Meditations on Responsibility, Part VI: Valuation and Payment

   Hopefully the reader has by now followed my line of reasoning and sees the meaning of and the need for three kinds of understanding.

Although there is a doctrinaire model of the three centers which explains that they can each, in their turn, play the role of holy affirming, holy denying, or holy reconciling force, in the broadest sense of the rough model, we are currently arranged in such a way that the holy affirming is the mind, the holy denying is the body, and the holy reconciling is the feeling. Before anything else happens, we first have to change positions and restore balance, because the holy affirming force of the mind has become overwhelmingly strong and dominates almost everything in most people. 

The most effective course of action, in most cases, is for us to learn to reverse the position and allow the body to become holy affirming. In the mind, we become holy denying: we become cynics, skeptics (in the classical philosophical senses of the terms) and reject everything — we question everything. This counteracts our deplorable habit of naively believing everything from outside ourselves. 

In the body, on the other hand, we invest deeply in sensation, which affirms a Being more innately powerful than that of the mind, which works far more slowly. Properly developed, it takes advantage of our intuition, which is from the beginning not a thing of the mind. 

Once this takes place, a certain kind of balance is restored, because the mind was already strong in the first place. Once the body develops strength in the organic sensation of Being, the two of them together make room for feeling to come in and play its role as a reconciling force.

This is a brief explanation of why the work on sensation is so essential, and why one who truly wants to balance themselves ought to simply forget about everything else and just work in this area to the exclusion of feeling this or that or thinking this or that. 

In a certain sense, it would be best to think or feel nothing for a while and to just study sensation. This is, after all, a study of the exact function whereby all impressions enter in the first place; and there is one of the esoteric meanings of Gurdjieff’s advice to Ouspensky that the way to digest impressions most effectively is to put the attention at the place where they enter Being. That place, specifically, is in the sensation, because impressions and sensation are uniquely linked in the act of perception and Being.

This is all well and good, you might say; but to what end? What is the point?

The point, as always, comes back to responsibility. I can’t become responsible for my life, I can not pay the debt I owe for it, unless I sense it in its entirety with a balanced set of functions and organs. I need to be consciously aware of its value first; because one is never willing to pay a debt for something one doesn’t value. Furthermore, one never becomes willing to pay a debt that exceeds the value of what it’s attached to. If you think about this carefully, you’ll see that it explains why you don’t work. You don’t work because you don’t care; you don’t care because you don’t see the value things have. If you truly saw the value within yourself, work would become a natural impulse; and clearly enough, it isn’t. So you need to learn how to have a set of sensations and perceptions that will convey that value to you.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking that the value lies in your work or “the” work. This is how you’ll perceive it for a long time; but the reason that you are supposed to work in life is so that you’ll perceive the value of life, not of your work. The value of “your” work is a selfish value; “your” work is about you, and its center of gravity is misplaced. 

This is one of the reasons that it is often said in the work (and this saying is equally often misunderstood) “the work is not for me.” The work is of life and for life; the work is of life’s of value and for life’s value. It’s a method of becoming objective about life and its value and one’s own inner world. Life and Being have, on behalf of God, collected an immense number of impressions within us over the course of our lifetimes; and to the extent that we become consciously aware and responsible for this collection, to that extent we begin to pay our debt.

This question of payment is thus a profoundly physical and practical one; yet it’s connected to profoundly metaphysical requirements.

For as long as one remains mired in one’s selfish perspective, it’s impossible to appreciate the debt we owe here and how it needs to be paid. 

May you be well within today.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.