Thoughts on Three Questions: The Second Question, Part 1

 

The Second Question: Why do some people have a strong awareness of spiritual things while others don't?

I ‘m at once reminded of Oscar Wilde’s comment: “all of us are lying in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”

Gurdjieff once remarked that there can be as much difference between two men in terms of their quality and character as there is between a human being and a stone. There are people that are animated and full of life; and ones that are inert and slow, impossible to change over the span of a single lifetime.

The keys to this particular question rest in an esoteric realm: that of the quantum state and gravity. 

We all believe the quantum state is too small to affect us, even though it’s the immediate and ongoing cause of our arising. We believe that gravity is, taken literally, nothing more than what holds planets together and causes us to fall down and break our bones. In both cases, nothing could be further than the truth; but we don’t understand the connections between the quantum state, gravity, and consciousness, which are inextricably intertwined and dependent on one another for existence.

The quantum state represents the physical body of the universe. 

It embodies a dualistic paradox: the wave/particle phenomenon. Material reality arises because of this phenomenon, neatly explaining its essential dualism. 

Gravity represents the emotional body of the universe, the wish to concentrate, to be together.

This wish for relationship begins as an apparently coarse thing in matter, but it is born of and ultimately culminates in love. 

Consciousness represents the intellectual body of the universe, the ability to think and to discover meaning, which arises in its higher forms through the aggregation that love engenders. In this way, divine love and wisdom are equivalent to gravity and awareness.

One’s awareness of what Alberto (who asked the question) refers to as “spiritual things” is dependent on the action of an inner gravity that draws fine substances together. Literally, the quantum energies.

Now, in this sense, every human being is formed as their own individual solar system. Solar systems have suns of different natures, intensities, and destinies; they are surrounded by planets of different compositions and sizes. Each solar system (and human being) is formed from a fixed amount of material. The sun may be small or large, blue or white. It may have gas giants around it or it may not. 

These solar systems begin, like all such systems, as bodies created by the collapse of dust clouds due to the action of gravity, of attraction. Swedenborg was the first person to recognize that this is how suns and planets are formed; and we can liken this by analogy directly to the action of the single fertilized egg which draws external matter to it in order to create a fetus and be born. It’s the biological analog of the formation of the solar system in a very literal sense, because materials are collected according to the gravity of attraction. The fetus ultimately grows in the same way that the particles in a cosmological dust cloud are pulled together through the action of gravity and organize themselves lawfully, again and again, all over the cosmos, into the exact same “fetus” of a solar system.

Leaving the cosmological analogy aside for a moment, the point is that from its very beginning a human being is created within the limits of possibility. It can’t be the size of an elephant; it can’t have superpowers such as flying. Within these strictly defined biological limits, a human awareness is formed and exists as a complete and aware thing well before the infant is born. 

During this period of development in the womb, the infant receives character. Its future possibilities are determined by this. It is even possible (I’ve seen it) that a person is actually born with a negative attitude, an emotional color that follows them their whole life.

May you be well within today.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.