The Thereness of Being

 

Quarry chain, Manitoga 

A conversation last night. The question of how thought and feeling affect the way I perceive life, and the idea that there are three parts of myself that perceive life. The word pondering came up. What’s the difference between thinking and pondering? The proposition was forwarded that pondering consists of three-centered considering.

The word consider comes from the Latin considerare, probably comes from sidus, sider, stars. Thus we infer that to consider is, in a broad sense, to take things in and discriminate according to a measurement on the scale of the cosmos. Interestingly, this brings us to Gurdjieff’s adage, consider outwardly always, inwardly never. We should, in other words, measure that which is not ours according to the scale of the cosmos; but that which is our own, we should measure only on the scale of ourselves. 

The point appears to make some sense, and deserves further examination. 

I believe we well understand how we think about things; and how we feel about them. We are not so clear about how we sense things in terms of our physical sensation. 

The word ponder comes from a root that means to weigh; this is a physical action. Human beings have long used such as balances (scales) to weigh things; and as such, it becomes apparent that we've become accustomed to the idea that weighing is done with an external instrument, artificially. 

Yet the quintessential act of weighing anything is to pick it up in the hands and use one’s own sensation to weigh it, to judge its heft. The action of pondering involves this weighing of an idea from within, according to the inner sensation — the physical sensation — of what it is. There's nothing particularly new about the concept that thought, ideas, and someone are physical objects with the gravity of their own: we speak of ideas as though they had gravity and weight. ("The weight of the evidence, etc.)Yet this is not conceptual; there is a physical fact connected to it which remains unexamined, because we dwell mostly in the realm of theory when we talk about things, instead of evaluating them from the point of view of this capacity.

The active physical sensation provides the thereness of Being. When Gertrude Stein remarked, of the fact that her childhood home in California had changed so much it could not be recognized, “There is no there there,”she was speaking of an external condition; yet we have exactly the same condition within us. Our childhood home is our essence, our sense of Being; and our sensation provides the thereness of that Being. 

For most of us, as human beings, there is no there there. And without the development of an organic sensation, the gravity we need to remain present is absent.

To ponder is to weigh; to sense the mass of what confronts us. And make no mistake about it, everything we encounter has a mass of one kind or another. Lest we become confused about this, let us remember that when we eat food, we take in mass; and that mass is collected in aggregations of cells and neurons that receive our impressions. The collected physical existence of a group of neurons and the electrical connections that they make together forms our impressions and memories; and it is no stretch whatsoever to understand that those particular collections have greater or lesser value — our discrimination is based on the measurement of the mass of those aggregations. This may sound conceptual, but it is firmly placed in biological fact. All life consists of the collecting of mass, its concentration, its reorganization into new structures, and the relationships between those structures.

One should think very carefully about this, because we contain a molecular cosmos within us that reflects the overall structure and action of the larger cosmos that surrounds us. The cosmos functions according to relationships of mass; asteroids, satellites, planets, suns, and black holes all regulate their interactions through, among other things, the concentration of mass. The whole universe is, in other words, a collective device that ponders: it weighs its own thereness and brings it into relationship with its own mass. 

From a certain perspective, for the cosmos, this is an inner activity. That inner activity of the cosmos, of which we are and infinitesimally tiny part, is akin to our own measurement of Being.

We cannot understand this without the development of an active sensation. To this end, all of our activities of being ought to be turned first; because unless it functions, the function of thought and feeling, no matter how amazing they may be, remain limited by the missing partner. 

As Gertrude Stein also said, in Everybody’s Autobiography, “you are extraordinary within your limits, but your limits are extraordinary!” 

To have a permanent sensation of Being ought to be ordinary. We don't; and that of itself is extraordinary.

Ponder that for a while.

May you be well within today.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.