Love and Freedom, Part I

The word free is originally from a Sanskrit root, pri, meaning love.

I hear folks talk about freedom all the time; we look at ourselves and our inner work and we proclaim it’s about becoming "free," without truly understanding what that word means or even thinking about it. 

Free = good, right? End of story. Wave the flag.

Who thinks of freedom as being loving? Not many; generally speaking, it’s seen as a liberation from laws, rules, and so on, not as an obligation towards God and others. 

Yet love is an obligation towards relationship; so at its root “freedom” doesn't mean liberation from laws and rules. It implies, rather, a greater understanding of and obedience to them.

It’s quite likely, in my opinion, that the French word for true, vrai, also derives from the self same root. In this etymological interpretation, freedom consists of love and truth. A search for freedom is a search for love and truth, not exemption from obligations and rules. Not, mind you, an escape from ego, either. Perhaps this is why Gurdjieff said we need to acquire conscious egoism. If we look at his aphorisms about faith, hope, and love, we see that in his estimation, love and consciousness are equivalents.

 Love is conscious; and consciousness is loving. This is inherent in the nature of consciousness and love. They are not separable qualities. 

Lest we lose sight of this metaphysical and cosmological law, let’s remember the central role that these two qualities played in two of the preeminent metaphysical authorities of the western world. Meister Eckhart sermons are peppered with conflation of the two; and Emmanuel Swedenborg’s magnum opus is entitled Divine Love and Wisdom.

A recent conversation where the word Love came up prompted me to describe my experience of sensation and feeling thus:

Whenever real feeling arrives in me, it is always a manifestation of love. 

Love is dimensionally complex; it has its own octave of development. We already know what the two highest notes preceding do in this octave are: remorse of conscience and sorrow. It’s straightforward enough: sorrow is the note si; sensing and receiving what Gurdjieff calls the sorrow of His Endlessness in order to relieve a portion of His burden is the highest calling a conscious being can aspire to; so it has to represent the final note in that often before the return to the divine. Since remorse or conscience is the action that leads to that, we know that it occupies the note la. This is entirely consistent, by the way, with my contention that these two notes represent purification (la) and wisdom (si.)

Remorse or conscience, when experienced, is one of the deepest forms of love, as is sorrow. In its own octave, Love reaches its highest evolution in human beings in these two forms, which perhaps have very little to do with what we believe our day-to-day experience teaches us about the emotion of love. Yet to experience real remorse and real sorrow in the form of higher feeling is the most intense experience of love one can have. This isn’t the love of our emotions; it’s the love of our feelings, which have a much higher intelligence, located as they are on the left hand or ascending side of the diagram.

Working backwards—sometimes, it's easier to see things that way—we can infer that the note sol represents love of others, in relationship. This kind of love is often spoken of in the Gurdjieff work, especially after work weekends or work weeks, because the point of work together is that we develop a collective energy that makes it possible to actively sense this. Because it doesn’t need a shock to evolve into remorse from this point (the shock actually comes between remorse and sorrow) one naturally develops an evolutionary understanding of remorse from this love-through-relationship. It is the love for others that begins this process; and this is why Emmanuel Swedenborg said that Godly behavior begins with love for one's fellow man, and then for God. This kind of feeling-love only emerges after one crosses over from the right to the left hand side of the enneagram.

The three types of love on the right hand side of the diagram are easier to describe by moving upwards through the scale. The note re represents the material world. Love at this level consists of cravings. They are, largely, body-cravings. This is where selfish physical love manifests; and most of our fear reflexes are grounded in this particular kind of love, in one way or another. It is the love of having for oneself.

This particular note is not always just a crude response to environmental demands such as food, water, and so on. It can be intensely transformed through the receiving of solar emanations and the concentration of divine substances in such a way that the ingestion of food becomes a sacred action. The central role that food plays in Christ's teaching is a function of this action; and it can naturally lead to much higher understandings if ones work begins there. Hence Gurdjieff's emphasis with his pupils to paying attention as they eat, and his equally powerful emphasis on the action of meals taken together, which evokes the notes re and sol at the same time – a powerful invocation of the primary notes in both triads , re mi fa and sol la si.

The second note on the right hand side of the diagram, mi, represents lust. It's an escalated order of craving, in which one does not just wish to have, but also to acquire and own. It is the love of desires. Love of desires is not aimed at the immediate, but expands to encompass the future.

The third note fa represents the love of power. This is the love not just of wish, but control.

Astute readers will notice that the seven deadly sins center around the loves on this side of the diagram.

Go. and sense, and be well.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.

Am I?

May 13.

There's a cardinal outside.

Cardinals have a loud, insistent call that includes a kind of OCD feature, hitting the same note over and over, followed by a descending note. Either that, or a group of descending notes. The descending note always starts out sounding upbeat, optimistic, and positive, then takes a nosedive. It's as though it gets infected by some kind of melancholy the moment it starts.

Human beings equally have a habit of doing the same thing over and over again, starting out optimistic and then discovering it's difficult to sustain the emotional tone that things begin with. I need to keep an eye on this, because doing the same thing over and over again doesn't always serve my life; every once in a while, I need to do something new, even if I don't want to. Perhaps, especially if I don't want to. As a friend of ours in Paris told us in January, we need to get out of our habits and challenge ourselves with something different. The virus has certainly done that for all of us; comfort zones are no longer safe places.

Unfortunately, this has brought out the paranoia in people; and it turns out human beings are extraordinarily paranoid. The number of utterly absurd conspiracy theories on the radar screen right now is staggering. The situation raises the question of whether or not human beings are actually, in fact, "intelligent": apparently it is quite possible we are by a very wide measure the very stupidest creatures on the planet, if not the entire universe. Yet it goes on expanding; and every time you think that the note has descended as far as it can go, a new, lower note sounds.

Viruses are ordinary things, a commonplace part of our physiological and immunological landscape; they exist everywhere, in every creature, and play important roles in the biosphere in every known ecosystem. Yet the destructive imagination of human beings has turned them into special things that belong to assorted countries and political groups and are, in various versions of the conspiracy theories circulating, in one insidious way or another under the direct or indirect control of human beings.

This is where the matter gets interesting, because in the end, it's all about mankind and our collective hubris. We are, it seems, pathologically unable to admit that we're not in control of everything. No matter what happens, it's always the fault of some other ethnic or political group.

We find out we're not in control; and we become enraged. It turns out that conspiracy theories are nothing more than emotional immaturity, naked on parade.

Blame always carries a subtle subtext that the humans are in control. Of course this is absolutely delusional; humans are definitely not in control anything, most especially themselves. As Tolstoy so tellingly noted in War and Peace, human beings, especially the "important" ones, always cast themselves in the rules of decision makers, leaders, and controllers, unable to see that every single one of us is being carried forward by tides so vast it is impossible that any of us could actually have the least control of them.

We're in complex and serial denial about our relationship with nature. That's what it comes down to. We can't accept the fact that nature is larger than us and does, in the big picture, whatever it wants to with us.

We're born and we die. We don't have control over that.

Omygah. Let's blame someone for it.

If I'm not in control —and I think that current events have illustrated quite conclusively that I'm not –then what is my role? What is possible for me?

It turns out I have the potential to be responsible for myself. That begins with my inward action. I'd like to try and get through the day being responsible, showing an intelligent and compassionate attitude towards others. It's certain that I'm going to lose touch with that thread of intention during the day; but I need to keep coming back to it.

The question is, how to remain in contact with my inward intention. I need to study it carefully, know where it begins and what it consists of. If there's any intelligence at all in me as a human being, it starts here.

In order to study this more carefully, throughout the day, it's helpful to become still inside for a moment. To stop and to sense myself. If I make this the only clear aim I have for the day, already, it's a huge thing.

To only have one aim: to be still for a moment and to sense. Nothing else. Not THINK about being still and sensing. Just be still and sense, without thinking.

Pause in the midst.

Let thought become stillness and sensation.

One of the interesting exercises that Gurdjieff gave his students was to intentionally intone the words “I am” within themselves during the course of the day. There are a wide variety of versions of this exercise.

However, in my many years studying Gurdjieff's ideas, I've never heard anyone rearrange this exercise in a practical way that can turn it into a question, rather than an affirmation. This is surprising, considering that the entire form of the Gurdjieff work is to ask questions, sometimes as habitually as the cardinal sings its note. The irony is self evident; and perhaps lost on those who engage in it.

Using Gurdjieff's idea as a question requires that we reverse the syllables and do something new for a change. Instead of going through the day saying, “I am,” one might instead ask oneself, in a new way:

Am I?

I don't know if I am—and perhaps this defines my lifelong resistance to the exercise. “Am I?” seems to be a more useful formulation to me.

Instead of insisting on something I don't fully understand, it invites me to participate in an exploration of it.

Go. and sense, and be well.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.

The Antiomygah

Yesterday morning, a pair of orioles passed through the yard. It's always exciting to see them; especially in pairs, because this indicates a breeding couple in the neighborhood. The bright orange of these birds seems very nearly tropical; and indeed, they winter over in the Yucatán peninsula in Mexico, where we frequently see them in January or February. To us, it's a week of midwinter vacation; to these nomadic birds, it's half their life.

We also have a pair of wrens nesting on our hillside. These perky little birds are tiny; and like chipmunks, who are also small creatures, they seem to have an indefatigable optimism about their affairs. In the chipmunks, it's definitely misplaced; our cat Marlowe has a thing about chipmunks, and it's not a good thing. At this time of year, when the chipmunk population is peaking, their corpses turn up almost daily basis at the doorstep. I think the cat is hoping we’ll put them up in the freezer for later. When outside, I frequently warn the chipmunks they don't want to live around us; to no avail. I'm accustomed to playing the role of Cassandra in this way. Not just with chipmunks. I've had a lifelong gift for seeing the inevitable and predicting it, only to watch people shrug it off and go their merry way as though the catastrophes being crafted, both personally and as a society, can be effectively managed through denial. Perhaps it comes from being a recovering alcoholic; after all, we alcoholics are more well schooled in the arts of denial than most, and intimately familiar with the catastrophes they so effortlessly engineer.

The mind receives life, interprets it, analyze it, and manipulates it to its own ends. In this sense, we're all self – willed, an expression usually used to describe the single mindedness and impulsiveness of children. We pretend that adulthood frees us of these qualities; but I'm not at all sure that's the case. Any careful scrutiny of average adult behavior reveals that these two qualities are still right there, plastered over with the attractive wallpaper of improved sophistication. We haven't grown up; we’ve just redecorated. Along the way, we learn to relabel: now we call it ego, which sounds more important. The authority of Freud is ever at hand to lend our childishness greater weight and importance than it actually has.

When I use the phrase single-mindedness, I use it to describe the way our thought, which has far less direction than we think it does if we examine it carefully, constructs and rationalizes most of our action and behavior. We generally careen from one set of unrelated thoughts to another in what is called association; I think of this, which makes me think of that, and that, and so on. It's far more like bumper cars than the organized traffic of an interstate; I infer firm directions where what’s actually happening is thoughts driving around in circles, smashing into one another and enjoying the stimulation. 

That's denial for you; it begins with me believing in a directedness that's actually far more random and chaotic than I understand. Following immediately on its heels is impulsiveness, the engine of desires which keeps the foot on the pedal and the car accelerating and turning so that it can continue to crash into other cars in stimulating alternate bouts of delight and consternation.

These two parts, the intelligence and the emotion, don't really live on the ground floor. They have great views; but they don't really have direct access to life in the way that the body does. Everything in life has to go in and out through the ground floor of the body in order to do its errands, get groceries, invite visitors, pay bills, and so on. The body, furthermore, doesn't come with the same set of opinions and attitudes as intellect and emotion. It has an objective quality that goes underappreciated most of the time. 

Its capacity for sensation is actually far greater than I understand; and because it doesn't interfere with everything it encounters (the thought and emotion are the guilty parties there) it can just be where it is and know what can be known. 

Although the body fidgets a lot and has all kinds of scratchy, itchy needs that need to be attended to, it also has a capacity for utter stillness at its core, a stillness that receives life objectively. 

It's quite interesting to discover that place, because it's mostly unknown to us. If we do encounter it, however, it provides a refuge from within which to live. It reminds me of the orioles. To me, a connection with the body looks like a midwinter vacation; but from the perspective of life itself, it's a dwelling place for Being, a repository that takes in a vast amount of what it means to live, on the ground floor, where all the provisions are obtained. I don't just mean the food that I eat; it includes the air I breathe, and all the other impressions that flow into me. 

If I begin here, on the ground floor, I begin to experience myself before the prevarication and the denial begin. 

It raises questions. 

What is actually happening here? That particular question is perhaps the most important question I can ask myself today – or any day. Usually, my intellect simply gets up in the morning and says, "this is happening! That's happening!" because it already has a set of associations and consequent assumptions at hand, ready-made. Then the emotions come in and say, “Oh My Gah! Oh My Gah!” 

And we’re off to the races.

This expression, “Oh My God,” has become so ubiquitous worldwide that you hear people from every nation saying it: South Americans, Japanese, Chinese, you name it. They may not speak a word of English, but they definitely know what OMG means. Essentially, the phrase – which is now emerging phonetically to become a single new international word, omygah – describes our life as a life of reactions. We don't dwell in the stillness of our being and receive life in our body with simplicity before we act. We never get there. Everything is one Omygah after another.

Omygah.

Gurdjieff had an exercise he called "STOP.” One could say a lot about that, but we might call it the antiomygah. 

The moment the STOP action takes place, however it is deployed, the first thing that happens is one asks oneself, what is actually happening here? I'm not sure anything is more important than this question. It can be used anywhere, at any time. It's the trade version of my teacher Betty’s adage for practice: what is the truth of this moment? 

If we stop, and become much more simple within our body and our Being for a moment, it is certain we will discover questions we didn't know we had and see things we didn't know were right in front of us.

Go. and sense, and be well.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.

Secrets of the Solar Cycle, Part IV: the Iota-in-Waiting

I suppose that the question of the solar cycles and the way they affect us seems quite theoretical. But humanity is perpetually under these influences. That is to say, from the moment you wake up in the morning to the moment you go to bed at night—and while you are asleep – these forces are working on you. There's nothing theoretical about it. The influences are ubiquitous.

Gurdjieff was well aware of this. He even described some supposedly physical maladies such as the flu to the action of cosmic influences; and for all we know there may be far more truth to this than our sciences currently recognize. Science is only capable of understanding the physical, yet so much of what affects us is metaphysical, and can't really be measured.

It's useful, in the morning, to sit quietly without any agenda – perhaps without even sitting in some special way, but just sitting in a chair in a quite ordinary manner – and relax all the parts of one's being, including the intellect and feeling, in such a way that one becomes softer and more receptive to higher influences. These influences can be more intimately experienced first thing in the morning before the inner engines start revving and deliver us to the compulsions and obsessions of ordinary life. 

At this moment, when we're still, we can better feel the influence of finer energies flowing into us. Those energies do not flow in just from the top of the head or into the chakras. 

These energies are fine; and the receiving part of our being is correspondingly fine. It is molecular in nature. So it is not our mind or our heart or our solar plexus that receives finer energy from solar and other astral influences; it is our molecules ourselves, which causes a correspondingly fine vibration to arise in the cells themselves. 

This is what is called sensation in the Gurdjieff work; and it has little or nothing to do with ordinary sensation as we experience it. It's associated with the formation of the astral body in the Gurdjieff work because it senses astral influences. These influences are much finer and have almost nothing to do with the day-to-day functional operation of the physical body. They’re meant exclusively for the development of spiritual Being. 

The entire point of the Fourth Way is to awaken the capacity for sensing these influences much more deeply and take them into the body.

In this work, one has to grow one’s own Being. No one else can grow it for you; and you cannot grow anyone else's. Gurdjieff's comment about becoming a conscious egoist relates to this fact. One needs to become a unique iota-in-waiting, prepared to receive a fine or influence.

How do I become such a thing?

Still within — active without. 

Don't get them mixed up.

Go. and sense, and be well.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.

Secrets of the Solar Cycle, Part III

Tympanum at Vezelay, detail

In the last post, I mentioned that the medieval masters encoded esoteric material regarding the nature of solar and planetary influence on spiritual development in the art and architecture of Gothic cathedrals. This knowledge was passed down from ancient times, and its nearly total loss is a recent event in the context of human history. Our modern astrology is a fragment of a much more expansive set of teachings and understandings that centered around inner spiritual conditions—not temporal predictions. The conventional applications of astrology—who should I date? Will I finally make some money?— were in all likelihood developed simply to make sure the discipline would be passed down to future generations. 

In order to take a look at some of the esoteric ideas of finer foods and astral forces, let's take a look at the tympanum found on the Cathedral of the Abbey of Vezelay.

As I explained in the past two essays, in medieval art, Christ always plays the role of the sun in the astrological spectrum. It's a reversal of the actual condition on earth; here in the solar system, the sun is the material representative of Christ and God, not the other way around. That is to say, the sun is an aperture through which much higher influences flow into material creation. These forces are primarily spiritual in nature and serve for the spiritual development of the entire solar system; whereas modern physics only recognizes the physical aspects of the sun.

In the tympanum, which has several different esoteric teachings about levels of creation on it, we see Christ surrounded by three bands of carvings. 

The first band, upon which Christ stands and which He is also surrounded by on the left and the right, represents the lowest level, the level we are on. He takes the central position because he is the solar or higher influence at the heart of all human activity. He's surrounded by ordinary human activities because He has descended to earth from the heavens.

The level directly above this is the level of the astrological signs of the zodiac, along with various medallions representing seasonal activity. From an esoteric point of view, this is the level not of earth, but the astral level, the level of the planets. Everything that takes place here may look like it's taking place on the human level —we see human figures tending the vines, plowing fields, gathering wheat, and so on—but in fact the activities represent the creation of astral, or spiritual, foods for mankind. 

We know this because according to Emmanuel Swedenborg’s doctrine of correspondences, everything that takes place on earth is the reflection of a corresponding spiritual action in heaven. Indeed, in the Bible, we see countless examples where ordinary food is compared to spiritual qualities of various kinds. This is part of the action of correspondence and its symbolic use throughout sacred texts from many different ancient cultures. 

These understandings, along with the associated iconography, were still active at the time the Gothic cathedrals were built, which probably explains Gurdjieff's great admiration for them. After all, it's certain he saw this tympanum and others like it – he was an avid traveler and tourist throughout France—and he would have recognized the significance of the levels built into them, along with the activities taking place on each level. To us, of course, it's confusing — most of the esoteric spiritual doctrines of earlier eras have been forgotten. When we see human beings on what is clearly the astral level in this tympanum engaged in various human activities, we assume they have something to do with what is going on from month to month on earth—whereas, without any doubt, these are activities taking place on a higher level. Hence their separation from the earthly level and their association with the starry medallion symbols of the zodiac. 

Above them is a third band which represents not planets, but the cosmos in general. Its design is generic because what takes place on this level is essentially unknowable to us. The highest level we can perceive is the one directly above us, and that one faintly, at best. This idea is remarkably consistent with Swedenborg's observations about levels, where angels from one level of heaven can't at all see the angels in the next level above them.

The activities taking place in the middle band represent the action of the higher on the lower. Christ is directly associated with that level – hence the large gap in the human action surrounding him, which puts him into direct metaphysical contact with the level of the signs of the zodiac and the associated activity. 

Just as Christ fed mankind with the spiritual food of his body and blood, acting as the light (the sun) of the world, so, in this work of art, the solar system prepares food for its lower levels through cyclical and seasonal actions. There was nothing unusual or surprising, in the minds of medieval thinkers, with believing that the natural was an incontrovertible reflection of the spiritual.

Once we realize this – and taking into account the fact that the signs of the zodiac are incredibly ancient, and were routinely inscribed on the ceilings of temples in ancient Egypt, as well as the inner lids of their sarcophagi —we can intuit that the individual signs of the zodiac did not just represent constellations, but also a range of spiritual foods, each one of which was available according to the season the sign appeared in. 

The entire group of constellations is not just a map of the seasons in which ordinary food is grown, but also a map of the kinds of foods that are grown for the soul throughout a solar year. There are probably vestiges of this teaching hidden in the various qualities expressed by the signs of the zodiac; and that in itself could become a whole study of its own.

Go. and sense, and be well.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.

Secrets of the Solar Cycle, Part II

The harvest, from Vezelay

The organic sensation of Being is the result, then, not just of a food – air being, as Gurdjieff described it, the second Being-food of man—but also of a process whereby the food is created for us. Hence, Gurdjieff’s solioonensius. 

It's quite typical for higher understandings of various kinds to flow in as a result of solioonensius; the process naturally makes such understanding available to those who are receptive in the same way that sugar naturally tastes sweet, or lemon tastes sour. One can actually learn a great deal about cosmic processes just by paying attention to these ordinary things with Being, rather than by trying to figure things out with intellect. All natural phenomenon correspond to spiritual ones; our natural instincts can inform us here, if we sense them.

Because sunspots have a high degree of variability in the emanations they produce, the effects that they have all the atmosphere of the planet and the material that we can take in as a result of it vary as well. This is also correspondent to human agriculture, in which there are many different crops, each one of which gives us a different kind of nourishment. Like ordinary food, spiritual food (referred to as spiritual food of the body and blood in the Christian communion) has many different varieties, each one of which nourishes a different part of Being. We need to eat a balanced diet of spiritual food for proper inner development; and although we seem to think we are to be in charge of our spiritual process—an irony indeed considering our capabilities of being in charge of outer things—we should in this case let the digestive organs of our spiritual being do their work without interference, in so far as possible. This is why Gurdjieff insisted his pupils should not engage in breathing ”exercises.” 

All that is truly needed is our attention.

A meal is prepared for us and put on the table in front of us: how many times have we encountered that concept, both in Christianity—where it’s a core teaching, Old and New Testament both—and other religious practices? Food is not perpetually available and perpetually served. It only arises and is made available season by season, and through effort. Most of the efforts of self remembering, seeing, attention, and sensation exercises are ultimately aimed at awakening a capacity to absorb this food.

The organic sensation of Being can’t develop without this food; and the food only becomes more available with the application of a finer attention, which is what Gurdjieff meant when he said that in order to transform the substance of impressions, the attention had to be placed at the point where they entered the body. This is not, mind you, the attention of the intellect alone; it involves the attention of all three of our perceptive parts. Of those three, by far, the attention of the body becomes the grounding force. The feeling is the sensitivity. The intellect only has the capacity to comprehend the perception conceptually. It is the conductor; but without the musicians, it can do nothing. 

This finer food responds and corresponds to Being in a way that requires a different language. Like the substances themselves, the kind of attention that they generate and are attracted to is finer then the ordinary, rather coarse nature of our sensation of ourselves. This is why I so frequently use terms of my own, such as the molecular sensation of Being, and refer to an intimate awareness of self. We need a new language to understand new things: you can’t put new wine in old bottles. In some senses, reading books from the past about the Gurdjieff work colors it too much with what went before, and not enough with what goes forward now. Language has changed; societies, habits, and customs have changed; the world has changed. So we need new ways of working and Being that correspond to those things.

At the same time, we need to understand the ancient teachings that brought us this work. They need to be understand freshly and in the context of the way we breathe in and out today, to be sure; as they need to be done in a deep respect to the past – but not enslavement by it. We have to be ourselves, today, and be as original as the day that we live in, which has never been before. 

That needs to be embodied in an objective appreciation of cosmic phenomenon—which, today, we ignore as immaterial, even though they are the most material things in our spiritual life. 

It needs to be embodied in an appreciation – not a dogma –of our heritage.

This particular understanding about the nature of the solar cycle came to me at about 3:30 this morning when I woke up and sensed the action of new sunspot AR 2762, formed on May 1, which is a part of the new solar cycle. This cycle has produced some interesting effects already; for example, in late April, the presence of two sunspots, one from the old and another from the new, cycle effectively canceled one another out due to their reversed polarities. It was one of the very few and rare instances in recent memory where I did not actively sense the presence of either of the sunspots as they arose. It was only late in their evolution that one of them predominated and, consequentially, produced a much higher than usual food in the atmosphere of the planet. Apparently the tension between them refined substances that can only be made available at the bottom of the solar cycle, when polarity is reversing itself. 

This should be of interest to others who can sense such emanations. It deserves further study. 

Go, and sense, and be well.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.

Secrets of the Solar Cycle, Part I

Detail of Christ, surmounted by astrological symbols and harvest activities

Tympanum at Vezelay Abbey, France

Photograph by the author

Gurdjieff made a wide range of comments about the nature of breathing, and how air has finer substances in it which can be concentrated by an individual whose inner state is such that they’re able to absorb such substances. 

The remark goes someway towards explaining the yoga interest in breathing; but perhaps it remains, in some senses, mysterious. 

I have explained before that air and the way it is absorbed has a direct impact on sensation. Yet it doesn't always have this impact, even for those who are able to concentrate the finer particles it contains. One wonders why; and I can explain this, although the subject is esoteric enough that I wonder who will understand it, or care.

Finer substances in the atmosphere of planets are not always present. In the case of the earth, the finer substances in air that feed sensation — and thus, a much deeper experience of Being —arise as a result of the solar cycle and solar emanations, particularly in the form of flares, but also streams of solar wind from coronal holes. (Each produces decidedly different effects.) Gurdjieff had an umbrella word for the sun’s influence on humanity, solioonensius. 

The sun’s emanations have a direct effect on the esoteric nature of earth’s air—what it contains, its quality. When the energy from solar flares enters the atmosphere of earth, it electrically charges not just the upper stratosphere, but the entire air column all the way down to where we breathe in and out. 

The reaction between air and the higher substances of the sun is what creates Gurdjieff’s “finer substances.” This cycle is identical in its nature to the cycle whereby plants, for example, grow and create food. It is both cyclical and seasonal; but the cycles and seasons are not ruled by earthly cycles and seasons, but solar ones. Ancient civilizations knew well of this, which is why solar worship featured so prominently in their religious practices, most particularly visible in the art and iconography of ancient Egypt. The overall underlying principle, if not the details, were also well known to esotericists as late as the Middle Ages, where we see astronomical symbols and activities of the harvest combined in the tympanums of so many Gothic cathedrals. In these depictions, Christ always plays the role of the sun. From this we know that conceptually speaking, Medieval esoteric schools definitely believed in a heliocentric model of the universe from a spiritual point of view. Stars and planets were trivial accessories to the force of God.

That is in itself the subject for a much broader discussion. What I want to point out right now is that when we engage in inner work, particularly in the formation of the astral body, this cyclical nature of the sun’s influence, along with the food that it creates for those who can eat it, we need to understand how it arises and why it is not always available.

It’s well known in the most esoteric circles of the Gurdjieff work that the arising of a permanent sensation of Being is associated with the formation of the astral body. This aspect of Gurdjieff's work is rarely discussed outside esoteric circles and the inner core of the teaching. The information is relatively useless for those who don't understand the experience. The fear is that the uninitiated and outsiders will assume anyone who thinks of these things in such a way is a lunatic.

However, because it constitutes part of the objective science of the Gurdjieff practice, I believe it needs to be recorded so that those who are able to work in this way understand the nature of the process in more exact technical detail. I won’t explain everything; but what I do explain will, I think, prove to be of significance to those who understand it.  

In summary, one can take in more finer substances only when the air is charged with them. 

Even then, the nature of the charge and the availability of various levels of these finer substances differs. In a general sense, however, these particles are available for ingestion and concentration (Gurdjieff called it "coating”) within the molecular organization of the body according to the attractive force within Being. These processes relate to what Gurdjieff would call conscious processes, but they are not conscious in the sense that our mind thinks about them or our intention can invoke them. They are conscious in the sense that they belong to the consciousness of a higher level than our own. We can participate in the manifestation of that consciousness, beginning on the molecular level of Being, and this can have a powerful influence on our own psyche and spirit. (Remember here that our intellect and our emotion are fractional states of psyche and spirit, not capable of an understanding at the same level.) We do not, however, run the show.

Go. and sense, and be well.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.

Technique

Isabel's grave.

April 30

Yes, the birds are singing.

It's gray, wet, and still raining outside—it will rain all day. Undeterred, the female redwing blackbirds are patrolling the strip of grass in front of our house, looking for breakfast victims. To us, they are small and beautiful and bring joy. To insects, they are enormous and deadly.

We are somehow able to hold these contradictions in front of us and understand both of them.

Maybe there's a lesson in there somewhere about our current situation. It seems huge and deadly, this disease; but there is beauty and joy in life nonetheless. The bad cannot destroy the good; they come together, in the day and the night, and meet in us.

I keep hearing the phrase “… when this is over and I can get back to my life" being used to describe the wish that this ordeal with the virus were over. Every time I hear it, it sounds ridiculous, because we are already in our lives: there’s nothing to get back to.

What the phrase actually means is that I essentially identify who I am, what my life is—what life means—with the routine I’m used to and expect. Not to what's actually happening now. This pathology of perspective is so deep-seated that in a subtle and unexamined way, I consistently reject life as it is in favor of some idea I have of it.

How it ought to be.

This may not be such a big deal in a superficial way, because I suppose we all understand the phrase is what we call a 'manner of speaking.' It does, however, expose the soft underbelly of our attitude towards our life and our habits. I suspect there’s a an undercurrent in all of us that rejects life as it is. Why else would we destroy the planet in our desperate efforts to find some better future that isn't there? The present becomes an acceptable casualty. Necessary collateral damage, we think to ourselves.

This actually goes on in us every day. It is not just an outward action: it begins within us.

Few question it.

We want something different; we want something better. Above all, we want-want-want. There’s an underlying greed of ego at work here. It reminds me of Epictetus, who said in the Encheiridion, “Seek not that the things which happen should happen as you wish; but wish the things which happen to be as they are, and you will have a tranquil flow of life.”

The word want derives from an Old Norse word vanta, which means what is lacking. We think something is lacking with things as they are.

Epictetus’ remedy for a “tranquil flow of life”—inner peace, if you will—is to cultivate a desire for things to be as they are.

This certainly sounds like a strange twist for desire. After all, isn't desire always construed as aspirational?

How would that square as a desire for things to be as they are?

It's an aspiration for what it is. This is, in essence, a search for truth. Truth is only and ever found in things as they are, objectified and set aside from my desires.

This came up recently in a conversation where I pointed out that we live in a world of technique. The number of manuals and formulations that get published on an annual basis advising us of what techniques we should use to get better results in every area of life, from how to bake bread to our spiritual well-being, is simply astonishing. Never mind which techniques are offered; ultimately, we're trained like Pavlov's dogs to believe that technique is necessary. There is a method. Never mind what method; there is one. We can argue about the methods (a lot—after all, it’s certain my method is better in every possible way than yours!) later. But there is no doubt there's a method. A technique.

The word technique, however, betrays itself the moment we use it. It comes from the Greek tekhnē, which means art—bringing to mind the well-known phrase, "it's an art, not a science."

Art begins with a creative emotional force. It isn’t just a collection of analytics and skills: it involves imagination and intuition, feeling. If we reduce it to a set of well-executed techniques, already, it isn't art anymore.

Gurdjieff once said, when asked what method one should use to develop spiritual Being,"I know of no methods.” This from a man who seems at times (at least in the books about him) to recommend an endless stream of exercises and methods. He wrote a few books; and birthed ever more of them by proxy.

But when it came to practice, he threw them all out.

There is no book that writes down what life can bring us. We have an organism that can receive its impressions; and those—the truth—are the very selfsame things that represent Epictetus’ “things as they are.”

The art of living, not the technique of living, is to inhabit things as they are. This is where truth is located; directly around me, right now, in things as they are. Not the way I want them to be or expect them to be or plan for them to be in the future.

Just quite simply as they are now.

Life arises quite naturally without techniques; it arises naturally from within, and naturally from without. Every attempt to use force to manipulate this is not an understanding, but in a substantially misguided effort to control what is already naturally whole.

To receive what is already naturally whole within being is a whole action in itself; and it answers, if one lets it, the question of what is lacking both in myself and the world that mirrors my desires. This is a simple action that also arises naturally.

It can manifest itself with ease when I stop interfering.

Go. and sense, and be well.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.