Love and Decency, part I

 

Piermont Pier, December 2021

It would be best if we could clearly see where we are and what we are doing, but it turns out this is quite difficult.

Truly seeing yourself where you are and as you are is a sobering experience; the distractions are many and the rewards, so it would seem, are few. 

The imagination generally serves as the steward of self-love. To understand that one is a tiny creature with little or no actual power over life and none whatsoever over death, it's a very humbling experience, and no matter how much we protest to the contrary, on our own we're not humble. It's only when we're exposed to cosmological forces ("higher energies") much greater than ourselves and are able to organically acknowledge them that humility can arise; and, for reasons that are not well understood, the human organism's ability to sense such forces has degenerated a great deal. Gurdjieff, of course, wrote a new mythology about that in Beelzebubs tales; but it’s an allegorical mythology that provides at best a rough template for the situation, not quite an exact explanation of its spiritual and biological roots.

This brief preamble brings me to a question I've been pondering over the last few weeks, in fact, most likely, the last few years – and maybe, just maybe, for my entire life.

This question is the question of decency.

The question calls to mind Victor Frankl's contention that there are only two kinds of people in the world, decent and non-decent people. This, as well, is an abbreviated and encapsulated version of what Swedenborg said about the nature of love and being.

We find ourselves in the middle of this life. No matter what else we believe, no matter how many imaginary events we construct in our mind, we are forever faced in every moment with the question of whether to behave like decent people who respect others, who love others, and to try to form intelligent and caring relationships with others, or to behave like self-loving creatures who take for themselves and care little for others or their needs. 

You can throw the whole lot of philosophy, whether esoteric or ordinary, politics, society, and so on into the dust bin for the time being. This is all one really needs to know in order to begin. 

Is one decent or non-decent? 

Should one be decent or non-decent?

These questions get lost in the shuffle as folks practice esoteric religion, or any other flavor of the external variety. The more external the practice of religion, of course, the less decent it often becomes; but this is not always the case, just a general trend. The difficulty with it is that it forms buffers in people that allow them to pretend they are decent while they aren't being decent at all. It is a spectacular form of lying when it functions in this way. 

Yet it turns out that many of the cultural and social institutions we have are equally spectacular forms of lying. Currency, in fact—which we would take to be "real" because we have printed sheet of paper and coinage that supposedly make it so – is a non-existing thing invented wholly in the imaginations of men which can collapse in a matter of moments, from a historical perspective, the moment peoples or societies lose confidence in the lies and imagination that create a given currency within a country, or for that matter in a set of digital electronic pulses on a computer. 

What this means is that the entire premise upon which the exchange of wealth and power in societies is based on is a complete fantasy. The collision between this and other spectacular fantasies from the western world — property ownership, for example — was what utterly baffled Native American peoples, who were simply unable to combat what they were unable to understand. We vanquished them first with our imaginations, and only afterwards with our cruelty and weapons. 

This little vignette is quite similar to the struggle between essence and personality: essence, which may be rather simple and straightforward, uncomplicated to what might seem to be the point of naïveté and even stupidity, and personality, which manages to invent an endless series of clever lies to prop up its machinations and intrigues, most all of which revolve around – you guessed it – money, and power, which are paradoxically tied to an actual essential thing that is real, that is, sex.

Untangling this ball of fishing line can be terribly difficult if one uses the mind to attempt it. The mess is produced by the mind in the first place; looking there for solutions to it isn't so helpful. It's only by sorting out experience through the capacity for sensation to receive it more deeply that helps to put it in perspective. And at that point it's quite important for feeling to enter from a different level than the ordinary emotions of life. If our sensation, rather than our mind, meets our life directly as a practical fact rather than a set of absurd fantasies that everyone has agreed are "true," we can perhaps begin to rewrite the general order of things in us. We don't have to throw away all of the imagination and the institutions we’ve created with it in order to assert our independence from them. 

We don’t, in other words, have to do anything except refuse to be enslaved by them.

I happen to be deeply religious; most people who know me know this. But it almost doesn't matter in regard to this question I'm raising, because God is a long way from us and we live in a very tiny, dark corner of the universe. We have to be responsible for where we are now and not on some unimaginably vast cosmic scale that we have absolutely no contact with, let alone control over. As we are, we exist as though we were microbes in the gut of some great being and nonetheless believed, as individuals, that we could control it. One delusional bacteria in the gut of a mammoth believing it is in charge of the whole mammoth. 

This won't do. We need to drop these crazy arguments about our power, our insight, all the philosophy and the nonsense and refocus on being here now, on trying to see what the truth of this moment is. 

If this practice is rightly understood, it immediately calls the sense of decency into place; there can be no rightly ordered organic relationship that does not acknowledge this sense. The moment that you see it violated, you realize that the violator has no real center of gravity or character of Being, but is, instead, a slave to external principles and external circumstances.

The principles that are installed in us by societies and belief systems are flawed and unreliable because they haven’t developed within us as organic entities, as organs that sense the true nature of Being. And without an organ in us that senses the true nature of Being, we can't actually be anything. We are then, instead, prisoners of our imagination. 

This development of character of Being, of becoming a real human being who acts decently towards others, is one of the chief basic aims of inner discipline. 

It's a quite simple thing, really, and yet we have become so complicated we fail to see it.

May the spirit of Christ dwell in us, now and always,

Warmly,

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.