The Functional and Spiritual Nature in Man, Part III

One of the failures of mechanistic rationalism is that it assumes that everything comes from the same place: that there’s only one level, the physical level, and that everything is physical. This invests all of what we are and understand in the functional alone. It presumes that impulse — the motive partner of function — is also functional. 

Yet impulse is the sister of agency; and function is unable to explain agency. “I am — I wish to be” is the prayer of agency over function: and agency does indeed rule function, in the same way that God’s will rules creation.

I began thinking about this subject because I’m so interested in the question of sorrow and forgiveness. That is, the question of real feeling, which is so central to the question of why inner work exists in the first place. In order to undertake such a work, and work to understand ourselves, we need first to understand how little there is in us that’s real. Our functions are, as Gurdjieff pointed out, indeed mechanical; and the moment we acquire even a small amount of real inner gravity, such as may come about from great struggle or tragedy, we realize this and see that there’s something more than just function at work in us. 

Once touched by real feeling, one never loses the taste for it.

As we are, we’re unable to forgive; and yet the aim of real work on one’s Being  is to become completely immersed in sorrow, down into the marrow of the bones, which consequently engenders and gives birth to the potential for forgiveness.

It’s quite interesting to me that in today’s Gurdjieff work, a counterrevolution is underway among some to propagate the idea of joy. This is in some senses the opposite of what Gurdjieff intended; and yet there isn’t any doubt that joy has its place in the Gurdjieff work. 

The difficulty is that one can’t make it central. That same tendency is strongly afoot in the Christian church, which plans not one but both feet quite firmly in said territory. Yet we can learn from the church, no matter far it may have strayed from its origins, about the place of joy, because the place of joy is absolutely and irrevocably rooted in the tragedy of Christ’s crucifixion. The resurrection can’t take place without death; and the resurrection is the source of joy. 

We mirror that understanding in the Gurdjieff work when we discuss the idea that we must die to ourselves in order to be born anew; and other works as diverse as Meister Eckhart’s Gnosticism and the Enlightenment of the Buddhist practice acknowledge this as well. To go straight to joy is to wish to get to heaven without the dying part.

Gurdjieff, of course, wrote the entire book Beelzebub’s Tales to his Grandson in order to bring the reader to the moment where they discover that their only hope is to grow a new organ that makes them aware of their mortality. 

It’s a trick in which the music stops playing and the magician pulls a rabbit out of his hat — a dead rabbit. 

This is where we really are. Real feeling offers us the opportunity to immerse ourselves in the ice cold reality of the place we occupy in this universe while we are in our physical bodies and our souls made slaves, without compromise, to the functional nature of the cosmos. It’s only in the slavery to the functional nature of the cosmos and to fate itself that we begin to understand the suffering that’s needed in order to become a real being. In a certain sense we’re incarnated strictly in order to appreciate that situation. But if we only appreciate it with our intellect, we’ve gone nowhere; we don’t care that the rabbit is dead.

I had a moment earlier this week, which has been a very rich week for solar influences, in which I more clearly saw the intensely tragic situation we are left in by the death of those around us. The death of one’s entire nuclear family, leaving one alone as the sole survivor, is an awful gift. It’s a rich field for the growth of remorse; and one begins to appreciate how others are also in this position. 

If we reach an age old enough to appreciate such things, to truly taste them in the innermost depths of our souls, we begin to see how the molecular chemistry of being and the emanations of the sun combine within us to produce feelings connected to unknown places, where the metaphysical nature of the soul is revealed without words. This is a place of great suffering which we should earnestly wish for; we can’t attain the sobriety we need if we don’t get there. 

Experiences of this nature cause me to examine almost every action that I’ve ever taken and to see, over and over again, what a fool I’ve been and how little I’ve really understood. Even the least of my actions, undertaken in what I thought were good intentions but were actually naïveté and self-serving stupidity, are to be regretted. 

I have no respect. I have no understanding. I don’t care about others enough. These are simple facts and I don’t have a right to feel sorry for myself about it; but I do have a duty to deepen my understanding of these things in order to be able to stand up more straight in my life and not do this again, not do it anymore, and to use the spiritual — not functional — action of feeling in order to remind myself of my duty.

If I catch myself up in perpetual identification with self remembering and the incessant flow of experience it brings into me, I miss the mark. Life is not just a series of experiences to report. I can’t come back to the group every week talking about how this happened and that happened. 

No one really cares what happened. 

What might help is to talk about what my questions are; and to not talk about how great the magical flow of being and sensation and awareness is in the moments when I encounter it, but to bring the question of how I am here and now. 

I need to bring the water up from the depths of the well, to do the work, rather than just extemporize about how great and wonderful the water is.

In this sense, I’m meant to suffer — but to suffer intelligently, with an aim in mind, and to suffer willingly. This is, after all, the entire point of Purgatory — a soul in Purgatory suffers willingly, with a purpose, because they understand that their punishment is just and that there is an aim to being in Purgatory: that one may be able, with great effort, to expiate one’s sins and free oneself from Purgatory.

Do we really think we can do that through the simplicity of joy? 

Perhaps; but I defy anyone who has studied Gurdjieff to find this proposition in his writings or the records of his meetings. This is not to say that there is no simplicity of joy, or that we cannot or do not deserve it from time to time. It’s simply to point out that the center of gravity for these questions lies in the suffering; that’s the root of the tree, and it’s where Christ was hung on it. Of course the tree has branches and leaves that spread into heaven and receive its emanations; but the tree without its root is a dead thing. Christ was hung on a dead tree rather than a living one, in order to illustrate to us that it was his suffering that brought the tree its life. The dead tree of the cross was even put together with the intention — horrifying as it sounds — of creating the possibility of suffering, because the suffering and the death of Christ were not just God’s will; they were necessary in order to provide the material for the resurrection.

There is the possibility for a resurrection within us; and there is a possibility of the joy. The joy is immeasurably great; but it can’t come about without the intention, the dead tree that lives only through our effort and can only be elevated through our own willingness to die, and the suffering attendant upon all of this action. If we really look around ourselves within the action of organic sensation and organic feeling, we see where we are: and this is where we are.

In the midst of all this, there’s only one thing that matters, and it’s work. This is a work without inflection; it can’t be depressed, or angry, or punitive, or authoritarian. All of those are qualities imposed by the ego in one way or another. A work has to be objective; it has to learn how to take things in, most especially the sorrow, without touching them but simply allowing them to be as they are. The moment we touch anything as it acts in us, we manipulate; and the manipulator is always of the devil.

Gurdjieff alludes to this in the Paris 1944 meetings, where he frequently advises his pupils to send what manipulates “to the devil.”

Allow me to briefly note, for those who are interested in such things, that the right side of the enneagram is functional and the left side is spiritual. In this sense the right side represents the devil and the left side represents the angel; and because they are part of the same system, this is why we have both a devil and an angel in us.

PS,

For those who are interested, there will be a special post tomorrow outside the usual 3-day schedule.

Be well today.

Warmly,

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.