Feeling, Time, and Mind, Part 3 of 3

Care is a mycelium that spreads its threads throughout life in every direction, invisible, yet the sustaining force of the mind – body itself. Because care is metaphysical — impossible to describe or explain strictly through the materials in which it arises, whether molecular or organic — it remains intangible and invisible as a thing unto itself, remaining visible only through its action. And indeed, major religions including the Gurdjieff work center the interest in man’s Being in one way or another in the action of care. Gurdjieff’s remorse of conscience is a reflection of the long action of feeling and care throughout the course of a life. Christianity and Buddhism’s compassionate practice are the immediate action of feeling and care in the presence of another human being and in the relationship that particular moment calls for. It is the way in which we care that defines us; and this reminds one of Swedenborg’s contention that a man’s being is defined by what he loves.

Examining this question a bit further, it occurs to me that intellectual thinking is more on the order of discrimination, whereas feeling and emotion are more on the order of sensation. Feeling itself is a heightened form of sensation; a perceptive tool to receive and engage with the immediate environment. Thinking, in the intellectual sense, is a tool to weigh the relative value of the components of those sensations; and indeed, when we engage in sensation exercises in the Gurdjieff work, we attempt to develop a different value of our sensory capacity within ourselves. With enough work on this question, it may eventually become evident that our sensory capacity in terms of body-sensation and feeling-sensation is actually enormous, far exceeding the expectations that ordinary experience in these areas usually imparts. This in itself changes the discriminatory understanding of the intellectual mind; a rearrangement takes place.

Because the perception of feeling and body sensation live so close to the immediate moment, and because the immediate moment passes so relentlessly before us and is gone, this causes a time-generated phenomenon in which our perceptions become fragmentary and are easily lost to one another. The sequential nature of emotional and feeling experience is such that we have an emotion of one kind, then it’s gone. Then the next one comes; and so on. This quite naturally and almost by accident needs to the creation of what Gurdjieff called many different “I’s”, that is, individual accretions of personality that collect around habitual and consistent feeling-reactions. It’s the nature of the relationship between time and feeling that creates this in the first place. 

The task of the intellectual mind is to more comprehensively organize the discriminatory perception of this perpetual serious of events; and it’s the task of the body-mind, the mind of immediate sensation, to lay the foundation for a fabric that binds these experiences together into a single perception of Being, rather than the fragmentary one which so easily arises as a result of the rapid sequential experiences of emotion.

We may be creatures of time; yet we’re created with three separate tools, intellect, body, and feeling, which have the capacity to bind time together in a new way. Put in simplistic terms, time without mind is stupid.

Care serves as the fulcrum for this binding, and it brings us to the question of wish. If I wish for something, I care for it. If I have an aim, I care for the aim. Because care is so firmly bound to the present moment in its initial impulse, the closer my wish and my aim are to being real, the more my wish and my aim find their center of gravity in the present moment. It’s only after this that they draw nourishment from past experience and extend their tendrils into anticipated futures; and that is a task to be guided by the discrimination of the intellectual mind.

Gurdjieff said many times that men are machines; yet what he did not mention — which seems evident as a result of this discussion — is that we’re time machines. Although we can’t physically travel into various different times, the mind exists in them eternally: the mind of feeling has the capacity to care about the past and the future at any moment, and the mind of intellect has the capacity to guide this. 

So now we finally come to a snapshot of the function of feeling and intellect in the context of time. While we live forever in the present moment — because perception and physical presence can never really put us anywhere else — the entire intellectual and feeling capacities of the human mind place us throughout time, as though we lived in an extended or eternal moment that can include all moments of the past and future. 

This may give us some clues and interesting new perspectives on Gurdjieff’s comment that man should use the present to repair the past and prepare for the future.

On behalf of our search for inward relationship,

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola magazine.