Wish and the Force of Holy Denying, Part IV: Bottoming Out

    

Capital relief from Serrabone

I’d like to return now to the phrase that was quoted at the beginning of the piece, in order to contemplate its importance:

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

When Gurdjieff asks us to come to an understanding of our own nothingness, it is actually a request that we take the final step down the ladder to the level of the moon — in the case of the solar system, the note re. In terms of the individual’s ray of creation, we are located at mi, which represents desire. When Gurdjieff says that non-desires should prevail over desires, it’s another way of saying that we need to take a step down from where we are in the octave in order to reach the bottom, where everything comes to rest and the impulse to return is actually born. We’re so filled with ourselves and our own desires that we never reach the place where our wish can become real. We think that we can have real wish from where we are, on this note where desire is born and dominates. Yet real wish comes from beneath us, not above us; and although we may ask for help, that help does not come from our wish. We need to go down to the bottom of what we are, complete the action of the passive force of Holy Affirming by letting go of everything we desire and even destroying within ourselves that belief in our own wish which is formed by our ego — for it is a false wish. And this is exactly what we don’t see: that even our wish as it exists in us now is based on falsehoods. 

This is one of the things that Gurdjieff meant when he said that everything in us is a lie. If we aren’t willing to see this, we see nothing.

The effort to reach into the stillness and the silence of the soul is the effort to step down to the beginning of wish— not to reach upwards for it. We cannot find real wish above us, because that is a prize that doesn’t belong to us. We must strip ourselves, as Meister Eckhart so clearly points out, of absolutely everything we are in order to become candidates for real wish. 

It’s there, at the bottom of the ray of creation, that real wish is born; and we can’t arrive there with even a shred of ourselves if we wish to receive real wish in us. One cannot put new wine into old bottles. New wine, in this case, is real wish; and it only arrives from within the ground of our own nothingness.

This ground of our own nothingness begins in our sensation; and it begins in that place of stillness that receives the entire force of the ray of creation which has now completed its downward movement to the bottom. It is here, where it comes to rest, and everything has been fully received — received unconditionally and without any personal inflection whatsoever — that real wish is born.

This particular observation is important because it applies to every impression we take in individually, as well as the sum total of all our impressions. It should be noted that it is possible for each individual impression to complete the ray of creation and drop down all the way to the bottom where wish can be born. This, however, is a very big thing and rarely achieved. If it ever happens to you, it will produce a sensation of unimaginable depth; and it is not an action you can undertake on your own, so please forget about that if you are even dreaming of it now. The point is that we’re built so that each impression could do this; yet we’re probably never going to get to that point in this lifetime. We can, however, take the sum total of what we are and point it in this direction.

A note: On April 4, 2022, consider the contents of this post in relationship to the post on that date.

May you be well within today.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.