s about becoming "free," without truly understanding what that word means or even thinking about it. 

Free = good, right? End of story. Wave the flag.

Who thinks of freedom as being loving? Not many; generally speaking, it’s seen as a liberation from laws, rules, and so on, not as an obligation towards God and others. 

Yet love is an obligation towards relationship; so at its root “freedom” doesn't mean liberation from laws and rules. It implies, rather, a greater understanding of and obedience to them.

It’s quite likely, in my opinion, that the French word for true, vrai, also derives from the self same root. In this etymological interpretation, freedom consists of love and truth. A search for freedom is a search for love and truth, not exemption from obligations and rules. Not, mind you, an escape from ego, either. Perhaps this is why Gurdjieff said we need to acquire conscious egoism. If we look at his aphorisms about faith, hope, and love, we see that in his estimation, love and consciousness are equivalents.

 Love is conscious; and consciousness is loving. This is inherent in the nature of consciousness and love. They are not separable qualities. 

Lest we lose sight of this metaphysical and cosmological law, let’s remember the central role that these two qualities played in two of the preeminent metaphysical authorities of the western world. Meister Eckhart sermons are peppered with conflation of the two; and Emmanuel Swedenborg’s magnum opus is entitled Divine Love and Wisdom.

A recent conversation where the word Love came up prompted me to describe my experience of sensation and feeling thus:

Whenever real feeling arrives in me, it is always a manifestation of love. 

Love is dimensionally complex; it has its own octave of development. We already know what the two highest notes preceding do in this octave are: remorse of conscience and sorrow. It’s straightforward enough: sorrow is the note si; sensing and receiving what Gurdjieff calls the sorrow of His Endlessness in order to relieve a portion of His burden is the highest calling a conscious being can aspire to; so it has to represent the final note in that often before the return to the divine. Since remorse or conscience is the action that leads to that, we know that it occupies the note la. This is entirely consistent, by the way, with my contention that these two notes represent purification (la) and wisdom (si.)

Remorse or conscience, when experienced, is one of the deepest forms of love, as is sorrow. In its own octave, Love reaches its highest evolution in human beings in these two forms, which perhaps have very little to do with what we believe our day-to-day experience teaches us about the emotion of love. Yet to experience real remorse and real sorrow in the form of higher feeling is the most intense experience of love one can have. This isn’t the love of our emotions; it’s the love of our feelings, which have a much higher intelligence, located as they are on the left hand or ascending side of the diagram.

Working backwards—sometimes, it's easier to see things that way—we can infer that the note sol represents love of others, in relationship. This kind of love is often spoken of in the Gurdjieff work, especially after work weekends or work weeks, because the point of work together is that we develop a collective energy that makes it possible to actively sense this. Because it doesn’t need a shock to evolve into remorse from this point (the shock actually comes between remorse and sorrow) one naturally develops an evolutionary understanding of remorse from this love-through-relationship. It is the love for others that begins this process; and this is why Emmanuel Swedenborg said that Godly behavior begins with love for one's fellow man, and then for God. This kind of feeling-love only emerges after one crosses over from the right to the left hand side of the enneagram.

The three types of love on the right hand side of the diagram are easier to describe by moving upwards through the scale. The note re represents the material world. Love at this level consists of cravings. They are, largely, body-cravings. This is where selfish physical love manifests; and most of our fear reflexes are grounded in this particular kind of love, in one way or another. It is the love of having for oneself.

This particular note is not always just a crude response to environmental demands such as food, water, and so on. It can be intensely transformed through the receiving of solar emanations and the concentration of divine substances in such a way that the ingestion of food becomes a sacred action. The central role that food plays in Christ's teaching is a function of this action; and it can naturally lead to much higher understandings if ones work begins there. Hence Gurdjieff's emphasis with his pupils to paying attention as they eat, and his equally powerful emphasis on the action of meals taken together, which evokes the notes re and sol at the same time – a powerful invocation of the primary notes in both triads , re mi fa and sol la si.

The second note on the right hand side of the diagram, mi, represents lust. It's an escalated order of craving, in which one does not just wish to have, but also to acquire and own. It is the love of desires. Love of desires is not aimed at the immediate, but expands to encompass the future.

The third note fa represents the love of power. This is the love not just of wish, but control.

Astute readers will notice that the seven deadly sins center around the loves on this side of the diagram.

Go. and sense, and be well.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.