Khemia

 

January 18.

Beginning life all over again this morning. 

Of course it contains all of the elements that are already here, the memories of the past, the objects, the conditions. But it is new and immediate and there is nothing here but this life and the breath that begins it with each intake. 

I felt tired and drained all day yesterday and it reminded me of how dependent I am on the chemistry of life and what it brings.

 We think we are the masters of the world we are in, yet tiny things like viruses and bacteria can bring us to our knees in helplessness. Occasionally, we find ourselves on our knees in helplessness through the act of prayer; and perhaps this is just an acknowledgment of the truth, writ larger. In our imagination, only things greater than ourselves can master us; yet anything can master us, because we are weak creatures. Only our psyche, which is of itself a very thin tissue indeed, leads us to imagine otherwise. We draw that tissue over everything around us and believe it signifies; but death will have us all in the end. 

In monastic practices, as well as the Gurdjieff work, it was commonplace to contemplate these things: "A monk is a mourning soul that both asleep in a week is unceasingly occupied with the remembrance of death." (From “The Ladder of Divine Ascent" by Saint John Climacus.) It might be said that life is actually for the remembrance of death, for this is the salt that makes the Love that is given all the more worth eating.

I remember looking at a stone statue of the Buddha in the backyard yesterday and realizing that these inanimate objects symbolizing concepts and effort outlast those who make them in almost every instance; wondering whether to resent that in some abstract way, but also appreciating the fact that these objects are inanimate —they have a life much longer than our own, but it’s a life frozen in hell, where awareness is too thick and heavy to participate except in the most microscopic ways.

Everything takes place in the chemistry of our life: that chemistry is the chemistry of transformation, from the Greek khēmia, the art of transmuting metals. To taste the sweetness, the goodness, of the ordinary is a very big thing; one remembers Gurdjieff's remark after they crossed the Caucus mountains in Thomas de Hartmann’s memoirs, a trip filled with great deprivations and near-starvation, where a tiny bit of bread was perceived as manna from heaven. "The whole trip was worth it, if only because we tasted bread," Gurdjieff remarked, or words to that effect. 

And it is indeed true: our sensation of life is blunted and incorrect, and only, it seems, through deprivation can we come to a moment of need and wish that is so great that we actually experience the molecular encounter with life which our body is so perfectly and exquisitely attuned to sense.

Yet in this act of khēmia, the transmutation of our being, we can come into touch with forces that awaken and enliven us in ways that we otherwise never understand. Again, as Gurdjieff said of true awareness, "everything more vivid;" yet this is a subtle thing and much greater than some colorful hallucination. It takes place in the vibration of our molecules themselves. Our cells become different creatures. We begin to know that they, as well, are aware and participate; that they have as vital a role to play in the cosmos as the angels do. We need to know both the molecules in us and the angels over us; because they are not so different except in terms of scale.

It's interesting to me that I have so many people who reject God around me. They think that this is some form of sophistication or superiority, that it represents a greater "fact" than any fact that includes God or bows down to God. 

In doing so, they never seem to see that their ego is the source of this attitude, that it is strictly a function of pride. One always hears the self-pride first in the rejection as it comes. If they do see that, surely, they never mention it for the infection it actually represents. 

For the deeper thinkers around me who feel this way—among whom I count some of my closest intellectual and spiritual friends—I’m always told that they find the word "God" offensive, because it has been so thoroughly corrupted by those contemptuous “religious people;” fundamentalists, presumably. 

I hear this with quiet amusement, noting the way that it judges, while presuming the judge himself is not already just as corrupt. Almost all of the people I know who speak this way tend to be men, although there are some few women. (The few woman of this ilk usually deliver a softer sell on this question.) In this way, the holiest of words and the most sacred of ways is ironically corrupted by those who would not be corrupt, just as much as it’s corrupted by the ones who eagerly embrace corruption.

 The word corruptus in Latin derives from the roots cor, “altogether,” and rumpere, “to break.” So to be corrupt is to be all together broken: for everything to be broken. It is the Humpty Dumpty of Being. We are all the king’s horses and all the king’s men: the whole of our emotional being and the whole of our intellectual being, unable to reassemble the molecular foundation of the sacred within us. We pontificate over it and mourn the loss of our being; and yet the very last action we ever take, which might — in the naked light of its contrition and remorse —lead us to a real understanding, is to admit that we are helpless. 

That we need to fall to our knees and contemplate our mortality, how very tiny we really are.

Our ego always tells us this is a place of unacceptable madness, because it has no power here. 

And yet that is exactly what is necessary and true.

These are the things I think upon this morning. 

May God be with you.

with warm regards,

Lee