Crime and Punishment

 

We are surrounded by an immensely complex and extraordinarily vast cosmos. 

The effort of creation that it took to bring this into its initial being was unimaginable; and its results are equally unimaginable.

In the midst of this staggering evidence of intelligence so high that our understanding fails, we fill our own world — the human world — with an endless series of opinions about God, about sin and crime and punishment and the necessity of this and that. Many claim to know what God thinks; and they have no compunction about forcing others to think that way with them.

Yet the whole cosmos was created as exactly that — a whole cosmos — and everything in it, every arising manifestation, every object, event, circumstance, and condition, was foreseen in the act of creation and is exactly as it is because it is necessary. Even the idiots who claim to know everything are necessary, as is the essential act of not knowing anything — of the two positions, the only realistic one.

So our notions of good and evil, crime and punishment, sin and salvation, are ultimately failures. God is too good and generous to create a world of punishment and hatred. That world is our world. Ultimately, as Gurdjieff says in Beelzebub’s Tales, every cosmic arising, every being, and every aspect of reality, is ultimately destined to return to the great goodness of God’s Being and to blend with it. Man is too small, in the greater sense of things, to commit any sins too great to be forgiven. This would be true in any case, because God’s love and forgiveness is infinite. Whatever hatred there is, whatever crime ensues from it, whatever punishment is meted out: that is of us, not of God. Love would have forgiveness prevail over all; love would demand that mercy be the only way.

It's in the small things of life that we need to learn this practice. 

Last week a woman posted a complaint on a local message board about cleaning woman who had broken an expensive marble sink she had just installed. She was furious and asked for advice on how she should approach the matter with her cleaning woman.

People had all kinds of ideas about how calculations should be made, moralities weighed and evaluated, payment negotiated and demanded. This between a woman who can install expensive marble sinks and someone who was raised in relative poverty and is struggling just to make ends meet.

I left a brief comment on the thread: 

Always be kind and merciful to those who have less.

Life could be that simple; yet we live in a world where the more people have, the less kind and merciful they feel. Our society is arranged that way. It’s clear enough that there is something desperately wrong with the feeling-parts of our society; we’re the ones that are broken, not God.

The question is whether we can admit that to ourselves. 

When Gurdjieff created his vision of a broken universe, the cracks in it were forming in us, not God. We're the ones who are responsible; and we're the ones who need to see that.

We can presume, from the fact that it is so, that the universe is broken for a reason. Perhaps it’s a call to us to see ourselves and to act, with voluntary intention, on behalf of the others around us to help bring goodness to where we are. It’s this act of bringing goodness to where we are in a given moment that is important; because if goodness is brought to the present moment, it will always be here and it will grow. It's the attempt to bring goodness to other moments and other places that so often fails; our vision does not reach that far. 

This isn’t to say that we shouldn’t think that way; but it's how we should act right now that matters the most.

with warm regards,

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola magazine.