Wish and the Force of Holy Denying, Part I: The Ray of Creation

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Gurdjieff considered Holy Affirming and Holy Denying as follows:

'It is evident that we men, like all units existing in the Universe, are formed and always consist of the same three independent forces, by means of which the process of reciprocal maintenance of everything existing is actualized, that is, the following three universal forces. 

'The first of these forces continually arises from causes appearing within the Prime Source itself from the effect of the pressure of new arisings and, issuing from it by momentum, flows out of that Prime Source. 

" 'The second universal force is what this first force becomes when, after having spent the momentum it had, it strives to reblend with the source of its arising, according to the fundamental cosmic law "the effects of a cause must always re-enter the cause. " (Passage from the chapter on justice in Beelzebub’s Tales to his Grandson.)

Holy Affirming is thus assigned the role of the creative force of God that flows into the universe: the force of creation itself. This places it at the top of what Gurdjieff calls the ray of creation:

The ray of creation begins with the Absolute. The Absolute is the All. The All, possessing full unity, full will, and full consciousness, creates worlds within itself, in this way beginning the descending world octave.  The Absolute is the do of this octave. The worlds which the Absolute creates in itself are si. (In Search of the Miraculous, page 132.) 

Readers familiar with my work on the enneagram will see from this passage how the note si is tied to the sum of material creation. (See The Universal Enneagram.) This represents, in its place in the octave, the reassembly of the force of creation which begins at the “opposite end” of the octave with the note re. 

In the passage from do to re— which is represented, in terms of astrophysics, by the Big Bang — a tremendous amount of momentum is developed, as referred to in the passage. The pressure of new arisings is that selfsame force of engenderment which flows inexorably “downward” throughout the ray of creation.

That momentum comes to rest at the bottom of the octave, which is read backwards in this case, passing counterclockwise from si down to the bottom of the octave at the note re. 

Don’t let this confuse you: it’s actually quite simple. What it tells us is that re is the point referred to where first force has spent its momentum. It is the point of rest. At this point, that force is transformed and begins the attempt to re-blend with the source of its arising. 

This is where the force of Holy Denying originates.

Gurdjieff’s cosmology expounds an essential tension between the Absolute, do, and material creation, si. 

The six notes re, mi, fa, sol, la, si represent, progressively, the progressive reassembly of the force of the Absolute, do, through a complex interactive hierarchy in the iteration and development of vibration. As such, conceptually, everything outside of the Absolute ultimately represents an element in the hierarchy of Holy Denying, that is to say, the effort to return to the source.

From this we understand that in specific (and yet at the same time most general) terms, from the 30,000 foot point of view, the Absolute “is” Holy Affirming and material creation “is” Holy Denying. Yet this is a bit too simplistic; because from a technical point of view, laid out in more literal terms, Holy Affirming is the force that we perceive in action if the octave is read as a descending scale. 

Holy Affirming is represented that reading of the diagram in which everything flows counterclockwise. In fact the natural tendency in the diagram and in the universe, because of the force of the Absolute and its action in creation, is to flow in this manner. The momentum from the Absolute proceeds from si backwards through all the notes down to re. 

Once the Holy Denying force manifests at the note re, it has to struggle upwards through the “downward pressure” of all of the forces from above like a salmon swimming upstream in order to spawn if it wishes to reassemble the vibrational complexity of the Absolute within itself.

"The ray of creation ends in the moon. Beyond the moon there is nothing. This also is the Absolute—do.”

This phrase, found in the same passage as the first ones, will become very important, so keep it in mind.

 May you be well within today.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.