Faith, Love, Hope, and Time, Part II

I have a very close friend, Rip, who I’ve known by now for over 47 years. I met him one night in September 1973.  At the time we were both freshmen at St. Lawrence University. The exact circumstances of how we met are unimportant. 

What is important is that Rip and I instantaneously had an affinity for one another that had a certain tone, a harmonic vibration, of the way that our essential persons interact. This is not about the pastiche of our personality; Rip and I have quite different personalities. This is about our essential inner harmonic vibrations, which have always been highly attuned to one another, much better than with most other people I know. 

Rip called me two nights ago on Christmas Eve and we had a cheerful, rather ordinary little conversation about where we were and what we were doing. Our conversations tend to go on for quite a long time because our harmonic vibrations instantly lock together whenever we speak to one another. The rhythm, the tonality, the syncopation of our exchange is always identical and its character has been exactly the same for the entire 47 years I have known him. 

I realized this after I got off the phone with it, and I remarked upon it to my wife. I then said, “our future reaches into our past to create itself; it knows what it needs to be, and it moves backwards through time to provide it.” 

My life has created this friendship with Rip by moving from now back into the past—because it is what is needed. It has what I would call an eternal determinism in it that transcends the event itself. Another way of describing this determinism is comprehensive. That is, it holds all things within it, both within and outside of time.

This mystery explains many different things, among them how we can have psychic insights that exactly describe future events in our lives. I’ve had a number of these over the course of my lifetime, and described them elsewhere, so I won’t go into that here other than to say it’s not possible to have a dream about the future in its exact detail unless it already exists. The point isn’t about whether such psychic phenomena are possible; indubitably, they are, and my family has always had a weird propensity for sensing these things. The point is that the phenomena are only possible because the future creates the past in an exactly equal measure to the way that the past creates the future. They are codependent entities involved in a reflexive action that affects both of them.

This casts a significant light on Gurdjieff’s proposition, “Use the present to repair the past and prepare the future.” The present moment is a fulcrum upon which both the existence of the past and the future depend. They are balanced, both of them, on this moment, which can tip them back and forth (change their attitudes relative to the fulcrum) according to the degree of awareness that is exercised in this moment.

We don’t perceive the future as creating the past; and the closest we can ever get to the past or the future is now. 

Yet now exists as a point on a sphere that moves in all directions, from itself back to itself. What appears to us to be over hasn’t happened yet from the perspective of now; and what appears to us to be happening next has already taken place.

This may seem bewildering or overwhelming, but it leads us to a moment where we may see that we have to accept the condition we are in, since both the inevitability of its past and the inevitability of its future are part of the whole thing that gives us Being in the first place. It’s likely that the Buddhist perception of illusion has something to do with a higher intellectual insight about this matter.

The role of consciousness in this field of forces is to assume a deterministic role of its own. 

Consciousness establishes an independent subjective determinism according to the degree of awareness in being. This slows and can even stop the passage of time from a subjective perception. Yet the establishment of this subjective determinism is also what we would call responsibility and freedom, that is, an awareness that divorces itself from the deterministic matrix that it inhabits both in the preceding and subsequent moments it encounters, but that assumes responsibility for the determinism of its attitude, its inclination, in this moment. 

In this sense, freedom is actually a full and conscious inhabitation of the comprehensive determinism of Being, as well as a decision about how to exist within it. Gurdjieff’s proposition was that man needs to exist within this field of comprehensive determinism according to what he called “three centered being.” Three centered being is perception by the conscious mind of intellect, feeling, and sensation of the experience of being the fulcrum. 

The fulcrum behaves differently when it is aware than when it is unaware. We can understand the fulcrum in several different ways. 

One is to see it as the place where all these forces meet and exert themselves on the fulcrum. If we see it this way, we become victims of the forces using us for leverage. This is our average (and pathological) perception of the fulcrum of Being.

Another way of seeing it, however, is seeing the fulcrum as the place that determines the relationship between the past and the future, the place that has the most—rather than the least—power. Even a tiny movement of the fulcrum has a massive effect on the way that the past and the future balance one another in us within this moment. Such is the nature of fulcrums. 

This is to say that a tiny change in our own inner attitude can cause the past to lift up the future, or the future to lift up the past. Either way, the point is that our attitude in this moment can serve to elevate our perception of what has already happened to us, or elevate our perception of what is to come.

The astute reader may have already in this one sentence recognized that the elevation of our perception of what has already happened to us is called faith; and that the elevation of our perception of what will happen to us in the future hope.

This leads us to the point of the fulcrum, which is love. 

In this way, we see that faith, love, and hope are all related in this question of time and its action on Being. Its furthermore explains why Gurdjieff, in his chapter on Ashiata Shiemash, listed these three properties in that order: Faith, Love and Hope. 

It describes the nature of their relationship in metaphysical space.

May you be well within today.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.