I often say that life flows into us.
This can be understand physically, in the literal terms of the impressions that enter our bodies; these impressions, from the outer world. And this is a powerful exper
ience — not a metaphor. It is a functional fact of existence. To be present to the outer form of life as it flows into us is to take in a sacred food which is provided for Being.
There’s a second way of understanding that life flows into us, however, and this is on the order of understanding that life is a substance.
Last week someone asked, at the annual All and Everything conference, what “The Sorrow of His Endlessness” was. I sympathized with the question: after all, it’s all very well to talk about this Sorrow, but what exactly is it?
I gave what I think is a quite simple answer, although an extensive metaphysical discourse might have been in order. I pointed out that the Sorrow is a physical substance. That is, it’s the fundamental form of matter and exists at the root of the arising of the universe. While this doesn’t deal with the complex and intricate questions of why there is Sorrow, it does establish the simple fact that it is material. It is material, moreover, in a metaphysical sense; that is to say, it is woven into the metaphysical materiality of the universe rather than the physical materiality. It may sound like a contradiction to speak of these two things in this way, as both being material. Yet that is the case. The metaphysical has a substance to it just as the physical does. The question has to do with how fine the rate of vibration is.
In any event, I bring this up because life itself is a substance that flows into Being through us. When we experience what are called “higher energies” in the Gurdjieff work — an oddly sterile way of describing the inward flow of divine love into being — this is exactly what we are speaking about, life itself. The best point of reference for understanding this from a technical point of view is not found in the Gurdjieff literature, but, rather, in the works of Emmanuel Swedenborg, who was not only a real scientist — Gurdjieff was at best a dabbler, who often comes across as a crackpot in his writings —but also a man gifted with extraordinary insights into the nature of spiritual being. Those who study Gurdjieff while overlooking Swedenborg are, in my opinion, making a somewhat critical error of education.
Life flows into us and creates being. This “higher energy” — the grace of the Holy Spirit — which flows into us is life itself, not a sensation, a thought, or a feeling—or, for that matter, a “presence.” All of these things can be said about life as it flows into us, but each is a property of life and of nothing else, so let us be clear that life — both physical and metaphysical — is the primary carrier of all of the thoughts, feelings, presences and so on within every created thing. Life is in other words the field of energy that creates the universe and all the Being within it.
That force is the fundamental force of Divine Love. So when we participate in relationship with a “higher energy,” we aren’t engaged in some clinical activity, partaking of some chemical food — although it’s entirely possible to pick it apart with our minds and describe it in that way.
The activity we’re engaged in is living.
This brings new meaning to Gurdjieff’s phrase “work in life.” Life isn’t what happens outside us — it is equally what happens inside us. It is what happens above us. It is what happens below us. It is, in fact, ubiquitous; and so if we “work in life,” we work everywhere, both physically and metaphysically, both horizontally and vertically. We insert the effort of our awareness into the midst of Love and Being in all its aspects.
The mind has a way of distracting us from this action. Life is a whole thing which has a wish for us to serve it; and yet from an early age our minds are by accident trained to mostly serve themselves. The separation of the mind and Being from life is described by analogy in Beelzebub’s Tales to his Grandson when the comet hits the planet Earth and creates the moon. This happens early on in the formation of our being. We become disrupted; fragments of ourselves are separated from us.
Coming back to life, receiving life as it flows into us, is by way of healing this wound. We are indeed vessels into which the world flows; and while we may never understand that mystery, we can still participate in it as a mystery. We could say that life flows into us; equally, that Christ flows into; and above all, that God's love flows into us. This is a mystery; and it is a mystery that gives us great purpose, insofar as we may sense it.
Yesterday I described the way we live in our body as though we were customers who’ve entered a shop filled with wonderful things. This shop is called our lives. The shelves are fully stocked, with so many riches that it would be impossible for any one individual to buy or own them all.
Yet the moment we walk into the shop, we acquire the mistaken impression that we’re the owner of the shop. We think that everything in it belongs to us; and we forget that this is a place of transactions where the owner must be paid for each thing we take.
The proprietors of the shop (a divine couple, if you will) are eminently fair and just and loving; yet they’re perpetually faced with a clientele who think they own the store, and behave as abusers and thieves.
It’s important to rethink this place of transactions, both physical and metaphysical, which we live within through an act of Grace. The very idea that we could own anything in life is already a circus of absurdities; we are never anything more than custodians, and that for a brief period during which, if we discharge our responsibilities in a dignified way, we may acquit ourselves with honor.
That is, unfortunately, rarely the case.
Be well today, and Live.
Warmly,
Lee
Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.
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