Notes on Feeling, part 3: Seeing and Feeling

 

Capital from The Abbey at Serrabone

The third of three parts.

So I brought up the difference between seeing and feeling in the last essay, and I sense that folks are perhaps going to misunderstand the distinction here.

To see is indeed essential; yet I want you to think carefully about this activity for a moment. We find ourselves at what might be called for many of us the beginning of our work — for everything is always a beginning — and yet it is quite literally a beginning, because we’re learning to see how we are, and that function, no matter how lofty our ambition, how sincere our intention, how committed our endurance to it may be, is a function for now of the outer parts. 

That is to say, although seeing can effectively serve as a bridge between the inner and the outer parts, which we cross in one direction (from without) in the hopes of being able to go within and stay there —, in other words, more fully inhabit our Being instead of experiencing Being as a tourist in Disneyland taking snapshots — it is essentially a function of the outer parts.

Now, in the discussion between inner and outer parts, it is easy to make the mistake of devaluing the outer parts, and it would be a terrible mistake indeed, because without them, we would cease to exist. Being is dependent not on the inner alone, and not on the outer alone, but in a developed relationship between the two. The outer must take its responsibility for that action just as the inner does. A close reading of Meister Eckhart’s sermon three, which I published commentaries on not so long ago, will help describe the relationship; and eventually, I’ll be publishing a commentary on sermon two, which casts further light on the subject. 

But for now, let’s understand that seeing is an outer action. It will always be valuable; it will always be, within its own right and the natural limits of its activity, essential for us.

Yet any fool can see (you’ll excuse the pun) that seeing alone is not enough. A fool can see; but a wise man discriminates and judges. The aim of seeing is, ultimately, to discriminate and then—yes—to judge. 

Yet when we use the word judge the word does not perhaps mean the same thing you think it does.

Judgment is generally considered to be a punitive action. A judge identifies a crime and convicts according to it. The judge corrects a misdeed, and so on. We all have a judge like that in us who beats us up constantly; and yet this isn’t the kind of judge we need.

Lest you think to yourself, “well, Gurdjieff never said anything about judges,” remind yourself that Gurdjieff said a great deal about policemen. The intellect, as he pointed out, is meant to function as the policeman of our inner being. Hopefully you’re familiar enough with his comments on the matter that we don’t need to discuss that further. The point is that the analogy by no means ends here. There is a higher authority than the policeman; and that is the judge. The judge is prominent feature in most traditional religions; and we need to go there for a better understanding of the actual role of discrimination and choice, which is the essence of judgment.

We all know that a person who has bad judgment makes for poor company. So we don’t want to have bad judgment; we want to have judgment… and it has to be “good.” 

But how?

To judge comes from Latin roots that mean to speak the law: a determination is made. Gurdjieff did in fact speak a great deal of judges from within, although he never used the word. Objective mentation is a form of judgment. This is not judgment that finds fault with the self in anger; it is judgment that sees the self from a larger perspective and corrects it. This bears a close relationship to Meister Eckhart’s comment on the source of goodness in sermon two and three; true judgment comes from a higher level. It flows into the soul from God. Yet this kind of judgment is impossible to achieve without a very different relationship of our inner parts.

Most of the judgment that we encounter comes from our outer parts, who have set themselves up as an authority. They appear to have all the power; and indeed, under ordinary circumstances, they do, because the inner solar system is arranged such that the center of gravity is askew. Reforming the center of gravity in sensation is essential in order to right the functional movement of the planetary bodies. 

At that point, once law is established — the planetary bodies in the solar system are in a rightful gravitational alignment — then what is “objective”, that which flows according to law, can exercise itself in a right way. This is related to the Buddhist concepts of right thought, right action, which are alternate interpretations of exactly the same thing.

Our perspectives, then, must be formed from seeing and from without — at least initially. 

Yet we intuit, and have had tastes of, a different perspective—the inner perspective from across the bridge that seeing has provided—in which everything looks entirely different. This isn’t just an attractive place; we sense that we didn’t know it was there before, and that it has more gravity and intelligence in it than my outward manifestations do. It is as though I’m a completely different person from that other side of the bridge.

I am. 

Here is where the danger lies, because I can’t assume thereby that I should throw the other person out. Paradoxically, I need to be two persons; and I don’t know anything about how to do that — in fact, it seemingly contradicts all of the things I’ve ever heard about inner unity, overcoming dualistic thinking, and so on. 

But leave that aside for a moment, because it is just intellectual meandering and distracts me from the task of inhabiting both persons, which is entirely possible, as long as I stop thinking about it all the time.

This is where feeling comes in. Feeling is buried deep within the capacity of the inner being. It is not a thing of the outer world; and this is what separates it from emotion. Yet it is asleep; as Gurdjieff put it when he described remorse of conscience (a not-so-encoded phrase meaning real feeling) it’s buried in our subconscious. Our chief hope, as he pointed out, is that its concealment within this underworld of our psyche (which is, in its own right, the “real” part of our psyche not destroyed by the outer world) has preserved it almost intact, rendering it a huge potential asset in our effort to understand ourselves.

Yet it is (like the secrets of Serrabona) hidden; and all too often, that which is so hidden is hidden for good reasons, because as we are in our outer self, if we take it out into the light we will do so without care and intention,and we may just damage ourselves even further. Our outer parts have become accustomed to damaging our inner relationships, so much so that they not only believe they have the authority to do it; they see it as their duty. 

So I need to form a new understanding of what duty is — Gurdjieff’s “Being-parktdolg-duty”—before anything else happens here; and my first duty is not to meddle too much. This is why in Gurdjieff’s approach we don’t try to work directly with feelings, something my own teacher emphasized to me.

Yet feelings must be invoked; and so what do we do? We are in urgent, yes, even desperate need of this faculty of remorse of conscience, real feeling, and yet any encounter we have with it is likely to tip over under its own weight, because we don’t know how to balance these vital inner faculties with the crude shoveling of our outer personality.

So we approach; but we approach on tiptoe. 

Quietly.

We approach with the question of what feeling is. Feeling, after all, is the inner corresponding part of outward seeing. We see outwardly: we feel inwardly. These two actions together, if they are rightly formed and balanced together, can bring a new kind of discrimination and judgment.

May you be well within today.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.