Evil is Personal

Capital from the Museum at Reims Cathedral

 [A continuation of the posts of notes on evil]

…every man, from the beginning of his human career, has a good spirit, an angel, and an evil spirit, a devil. The good angel advises and continually inclines him to that which is good, that is godly, that is virtue and heavenly and eternal. 

The evil spirit advises and inclines the man continually to that which is temporal and transient, to what is sinful, evil, and devilish. This same evil spirit forever woos the outer man, and through him ever secretly plots against the inner man, just as the serpent wooed Lady Eve and, through her, the man Adam (Gen. 3 : 1- 6.) The inner man is Adam.

—Meister Eckhart, The Complete Mystical Works, The Nobleman, p. 558-59

If sin is personal, and flows from inner impulses towards evil, as Swedenborg claimed—it seems difficult to argue that point, however else one wants to evaluate Swedenborg—then evil is personal. That is to say, evil is a personal choice. As Gurdjieff himself said in his aphorisms, If you already know it is bad and do it, you commit a sin difficult to redress.

If there is bad in Gurdjieff’s universe, there is good; and if there is good, evil must lurk in it too. (We can recall Orage’s remark that when he first saw Orage, he realized that hanging was too good for him.) Evil is personal: it’s an inner quality that emerges in us and belongs to us. Evil does not choose us; never mind the devil and angel on our shoulders—a device attributed to St. Jerome which Gurdjieff also adopted to his teachings. 

We choose evil. 

Anyone who doubts it can go read Hitler’s Willing Executioners for a primer on that question. The principle here is a simple enough one: granted agency as one of the law-conforming properties of creation, we are given choice; and our spiritual choices, which begin in the distilled and uninflected difference between selfishness and unselfishness, quickly run up against the consequences of that one choice, which become progressively disastrous the more force they acquire. The potentials of selfishness and unselfishness are, in practical terms delineated by death alone: on the one hand, Cain slays Abel; and on the other, in the classic John 15:13, Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends. Love will die for another: evil slays the other.

Our choices between good and evil, then, begin with our choice of unselfishness or selfishness; and what begins here in nearly benign innocence—of course I sometimes need to choose for myself, don’t I?—rarely ends there.

I remember a conversation with a friend who is a follower of Sadhguru, who asserted there was no such thing as evil. We disputed that; to me, it smacks of westernized interpretations of what are otherwise very complex eastern philosophies.  In these philosophies, everything is actually “good;” it’s just how we see it that colors it. (Such ideas are in my opinion not too different from Christian Science, as it happens, but when covered with a patina of eastern philosophies they’re apparently more acceptable to western modernist spiritual communities.) 

I asked this friend whether it would be evil if some depraved individual raped, tortured and murdered her son (who was with us at the table.)

She paused for a moment and then said, after reflection, and with a touch of sobriety less infected with spiritual overenthusiasm,

“That’s very different.”

Indeed.

My point is that it’s easy to sit in one’s armchair—or in a full lotus pose—hands folded in lap and pontificate over the idea that there is no evil. This impersonal, intellectual, and essentially selfish idea collapses in the face of real personal experience. We can’t meditate our way out of the real world: there is evil. It’s a fact that has to be dealt with; and an actual encounter with it pulls back the veil of negationist philosophies to reveal its deeply personal roots. It’s like the old saying: there are no atheists in foxholes. Survivors of evil know its face in ways that philosophers can’t. I’ve never met a person who truly suffered at the hands of true evil and then denied its existence; but I’ve met plenty of comfortable, middle class spiritual practitioners who do deny it.

One can sense evil in people; it has a physical presence as an emanation. It’s a material of coarse vibration that collects in people, and collects more of itself to itself. Evil, one estimates, has about the same capacity for recruitment of inner force as good does. It is only our will than can make a difference.

One of its salient features is that evil always poses as good. Those who adopt evil ideas or do evil always believe they’re doing good; hence Swedenborg’s definitions of devils, who do simply awful things because they think they’re the good thing. 

If we study the table of inversions from Metaphysical Humanism, we can perhaps see how decisively good and evil separate themselves from one another. Evil is almost exclusively selfish and uncaring, and good is almost exclusively unselfish and compassionate. 

The evil of this level—the 24 inverted laws—are, unto themselves and in their own eyes, a good. They only acquire perspective when juxtaposed against the corresponding table of angelic laws. 

  

May your heart be close to God, 

and God close to your heart.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.

Love in the Time of COVID-19, part II.

Love in the Time of COVID-19, part II.

Real feeling is not like my ordinary emotion. It's always a deep experience of the sensation of love, love for God, the sacredness of life, and my fellow human being. This experience is too often completely lacking within ordinary Being.

Interestingly, in times of extreme distress real feeling has the opportunity to emerge. When human beings are, as a society, threatened, sometimes the scales fall off people’s eyes and they see how valuable their lives and each other actually are. This is a rare thing; a consequence of disaster, which seems to be the only thing that can shock us out of our complacency and self-love. Disaster is never to be wished for; yet once one has it, an opportunity arrives to re-discover a “new” love—not actually new at all, but rather, a deep and ancient love that has been buried beneath our self interest and our obsessive investment in money and things at the expense of human beings and caring. This love is a real love inspired by higher energies, a transcendental force.

In the midst of the undeniable anxiety that affects even the most grounded of us, the fear that perhaps we will lose everything—which means, primarily, our money and our things—we wake up for a moment and realize that what we really need to preserve, what really matters the most, is our Being and our capacity for real Love.

The shock of disaster shows us that we’ve forgotten our Being: that we’ve forgotten how fragile our lives are and how much we need to truly support one another, instead of squabbling about imaginary things like monkeys in a zoo. If I forget myself, my Being and my capacity for love, in the midst of ordinary life I become possessed by imaginary dangers, and lose my ability to prepare for or meet real danger when it comes.

Now is the time I need to come back to my Being and rediscover my capacity for love. I was given this capacity to love God and to love others as a sacred charge. 

How do I meet this responsibility?

This begins in the smallest actions of my life. I need to pay more attention to what I'm doing and how I treat others. It’s in the smallest things—the least actions—that I can begin to re-discover this practice of Loving Being.

Simply put, the practice of Loving Being is the immediate, intelligent, and attentive recognition in this individual moment of the sacredness of life and the essential value of our humanity. Not to think about it.

To feel it.

We’re called by life itself to love God and love one another; not to love ourselves and things and money. Every time my attention turns away from the present moment and my investment in it, I forget my sacred duty to Be and to Love. The human organism has a powerful capacity for this kind of inner concentration; and it begins incrementally, in my attention to what’s right here, right now.

If I make an effort to understand this, every practice in life can be a heart practice.

May your heart be close to God, 

and God close to your heart.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.

Lascaux to France, Redux

Painting by Constant Troyon

Musée d’Orsay, Paris

January 30.

Dinner last night with old friends in Paris.

An apartment near the Louvre; courtyards, venerated staircases, improbably narrow doorways that one’s furniture many not quite fit though. The genuine warmth of greetings.

As is so often the case, conversation turns to inner work. Everyone thinks they know something: above all, folks proudly claim that they know we don’t know anything. My friend P. gently proffers an argument that this isn’t actually true: there are things we can know... but alas, dogma does not permit such observations. The cloud of unknowing is apparently immune to critique. It does make an excellent dodge; no matter the situation, one can always hide behind it and claim the high ground—without, mind you, doing any real work whatsoever.

Later in the evening, I’m advised I should “sometimes” (translation: this time) check my mentation at the door. I quietly advise that I try to work with all three parts. It isn’t listened to. In Gurdjieff murder mysteries, it’s always the intellect that did it... with an idea... in the head.

I decide to say little for the rest of the evening, reminding myself that those who make negative remarks about how others think typically reserve for themselves the unabridged right to think all they want, and talk about it all they want to. It is what they think about and talk about that grants them immunity; of course it’s always this way with we human beings. Myself included. What I think about is always superior to what others think about; what I talk about is always superior to what others talk about. I see this in myself all the time. 

This is how we all are. Even when we’re having fun.

Only the receiving of a true capacity for feeling can put this right; one decides to simply listen and receive. 

My friend P. and I, who are admittedly of somewhat like minds, establish a rough parity on matters intellectual and manage to have a well enough balanced exchange while the women (by their own choice, and our intentional and pointed exclusion from same) are in the kitchen. We have divided, more or less at their request, into traditional roles: the men in the sitting room, discussing philosophical questions, the women making food.

Maybe the whole point of it is to highlight the way we men discuss useless things while the women engage themselves in practical matters. I hadn’t thought of that before, but now that I have it occurs to me that this was probably how the caves at Lascaux got painted with bulls. The men went down into the darkness with pigment and ideas; the women rolled their eyes back in their heads,  chopped up mastodon and vegetables, and made stew.

No bull.

We were at the Musée d’Orsay yesterday and ran across more than a few pastoral landscapes populated with bulls. Nothing more than a common fixture of Northern European period genre painting, one might think; and therein lie the dangers of thinking.

Neal asked me what the paintings of cattle were all about.

“You don’t see it,” I replied. “These aren’t romanticism. They’re Mithraic.”

The cult of the bull has never truly left us. Our concierge at the hotel in Amiens cheerfully advised us, while we were being treated to the spectacle of the star cow Ideal from the upcoming agricultural trade show in Paris, that this particular show draws a bigger audience than all the others in France, including those for huge industries such as automobiles. It’s one thing when one thinks about this in American terms: sure, we have (I think) big cattle shows in Missouri; but not in Washington, DC, which is paradoxically filled with intellectually bovine beings on two legs, rather than four. It’s another thing with the French; they get it.

Cows matter.

The point here is that man’s connection to bulls and cattle is an ancient and powerful one. We never left it behind; the iPhone and the internet haven’t severed our connections to this visceral past, and they can’t. No matter what we do, our connection to agriculture and pastoralism, along with the animals that mediate it, remains stubbornly mythical. We may drive around in electric cars, but we secretly yearn for an ancient past filled with bulls and carts, myth and meaning. The movies and games of our popular culture rip the veil of technological sophistication off our faces: even as churches and religions are abandoned in large number, folk still want to believe in magic. In secret powers, inner and outer. It’s as though no matter what we do, the sense that hidden, higher truths underlie our superficialities can’t be exorcised. 

Of course this is what P. and I were discussing while excluded from the kitchen, where the ancient, secret inner superpowers of women’s cooking were being practiced. Bulls didn’t exactly come up, but we were surrounded by mythically abstract paintings (some of them outsized and magnificent) that gave the room a feeling not unlike Lascaux itself. The bulls were in the room with us. They may not be visible, but they provide the inner meat of our lives and drive us forward. Fecundity, ferocity, intelligence, presence: the bull has it all; and it implies a mastery we lack. Even when the noble bull is reduced to the centerpiece of a romantic landscape painting, its power can’t be denied. 

The ice age is still with us; we may think we’ve tamed our inner natures, made them food for our imaginations, but their docility is a lie... beneath the surface, we haven’t changed much in all these many millennia. 

The bull-gods are still here in us; and in some poorly understood way, some portion of humanity: our tattooed children, perhaps—is trying to reclaim that hidden nature. The beginnings of this may be as primitive as the roots: a geometric pattern here, a dash of strange garb there—but I believe the cult of the bull is on a path to comeback. 

Call me a romantic, if you will (I don’t deny it) but we can still be moved by this deeply human past, if we but embrace it.

May your heart be close to God, 

and God close to your heart.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.

Gathering Life Unto Itself, Part II

March 14, continued

On the question of gathering life unto itself.

This understanding – it is not an idea – of gathering life unto itself isn't quite correctly stated. One comes to an understanding of gathering the life within unto itself. This action is the action that everything else in life depends on. This gathering or concentration of force is created by the gravity of consciousness, as expanded on in The Quantum State of Being. 

Gathering of inward force into Being takes place whether I'm aware of it or not; yet if it begins to engage in activity under the authority of its own powerful awareness, rather than my own weak one, something new begins to happen.

Life has a natural tendency to gather itself unto itself. This is how the universe is arranged. Sometimes it happens automatically and naturally, as in a flock of Canada geese. Other times it happens consciously and naturally, as is possible in a human being. The more consciously and naturally the force of life gathers itself back into itself within me, the closer I come to my ordinary and natural humanity, which is usually masked by my ego and my desire. So the gathering of life into itself is also an unmasking of a kind. The scales fall from my eyes, so to speak.

And here I am. I live. I breathe, I write this. No matter what action takes place, I am already engaged in the action of living. This is where everything begins; and what happens after that isn't so important. It is merely a consequence; the central aim is always this life and this humanity, always and everywhere.

Let's face it, I'm no expert on how to be human. To be truly human is a huge thing; it encompasses a cosmological responsibility that eclipses anything I think about my day-to-day life. I keep getting this wrong, because I think of my humanity in a fractured way which depends on fragments of myself for understanding, rather than allowing to understand through the inflow of life. 

Yet by returning to the reliable grounding force of awareness within sensation, I always have the possibility of being at least a little more human. As I rely on this sense of inner gravity, focusing the attention on it as outward life proceeds, the possibility of a more apt alignment is forever present.

Outward life does not have to be the arbiter of everything that happens. From the beginning, the living presence of my inward being ought to have the greater influence. To live without this understanding degrades ones dignity. Dignity, that is, the honor and respect for life and other beings, begins with honor and respect first for God and then for my own Being—not my ego, but my being, the fundament of my existence. It's this fundament of existence that is fed by the gathering of life unto itself.

The sound of the geese in the morning is the sound they make collectively to gather together and to become aware of their gathering. There is no arbitrary, idle, or accidental quality to it; nature has provided quite exactly so that this vibration of relationship arises, and is shared. It is a call to a certain quality of Being. By becoming aware of this, by analogy, I understand that similar calls to Being and relationship are issued within my own nature.

I am able to listen. 

To listen closely, and intimately. If I hear a call to sorrow and a taste of grief in addition to the vibration of joy and togetherness, I can be sure that I am just a little bit closer to the truth of life as it is, instead of life as I expect it to be.

May your heart be close to God, 

and God close to your heart.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.

Gathering Life Unto Itself, Part I

It's March 14—Saturday morning. 

I'm in my study, as is so often the case on a Saturday. The Canada geese are outside on the creek, calling not just to the present moment, but to time itself. Like all living creatures, they gather life unto themselves and carry it with them in their flock.

Waking up this morning, I also gather life unto myself. It is a subtle vibration that flows into being within me. The presence of God, which is objective, does not belong to me, and already sustains me in this moment. I sense it as a personal presence; a silence that puts its demand upon this moment from within and from underneath – a support from the molecules of life themselves.

As I attend to this, the undertone of sorrow that sustains the universe makes itself known – not as the overwhelming force of remorse of conscience that is sometimes available to help, but as a tiny presence that is not just a sorrow, but also a friend. 

This reminds me of something I was taught yesterday through life itself, in a simple and ordinary exchange. I called my nephew Tom to wish him a happy birthday. His mother – my sister Sarah, who died in 2011— is no longer here to do that for him; and although I held it together during the phone call, the sense of grief that overcame me during the conversation caused me to break down in tears for a moment after I hung up the phone.

I understood from this moment that it’s my responsibility to carry my own grief; life includes both the capacity and the need for grieving. I'm reminded, by association, of the chorus in The Trojan women where the women dress the corpse of Astyanax for burial:

Beat, beat thine head:

Beat with the wailing chime

Of hands lifted in time:

Beat and bleed for the dead.

Woe is me for the dead!

In summary, Hecuba remarks,

Go, women, lay our dead

In his low sepulcher. He hath his meed

Of robing. And, methinks, but little care

Toucheth the tomb, of they that moulder there

Have rich encerëment. ’Tis we, ’tis we,

That dream, we living and our vanity!

(Taken from the Gilbert Murray translation.)

The image of hands lifted in time evokes an offering up of life. The gesture is as ancient for man as the call of the geese on the creek; the references to dreams and vanity remind us that we are both asleep and selfish. It is not death that brings sleep and illusion, but life – how deftly Euripedes brings this insight! 

At the same time, in confronting time and death, which are the two real subjects of this part of the play, we offer up: we witness. It is the action of Being itself that provides this witness. The catastrophe of the fall of Troy provides a moment of seeing what life really is; and herein lies the value. In the same way, the recent arrival of CoVID-19 as a force on the planet provides an equal stimulus to seeing where we actually are, as opposed to where our imaginations place us. We are here to fulfill our responsibility as living creatures by witnessing and Being, not through the imaginary "achievements" which mark our lives. It is the action of living and the taking in of the impressions of life as a sacred task that actually matter; and we honor both life and God if we undertake this task without the pretensions and arrogance that characterize most of our day-to-day activity. It is, in the end, our character that matters.

Perhaps a wide ranging excursion, given that I begin here sitting in my chair, immersed in the inward flow of Being and that whisper of a finer, more precisely attuned feeling which accompanies any legitimate investment in sensation. 

But there one is; perhaps it illustrates the potential scope of intellect when it is grounded in this first grain of Being, rather than the air.

Today I hope to offer myself to life with all the joy and optimism of living itself, as well as the intensity of grief and mourning. Not dramatized, but lived quite directly and with as much honesty as can be brought to the present moment.

May your heart be close to God, 

and God close to your heart.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.

A continuity of feeling

January 28, Amiens

In the action of self-remembering, there’s a question of how we experience continuity, that is, the continuous action of Gurdjieff’s “I am.”

The prayer “I am... I wish to be” is the Old Testament prayer Moses encountered: “I am that I am,” the Lord said to him. 

This continuity of “I am” begins in sensation. As Gurdjieff said in Wartime Meetings, organic sensation is what creates our individuality. 

Yet this isn’t enough.

It’s a continuity of feeling that we ultimately lack; and that continuity of feeling, that feeling-awareness, can’t develop until after sensation unifies the physical sense of being-continuity. Much material has to be deposited and concentrated for that to take place; as we are we may take it in, but too often we subsequently dissipate it. The sensation of Being certainly helps with the ongoing action of concentration; yet unless we’re willing to intentionally suffer our feelings as they arise, it’s insufficient. 

To suffer one’s feelings is, to put it in Jeanne de Salzmann’s words, a demand; an imperative that’s perhaps more than we’re ready for.

Hence the prayer of the New Testament, Lord have Mercy. In this sense the Old Testament is the primer on the active physical body of Being (organic sensation) and the New Testament the primer of the active feeling body of Being: of Love, of which true feeling is exclusively composed. 

Simply put, the myopia of day-to-day being, the fragmentary existence of self-awareness, is in the end a discontinuity of feeling... of love. If the organic sensation of Being creates our individuality, it’s the organic feeling of Being—emotional awareness—that fulfills it. Without organic continuity of feeling, we don’t sense life enough... no matter how much we may sense it in the first place. All the sensation on the planet can’t play the role of feeling.

The body of voluntary feeling arises in the same was as voluntary sensation. Feeling becomes an active, willing participant in Being, as its own force—not a force under the “control” of the ego, which never “controls” even ordinary emotion in any truly meaningful way. Impulse too often overrules rationality in our ordinary ways. 

Yet true, voluntary feeling never overrules—it’s not in its nature. Voluntary feeling is not a creature of the ego; it exercises mastery over that portion of ordinary being by virtue of its integrity alone, which is much more powerful. An inner alignment takes place in which ego knows its place as a servant.

The continuity of feeling leads us into a landscape of feeling that connects the various moments of our life through a constant feeling-sensation of Being. We no longer come and go; feeling connects each moment to the next in partnership with sensation. 

That feeling is suffering. The center of gravity of pleasure is in the body; the center of gravity of anguish is in the feeling. When present, the two balance one another. 

Together, organic sensation and voluntary feeling lay a foundation for an inwardly formed, intelligent sense of self. This intelligence is formed not by outside influences but by inner awareness of Being. The center of gravity in life becomes internal. 


May we discover our Being, grounded in God.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.

COVID-19 and inner work

How should I understand the coronavirus in light of my inner work?

Think of the 23rd Psalm and the way it begins.

Despite what it looks like, we're surrounded by a nearly infinite amount of hope and love. Not only that, within each of us we carry a fragment of a highest and most sacred nature. God's love dwells in our hearts in every moment that we live and breathe. Never forget this: know it with the mind, sense it with the body, feel it with the feelings.

Viruses are creatures of the planet. They expose our nationalism and our financial markets for what they are: fantasies of our imagination. They’re powerful fantasies, to be sure: but in the end, we are creatures of this planet and human beings, not creatures of politics and money. Viruses remind us of this, in such a way that they erase our fantasies and illusions.

Because this is terrifying—we love our illusions— we tend to panic.

The first and most important thing for me to do in the face of this onslaught is to ground myself in my sensation—to understand my humanity instead of paying it the usual intellectual lip service.

This can be a real opportunity to experience myself as I am—physical, emotional, vulnerable.

And able to be compassionate.

Here I am, in the middle of life. This is the truth of where I am and what I am. I can use this as a reminder to work in every moment.

Working means to inhabit my life, to be here.

It's my duty to acquit myself in my life with honor, dignity, intelligence, and integrity, in so far as I am able. If I run about like a ninny and act terrified, what am I serving? My mother’s old folk saying goes: when in trouble, fear, or doubt, run in circles, scream and shout.

I last saw my mother on Saturday, at the veterans home where she is now a resident. We looked each other right in the eye as I left, and said I love you to one another. It was a poignant moment; one of those moments when two people acknowledge that we never know if we will in fact see one another again.

On Tuesday, they closed the home down as a precautionary measure and I can no longer visit her. This is a reminder that we always live in the shadow of death, and ought to exercise and appropriate an intelligent sobriety—not to be somber, but to be intelligently joyful in the light of the darkness that surrounds us at all times. Without that darkness, we would not recognize the light; and without the light, we cannot be.

I need to see myself and understand what my action is, not be taken away from life by my reaction. If I get the disease and die of it – well, everyone dies. Gurdjieff said that one of our most important aims should be to not die like a dog: and if I begin by reacting to this situation by acting like an animal, I will die like a dog. No matter when I die. I begin dying like a dog the moment I forget my inner work and my relationship to God and to life and to humanity.

Above all, my work centers around an interest in what it means to be a human being — to think, to sense, and to feel in this moment, in my own Being. Any moment in ordinary life can be extraordinary and offer an opportunity to sense and to participate in the sacred nature of existence. It's always here with me. The question is whether I'm here to be with it.

One ought to be steadfastly grounded in one’s inner work. This needs to be anchored to sensation in such a way that the incoming impressions don't constantly knock me off my feet in one way or another.

Begin there, and little else will fail to point the inner compass back towards God.

May your heart be close to God, 

and God close to your heart.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.