The Functional and Spiritual Nature in man, Part II

 

Sunrise, Hudson River

June 9 2021

Almost everything we think we “feel” isn’t actually feeling, it’s emotion. Feeling — real feeling — is of a different order and always begins with the immediate and irrevocable understanding that it’s a sacred impulse. All true religious impulse begins with real feeling; and yet it’s difficult to sort out for most people, because emotion can be so intense that it deftly mimics this impulse quite effectively. 

There’s a level of emotion, engendered by ego, that directly reflects divine feeling but is so intensely infected with ego that it turns the results upside down. Religious fanaticism is directly born of that damaged reflection. Because the difference is very poorly understood when seen from the perspective of this level and without the experience of real feeling, its destructive results are what mechanistic rationalism uses to accuse religion of being dysfunctional. Human beings do not even suspect that almost all of what we call “religion” is of this level and does not embody the beginning of actual religion, which is rooted in real feeling.

We have the capacity to feel at a depth and a level that is not of the self and has nothing to do with our own self interest. Real feeling is entirely free of those interests; and the understanding it imparts draws us inexorably towards several important religious impulses that belong not to ourselves, but to the nature of God. These two impulses, which are also easy to misinterpret from this level, are sorrow and forgiveness.

In the midst of what should have been the greatest of personal sorrows, when Christ was hung on the cross, he said, “forgive them Father, for they know not what they do.” Christ embodied real feeling; and because real feeling is always selfless, his concern while he was dying was not for his own condition but for the condition of those around him. The comment in the Gospels (see Matthew 27:11-14) decisively illustrates that Christ’s understanding of feeling was from a different level than our own.

We thus see that sorrow and forgiveness, in the context of metaphysical awareness and real feeling, are divine forces that have nothing of our ordinary self in them. Our concern becomes one of absolute concern for others; and it’s thus difficult to use the words compassion, empathy, or sympathy to describe it, because each one of these presumes in one way or another that our own self interest has come into relationship with the self interest in the other; whereas in reality real feeling eclipses our own self interest and puts it aside as unimportant. This is a higher level of concern; and once again, in Scripture, when Christ says “greater love hath no man than this, to lay down his life for his brother” (John 15) the reference is to real feeling. It’s a feeling so great that one’s own life matters not; and how many of us can claim to have a feeling even remotely related to this during the course of ordinary life? It’s only during very great trials that we may have such an experience; and this is a clue pointing to the essential role in suffering to bring us to a real understanding.

In examining these questions, one must begin by understanding that it’s the duty and the responsibility of any conscious entity to take on the task of the regeneration of awareness into the gravitational field of metaphysical and divine consciousness, which realigns priorities not just on the spiritual, but also the functional level. 

This question of the functional level needs to be examined more precisely, because Gurdjieff spoke often of the fact that much in man is nothing more than a function — for example, he said that sex, which human beings believe is a very high activity, was nothing more than a function. Because most of our lives are lived out on the functional level, we confuse functions with spiritual qualities day in, day out, in almost everything we do. We live in an emotional landscape, a magnetic field which is attracted or repulsed by everything around it in millions of different ways all day long; and we don’t suspect that there’s a feeling-landscape which completely inverts and changes the nature of the emotional landscape if it manifests. It realigns everything.

A study of the difference between the functional and spiritual parts of our nature, which is directly related to a study of the emotional and feeling parts and the difference between magnetism and gravity, can be of great service in sorting the conceptual framework of this question out. 

Yet the essential aim of all inner work, in the end, must be not just to awaken the organic sensation, but also to awaken the organic feeling in us — the real feeling, the sacred feeling of the divine, which is forever searching for vessels within which to express itself. 

All great art, all great architecture and music, in fact every achievement of any significance in the temporal world, springs from a manifestation of that expression. This is why the Gothic cathedrals were built; and the fact that we make nothing of this kind, nothing of this great beauty and sublime substance, in the modern age is because we are clueless about these things.

Be well today.

Warmly,

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.