Force and Function

  

Dove courtship

April, 2021, Sparkill

The male dove preens himself elaborately to show the female that he has ample down to line their nest with.

It’s commonplace to discuss the action of the various individual centers as functions. 

For example, Gurdjieff says that sex is a function. Because we tie sex so closely into intimacy, emotion, and even — in sometimes significant ways — to feeling, we don’t see that it's actually just an engine that drives things. In objective terms of the overall function of the organism, it’s like a dynamo or carburetor. It has no more technical purpose than a hammer or a wrench. Yet we get very tied up in it, because it’s a very big hammer and the use of it produces immense satisfaction.

The problem with hammers is that they can be used to destroy things as well as drive nails.

The discussion I’m interested in this morning, however, examines function from a larger point of view. There are lower functions and higher functions. Higher intellectual and higher emotional centers, for example, serve as very different functions than the lower centers. 

In order to understand the question from a fundamental point of view, we first have to understand what "function" means. As a noun, the definition of the word is “an activity or purpose natural to or intended for a person or thing.” It comes from the Latin to perform, to have an action: and so a function is a part of the self that provides force of a certain kind. 

In this context, we can see that intellect provides a force; sensation provides a force; feeling provides a force. When Jeanne de Salzmann says we exist within “a play of forces,” she’s calling our attention to the fact that all of the parts of ourselves are forces that our conscious mind finds itself in the middle of. When we're identified with one center or another, we confuse “ourselves”— our being – with the function of that center, with its force. It becomes everything "we" are. It’s something like the electricity in a lamp: instead of being the agency that turns the lamp on and uses its light, we mistake ourselves for the electric current, and so we are “stuck in the lamp” like Aladdin’s genie. )The fairytale, by the way, is a spiritual allegory about identification and desire. Other parables about lamps, for example, the opening verses of Matthew 25, refer to the same question of force, identification, and the conservation of being, which is otherwise immediately expended.)

I'm drawing here with very broad lines, creating a sketch which one might spend some time thinking about and refining, filling in the details. What I’d like to get to here is the fact that unity of Being, continuity of Being, is yet another function.

Sensation can create unity of Being; and yet this isn’t an end in itself. It's merely another function that we need in order to live. It is, in point of fact, a far more important function than the average function of the other centers, because it's an emergent function that arises because of cooperation between the centers. 

If a person becomes a truly “three brained being,” the function available to them for manifestation already comes from a much higher level; and yet their manifestation and their functions still take place on this level. That is to say, the function and its inner action are always paramount. The nature of its influence on the outer functions in this level are far less important than the nature of its influence on awareness and Being. In this sense, once the function of individuality (undividedness) is present, everything should proceed outwardly exactly as it always has. That, at least, from the point of view of any other person. The intention is not, of necessity or by default, to “use” this function to “improve” our life, its conditions, and so on. Such a thing may happen; but it isn’t really of so much interest relative to what takes place inside, to the kind of seeing that begins—the type of impressions that are taken in.

This question of the impressions is a quite interesting one, because in a state where the function of unity is active, exactly the same impressions — all of them — are available that were there before there was unity; and yet now the impressions have, from the point of view of function, “changed type,” because the functions now take place within a rate of vibration that corresponds not to the subjective nature of impressions, but to their objective nature. An impression can be subjective or objective; and yet this paradoxically depends on the perceiver, not the impression itself. The impression by itself is in a certain sense inert; it's the receiver that characterizes its nature.

We could examine this from a molecular and biological point of view with some profit. By itself, a virus is inert and can do nothing; it can't respirate, it can’t even reproduce. Cells, however, play a completely different and superior role in the existence of the virus, because cells can be either passive, in which case they're receptive to the virus and have no defenses, or active, in which case the virus is unable to penetrate the walls of their cells. On average, cells are often, like ourselves, passive in this regard. They need to be "awakened" in order to resist infection: on the alert, aware, from a molecular perspective. So you see, even molecules need an attention in order not to become identified and taken. This is, mind you, an analogy; and the molecular biologists would rightly cry foul on it from a technical point of view, for reasons a bit too complicated to explain right now. The analogy, nonetheless, is still to my liking.

In the same way as our poor little cells, if I'm passive, if I have no unity of being, everything that comes into me takes me over and replicates itself in me. I’m not the authority. I don’t have the force — the function — in me to resist my infection by outside events, which enter me and propagate themselves (through association, repetition, and obsession)  to take over the life of my inner Being. 

Yet if the function of unity is available to me, I resist. My “I am” is stronger than the outside world; and even though all it does is gather the force of my Being around this single and quite simple awareness of “I am”, this changes everything, because I'm no longer the subject of invasion. I have borders, I have a border patrol. The organization is different.

I'm not the victim any more.

It’s quite difficult to describe the unity of Being in any average words. The function of sensation is essential as the grounding force in this action; intellect and feeling interchangeably play active and passive roles, another subject too complicated to get into here. The point is that if all three functions are present and accounted for, the fourth function appears. 

Everything that's perceived is evaluated differently under such circumstances. This does not provide comfort; on the contrary, it's a distinctly difficult place to inhabit, but it conveys a reliability that allows us to begin to approach understanding of intentional suffering. 

By doing so, we can begin to lay a foundation for true remorse of conscience; and on that foundation, it’s possible to begin to build a real inner church.

May you be well within today.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.