Metaphysical Humanism and the Laws of Being, part XIX—The third lawful order

I've been working on my new book on Metaphysical Humanism for more than a year now.. 

I did tell readers I would eventually get back to publishing some of the material, and that moment has come. The overall work, however, is still unfinished...

We're picking up where we left off. 

Readers coming in in the middle of this dialogue might want to consider reading the original material which was published earlier in the space between 9/22 and 11/18/2018.

The Triad of Existence: Notes

The triangle indicates the genesis of the entire universe from a single point of Love into the entire scope of the cosmos. 

This scope is bounded at the base by intellect and matter; the forces are completely balanced, and create the field called existence. 

Study of the dialectical forces in the diagram yields some interesting insights into fundamental functions of the first three laws. For example: 

1. The interaction of Matter and Intellect creates a directed line of developmental tension, or exchange of force, between order and chaos, which runs along the base of the triangle—indicating it as perhaps the fundamental underpinning of the nature of the universe. This line is the line of entropy.

2. The interaction between Intellect and Love creates a like line of development governing the difference between dispassion and compassion, indicated as the line of wisdom. This line has an ascendant nature, and indicates the ascendant moral compass of a universe guided by compassionate relationship.

3. The interaction of Love and Matter creates a third line of exchange of force, showing the genesis of the universe of manifested matter (physics) from the the Supreme Unmanifest—the impulse of Love (metaphysics.) 

The meta-interaction of these three sets of forces produces existence; and we can thus not only see how existence merges from the major forces, but also the tensions and dialectic between the various forces which produce the principal underpinnings of existence:  manifestation, order, and wisdom. 

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 Sensation of Unity

Painting by Hilma af Klint

From the Guggenheim show in NY

Photo by the author

…Then one must change the way of working. Instead of accumulating during one hour, one must try to keep constantly the organic sensation of the body. Sense one's body again, continually without interrupting one's ordinary occupations—to keep a little energy, to take the habit. I thought the exercises would allow you to keep the energy a long time, but I see it is not so…

 The key to everything—remain apart. Our aim is to have constantly a sensation of oneself, of one's  individuality. This sensation cannot be expressed intellectually, because it is organic. It is something which makes you independent, when you are with other people.

—G. I. Gurdjieff, Meetings at 6 rue des Colonels-Renard, Paris (Gurdjieff’s Paris apartment), 1938

with Mme de Salzmann assisting

Dr. Welch often used to open his exchanges with the question, 

Why don’t I work?

This question isn't as touchy-feeling as people would have it. It's actually quite technical, at its heart.

First of all, “work” in its essence consists of returning to myself as often as possible. 

Secondly, this action causes the organism to actively take in impressions at the point where they enter being, depositing finer substances in ever-greater concentrations within being. 

Third, this eventually leads to the deposition of enough material to render the action of sensation “organic.” 

When a function is organic, it means it has become a normal, everyday working part of the organism’s functions. Mankind has, over time, lost a number of what would otherwise be ordinary functions in the course of the deterioration of his psyche and Being; sensation is first among them and must needs be the first organic function that’s restored. If one doesn’t work or can’t work, if one’s wish to work is weak, if one’s work is weak—it all begins with sensation. 

There is no other ground-floor function so important to right the incorrect working of the organism; and if this isn’t righted, all other efforts will ultimately turn out to be in vain, because nothing can become more permanent without sensation. 

Hence the words of Gurdjieff, above. There is no other place to start; everything else takes place in imagination, which is tremendously creative and usually leads the mind in a thousand other directions, every one of which appears to be subjectively profitable—but none of which are worth a penny.

If your work is weak, your sensation is weak. If your sensation is weak, your work is weak. 

We all come to group meetings with different ideas, different opinions. Our intellects differ—our intelligences differ—our emotions and our feelings differ. All this is lawful, and the fact is that these differences are even necessary, since we learn from one another through them.

Sensation, however, is the same—for all of us, presuming we activate an organic sensation, sensation is the exact same function. This is another meaning of organic. Sensation is the same for all of us in the same way that we all have lungs, all have a heart, and so on. It is a sense (see my monograph on The Sixth Sense) and it has an objective quality that doesn’t exist in thought and feeling, at least on this level.

As such, sensation doesn’t just serve, as Gurdjieff remarks above, as a unifying factory for ourselves ; it also serves as a factor that unifies members of a group when they work together. It is the one thing that we can be certain we share in common when we come together, if we work and if we share. 

Organic Sensation serves as the connector to the level below mankind, which is the foundational material upon which our own Being stands and must stand. To live within organic sensation is to live in the house built on stone, rather than the house built on sand. No upward growth of Being is possible without an equal and corresponding downward growth; and sensation is where that begins. It is the faculty whereby we connect with the molecular Being of the level below our consciousness, which is what creates our material body and the functional Being which inhabits it.

Sensation needs to become permanent in such a way that I don’t have sensation. 

Instead, sensation has me. 

Any understanding of the question that falls short of this isn’t enough.

On the question of wish.

I heard someone say recently that they didn’t have a real wish and didn’t know what a wish was. Etc. etc. 

In passing:

The classic tropes in group work are either 

(a) talking about how deep and wonderful working together is (we're so fab/the G. work is so fab)

(b) whining about how I can't work (I'm not fab)

(c) speaking about a magical experience one has had (that was so fab!) 

Don't do these things. They are repetitive, infantile, and obnoxious.

Ahem... back to wish—

as though wish were our own property and under our control.

I can have a wish of my own, to be sure; but it’s subjective and weak, like my work. (I'm not fab.) No wonder I never work, and it never does anything. In reality, I can only prepare for a real wish; real wish descends into Being only through finer energy which penetrates the body. 

Real wish is a three-centered faculty that arises from a conscious source; if I open to the inward flow of the Divine, then and only then does a real wish arise in me. 

Real wish is inexorable and durable and not easily forgotten.

To think that I can have a wish is to believe that I can do. If a person has a real wish, one instilled in them and distilled from contact with a higher source, the taste of it never goes away. 

I’m not able to engender a wish like this on my own; I need help.

I'm not fab.

May your heart be close to God, 

and God close to your heart.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.

Rejecting the Devil

Panel from the Apocalypse Tapestry

Angers, France

Photograph by the author

Rejecting the Devil

As long as we’re living in the world, we all walk midway between heaven and hell. Therefore we’re in an equilibrium. We can freely choose to look either upward to God or downward to hell. If we look upward to God, we recognize that all wisdom is from God and that in our spirits we’re actually with angels in heaven. If we look downward (as we inevitably do if we have false thinking from an evil heart), in our spirits we’re actually with devils in hell. 

—Emmanuel Swedenborg, ibid, p.90

When we follow the divine design in the way we live we are in God, because God is omnipresent in the universe and in everything within it at the inmost level, since things on the inmost level are in the divine design. Things that go against the divine design are all outside that inmost level. 

On the outer levels God’s omnipresence takes the form of an ongoing struggle with things that are against the divine design, and a constant effort to restore them to the divine design. The more we allow ourselves to be restored to the divine design, the more thoroughly pres- ent God is in each of us; consequently to a greater extent God is in us and we are in God. 

—Emmanuel Swedenborg, ibid, p.91

In a universe of strong laws, the devil is given free reign. Although angelic, he’s a creature of the lower realms, and hence in direct contact with earth and its denizens. The devil is the driver of temptation, and hence sin. 

Yet the devil answers to man; as we well know, Christ commands him (get thee hence, Satan—Matthew 4:10), and Swedenborg successfully defends himself as well:

To the things he (the devil) said I made this reply: “It’s also a law of the divine design that by our own work and power we are to gain faith for ourselves by means of truths from the Word, yet we are to believe that our faith comes from God and not a grain of it from ourselves. Likewise, by our own work and power we are to become justified, yet we are to believe that our justification comes from God and not even a jot of it from ourselves. We have been commanded to believe in God, to love God with all our strength, and to love our neighbor as ourselves. Think about it and tell me how God could command these things if we had no ability to obey and do them?” 

At that the satan’s face changed. It went from white to a sickly yellow; then it soon turned completely black, and with a pitch-black mouth he said, “You’re speaking paradoxes against our paradoxes!” 

Then he immediately sank down toward his own people and disappeared. 

We note that Swedenborg here contradicts Gurdjieff’s classic adage, man cannot do; he does, by defending himself against a powerful metaphysical creature of the hells. Let’s remember the strong Christian tradition, by the way, of the power of men—especially the clergy, but by inference even the ordinary Christian—to compel the devil. This is achieved, in Christian practice, by invoking the power of Christ (God within man.) The belief extends itself further into darker territory in the presumptive actions of black magic, which allow humans to compel the creatures of hell for their own selfish reasons—although always at the cost of the soul. 

One ought to carefully consider what this metaphor means in terms of the practical day-to-day aspects of one’s spiritual practice in even the simplest of terms. 

Even Mr. man-cannot-do Gurdjieff believed that man could do enough to banish the evil in himself, with sufficient effort. Swedenborg’s concept of redemption bears a strong relationship to Gurdjieff’s teachings on doing:

The divine design is that we arrange ourselves for receiving God and prepare ourselves as a vessel and a dwelling place where God can enter and live as if we were his own temple. We have to do this preparation by ourselves, yet we have to acknowledge that the preparation comes from God. This acknowledgment is needed because we do not feel the presence or the actions of God, even though God is in fact intimately present and brings about every good love and every true belief we have. This is the divine design we follow, and have to follow, to go from being earthly to being spiritual. 

—Emmanuel Swedenborg, ibid, p.139.

Readers will be reminded of Gurdjieff’s Stumpfsinn and Blödsinn; both German words meant to indicate the fact that man no longer feels the presence of God.

Swedenborg conceives of the first stage of spiritual redemption as an emptying out of what is human; this is also a persistent theme in Meister Eckhart’s sermons:

If I should have gone out of myself and were entirely empty, then indeed the Father would bear His only­ begotten Son in my spirit so purely that the spirit would bear him back again. 

—Meister Eckhart, The Complete Mystical Works, P. 399

Thus for the soul to be united with God or to become so, she must be divorced from all things, she must be all alone as God is all alone, for a work wrought by God in an empty soul is better than heaven and earth. 

—Ibid, p. 41

Thus no vessel can hold two separate kinds of drink. If it is to contain wine, we must pour out the water; the vessel must be bare and empty. And so, if you would receive divine joy and God, you must pour away creatures… In short, to take in, to be receptive, a thing must be empty. 

—Ibid, p.534

Gurdjieff’s principal teaching on this matter consists of the idea that a man or woman must recognize their own nothingness. This adage is, in its essence, a reformation of the idea that we must empty ourselves to prepare ourselves for receiving God in Being. And, of course, in Gurdjieff’s teaching the aim is to acquire Being; yet we see from the various relationships here that the Being Gurdjieff refers to is that selfsame regenerated Being, one with God, which Swedenborg and Eckhart allude to. 

This acquisition of God’s Being is a de facto conquering of Satan. Satan, in Swedenborg’s cosmology, equates to untruth:

People who have made falsity so strong in themselves that it becomes their belief are called “satans.” People who have made evil strong in themselves by living it are called “devils.” 

—Emmanuel Swedenborg, ibid, p.115.

This is reflected in Gurdjieff’s picture of a “human” being as a person filled with nothing but lies. Swedenborg’s conception is more nuanced that Gurdjieff’s devil; Swedenborg’s devil has a master (satan) which on the surface of things appears to be a more logically and theologically sophisticated concept than Gurdjieff’s. Conflating the two, as Gurdjieff does, obscures the motive force behind the devil on man’s one shoulder, which Swedenborg calls satan. 

Gurdjieff’s satan (the willful force behind our evils) is, however, self-interest; and this is entirely consistent with Swedenborg and Eckhart’s configuration: that which is not-God is of the personal self, i.e., it is selfish. 

We come, here, to the point that Gurdjieff renamed his essay on Pure and Impure Emotions to The Meaning of Life: that which is of the personal self has already strayed. This only makes sense in the context of Swedenborg’s redemption and Eckhart’s rebirth of the soul in God (which Swedenborg also explains at some length in The Lord the redeemer.)

Man has, in other words, at the very least a potential to overcome the devil, or, temptation and sin. This is true even in a universe of strong laws. All three authorities present a strong, but ultimately redemptive, cosmology in which man can reject the devil. 

I was asked yesterday by my son Adriaan what Gurdjieff meant by the phrase, “the devil, you can trust.” I explained this by reminding him that you can always trust your enemies more than your friends: this, for the simple reason that your enemies can never betray you. One can be certain, that is, that one’s enemies will act against one; and there is a subtle philosophical point here worth examination: one trusts the devil because he has been appointed to test us and mislead us. One can, in other words, use one’s inner devil as a consistently reliable compass that points us towards true north: all we have to do is go in the other direction. The reason that Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil features as the last (and perhaps most important) request one makes of God is because temptation is always with us. It refers, furthermore, to Swedenborg’s distinction between satan (the will to evil) and devils (evil deeds themselves, that is, the will made manifest in the material). Satan and the devil are, in other words, neat reflections of Swedenborg’s parallel spiritual and material words: satan is spiritual evil, the devils material evil. 

In Gurdjieff’s cosmos, selfishness connotes satan: the impulse toward’s one’s devil. We can go one step further: when Gurdjieff says, like what it does not like, the word it signifies selfishness, or satan. Instead of using metaphysical or metaphorical terms to denote satan, he has turned the question into a practical inner action which indicates the goal without invoking the image of the incubus. In this sense he has objectified an action which Eckhart and Swedenborg also pointed to.     

May your heart be close to God, 

and God close to your heart.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.

Now available on Amazon: a new monograph:

The Abbey-Church of St. Foy

What, you might ask, could be more fun than a church—yes, a church—established by a bunch of criminal monks whose thieving habits led them to steal the almost certainly bogus relics of several different saints in order to attract attention, notoriety, and, above all, visitors and cash flow?

The contradiction is difficult to top; but they did it anyway. Then, to top it all off, they decorated the front of their church with a spectacular tympanum, meant to represent the Last Judgment and the sorting out of souls between heaven and hell. Not exactly the kind of decor that you would want over your head every time you walked into worship if you were, say, a thief.

Yet there it is.

Despite the rather bizarre circumstances that led to the creation of this church, it’s a masterpiece of Romanesque art, and the money, time, thought, and religious insight that went into its creation incorporates more than a bit of the rich symbolic tradition, both inner and outer, that characterizes art of this period.

The monks, it turns out, weren’t just thieves—they were geniuses. This monograph explores the tympanum at Conques with an eye to revealing some of the extraordinarily sophisticated psychospiritual observations encoded in its superficially obvious imagery.




May your heart be close to God, 

and God close to your heart.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.

Strong-law cosmology

Always go towards God, even when the devil is driving.

…My own formulation.

We all have a devil in us. This was, of course, a classic trope of Gurdjieff’s: each person, he said, has an angel and a devil in them… the devil, you can trust.

My wife asked me what “the devil” in us is. The devil, of course, represents temptation. In his classic guise he works as an agency for God, testing mankind’s faith and resolve. According to Swedenborg, devils or spirits are continually testing man in order to provide opportunities for inner development… “going towards God.” In Swedenborg’s cosmology—a strong lawful cosmology, of which more in a minute—the choices a human being makes are what determine his or her eligibility for heaven or hell. Those choices, furthermore, cannot be in any way compelled by God—for example, by the exhibition of miracles—because to compel would be to invalidate the laws whereby individuals must choose for themselves and by themselves in order to qualify. 

This act of choice relates closely to Gurdjieff’s wish, what one cares for. One has to, as they say, give a damn one way or another. And one has to own that property within one’s self, not as an implant from some outside agency.

If God’s omnipotence was as absolute for doing evil as it is for doing good, it would be possible for God to lift the whole of hell to heaven. He could turn devils and satans into angels. In a moment he could take all the ungodly people on earth, purify them from sin, make them new, holy, and reborn, and justify them…

God cannot do this with his omnipotence. It’s against the laws of his design for the universe. It’s also against the laws of his design for human beings, which dictate that the individual and God have to form a mutual partnership. 

—Emmanuel Swedenborg, True Christianity (edited for brevity)

We had many talks about the idea of miracles, and about the fact that the Absolute cannot manifest its will in our world and that this will manifests itself only in the form of mechanical laws and cannot manifest itself by violating these laws. I don’t recall which of us was first to remember a story in which we at once saw an illustration of this law. The story is about an over-aged student of a seminary who, at a final examination, does not understand the idea of God's omnipotence. 

'Well, give me an example of something that the Lord cannot do," said the examining bishop. 

"It won't take long to do that, your Eminence," answered the seminarist. "Everyone knows that even the Lord himself cannot beat the ace of trumps with the ordinary deuce." 

Nothing could be more clear. 

—In Search of the Miraculous, P.D. Ouspensky

This feature whereby God cannot interfere with the action of choice in his own creation indicates a cosmology of strong laws: that is, laws that cannot ve violated, even by the deity. This subject of God’s ability, and whether it has any limit, is an old one. In Swedenborg’s True Christianity, the chapter on  creation and its limits—God’s Omnipotence, Omniscience, and Omnipresence— he finds common ground with Gurdjieff’s comment to Ouspensky about the seminary student’s remark that even God cannot beat the ace of spades with a deuce. This equally indicates a universe of strong laws, that is, laws which not even God Himself can break. And Gurdjieff’s Beelzebub’s Tales lays out an elaborate, highly structured universe wholly governed by laws, not just of physics but also metaphysics.

The difference between a cosmology of strong laws and a universe of weak ones is simple enough. In strong-law cosmology, God cannot interfere directly with His creation. Creation stands apart from Him as an independent entity in which the action of deus ex machina does not exist. This conception is also, I believe, consonant with Sufic law in which there is a permanent veil between God and His creation—an inviolable separation of power.

In a universe of weak laws, magic—actions that violate what would otherwise be obvious laws—is functional. God (or Gods) can have many direct effects on the universe, and even individual humans. This is the preferred cosmology of Western Greco-Roman cultures (Swedenborg even mentions this), and its threads still run deep through western society. The literary tradition of fantasy, notably, proposes cosmologies of weak law, even though the affection of such works is that there are laws, just ”laws of magic.” In short, cosmologies of weak law engage in a lot of wishful thinking—just like human beings. They consistently present unexplained situations where obvious laws of nature are casually violated using superhuman powers.  

Any serious review of Swedenborg and Gurdjieff will reveal that they both present cosmologies of strong laws, in which God does not and cannot interfere directly with His creation; yet in both of their cosmologies, angelic creatures—including satan—act as significant agents. Beelzebub’s Tales is heavily populated with angels, including Beelzebub himself.   

An additional note to readers:

...New installments from The Inherent Wave of Being— A Treatise on Metaphysical Humanism will begin Jan. 2020. 

If you haven't read the original series of posts, it published between September and November 2018.

May your heart be close to God, 

and God close to your heart.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.

Some notes on sexuality, part IV

Capital from L'Abbaye Fontevraud

Photo by the author

A virgin who is a wife is free and unfettered by attachment; she is always as near to God as to herself. She brings forth many and big fruits, for they are neither more nor less than God Himself. This fruit and this birth that virgin bears who is a wife, bringing forth daily a hundred and a thousandfold! Numberless indeed are her labors begotten of the most noble ground or, to speak more truly, of the very ground where the Father ever begets His eternal Word: it is thence she becomes fruitful and shares in the procreation. 

—Meister Eckhart, Sermon 8

To examine sex from the perspective of its physical manifestation in me is insufficient. Sex plays a much greater role in the arising of Being in the first place; the very nature of God’s interaction with the soul is sexual.

This question was well understood and deeply examined by the monastic and mystery schools of the European Middle Ages (as well, of course,  as much earlier such schools); and the records of those investigations were subtly encoded in medieval iconography, which sets something of a world record for its ability to conceal questions of fecundity, insemination, gestation and birth in works of art, especially medieval statuary. As my own books on the subject (The Esoteric Bosch, Bosch Decoded and The Reconstruction of the Soul) note, medieval art was rife with sexual and procreative imagery, some of it quite obvious and direct. Much of it, on the other hand, was covert; only initiates fully understood it. The obvious, if not flagrant, tradition of depicting the Christ figure in the vaginal aperture of the mandorla is a classic example, as are the erect penises found on some gargoyles. The tradition of using floral and vegetal imagery to depict cosmological sexual interactions is only less obvious until is taught to recognize it—and they were cosmological, for sex was embedded at the root of creation.

The integration of this imagery into everyday religious practice in gothic cathedrals is striking. Given that any given gothic cathedral represents, in its symbolic entirety, the entire universe means that it (sex) could not be left out; but its nearly ubiquitous presence throughout the cathedral environment indicates how absolutely fundamental a force it was considered to be. The theme of the cathedral was creation and its relationship to God: first as a creation entire (the whole universe) and then the creation of the individual (the soul) as a procreative action—a sexual action, an engendering—on behalf of God. 

Meister Eckhart may not have written about sex “as such”, that is, in its ordinary man-to-woman physical context (daresay the inquisition would have gone worse for him had he done so) but his emphasis on the eternal fecundity of God, who (even now!) forever gives birth to creation, cannot be emphasized enough. He envisioned our spiritual life as a birth into Being, followed by a rebirth into God. His sermons remind us how central this understanding was to the core mystical tradition, even if from a medieval theological point of view sex “in the flesh” was considered by default to be problematically sinful. The idea that it was is, in my own eyes, doubtful. They weren’t prudes—we just see them through our own prudish lenses.

This leaves us, after these questions about medieval Christian mysteries are examined, with the question of the relationship right now between ordinary sexuality and the birth of Being. 

They are not separated,  either conceptually or physically.  

How do I experience that? And, perhaps more importantly, how can I come into a right relationship with it and make my peace with it?

There is an oddly sexual undercurrent to higher energy. Ordinary sex energy actually interferes with that current in the same way that ordinary thinking and emotion interfere with a sensation and feeling from the higher parts. This is why Gurdjieff frequently described ordinary sex (and its ultimate result, orgasm) as “blowing one’s nose.”  The discharge of ordinary sex energy frees up one’s inner life to allow a finer current to flow within. If this doesn’t take place, all kinds of trouble ensues, even in quite ordinary ways. Bottled up and mis-used sex energy is a source of great excess and violence; it doesn’t matter whether we paint this picture in Freudian or esoteric terms, the outcome is the same. Sex becomes explosive if it isn’t discharged. This is, I suspect, more true of males than females. 

It helps if I see this within myself. I consequently have a responsibility to attend to my sexual needs in an intelligent and non-destructive way. There’s no single answer to how to go about this, but the question needs to be there—along with a willingness to surrender any guilt about it. This may prove impossible, because of there’s one thing social forms seek to instill in humans above all others in regard to sexuality, it’s guilt. I doubt we can overcome this issue, inwardly or outwardly, by walking in any straight lines. It’s a maze with a Minotaur in it. 

Now that I’ve brought that analogy up, let me point out that perhaps the value of that myth is in its suggestion that I trace my sexuality and its nature back through its beginnings in a thread from my birth to where I am now. Seeing it in its wholeness is necessary. This is, of course, true for all of life experience; but I think we too often forget that our sexual nature ought to be continually pondered, along with all the other questions our life has raised. Instead, we avoid it... why? It is what gave us Being in the first place. 

My life is born, here and now, through an engendering of Being. In the most sacred moments, my higher parts can sense that. If my lower parts choose to see the world through an inferior lens of the same essential nature, I have to accept that and suffer 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.

Some notes on sexuality, part III

Capital from L'Abbaye Fontevraud

Photo by the author

What are the 'two sons' of the soul? 

St. Augustine speaks - and with him another, pagan master - of the two faces of the soul. The one is turned toward this world and the body; in this she works virtue, knowl­edge, and holy living. The other face is turned directly to God. There the divine light is without interruption, working within, even though she does not know it, because she is not at home. 

When the spark of intellect is taken barely in God, then the 'husband' is alive. Then the birth takes place, then the Son is born. This birth does not take place once a year or once a month or once a day, but all the time, that is, above time in the expanse where there is no here or now, nor nature nor thought. 

—Meister Eckhart, Sermon 31

Understanding how independently the rest of my Being’s sex functions becomes more possible if I see how preferential it is, and how distinctly it has formed its preferences independent of my own being. Before I’m aware of it, it has already made up its mind as far as what’s interesting; what body types, what facial features, and so on. It even has its own curiosity and experiments from time to time with attractions outside the normal range. It turns out sex has an intelligence fully capable of appreciating—and respecting—in ways that are hidden to the casual inner eye.

Why is this the case? I believe it’s because it has its own mind, much like the other parts. I’ve spent a number of years observing the fact that the feeling, the intellect, and the body are independent intelligences. It strikes me now that sex is another independent intelligence, although it’s far more automatized than the parts we think of as the three “principal” centers (intellect, emotional, and moving.) This explains, perhaps, why Gurdjieff separated consideration of instinct and sex from the action of the other three centers when it comes to day to day life. They’re too fundamental and too automatic to work directly with the “big three”, perhaps; yet that doesn’t explain why he told people that it’s important to work with their instinct. 

Why didn’t he say that about sex?

This idea of working with instinct implies a direct investment in that intuitive part of Being; yet we don’t hear him talking about working with sex, even though sex equally has its own intelligence and intuition—and powerful ones, too. (Remember how Gurdjieff told Ouspensky that if sex center in a person only worked with its own energy, that would be a big thing.) 

One might suppose this sexual part doesn’t comfortably fit into the development of our psychospiritual Being; yet that can’t be possible, because it’s such an integral part of it in the first place. 

That leaves me with a question of exactly where sex does fit in; it’s a troubling question without any obvious answers, which is probably why it has plagued Traditional religious authorities throughout history.

Approaching this, I ask myself exactly what my sexual intelligence consists of. There must be one; and I believe that I can and have sensed it as an undercurrent in my relationships with women. It I nforms (inwardly forms) a certain intelligent spiritual intimacy. The fact that I simply won’t have sex with the women I interact with doesn’t preclude a psychospiritual acknowledgement of their inherent sexuality; a respect for their sexual nature which gently and honorably pays it its due. This subliminal exchange ought, I think, to be an ordinary part of a healthy, adult exchange between the opposite sexes. That exchange takes place below the level of ordinary consciousness, as a textural platform that grounds the exchange in a certain truth. 

That truth is grounded in a finer and higher energy; although that energy seems to be driven by our coarse animal urges, it actually enters this level from a much higher place and actually has the potential to form a more human, more sacred respect for one another. 

Admittedly I am reaching, intuiting here; attempting to understand the experience of this undeniable energy, this irrevocable component of human Being, as an active and participating force in the world of interaction between men and women. In me. Not just as a crude force that thrusts me into the conflicts of desire, but into the temples of respect. 

I equate this with the observation I’ve had that my sexuality, as animal as it may appear, has a greater, even cosmic, scope to its nature. It’s all of womankind that’s significant in regard to this sacred force; sex is not about my microcosmic attraction to individual women, but to femininity itself. It’s the polarity that attracts, not the individual: man is drawn towards woman in a sexual way because of forces much larger than our individual impulses. In this context, my wish for sex—its driving force—is a wish for sex with all of womankind, not just woman. 

It’s a rather more religious and philosophically grounded version of Portnoy’s Complaint, if you will: one that examines the question not from a commonplace, but planetary perspective. The forces that drive my own (and every other man or woman’s) sexual impulse and experience aren’t just planetary, but solar. They come, in other words, from a level so high above me that I can at best barely taste the air they breathe. I ought to respect that; and that respect ought to first be engendered organically, then honored for its authority. 

Perhaps these ideas aren’t very new; I doubt it. Yet I find little discussion of the matter among those of us who have a wish for Being. Despite that, it ultimately needs to be examined; and if we attempt that alone, it’s not enough. Questions of this scale may have to begin within the individual, but the culmination of such studies has to be within the community. We can’t, I don’t think, begin to understand both the individual and collective failures of mankind to come to grips with  a right attitude towards and exercise of our sexuality towards one another without better understanding its relationship to Being; and obscuring that relationship in a shroud of tantric mystery is not enough. It has gone on too long; and the shroud itself has been, if I dare say so, far too male in the first place. 

Perhaps the ancient fertility cults and temples of the Goddesses come from a time when femininity was afforded a better—even primary—place in society. I can’t say. What I can say is that it’s all to evident it isn’t in a good place now. 

May your heart be close to God, 

and God close to your heart.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.