The Kingdom of Heaven

 Some thoughts from September 18, 2020, early morning.

We are born into this life at the threshold of a great journey. It places us in a moment where we travel through a vast landscape of experience, filled with impossibly beautiful objects and beings, extraordinary creatures, fantastic situations that no novelist could dream of. 

It is a whole world created through a magic that we ourselves also carry inside of us. Our soul is the heart of a single atom in this vast landscape that is called the universe.

Life falls into us and forms a substance of increasing gravity as we grow older. The kingdom of heaven is attracted into that gravity and begins to re-create itself in every soul. It is born again a new with each creature that lives in this universe; and so it expands its footprint throughout the universe, providing a place for the awareness of Being to live.

Eventually, the concentration of the substance brings us to a different and new understanding of life that is so different and so new that it cannot be brought out into the daylight where it can be seen and discussed. It is a sacred thing born of God himself, and can only be carried at the heart of Being in the soul where no other things can fit and no other things belong. 

To the extent that we come into relationship with this sacred place and at sacred substance, we discover the truth of the fact that the Kingdom of Heaven is within.

There are many secrets of heaven; and yet the greatest one is always the secret of the relationship between ourselves and God. When, in the Bible, God says, I am a jealous God, it does not mean jealousy in the way that we usually understand it. The word originally came from the word zealous, hence zeal; and what it means is that God is a great and relentless energy that gives us Being. God’s aim is to Be; and we embody that aim. In this way God is a jealous God; there is only one wish, and it is the wish of glory, the wish of grace, the wish of the love that can be borne in each of us with all of the same great power that God himself exists through.

It may be that I speak of things here that sound obscure or don’t relate to the Gurdjieff work; and yet this is the heart of the work itself, to have the Kingdom of Heaven born with in us. That is why this work is called esoteric Christianity. It is what is born within us, the inner, that we seek.

We go on this journey which is a journey of many trials. The journey is a journey towards this mysterious, infinitely beautiful, and tragically wonderful landscape that the soul inhabits. Many of the pieces that Thomas de Hartmann wrote under Gurdjieff’s direction contain harmonic intimations of that landscape, and can occasionally offer glimpses of it; and yet those glimpses are available everywhere if we turn our eyes, our intelligence, our feeling, and our sensation towards life as it is — instead of living in our imagination and our ego. Our imagination and our ego are like tiny closets in a great house which we have decided to live in, instead of coming out into the house and being in relationship with all of the rooms and their many wonders.

Eventually, feeling gives birth to a quality of the soul that transcends ordinary life. It has no pretensions; it engages in no speculations, because it has no connection to that function and instead receives. 

It does not receive once in a while, but always, and everything that it receives is received in order to honor the Glory, Grace, and Mercy that is sent by the Lord to sustain us on this journey. Those three qualities are the manna from heaven that sustain us in the wilderness of life.

This journey into the heart is a journey into everything that is good and is precious and is whole in life. The Lord, in His abundance, sees to everything along the way if we just listen. It is important not to get tangled in the ordinary things of life because they will snare us like brambles and prevent us from letting go of the things that hinder our union with the soul.

One can give no map to the kingdom of heaven; it is not a place. It is an event. We are already within it, but blind to its nature.

Ponder that for a while.

May you be well within today.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.