Dehypotheosis

April 14, redux

 Perhaps it’s possible to form a hypothesis of some kind; I speak, that is, about a real hypothesis, not one of the many heaps of bullshit that I pile around me in defensive mounds. 

The real hypothesis would have to be formed from real material, actual impressions of actual life, not the theories I’ve collected in buckets from everyone around me, from all the books filled with all the opinions.

I remember that as a youth, while life and my parents and teachers were filling me full of their own piles of bullshit, I always felt like a blank slate, an empty vessel that knew nothing, really, other than what I was as myself. 

I felt like an idiot. 

Somehow I always have.

I can draw a line connecting my childhood to my present state that has a gap in it. This is a bit difficult to explain, but I’ll try to.

I acquired a more permanent form of Being — be careful when you read that, for all these things are relative, mind you —  just under 20 years ago in the wake of the collapse of my entire outer life. 

I woke up one morning and everything in me was different. 

Ever since then I have had a certain permanence of continuity within myself. The struggle between presence and absence has never gone away; but it isn’t mediated by hundreds of different people. There is one of me. This allows the suffering of oneself to become most wonderfully concentrated; but that isn’t the point here. 

I see from this perspective that my state of being an empty vessel that knows nothing is very much the same state that I was in when I was quite young, from three or four years old—the earliest that I have specific and continuous memories of what life was like—until I reached, more or less, adolescence. Adolescence was, in a sense, my first transapalnian-perturbation: an event in which the world was destroyed. The second event of that kind in my life was when I woke up changed in 2001.

I don’t know the person who was there before June 2001, because there wasn’t anyone there. There was a real person there when I was young, but he did a disappearing act for something on the order of 30 to 35 years. 

Notably, factually, and with little embellishment, when things changed in me in June 2001, it began with an encounter with the Virgin Mary; and it ended with a great light that flowed into me and showed me we are vessels into which the world flows. 

This is exactly the way I experienced myself as a child; and it was exactly what transformation, within the narrowly limited scope of this experience and this discussion, consisted of. What “happened in between” was fiber that ended up filling the digestive system with coarse substances that proved useful mostly in the sense that they produced a massive bowel movement that rid me of their presence. Once that took place, the digestive system was able to absorb impressions much more meaningfully and finally begin, after all those years, to extract some nourishment from them. If you wish to look at it in a biblical sense, you could say that I “became again as a child.”

Inevitably, readers will equate this with Christ’s statement in Matthew 18:2,3, “and Jesus called a little child unto him, and set him in the midst of them, and said, verily I say unto you, except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter the kingdom of heaven.”

I could say some things about that kingdom, but this is not the place for it. 

Christ used the word “verily” in order to indicate the certainty of his statement, the absolute truth. Speaking from my personal experience, I believe his comment has something to do with the description of experience that I had as a child, where I truly knew that I was a single person and an empty vessel that the world was flowing into. I didn’t see at the time that the materials the flow of experience was coating in me would leave a subjective residue that I would interfere with and construct a falsity from. It all looked good on the way in, even if I didn’t understand anything. I can see now that everything I thought I understood was because everyone around me—my parents, my teachers, my friends—told me it was like this or like that. This is analogous to reading all the books about spirituality that tell you what it’s like. I swallowed the Kool-Aid; I ate bullshit at first by the teaspoon, then by the tablespoon, and finally by the plateful. 

I learned to believe that it was delicious.

Yet the vessel can in some sense be re-emptied; although the bullshit has taken up permanent residence, it can be compacted and stored in a separate place. In this manner it can be identified and dealt with — again, only to a certain extent, because anything with a mass this large within Being exerts a certain gravity of its own that has to be reckoned with. 

The point is to see a separation between who I am and the hypothesis of who I am. Every time I begin to develop a hypothesis, the gravity of the bullshit draws me closer to its event horizon, and if I flirt with that territory, I usually fall in, as it is said, “up to my eyebrows.”

It’s quite interesting to see correspondence between my nature as a child and my nature, so much later in life, as a candidate for becoming a human being. Both of them involve allowing life to arrive on its own terms. Letting go of the delusion, so deeply rooted, that anything can be done on my own terms other than to allow life to enter. 

As a child, I always experienced life from moment to moment, never knowing what would happen next — and oh my, a lot of things happened! — and constantly bewildered by the new things, every day, that there was no actual way of dealing with but that just were the way they were. Much like the day my sister died, which could not be “dealt” with (the hundred thousand forms and family matters in its wake still left Sarah dead) but had to be accepted. Beginning at the point of acceptance made the experience harmoniously meaningful; and that harmony is still with me this morning in the sense of her presence and Being, which still reverberate as a rich series of tones within me, at a time when I have none of my nuclear family left and have reformed my familial core around my children. 

These experiences cast an important light on Gurdjieff’s opinion of our relationship to our parents and our children. He said a lot of useful things on this which you already know, if you are familiar with his teaching; yet they're useless unless you apply them quite directly and intelligently to your own experience, the actual fact of your own parents and children, the roles we play with one another in the succession of Gods in our tiny universes.

warmly, 

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.