Feeling and Time

When I spoke about feeling in the previous post, perhaps I didn’t emphasize enough that I'm not speaking about my emotions and reactions. Feeling is a deeper thing than emotional reaction. Emotional reaction is like the surface of the ocean. It appears vast; and it’s what affects us directly when we are sailing on it. But it is just the surface of something much deeper, on a much larger scale, that penetrates everything we do.

At the heart of feeling lies the love creates the universe. We are a fragment of that love; reduced as we are to a tiny size, we can only ever participate in a fraction of it, yet that expression is a sacred duty, a religious obligation. Our duty, our obligation towards feeling is to move past the surface of our psychology and into the depths of the soul, where feeling finds its most intimate roots.

In order to explain this a different way, I’ll invoke a paradigm from the plant kingdom. All growing plants form symbiotic relationships with fungi, without which they could not live. The fungi are invisible networks of mycorrizae, a fine web of rootlets that grow around the plant roots and throughout the soil into unimaginably large organisms, completely invisible, which nonetheless serve as mediators for all the nourishment the plant collects for its growth.

Feelings are much like this. They exist under the surface of ordinary being, beneath personality, in a very fine web of Being that feeds everything we are, all that we love. They actually serve as the connective tissue between God’s influence, the life of the soul, and our ordinary being. 

The analogy with the way that fungi interact with trees and other plants is quite exact; and this is no coincidence, for in every case the material reflects the spiritual. We only know that our feelings exist in the same way that we discover fungi exist; their fruiting bodies, mushrooms, occasionally sprout up in order to reproduce. Then we see them, and marvel.

Even here, the analogies continue, because mushrooms are things of extraordinary fragility and beauty; they can be edible and ecstatically aromatic, like truffles, or deadly poison, like the Death Angel. They can be psychedelic: they can give us visions. Woo hoo. 

The point is that feeling contains an essence that has been distilled in the same way that fungi distill finer, elemental essences from the world around them: said essences are concentrates of dispersed qualities expressed by the divine. 

Those essences, in the case of fungi, have multiple natures which we can learn from. They have these fruiting bodies, organs of sexual reproduction, which are in many cases of great visual beauty; they have these essences in them which can be poisonous, psychedelic, nourishing; they give seed by putting out invisible spores that propagate the fungi. All along the way, they are planetary organs of great beauty, of mystery, of secrets nourished, secrets held, secrets told.

Our feelings are very much the same. They have an impact on our psyche that is much greater than our emotions; they are made of finer substances than we can generally sense with the coarse, ordinary parts of ourselves, and help to digest the impressions we encounter and collect. Feelings are the deep mirror of emotion; we have emotion all day long, and rarely understand that underneath it feeling is functioning. 

Feeling connects us to the soul; and what it builds in us over the course of a lifetime deepens according to our attentiveness.

When I say that we need to become responsible to our feeling, as I did in the last post, what I’m speaking of is a sacred religious responsibility towards this organic property of Being; and it’s clear enough I didn’t explain it very well, because I was in the midst of describing a deep impression of the moment that made it sound like this is the kind of thing one encounters in psychotherapy.

I’ve been in psychotherapy more than once; and I have nothing but respect for the profession, which is of great value. Yet it is very different than an exploration of the deep territory of Being and feeling.

I will leave that subject for the time being, although I may come back to it. I want to discuss a related phenomenon which may appear on the surface to have nothing to do with the subject of feeling, but in fact has everything to do with it, because feeling itself, taken on the scale of societies and planets, is a tissue that functions to connect time.

Really it does.

Day before yesterday, my friend Paul, with whom I have shared many metaphysical discussions, pointed out that if the future already exists, it calls the existence of free will into question. This is an ancient dilemma that has been contemplated by philosophers and religious masters for thousands of years. The contradictions are evident: if free will exists, it means things can change and be different; yet if the future already exists, everything has already been determined, and the way we behave according to what we think is our “free” will can have no impact. 

Uh oh. In the early Christian era, this dilemma led to crisises of thinking about salvation. God is all-powerful and universal and exists outside of time; so if a Being is going to be “saved,”that is, redeemed of sin, God is making all the decisions, and they are already made. Redemption takes on an inevitability that either pre-saves or pre-condemns any individual; and their own will and action have no impact on it. An all-powerful deity makes for universe, in other words, of puppets.

Gurdjieff’s solution to this idea was to conceive of a broken universe in which even God is fallible: that is, not actually all-powerful. In essence, this conceptually accurate definition neatly defuses the issue of free will; but at the expense of an all-powerful God. 

As to why it's conceptually accurate, I will simply point out here that  descriptions of God as powerful, all-powerful, or broken are all inadequate; every one of them actually implies a limitation of one kind or another by assigning a quality. According to the ancient and important tradition of apophatic theology, one identifies God by knowing everything he is not. 

Anything one can think of is not God.

 Let us leave that thought and move on.

Ah, I fear this essay may run too long. Because we have only just now reached the deep end of the pool and we must keep swimming.

In point of fact, material reality is an illusion. All reality is created, ultimately, from quantum energies, which are not material entities in the way we encounter, experience, or understand them. Quantum physics has made this quite clear. 

This dilemma has, however, vexed our poor physicists for over a century by now. This is a fact I quite literally learned at my grandfather's knee: he was one of the founding fathers of quantum theory, and I remember him speaking to me of such things even at the wee age of 5 or 6. 

Oh My Quanta.

One of the consequences of this understanding is that we discover material reality has flexibilities that appear to be impossible according to its own nature, such as quantum entanglement, which produces phenomena that directly violate fundamental tenets of physical reality, such as the speed of light: quantum entanglement functions instantaneously, hence exceeding the speed of light. 

Yet there it is.

One of the peculiar properties of our current understanding of quantum physics is that time travel is scientifically possible. From what we can see where we are, it's actually more theoretically possible by a wide measure than interstellar travel. 

All time is, from a certain technical sense — and also from an actual spiritual sense — simultaneous, that is, everything exists within eternity, a place that lies outside time and comprehends time as a part of itself — just a fraction of what it is. This is why the future can be sensed by human beings (see my post of two days ago.) 

This sensation of time is ultimately connected to feeling, which I may be able to explain later if I don’t run on too long. However, the point here is that time is a reflexive entity: it isn't a linear progression going from past to now to future, but rather a field of energy that's engaged in a perpetual simultaneous dialogue (we could call it a PSD) with itself. This is a fairly simplistic but nonetheless accurate description of the quantum state from which material reality arises; and the nonlinear dialogue of time implies that events from the future can affect the now (take the example of the dreams, again, in my post two days ago) or even the past. 

Time is not a progression; it is an exchange of relationships that acquires an order that does not ultimately reflect its true nature. (See my book Metaphysical Humanism regarding the formation of order.) In this sense it is indeed possible to do exactly what Gurdjieff said when he advised his pupils, “use the present to repair the past and prepare the future.”

What he was indicating here is that the present moment, and the mindfulness and attention that accrue to it insofar as we make inward effort, have the ability to directly affect and change the past and the future. This is because the dialogue that takes place within the intelligence, attention, mindfulness, and feeling is eternal, that is, it is a part of the PSD of the universe that functions outside of time to reconfigure the energetic state of things. 

In this way what appears to be a fixed material past may be changed in the same way that the future may refer to us and advise us of its nature. Thinking creatures, in other words, assume a direct responsibility for the work of God.

This idea is by far nothing like a new one; Ibn Arabi referred to human beings as the vicegerents (officeholders) of God. We are, that is, God’s representatives in the material realm; and unto us consequently accrue great responsibilities for helping to repair and reconfigure the fabric of creation. We may do it increment by increment; but this is our real purpose.

Because the universe is created through love and love alone, a deeply spiritual feeling (it is the feeling of creation itself and love itself) penetrates everything in tiny measure. Like all other creatures that can perceive, we collect it in the same way that bees collect honey, or that fungi around tree roots allow the roots to collect essential minerals and water for the growth of the tree. Those collections of the very fine substances of love, which arise as energies at the point of manifestation from the quantum state, are relationships which function like mycorrhizae. They grow within beings and eventually produce fruiting bodies.

Our feelings arise from these actions. They are, ultimately, rooted at the base of creation in an infinitesimally fine web created of light. 

BTW. It should be mentioned here that light has especially fine functions that are completely misunderstood by modern physics, but, OMQ, that’s another subject. 

And I think I have gone on long enough for today.

Perhaps I’ll write a bit more about this tomorrow.

 Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.