In Memorial

 There’s a difference between remorse for one’s own action and remorse on a larger scale. 

The difference lies to some extent in the material that Gurdjieff wrote in the essay, “The Meaning of Life,” which was originally entitled, “Pure and Impure Emotions.”

Most people make the mistake of confusing remorse for their own external actions with remorse of conscience. They aren’t the same thing.

From Gurdjieff’s comments on January 13, 1944:   

“Now you need remorse of conscience. It must grow in you. Here, most have heard about it, they’ve understood it with their heads, they have never felt it. These are impulses that not everyone in the world has had.”

Without trying to describe true remorse of conscience, it’s very important to understand that this is an inner process, not an outer one, and that such remorse arises from deep within to affect the arrangement of the inner world, the inner universe. 

Our principal relationship with who we are and who we wish to be develops in this inner environment, and the atmosphere of remorse is part of what makes the atmosphere of that planet breathable for a true human being. Otherwise, even if you got there you couldn’t stay, because the air is not for you unless you can absorb the substances that it has in it. There is no easy air in this room.

There is a form of remorse that is impersonal, that is pure, in the same way that there are emotions that are impersonal. These are selfless forms of the feeling-impulse. Remorse is not of emotion; it is in its essence a feeling property, that is, a property that has a spiritual, not temporal, affect on a man or a woman’s  being. If you were to take a close reading of Meister Eckhart’s sermons (something that takes many years to do) you would eventually realize that remorse of conscience is closely related to the development of the soul; and that the soul is the closest thing that man has in him, or woman has in her, to God.

I explain this only so that you’ll be clear about the difference between this and all the ordinary regretful or bad feelings that you have about yourself and the things you’ve done. Those emotions point towards remorse, but the path always leads sharply inward, in directions that take it decisively away from the personal. 

The personal is nothing more than a rough approximation of the universal, a symbol for it. The continuity of lives from generation to generation will give you some rough idea of the way this functions. The individual life is the representative of a much larger process; this is what’s meant when it’s said that “the work is not for us.” One could equally say that I’m not capable of taking things in any other way than personally; but I ought to be.

And remorse will help there. 

Individual lives, on whatever scale, are the vowels, consonants, and punctuation marks for much larger sentences. This is akin to Gurdjieff’s observation that human beings have “scrolls” in them upon which the matters of their life and impressions are written. Swedenborg says that a human being’s whole life is written on their scrolls, every single little bit of it, and that after a person dies and arrives in purgatory, angels read it to take their measure, starting from the fingertips and moving inward.

The path from the outward leads inward; the inward leads to remorse, and remorse leads to a much more universal sorrow. 

This sorrow is generative. It is sexual. Only the true initiate can know sexual sorrow. This path is lawful and can be trodden only through intention, an intention that begins in sensation and engages with the feeling. Much of the Work is sexual, but in a way that cannot really be understood using crude approximations of the ordinary body. Higher Being-Bodies have their own sexual lives, just as the lower one does.

The attainment of an impersonal understanding of remorse is the beginning of an opening to a much greater work which can only be undertaken from within, in conditions of attention, surrender, and intelligence.

Every individual event in a life has a selfish nature to it in the same way that individual events in books do. Identification is the equivalent of naively believing in the character as the primary message, and thereby failing to understand the greater narrative that the events are describing. Selfishness, both inwardly and outwardly, reads life as a single sentence, not part of a paragraph or a novel. While compelling, it takes it out of its natural context. 

No one wants to live within the natural context. It isn’t of the ego.

Remorse of conscience is the countervailing force that moves out into the pages of the book and opens the narrative to the entirety of its message. There are many different books; and a life may turn up in more than one of them at the same time. All the books that are being written are ultimately intertwined into one great work, much like Gurdjieff’s “All and Everything;” and perhaps that alone gives us new insight into why he gave the book that title.

Yet all of this is allegorical; and when we speak of remorse we speak of a real inner process that takes place within the living core of one’s being, not as a psychology or philosophy, and not as a thing to be manipulated or employed for other purposes. It is a thing unto itself, which calls attention to the great narrative, not the petite one I have constructed for myself from the things of my life. 

Almost everything Gurdjieff was attempting to bring his students to see in the work of the meetings of 1944 was aimed at bringing them into a sensation and feeling of the great narrative, to move out of the personal one. 

One sees and hears this again and again in his encounters with his pupils. This is a grand task, on a mythical scale, that reaches, in the minutia and particulars, the quirks and irregularities, of his meetings into territory that cannot be imagined with the intellect.

He was attempting to bring his groups into a realm where the members could actually be human beings, where they could truly sense and feel the inner life, and reconnect with our birthright.

May you be well within today.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.