Wish and the Force of Holy Denying, Part II: The Ladder Between Heaven and Earth

  

Architectural detail from Serrabone

When we consider the question of the effort to reassemble, we must now make it personal by transferring the entire cosmological hierarchy and its functional relationships to the psyche and soul of man. 

This process takes place in a human being: there is a place, as Meister Eckhart makes so clear, where the divine flows into the soul. As we are, we’re quite distant from this place. Our task in life is to return to it; yet everything in life arranges itself against this. There’s a pressure, a momentum, so to speak, that quite literally pushes us down and wishes to keep us fixed in the descending movement of the octave. That wish isn’t a conscious resistance and a rejection of creation, however, but rather a natural obstacle that is formed by the force of the movement of Holy Affirming. We might call it the “anti-wish”: God has invested so much force in the act of creation that it has an automatic tendency to follow its own momentum and continue to create, create, create.

Yet all of this natural force has the lawful property of coming to rest at the bottom with a powerful boomerang effect, a wish to reassemble; and in order for that wish to be fulfilled, a kind of ”cosmic ladder” exists. 

The ladder was already lawfully created by the downward motion, so it is implicit in creation.

This is Jacob’s ladder of the biblical tale, a structure upon which angels (vibrational entities) move both upwards and downwards. As we are, trapped near the bottom of the ray of creation, we have the opportunity to move upwards because a mechanical structure that supports it exists. But it’s much easier to go down the ladder than up it; to go up the ladder, one has to lift one’s own weight (take responsibility) and use will — employ an intention to go upwards. If one is irresponsible and has no particular intention, the automatic impulse will be to go downwards.

There are several metaphysical problems with our inner position. 

The first one, as is already obvious, is that we’re working against the natural tendency of things to go down if we have a wish to move upwards. 

The second one is that we’re not at the bottom of the ladder. This is a critical point. The bottom of the ladder for earth lies at the moon, a place of 96 laws. That is the place at which Holy Denying, the force whose essence is a wish to return to the source, has its origin. It’s the root of being. 

In a paradox with too much dimension to appreciate in any superficial way, this means that we actually have to make the conscious decision to descend the ladder first if we wish to reach the root of the ability to move back upwards. All of the work in the development of “moon” in ourselves a relates exactly to this question. All of the work on sensation relates just as exactly to this question. It also gives an important indicator as to why we initially need to place ourselves under more, not less, discipline if we wish to begin any real work in ourselves.

We need to go back to the source of the force of Holy Denying in order to create a foundation at the beginning of its impulse if we wish to fully embody its effort to move back towards the divine within ourselves. This source, I might note, lies at the bottom of the ray of creation, the lowest point where everything comes to rest and stillness. This is the place where one finds the least resistance to the return — where my wish is born.

This means that we are, quite surely, trapped in a strange place: “one rung up” on the ladder and still in the midst of the downward movement of Holy Affirming. There are intriguing complexities and connections between this position and the development of our egos, which — because they have a certain authority over the downward movement, which is more natural to us — make us think we’re Gods.

We see from this a cogent metaphysical explanation of the ancient adage ”the way down is the way up.” Everything from the point at the bottom becomes a struggle against forces far, far greater than myself. 

Yet there’s an advantage to this place at the bottom of the ray of creation: it’s also the point at which the receiving of the force of the Absolute is the most completed. In this place I’ve been given everything that can be given by God and creation to begin in the act of Being: the effort to develop an individuality that can contain intention, will, consciousness, and an aim to return to the source.

We should remember here that Gurdjieff describes Holy Affirming as the passive force. This is because it needs to do nothing more than exist to move downwards. 

The Holy Denying force is active because it must use will and effort in its attempt to return to the source.

  May you be well within today.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.