Road Trip

"M. G .: In life, you can monitor your impulses. It’s not related. These tasks concern your outer life. But when you remember your work, that's what I said: just do this exercise, nothing more. In ordinary life, do what you did five, ten, or one year ago. If you had a task in life, keep it up. But don’t mix the inner life and the outer life, the world inside and the outside world. I was talking about the inner world. You have it confused with the outside world.

(To P. L.): Do you understand what we are saying? The exterior world and the inner world have nothing in common. Our work concerns exclusively the inner world. Your external life doesn’t interest me. It depends on your situation, on your uncle, on your bank account. This is not my domain. [There] You can do whatever you want. Your associations, your thoughts, your decisions about it, it's something different; our work is inner work and it is for that that we are here.

For external life, I have an office. I even have three. We can talk about these issues. I have an office of funeral directors, a marriage and divorce office."

—Quote from Gurdjieff's Wartime Meetings, 1944. (Available in French only—can be bought from Amazon. Fr. Translation by the author.)

Notes from July 31.

Several times over the past week, people I know have presented the idea that perhaps I place too much emphasis on the difference between the inner and the outer. 

It occurs to me that perhaps others don’t understand the precise way in which I use these terms. There are alternative ways of saying it, such as referring to the natural and the spiritual. Or one could speak about two different levels, which is also common. 

Yet the overarching question remains: is there one thing, one single thing, called Being?

Of course this is the case; and there are times when I speak about that in person, as well as write about it. Yet the important point is that Being, like all other phenomena, is multidimensional and has many different aspects. It sorts itself into classes and levels, because this is the nature of both creation and its inhabitants.

Let’s take an example. A car is a single thing from our point of view. Yet a car, from a mechanic’s point of view, isn’t just a car; it’s a carburetor, it’s an exhaust system, it’s brakes and electrical components. One can get in a car and drive it without paying attention to these things; yet when, for example, the transmission fails, we need to know there’s a transmission. The car has a single nature from the point of view of one level, and multiple natures from the point of view of the other. The exhaust system isn’t going to help the car stop. Only the brakes can do that.

My interest in our inner and outer nature focuses around the components of what we are, because I think we fundamentally misunderstand how our components are put together and the ways in which they interact. From the macroscopic perspective, our inner nature flows into us from a higher level, from God; and when I speak of the inner, I always consider it from this perspective alone. It is connected to the soul and to much higher levels of Being which don’t belong to me. 

Let’s consider it from the point of view of our analogy: the car is a whole single thing that has all these constituents, but it doesn’t exist because cars make themselves. The whole idea of car is a higher idea on a higher level than cars themselves: it flows into existence through an agency which then creates cars. In the case of our analogy, the agency is human beings; yet human beings are, in their own right, equally created by higher agency whose influence flows into Being. Here we are touching on metaphors that brush up against the thoughts of God Himself; territory much too large to squeeze into a single universe, let alone an essay. 

The outer can be compared to the car. It’s the result of this higher thought that flows into the universe. My own agency, my personality, my Being, insofar as they exist in the form of “Lee,” are in a certain sense the outer form, the outer self. Being from a higher level flows into this shell of material creation and finds its residence in myself and my agency. In this sense almost everything I am is an “outer” result that flows from the inner qualities of divine love and wisdom. Folks who are interested in exploring this question at greater length would do well to refer to Swedenborg’s book of the same title.

When we conceive of ourselves as single beings, we run the mistake of confusing ourselves in terms of levels, natures, and God. There are multiple levels. We have, as it is taught in multiple esoteric disciplines, two natures — two different natures, not a single nature. It’s all too easy to confuse ourselves with God because we have a part in us called ego who does that all day long for entertainment purposes.

We can’t become aware of our partiality unless we study our parts. If we decide that everything is one thing, whoops! There aren’t any parts. It’s all one big pile of mush. I’ve noticed that spirituality encourages people to wallow around in piles of mush, rather than engage in precise observation and precise thinking. I think this can give some results, sometimes even good ones, but it’s not the same thing as precisely observing yourself and precisely thinking about yourself. We could come back to the analogies and think of a symphony. A symphony is one thing; but it is made of many harmonies and movements, and those in their turn are made of notes. You can listen to a symphony in enjoyment and be a full participant in the experience of music; but if you are interested in being a performer, and reaching a higher level of understanding of the symphony than just your emotional engagement with it, you’ll need to study music. You’ll need to understand notes and harmonies and time signatures and so on. To be sure, this can be done by instinct; but it will still take a great deal of time, listening, learning, and observation.

It’s quite true that life is a single thing. One ought to have intelligent interest in experiencing being as a whole thing; yet one ought, as well, I think, to carefully study the difference between what is mine and what belongs to God. Christ brought this up in multiple parables. He clearly, in my view, had a wish for us to understand the difference between the two. When we render to Caesar what belongs to Caesar and to God what belongs to God, one of his more famous adages, we do so by understanding the difference between the two. They are not one thing. We have two constituent parts, speaking in the broadest sense, one which belongs to God and the spiritual and flows into us, and one which belongs to nature and the material world which we inhabit with the parts that are designed to engage with it. Coming back to the analogy of the car, spiritual fuels flow into it from God, without which it would have no motive force or purpose. It would just sit there like a lump of metal and wires and plastic and glass. Yet it is all of the parts, the transmission, the tires, and so on – the “external” or natural parts — that give it the ability to fulfill its functions as a “single” thing.

There is a limit to how much use one can put the study of constituent parts to. Although I like to think precisely and deeply, there is an irony in my approach, because while I do all this thinking about specific and detailed matters, the way in which I actually am inside, the way I live in the way approach being, is actually much less like this than it appears. Being within myself is seen, sensed, felt as a whole thing, not a bunch of little parts glued together. The integration between all of these parts is as intimate and precise in its own way as a highly engineered car. I study being through intellect, but I inhabit it through instinct and intuition.

There’s probably a bit of that in all of us; the trick is in balancing it. Instinct and intuition alone are not enough; but neither is intellect. What looks like mush is actually a highly structured environment: oatmeal has a complex molecular structure with laws and organization that make it what it is. I don’t think about its molecular structure when I eat it; but if I become very interested, through a specific and intelligent intention and attention of Being, in coming into relationship with the oatmeal (which hopefully has blueberries in it), then I am engaging through sensation and feeling (tasting and enjoying) in an interaction with the laws, the organization, the molecular structure of the oatmeal. My own molecular structure has come into contact with its molecular structure: we form a relationship.

I suppose it’s probably difficult for some to see what I’m getting at here; not to be glib, but the point is that we have two natures, an inner and an outer, but we also have a single nature. Things look different depending on which end of the telescope one picks up. It’s always presumed, from a gross perspective, that we ought to pick up the telescope and look through the little end; but there is an equal validity to doing it the other way around, even if it provides a point of view different than conventional assumptions.

What concerns me about our human condition is that we constantly confuse the inner and the outer nature. The inner nature engenders our spiritual Being; the outer nature embodies it. Yet mechanistic rationalism and secular humanism insist that there is no spiritual being, that the outer nature both engenders and embodies. 

This question of what engenders and what embodies is an essential one, and if my wits are about me, perhaps I’ll write some notes about it tomorrow.

Go deep in your heart, and be well-

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.