Notes from Dec. 2
Unfortunately, because so few people have a concrete and deeply examined experience of Being these days, we're left in a situation where so much of what is said are quotes from various dead authorities.
I’m not dead yet; and I don’t claim to be an authority. But 20 years of immersion in various "signature experiences" of Being have left me with some distinct and carefully examined impressions.
The attention needs to be given the freedom to rediscover its own center of gravity. Thought won’t do that. People are perpetually confused by thinking and thought and the way that it produces an impression and begin to believe that this is a path to Being.
It is not a path to Being. It is an accessory to it; and a vital one. But the path does not begin in the thinking.
I need to be rooted in my body without compromise.
Then, I have the ability to wait.
There's a huge difference between the sensation that one encounters in exercises and through the volition of the mind and its attempt to connect, and the sensation that arises and manifests as a living part of the organism. One is fleeting and directed, without authority. The other one is powerful and permanent, and exercises its own authority throughout.
If one doesn't understand what this means, one doesn't understand sensation. If one's organic sensation isn't permanent, always there, exercising its authority, no one is home. Fragments are there; the thinking is. But without the permanent authority of sensation in one's body, as its own independent entity, one is not there. One just thinks one is there.
The authority of sensation roots us permanently and irrevocably in life. This is not a happy or pleasant moment, although it does carry its satisfactions. It is a moment where one can no longer avoid what one is. One is required by the conditions and the laws one comes under to serve what one is, and this means one has to serve the things one doesn’t want to be as well as the things that one does want to be. One is required by the conditions and laws to see these things.
One isn't going to like it. It isn't for liking. It is for Being.
The general problem with us is that we don’t want to Be. We want to like ourselves, and we want to like Being.
Being isn't here to be liked. It's here for us to serve within it. Actually, to be quite frank, none of us want to be here and serve. One might say this is the essence of the problem. If you go through Meister Eckhart’s sermons for many years, with some attention to detail, and a direct understanding of this question of Being, you'll eventually see that he talks about this all the time, although he doesn't talk about it in the rather simple and unreligious language I use here.
Perhaps the first step ought to be to stop liking everything. When Gurdjieff said “like what it does not like,” what he was in essence saying is that you don’t have room to like things here in this work. Everything has got to go. My own teacher — another dead person whose authority I will now ironically quote — said to me, “the things you love the most are the first things that have got to go.”
I would urge you to do nothing but contemplate the question of this authority of sensation until you understand it.
I know some few people who truly understand this; and each one of them recognizes the other because one is different if one has this understanding. Even in the Gurdjieff work, the understanding is quite limited; far from everyone has it. And the reason for this is before any other reason the belief that one does have it and one does understand it.
That has got to go.
When you reach a sensation, an authority of sensation, that is permanent and irrevocable and nails what you formerly were into the crucible of a harmonic awareness of Being from which you cannot escape—in which what you think you are is dead and you become alive again in a different way—then you have an understanding.
When you're confronted with the terror of being unable to escape, then you have an understanding.
When you're required by law, and not just by circumstance, to see how you are, then you have an understanding.
This isn't a territory where compromise makes itself comfortable. It isn't a territory where commitments can be casually betrayed. It is a territory, quite frankly, that one won’t want to be in at first.
With time, the humility and generosity that this condition teaches you with will become your best friend. But it will not be the friend of your life and the way you behave. It will be the friend of your inner work; and until it has that friend, your inner work is weak and alone.
This is a difficult circumstance, because in order to be strong, inner work must have a relationship; and that relationship has to be rooted in this authority of sensation. If this grounding wire is not always grounded, then the positive and negative currents cannot flow through the cables that provide them. If intelligence and feeling are not rooted in sensation, the current in them fluctuates constantly, sometimes creating spectacular sparks which you think are important spiritual experiences, otherwise leaving everything that flows completely dead. You can't remember yourself. Your awareness springs in and out of being only according to the accidental flow of the grounding force.
This has to stop being accidental.
Imagination is the enemy. Sensation is home territory. Don’t let the associations and the imagination they produce take you away from home.
If this was the only advice I ever gave anyone, it would already be enough to begin something practical.
May you be well within today.
Lee
Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.
excellent advice
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