God's Ray of Creation

 

It’s said, in the apophatic tradition, that nothing can be known of the nature of God, and that whatever can be known is only known through not-knowing; that is, we draw closer to an understanding of the nature of God through an iteration of everything God is NOT. What God is NOT is, furthermore, anything we can think of; therefore, it is only by unknowing that we can know God.

Of course the equally important and historic cataphatic tradition directly opposes this idea; yet the tradition inside the Gurdjieff work has, for many decades—perhaps all of them—been dedicated to a somewhat one-sided propagation of apophatic practice.

Gurdjieff’s third obligolnian striving implies, if indirectly, that we can at least know something of God, if only by knowing His laws. Yet the knowing of those laws may by inference bring us closer to knowing more of God’s own nature. So there is a potential cataphatic (God-knowing) path open to us here.

In order to understand the place of the created universe in the Being of God, we need to see it as the first note in God’s Being: that is, the note re of the enneagram. This places the universe at the bottom of the Ray of Creation of God’s Being: all other aspects of God are ascendant.

In the traditional chakra system, this is the root chakra, the baseline of the material. Those familiar with my work in The Universal Enneagram will know that this is the first force of existence, in the following progression:

Re = Materiality (the entire universe)

Mi = Desire

Fa = Power

Sol = Being

La = Purification

Si = Wisdom

Do = Absolute

Because in many traditions, including Swedenborg and Gurdjieff’s esoteric cosmologies, the universe is a reflection of God’s Being, we can easily extrapolate and apply an enneagrammatic (ninefold) nature to God based on Gurdjieff’s cosmology. In Gurdjieff’s world, if the universe is structured according to the laws of three and seven—also known as the law of octaves—then God’s own Being must in like measure embody those exact same laws. 

This leads us to the insight that, despite our apophatic tendencies, we can know God’s Being through the laws of our own universe—once again, per the third obligolnian striving.

This means that God has first of all a material nature—the universe, the body of God— which also represents the moon. This universe (along with all other like universes) is the bottom of the ray of creation of God’s own Being. In this sense the multiverse (the uncountable number of universes) composes the cells of God’s body. Each universe is a single cell.

There are several striking conclusions to be drawn from this. First of all, it means that God’s physical body is the note Re, the material force of the multiverses; this is, as Gurdjieff specifically implied in Beelzebub’s Tales, the place where God resides. 

He resides here, however, not as a separate entity occupying a space different than Himself; the multiverse is the body in which God arises and dwells. This aspect of the material nature of God sheds additional and perhaps important light on Gurdjieff’s comment that “everything is material.” Yet as with mankind, the consciousness that arises is far greater than the materiality it resides in.

Second of all, because of the reflective nature of the cosmos, we can understand that the material universe itself resulted from the “collision of a comet” with the “earth,” which otherwise would have represented the end of the ray of creation. In the enneagram that original end would have represented “desire” or “wish,” and bear some thinking about. 

Was it God’s encounter with the force of time (as described in Beelzebub) that caused the collision that split the material universe off from the rest of His Being? 

Thirdly, because the moon is strongly—and most importantly—associated with the action of organic sensation, it means that the universe/multiverse (God’s Body) is His sensory tool for perception. This adequately and accurately explains Ibn Arabi’s comment that “Man is to God as the pupil is to the eye,” made at the very beginning of The Bezels of Wisdom. The role of all conscious beings throughout the multiverse is to take in the microcosmic perceptions which God’s body requires for its maintenance and function. The reason for this lies in the initial position of the material on the octave.

 This explains much. Yet it leaves us with magnificent questions; because it means that God has transcendent and metaphysical aspects of His Being which embody desire, Power, Being, Purification, and Wisdom: all of which are simply precursors to an Absolute that transcends each of them.  

Each of these aspects makes an individual contribution in kind to what is called Glory; Glory represents the entirety of the enneagrammatic nature of God. 

Understanding this underscores, for those who understand what the nature of organic sensation is, the need to inhabit it as fully and constantly as possible; for it is through a “permanent” or unflagging relationship with this force that the primary Being-duty of our existence is discharged. “Presence” is perception; to receive is to live according to God’s law, at the beginning of this great octave. 

On behalf of our search for inward relationship,

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola magazine.