For M. G.

 

April 5

For M. G.

Mark well these words from the holy communion, because everything I am about to say relates to them.

We do not presume to come to this table, or merciful Lord, trusting in our own righteousness, but in thy manifold and great mercies. 

We are not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under thy table. 

But Thou art the same Lord, whose property is always to have mercy; grant us therefore, gracious Lord, to eat the flesh of thy dear son Jesus Christ, and to drink his blood, that our sinful bodies may be made clean by his body, and our souls washed through his most precious blood, and that we may ever more dwell in him, and he in us. 

Amen.

Sometimes impressions are too intense and too personal to share. 

As work becomes deeper in the parts of being are more harmonized, impressions sink into the body more deeply and enter realms where it is impossible to describe their action without using too many words and already thereby missing the mark entirely.

The various parts of Being work at very different tempos and it takes many years to learn how to have a presence of Being and a connection to sensation that harmonizes these tempos better. To do so is already a rare thing, and it’s easy to assume one has an understanding of this when in fact nothing of the kind is there. It engenders a kind of arrogance that forms a pimple on the face of one’s work which looks normal to all those who are like this. Everyone accepts it. There is a consensus that these pimples are normal things and that in fact one ought to have them. The more, the better.

Ultimately, each impression ought to be about a feeling relationship. The ultimate goal of harmonizing the policeman of thought and of the landowner of sensation is to make room for true emotion to enter. That entry always begins with remorse of conscience; and together these three things can lead to real feeling, which is the door to the secret inner realm where all true work of Being takes place.

Last night, I said to my wife that this is not a place that anyone, from their ordinary parts or selves, wants to enter. All of the ordinary that’s in us would prefer to stay outside the temple engaged in all the “festivals of light and color,” the processionals and ceremonies that take place in profane territory. These are all amusing distractions and the preference for them is strong. It’s only inside the temple, where the sober action of relationship with God takes place, that anything real happens; and the need for doing anything real isn’t at all apparent to us.

The work is not meant to take us to a place that we like; it's meant to take us to the places that we don’t like. And this seems paradoxical; why should anyone want to go to a place they don’t like? 

This needs to be contemplated very carefully. All of the most important things in life, all of the higher feelings and the things we can understand inside the secret parts of ourselves where it really matters, are in the places we don’t like. The secrets of what it means to be were hidden in those places precisely to keep those within us who have no real interest in Being from touching them.

Well, I could say a good deal more about this, but it is nearly impossible. What occurred to me last night, and what can perhaps be said—although I have my doubts—is that an individual’s life is so vast and contains such an extraordinary and comprehensive cosmos of its own that, if it's properly digested and understood, rivals any galaxy or even collection of them in its scale. The responsibility for an entity of this magnitude is overwhelming; in fact, one comes to know that one isn't truly capable of being responsible for it. One only comes to know one’s own nothingness in the face of one’s own scale.

We're not just nothing unto the cosmos; we are already nothing unto ourselves within the scale of ourselves.

In order to sense this, we must first sense the scale of ourselves; and in order to sense the scale of ourselves, we must learn the value of even one single impression. 

A true and deep receiving of a single impression can already change our inner universe beyond measure; one impression, truly received, can change the course of a life forever. Two impressions of such quality are almost too much to hope for; and if there are, through some stroke of divine Providence, three of them, then all of life can be renewed.

This, of course, is an allegory, a parable; and yet it captures the general gist of the matter.

The difficulty with this work is that it has nothing to do with how happy we want to be; it has to do with how much we're willing to suffer. The whole of life is in fact constructed in that way; and yet we begin upside down in relationship to the question, and stay there, standing on our heads...

insisting that it’s the best pose.

A note to readers:

M. G. is not Mr. Gurdjieff, but a friend currently dying of a debilitating degenerative neurological disease.

May you be well within today.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.