The energy needed for the awakening of conscience—which is effect the awakening of real wish— always comes from suffering and from no other place. Exercizes have value not because of their mechanical actions, but because they create friction with the parts of Being that want to remain couch potatoes. And in every case it’s the friction we encounter that helps use. The worse outer conditions are, the better for work.
The other evening someone I know talked about an awful habit they had which they felt basically ruined them over and over again in the midst of life and I described it as pure gold.
We’re all like that; we come back repeatedly to the catastrophic—for inner awakening—results of having our inner parters lie around on the sofa all day long instead of getting up off their asses, coming into relationship, and doing their work.
Seeing that passiveness, that inability, that irresponsibility—a failure to respond—is what generates energy that can set the acquired mass of centers into motion. Once moving, it progressively takes less and less further effort to keep the mass in motion.
Suffering is in fact a ”bridge” to a higher energy; and herein lies a stage clue to both ancient and modern esoteric practice. Suffering on the material level is the corresponding element to Gurdjieff’s sorrow of His Endlessness. God’s suffering, so amply, utterly, and timelessly symbolized by Christ’s crucifixion, is mirrored in every form of human and material suffering.
The material of suffering is a finer material than other materials.
And it’s exactly this finer material one needs to set the inner parts of centers into motion. It is a kind of high-octane fuel, which burns better and imports more movement than other energies.
In a further interesting twist, the energy of grace is closely related to this question. The suffering of God is the denying part of God’s Love, which flows abundantly into the universe. God keeps the affirming part of His Love for Himself; it acts as a powerful attractant for those who sense it, imparting a wish to return to God, which is God’s greatest wish for His creation. There are various names for an active wish in this regard, perhaps the most important one being Will. If one acquires Will, one ingests a greater part of the denying force of Love, and is correspondingly more attracted to the affirming part of Love which resides forever in God’s Being. In this way “magnetic center” in man is actually the formation of a stronger negative polarity in us, which as it develops is correspondingly more and more attracted to the positive polarity of God’s affirming Love.
The reconciling portion of Love, as always, lies in relationship; and in this sense it is Christ’s formation of relationship—the ”taking up” of an active position between God’s affirming Love and material creation’s denying Love—that becomes the reconciling factor. That reconciliation takes place through awareness; and this we can see that awareness itself, consciousness, as Gurdjieff described it, is the critical partner between the two other divide parts of God’s Love. Conscious Relationship, in other words, is the “third part” of God’s Love, which contains within it the possibility of active mediation. In its role, it has to embody both the love and the suffering in equal measure.
And it is our inner couch potato’s wish to avoid the suffering that, so to speak, does us in. The metaphysics of it seems to complicated and the fridge is too attractive. It’s easier to binge and watch TV, which requires little effort and doesn’t expose us to all those uncomfortable pieces of inner territory we’d rather avoid troubling us. They are too hot; and even though Gurdjieff told Ouspensky that baked potato is more intelligent than a cold one, if we should want cooked potatoes, we’d rather have fries, which are done in a flash. No one wants to take the time to bake anything.
There’s much talk of “opening to a higher energy” in various inner works, not least of which is the Gurdjieff work. The phrase is somewhat newly minted, since it wasn’t a commonplace one in Gurdjieff’s teaching—if he even used it at all. (Let the Gurdjieff scholars—there are enough of them—pass us judgment on that question.) Yet it isn’t often recognized that this higher energy is itself an energy of suffering. It is of course an energy of love—yet the love it calls us to is not the love of comfort.
It’s a love that wishes to put into motion forces which will bake the potatoes; to impart enough energy to set the mass of the centers into their own movement.
Ponder that for a while.
May you be well within today.
Lee
Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.
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