Perception

Rose Breasted Grosbeak, Sparkill. 

Photograph by the author.

May 25.

“There is a finer quality of life that is metaphysical in nature; and it expresses itself in organic perception. “

This is a phrase from my diary entry yesterday. My wife questioned it, saying she didn’t quite understand what I was getting at here.

The question is actually quite complex, and takes more than a bit of discussion.

First of all, the word physical is taken from a Latin root, physica, meaning things of nature. Nature, in its turn, comes from the same root as the English word natal, meaning, that which is born. 

That which is physical is that which is born, which exists; and a close examination of Meister Eckhart’s sermons will reveal that these two words, taken together, indicate creation — the material creation, everything that is “born” of God. In both the science and the theology of the Middle Ages (which were not separated in that era) everything was born of God. There was little or no question about it, either in European society or elsewhere. Just about every society has a creator myth. There was, in other words, at one time in every human society the understanding that some metaphysical entity, some entity beyond nature, had given birth to it.

This, of course, did not satisfy the western scientists of the “Enlightenment,” who felt that being "enlightened" was above all the dubious quality of seeing that nature gives birth to itself. Of course, this is quite impossible; and yet the transcendental nature of creation has been shoved off to an impenetrable veil behind the Big Bang, which scientists of today’s era conveniently either ignore or dismiss. The only thing that matters in their own minds is what they can see and touch — even though, in a spectacular irony, the majority of their instruments now measure things that can’t ever be seen or touched, because they are either far too large or far too tiny. 

This shrinking down of the human mind and its understanding of the universe into tinier and tinier scales has produced some very interesting results, but in the meantime, the human soul and the human psyche have been progressively shrinking with it, and they are now so tiny that the world doesn’t have the ability to form good relationships anymore. Good relationships are built not on physics — nature, what is born — but metaphysics, that is, matters of conscience, quality, and love, which do not of themselves exist in matter, but only in the consciousnesses that perceive it — which are by their very nature or birth metaphysical, not physical. They are born not of matter, but of Being.

This thing called consciousness, or awareness, is born within matter, but it isn’t of matter; if it were, we could bottle it and sell it in grocery stores. It would be cheap and easy to find. Yet it isn’t cheap or easy, and our understanding of death and the threat that it carries is in large part based on this understanding, in the instinctive core of ourselves, that awareness isn’t cheap and easy to find. It’s not made of stuff. It is made of finer materials. We don’t know what those finer materials are; but our search for it with instruments and flasks and chemicals will never reveal anything. Religion and philosophy, in the classical pre-”enlightenment” era, made some considerable progress towards illuminating those questions; but, being creatures of the humanities and not the material sciences, they have been flushed down the toilet by modern academia and the technological society, which insists that its relentless pursuit of the material is the only thing that matters — aside, of course, from money, which has quite decisively replaced God as the source, in the modern human mind, of all things born or created.

Yet in the existence of love alone we can be certain there is a finer, metaphysical quality of life. This mystery confounds scientists more easily than philosophers; and everyone, religious or not, seeks it in one way or another. Scientists love science; but they don’t know why, anymore than a baseball fan knows why they love a hot dog. 

It’s in the relationship between organic perception and what it perceives that love or a lack thereof arises. That is to say, for reasons once again unbeknownst to science, atoms and molecules assemble themselves into extraordinary structures which require the ability to express awareness and receive impressions. The mechanistic rationalists would have it that this happens by accident, with no intelligence guiding it; but the idea itself is stupid, in the classical sense of the word, meaning a stupor or daze in which intelligence is unable to perceive the facts so plainly in front of it. 

Intellect is the only part of man’s Being that has the luxury of being able to separate itself from the other parts completely, and construct wild fantasies about everything. Organic sensation and feeling are much more closely tied to the immediate work of perception, and find it much more difficult to lie about things, although exaggeration is well within their range.

Understanding the question of this finer quality of life rests on use of the word quality, which means particular property or feature, that is, of what kind something is. It contains within it, in other words, the action of discrimination, of differentiating between things. 

The word fine is derived from the same Latin root as the word finished, which means completed. So when we speak of a finer quality of life, we speak of a perception of life that is more whole, less dazed, less in a stupor — less stupid. It is, to put it differently, a search for the intelligence that gives birth to life within this moment. That intelligence is embodied in our own awareness; and if we ignore it in favor of obsession with the material things we encounter, we already fail to embody the wholeness which consciousness has the potential to perceive.

The word organic refers to the organ of perception, the instrument, which is the body. Our perception rests here, prepared to perceive. Using the word perceive is equally important in referring to wholeness, because to perceive derives from two Latin roots, -per, which means entirely, and capere, which means to take. 

To take in entirely.

Gurdjieff frequently spoke of acquiring what he called impartiality — that is, wholeness. There is a wholeness to life; and organic perception, the action of taking it in wholly, brings us into a relationship that appreciates the connections between everything. 

This engenders a new kind of respect for life and being which is not available without a different kind of mindfulness.

Go. and sense, and be well.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.