Wish and the Force of Holy Denying, Part III: Wish and Holy Denying

 

Capital relief from Serrabone

 Thus, taken from a higher point of view, our entire work and our wish embodies Holy Denying as its essential source of power, energy, and action. It is our wish — it is our effort to return to the source. And, strangely, it positions itself “against” the force of creation. 

This is because the force of creation reflexively resists the effort of its result to return to the source. This is why Gurdjieff calls the action between Holy Affirming and Holy Denying a “clash.”

Creation is told by God, “you must be; and you must be apart from me. This is my natural will. I have done this out of love for you.” This is much like the parent who turns his or her child out into the world on their own out of love for them and their need to develop their own life and being. Hence Gurdjieff’s tendency to drive his pupils away from him, sometimes in what appeared to be actively hostile conditions.

The child, on the other hand, if they are not improperly formed, recognizes the authority of the parent and insists on finding a way through the maze of life back to the parent in order to re-create the family and the love that gave it birth. 

If you recognize the parable of the prodigal son here, you’re not mistaken. The point is that God’s will pushes us away from Him exactly so that we’ll be forced to develop our individuality in order to return. It’s only through the taking on of this responsibility that anything real with any real understanding can be formed in us. 

This takes place through our active effort against the passive force of creation and Holy Affirming. It’s born of a lawful condition, an apophatic demand, in which we must deny God in order to return to the source of affirming. Hence an explanation of Gurdjieff’s term “conscious egoism.” The term deftly encompasses everything about the position we’re left in simply because of the structure of the cosmos.

Every single element of Gurdjieff’s teaching is deeply intertwined with the action of these cosmological and metaphysical forces which we embody in the very planetary and physical forces that we inhabit. It’s our awareness, our consciousness, that is metaphysical; and it is that entity exactly that functions as the third force, that which embodies the action of Holy Reconciling. 

Consciousness is the force that binds the downward movement of Holy Affirming and the upward movement of Holy Denying together. They’ve been separated into two opposing entities; and yet this separation itself is confusing and metaphysically dialectical, because they are actually the same force, just seen as moving in different directions. 

If you read the enneagram counterclockwise, you see the graphic representation of Holy Affirming; and if you read it clockwise, you see the representation of Holy Denying. In this way, you can understand that it is actually the same force. It has been divided from itself only by the action of its impetus and momentum.

The analogy of a salmon once again comes to mind. Born from an egg in a stream distant from the ocean, it swims downstream almost effortlessly into a realm where it feeds and grows. Only at the end of that process does it struggle mightily back upstream to the place where it can spawn; and there it dies. Man’s life and existence recapitulate that life cycle in the same way that the enneagram represents it as a piece of graphic art.

Holy Reconciling, then, becomes a duty and a responsibility, because the ultimate cosmological function is the reunification of Holy Affirming and Holy Denying; and only consciousness can effect that reunification. While the reunification is lawful, it isn’t assured; the force of consciousness arises as an obligation that needs to be fulfilled in order to bring that assurance into life. It can’t be active or passive, because it has a different role; it must reconcile. And in order to reconcile it can’t be interested in its self (the ego); it needs to be objective, to take neither the side of the affirming or the denying as superior, but to take both sides into account and bind them within the truth of their own contradiction.

In a world where our desire stimulates us to take a side—to be active or passive, to be this or that—the lawful duty assigned to us is rather to reconcile these opposites; and that can only be done by being aware and questioning, because otherwise each of the two forces demands that we believe in it wholly. They serve, each in their own way, as a recruiter for their own cause; and because of their inherent nature, neither one of them is lawfully able to recognize the opposing cause without a reconciling factor, which is the agent that has that duty and that ability.

Perhaps it’s quite important here to point out that Holy Reconciling is the only force that has the ability to bind the other two forces together. Without it, the two forces as they are would exist forever separated: God would at once lose everything that creates His being, and creation would lose God. The failure to embody Holy Reconciling is iterated, on our own level, in atheism and mechanistic rationalism. This is an absolutism that acknowledges only the Holy Denying force. On the other hand, for those who acknowledge only the Holy Affirming force, they become religious fanatics — the exact opposite of atheists — and in this way they equally lose God, by insisting on nothing but God at the expense of everything else.

So we can see that mankind’s tendency is not to bind the two forces together, but to insist on an inner condition in which either everything is God — in which case we lose God at the end of everything— or that nothing is God, in which case we lose God right at the beginning. Either way, without the force of consciousness, the end result is the same.

This is not to indulge in moralizing about the two opposing forces, which we easily see at work not just in society and the world at large but also in ourselves; it is also a vision of our failure to understand metaphysical structure we are created within. This was the greater part of Gurdjieff’s exposition to Ouspensky, which is rarely examined at the depth it needs to be in order to understand how dire our condition actually is. At that, the difficulty with Ouspensky’s commentary on the situation is to mechanistic; it does not truly come to grips with the struggle inside the human soul that is so much more deftly embedded in the mythology of Beelzebub’s Tales to his Grandson. Hence the insistence of those closest to the heart of the Gurdjieff work to focus on Beelzebub’s Tales as the most essential material for a tactile encounter with these questions.

It pays to be clearer on these questions. A touchy – feely approach to the understanding of metaphysical structure is, generally speaking, successfully only intermittently and by accident. If we want to know how to play music, we must become familiar with the scales.

 May you be well within today.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.