Memory and Being

July 5

Yesterday, during a conversation, the question of memory, the past, and the purpose it serves came up. We take this function for granted; yet it lies at the heart of every action we engage in, because the form of our Being exists and is rooted in the collected impressions of our lifetime.

We remember our experiences individually, but they form a collective whole within us. One of the hopes and aims of memory is for us to come into a greater tactile relationship with that greater whole, so that we act from a larger, more measured and mature context than the less nuanced and intelligent emotional reactions that prompt us in individual situations. Emotion is there to react, but without a greater intelligence to guide it it acts mostly according to animal instinct and survival motives. 

Yet it’s the wholeness of our lives that we hope will come to bear on situations; this is part of what mindfulness is all about. If I just react from the animal parts, I'm partial. 

In the most basic way, memory serves the function of care. The repair molecules in our cells care about the way things are arranged; their molecular memories contain information about how DNA should be sequenced, the way molecules should be folded, and so on, and all of their actions—their expression of agency— emerge from comparing the molecules they encounter to this library of forms. 

We live on a much larger scale, but we're not different; our memory serves as the form of our Being, and we attempt to repair that which we find around us — to reorder it, to configure it so that it works properly both within and outside of us —so as to serve our library of form and understanding of order accordingly.

The difficulty, of course, is the difference between subjective and objective understanding. The cell’s molecules engage memory relative to objective forms: one molecule sweeps up and disposes of cellular trash, the other one doesn’t. Either molecule A, the sweeper molecule, can sweep or it can't. Perhaps it's weary... it's having trouble sweeping. It’s something of a black-and-white situation. 

In the case of human form, however, the inner library of memory, it’s much more complicated. Form has undergone a mutation that introduces a much wider range of subjectivities. On top of that, there's a conflict between the inner and the outer. Objectively, the outer has its own impetus and will do whatever it wants regardless. It's only the inner part of myself, the memory, that can be reconfigured. I cannot as a single human being impose my will on the exterior and assume it will conform.

I'm the one that needs to find a way to conform.

Examining memory through the taste of things past, the history of my life, reveals that it leaves more than one kind of pattern in me. It’s not just the words, the thought, the events that are recorded in me: every sensation and feeling is also there. So although it isn’t spoken of very much, I have a lifetime of history in sensation and a lifetime of history in feeling which form whole repositories of memory in their own right, repositories that in some ways have even more influence over me than the thoughts I have about those past events. 

All three of these different sets of memories — thinking, sensing, feeling — are consonant in me at any given moment. They sound their notes together. I only notice the thought, and perhaps the feeling, if it is strong. 

Yet the wholeness of my being emerges from the simultaneous memory of these three parts.

As I contemplate this (i.e., observe it from the sacred space of my inward temple) perhaps it occurs to me that many of my memories are “broken.” I learn, with experience, age, and maturity, that things I did in the past weren't well informed. I wasn’t present to them; I didn’t understand other people. I did things that were ill advised. 

I gradually come to see that the past lives within me as a template for present behavior; but it's a template with undesirable distortions. I somehow need to come to terms with that template and repair it so that it can serve better in relationship. After all, that's the primary purpose of memory; it is the template for relationship. 

If there are nonconformities and distortions, it turns out, they arise from the difference between objective experiences that are taking place now and my subjective template. 

What happens now is objectively true. 

As my teacher used to say to me, “what is the truth of this moment?”

I better serve relationship by discovering the incongruities between my past, my memories, and what is true now. In every case, I can’t rely on an outdated and poorly formed template. I need to be clever and nimble, to discover a way to act that includes the template but is in a large part free of it. 

The template isn’t as useful as I thought it was. It can’t be used in a rigid way where I try to force everything into it. I need to be present to it, to include it, but the template is what needs to be adjusted as I live and respond. It has a lot of good in it, but I need to be aware of where the mutilated spaces in it are, the places that are not well formed. Otherwise "molecules" of impression will arrive which do not well fit the available docking locations in my mangled template, and these "molecules", which have important foods for my Being in them, will be rejected.

Unfortunately, as we grow old, our template of inner memory tends to become more rigid, whereas the opposite ought to take place. The more we open our hearts to Being... the more we trust in life and invest in love... the less rigid these templates of memory appear to us. 

Perhaps it’s okay to let go of past angers and feelings of injustice. Perhaps I should just act from the love that is present now and not my misconfigured attachments to things that happened before. 

I can take each moment as an opportunity to live now and to discover a new way of living. I don’t have to let the past influence everything I do.

There are more complicated thoughts here about the relationship between memory and time, and our experience of it, but I won’t speak of them now. Instead I'm returning to that delicate and intimate place between the actual molecules of my body, where they form magnetic relationships with each other and with the world at large, of which they are a part.

These magnetic relationships are produced by positive and negative charges, which result in attractive and repulsive forces. My body operates in this way on a mechanical level; yet the mechanics of it are the least of the story. My entire being arises from a magnetic relationship that exists between the cells. My consciousness, my awareness and everything in it, including my memory, emerge from this vibration of attraction and repulsion. The two forces need one another in order to be in relationship; and their activity, the exchange between the two, reconciles their relationship and moves towards equilibrium.

This is a technical description of the situation, but the harmony of vibration within my cells is directly available to my awareness. The more sensitive I become to how I am, the more quietly I reside within the innermost core of my being, close to the soul, the more deeply I sense the nature of this vibration, of the way it arouses being itself from a passive slumber into an active state. 

I can explore the world from this state. I have that opportunity today. If I am invested in this magnetic sensation, this organic sensation of Being, I can live more directly. There is a certain level of objectivity to it; it doesn’t think or invent things with its imagination. It resides within the fundamental field of Being. I'm here with it. I just need to remember that through the simple act of sensation alone, not by thinking it up.

This subtle harmonic vibration that creates my Being emerges out of an active force of love. If I’m fortunate, if I deepen my sensation of myself enough by sitting quietly and experiencing being as it is — not as I wish it were through memory or intellect — then I participate in this love in a new way.

Go deep in your heart, and be well-

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.

Will Be, part II

When we examine the events in the order of existence created for men by the Very Saintly Ashiata Shiemash, we discover that they begin not in Babylon — which has always traditionally represented the outer world and its temptations — but in a city named Djoolfapal, the capital of a country called Kurlandtech. These are invented places with no historical counterparts. 

The city of Djoolfapal derives its name as follows. “-Djool” is simply an alternate spelling of the English word jewel. “-Fa” denotes the note fa in the musical scale and Gurdjieff’s enneagram. “-Pal” is an appendage meant to make the town sound like an Asian city. The name means “Jewel (thing of great value) located at the note fa, that is, prepared to move from the note fa to the note sol. This denotes a place where preparations to move from natural influences to spiritual influences are very nearly complete, where the conditions are ideal (the jewel.) And of course the movement to the note sol is a movement to the sun, which Ashiata Shiemash, a ray of light from the sun, is uniquely qualified to mediate. 

 The word “Kur” in German means cure or healing, and “Kurland” would indicate, in that same language, a country in which healing takes place. Extending the analogy by appending “-tech” creates a hybrid German portmanteau word meaning, roughly speaking, country where technical means are applied to effect healing. The linguistic coincidences here are too obvious to overlook, given that Louise March was German and spoke the language fluently.

Extending the analogy, Beelzebub, on first arriving in this land where healing is accomplished by means of technology (work) he entered into relations with the “Tchaftantoori” brotherhood, whose name signifies “to be — or not to be at all.” This word sounds suspiciously like the German words for cooking tandoori meats- “schaffen”needs to make in German and one of the declinations of the verb is, “er, es or sie” (he, it, or she) “schaft,” that is he makes.  The name of the brotherhood, in other words, means those who cook spicy chicken– rather than those who make soup out of chickens by allowing the chicken to run to the kitchen while the water is boiling, an analogy that turns up elsewhere in the book.

The two terrestrial beings who founded this brotherhood were named Poundoliro and Sensimiriniko. These two names likely indicate two important factors for Being that allow the proper evaluation of one’s state. Poundoliro refers to two major European currencies, the English pound and the Italian lira; furthermore, while both indicate valuation, the word pound also indicates weight, or gravity—as does the word ponder. 

The associations are clear enough: to weigh, to ponder, to evaluate.

Gurdjieff coined this particular word to indicate the inner personal gravity which creates enough weight within being for proper evaluation to take place — and that is indeed exactly what these two founders of the brotherhood  do. 

The second protagonist, Sensimiriniko, has a name which likely refers to sensation. 

These two factors within being, according to the story line, have the capacity to reach a correct evaluation of one’s lack within being. 

Their seeking out of the monks dwelling in monasteries in the environs of the city is an account of the recruitment by these active parts of being of various “I's,” different individuals within the inner kingdom, who already have an interest in work of this kind. This represents a connection between the outer, or intellectual, understanding of real inner work (monks are those parts of being which are capable of being aware of and thinking of work) and the inner parts, the sensation and the gravity of being, which Gurdjieff also called magnetic center. 

By the time Ashiata Shiemash arrives, this brotherhood has already prepared the ground to move from fa to sol. Their recognition of the need for corrective action (the Kur) and their exemplary efforts (the Djool) is what renders them eligible for this work.

Ashiata Shiemash, in his role as the ray of light from the sun, works with the brotherhood — the inner parts — to introduce objective ideas. This is the entry of a finer energy into the psyche of the ordinary kingdom of being within us. They form, according to the narrative, a separate and new kingdom within us — a kingdom of objective truths that isn’t contaminated by our ordinary selves.

The story of how the brotherhood began to recruit more and more individuals because of their “intensity of ableness”is not meant to indicate any outward action. The story itself is already so highly idealized that any critical evaluation of it renders its events highly suspect in outer terms. In inner terms, however, it becomes far more plausible. The consequences of this evangelism spread the potential for sensation of conscience throughout the population; in allegorical terms, this represents the exposing of more and more parts of being, or individual I’s, to the effects of conscience.

The culmination of this activity rests in  Ashiata Shiemash’s discourse on objective conscience. It describes the ultimate aim of such inner work.

I leave it to readers to explore the implications of this inner teaching at further length. It raises a rich series of questions about the nature of our inner order and its possibilities. Understanding the text about Ashiata Shiemash from this point of view will require a complete reconfiguration of any average understanding of its trajectory. 

I suspect Gurdjieff hid many more clues to his understanding of such matters in the story line.

What is more compelling than any other thing is the idea that Gurdjieff felt we had the potential to create these conditions within ourselves. 

“Will be,” he said to Louise March; and he meant inwardly, not outwardly. 

The story is not about some ancient past, but the future of our work: hope of consciousness.

Regards,

Lee

Will Be, part I

My friend Philip occasionally tells a story that he heard directly from Louise March, Gurdjieff’s personal secretary. While Louise’s daughter is a close friend of mine, I never knew Louise herself; but Philip did, and his memory of this one story is vivid.

Louise recounted a moment in time at the Prieure, when Gurdjieff was deeply involved in writing the chapters about the very saintly Ashiata Shiemash from Beelzebub’s Tales to his Grandson. She remembered it as intensive work, very concentrated, which took great effort on both their parts. At a certain point, when they were very close to finishing up the work on the chapters, Gurdjieff looked at her one afternoon and said, “you believe was?”

Louise paused for a moment and pondered the question. “Yes, I believe that he must have existed,”she replied.

Gurdjieff looked at her intently and said, “not was.”

 “Will be.”

This particular tale is an extremely important one, because it casts the entire story of Ashiata Shiemash in a new and different light. 

In order to understand what Gurdjieff meant by this arch remark, we need to move beyond the idea of the tale as something with any intention of having an actual historical context.

In the first place, Gurdjieff set the story in the past, when the city of Babylon was still a living entity. Superficially, one might interpret this as a record of an actual historical event, one of Gurdjieff’s legominisms (a special word denoting a story about something that actually happened.) Yet as we know, there is absolutely no record of any such personage in any known history from that era: the character appears, on the surface of things, to be wholly invented. 

We must also consider the fact that the name Ashiata Shiemash is an amalgam of various regional words which mean, literally, ”A ray of light from the sun.”As such, the character represents not so much a person as an event or a force. Both of these point strongly towards an allegorical assignation to the entire story.

Yet even more compelling is the fact that Gurdjieff told his personal secretary that the story was not about an event from the ancient past, as we all assume it must be when we read the book. This beguiling interpretation invokes romance, mystery, ancient cultures, secret wisdom, and so on; it pushes every button a student of esotericism wants to have pushed. But it’s entirely false; the story is not about the distant past, but about something that will happen in the future. 

Gurdjieff conceived of this, in other words, as a story to conceal a teaching that could bring a change in society about. Yet he set it in impossible circumstances; its matrix is firmly ancient, and no society or culture we can conceive of in today’s times — or, for that matter, future ones – can possibly produce the kind of conditions he describes. 

It is not, in other words, a story about any external set of circumstances, past, present, or future. 

It is, instead, an allegory about inner spiritual events. 

In this sense, it has a firm and unerring relationship to at least two other vitally important works in this tradition. The first is Plato’s Republic; there is no doubt Gurdjieff would have read this. The second is Ibn Arabi’s Divine Governance of the Human Kingdom. These works are the products of two major streams of philosophy: Plato’s Republic, arguably the most important philosophical document of Western classicism, and Ibn Arabi’s dissertations on Sufism, perhaps some of the most important philosophical dissertations on Islam in the world.

Each of these texts describes, using elaborate allegory, the nature of the inner organization of man and the proper way to approach a realignment of inner conditions in order to produce a more ordered state of Being. While the circumstances, events, and characters are laid out as though all of the action was taking place in the outer world, every single one of them is actually an inner condition of one kind or another. 

Understanding Gurdjieff’s Ashiata Shiemash from this perspective casts everything that is said about him and his work in a new light. It’s necessary to reread the chapters understanding the entire process and each detail of Ashiata Shiemash’s influence as the influence of inner work on the rearrangement of one’s being.

Regards,

Lee

Letter to a friend

Letter to a younger friend

June 25

…the difficulty with you, and others in the work, is that you want to come to some big golden experience. Preferably, this will happen after a prescribed pattern of activities such as Magickal Exercises which will verify everything you think you have been taught.

Your suffering so far is worth more than every exercise you will ever undertake. If you double your suffering, maybe something will happen. It will be small. You have to stop expecting big things and thinking you have seen big things or are having big things happen in you. 

If you keep working and suffering, perhaps you’ll keep this email and read it again on this date 20 years from now—when I may or may not still be alive—and you will understand what I say when I tell you that the whole point of the Gurdjieff work is tiny changes over a very long period of time.

All the golden experiences you think you are having during this period will be worthless. Only those tiny, incremental changes will make a real difference in you; and that difference will only make you more human and, if you are lucky, very much less special than you think you are now.

The reason that changes have to take place in very small amounts over a very long period of time is that you will otherwise become imbalanced and some part of you will become very great and also very hard, so hard that it will need to be broken if you want to go further than that. 

If you make the tiny changes, everything gradually adjusts, and the parts that can resist are outfoxed.

Go and sense, and be well.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.

In Memorial

 There’s a difference between remorse for one’s own action and remorse on a larger scale. 

The difference lies to some extent in the material that Gurdjieff wrote in the essay, “The Meaning of Life,” which was originally entitled, “Pure and Impure Emotions.”

Most people make the mistake of confusing remorse for their own external actions with remorse of conscience. They aren’t the same thing.

From Gurdjieff’s comments on January 13, 1944:   

“Now you need remorse of conscience. It must grow in you. Here, most have heard about it, they’ve understood it with their heads, they have never felt it. These are impulses that not everyone in the world has had.”

Without trying to describe true remorse of conscience, it’s very important to understand that this is an inner process, not an outer one, and that such remorse arises from deep within to affect the arrangement of the inner world, the inner universe. 

Our principal relationship with who we are and who we wish to be develops in this inner environment, and the atmosphere of remorse is part of what makes the atmosphere of that planet breathable for a true human being. Otherwise, even if you got there you couldn’t stay, because the air is not for you unless you can absorb the substances that it has in it. There is no easy air in this room.

There is a form of remorse that is impersonal, that is pure, in the same way that there are emotions that are impersonal. These are selfless forms of the feeling-impulse. Remorse is not of emotion; it is in its essence a feeling property, that is, a property that has a spiritual, not temporal, affect on a man or a woman’s  being. If you were to take a close reading of Meister Eckhart’s sermons (something that takes many years to do) you would eventually realize that remorse of conscience is closely related to the development of the soul; and that the soul is the closest thing that man has in him, or woman has in her, to God.

I explain this only so that you’ll be clear about the difference between this and all the ordinary regretful or bad feelings that you have about yourself and the things you’ve done. Those emotions point towards remorse, but the path always leads sharply inward, in directions that take it decisively away from the personal. 

The personal is nothing more than a rough approximation of the universal, a symbol for it. The continuity of lives from generation to generation will give you some rough idea of the way this functions. The individual life is the representative of a much larger process; this is what’s meant when it’s said that “the work is not for us.” One could equally say that I’m not capable of taking things in any other way than personally; but I ought to be.

And remorse will help there. 

Individual lives, on whatever scale, are the vowels, consonants, and punctuation marks for much larger sentences. This is akin to Gurdjieff’s observation that human beings have “scrolls” in them upon which the matters of their life and impressions are written. Swedenborg says that a human being’s whole life is written on their scrolls, every single little bit of it, and that after a person dies and arrives in purgatory, angels read it to take their measure, starting from the fingertips and moving inward.

The path from the outward leads inward; the inward leads to remorse, and remorse leads to a much more universal sorrow. 

This sorrow is generative. It is sexual. Only the true initiate can know sexual sorrow. This path is lawful and can be trodden only through intention, an intention that begins in sensation and engages with the feeling. Much of the Work is sexual, but in a way that cannot really be understood using crude approximations of the ordinary body. Higher Being-Bodies have their own sexual lives, just as the lower one does.

The attainment of an impersonal understanding of remorse is the beginning of an opening to a much greater work which can only be undertaken from within, in conditions of attention, surrender, and intelligence.

Every individual event in a life has a selfish nature to it in the same way that individual events in books do. Identification is the equivalent of naively believing in the character as the primary message, and thereby failing to understand the greater narrative that the events are describing. Selfishness, both inwardly and outwardly, reads life as a single sentence, not part of a paragraph or a novel. While compelling, it takes it out of its natural context. 

No one wants to live within the natural context. It isn’t of the ego.

Remorse of conscience is the countervailing force that moves out into the pages of the book and opens the narrative to the entirety of its message. There are many different books; and a life may turn up in more than one of them at the same time. All the books that are being written are ultimately intertwined into one great work, much like Gurdjieff’s “All and Everything;” and perhaps that alone gives us new insight into why he gave the book that title.

Yet all of this is allegorical; and when we speak of remorse we speak of a real inner process that takes place within the living core of one’s being, not as a psychology or philosophy, and not as a thing to be manipulated or employed for other purposes. It is a thing unto itself, which calls attention to the great narrative, not the petite one I have constructed for myself from the things of my life. 

Almost everything Gurdjieff was attempting to bring his students to see in the work of the meetings of 1944 was aimed at bringing them into a sensation and feeling of the great narrative, to move out of the personal one. 

One sees and hears this again and again in his encounters with his pupils. This is a grand task, on a mythical scale, that reaches, in the minutia and particulars, the quirks and irregularities, of his meetings into territory that cannot be imagined with the intellect.

He was attempting to bring his groups into a realm where the members could actually be human beings, where they could truly sense and feel the inner life, and reconnect with our birthright.

May you be well within today.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.

One Place

June 21

There is only one place where everything begins, and that is from within the presence of God.

The longer I live, the more I notice that we all believe things begin somewhere else. Especially in the natural world; mechanistic rationalism is convinced that only the material exists, and that everything that takes place is embedded in the flat landscape of physical law.

Yet this is a place of nothingness that does not take Being into account, and all being Begins in God. We can’t discuss any of the core values that make a difference to human beings— love, goodness, ethics — from a place that begins in nothingness, because nothing exists there except the mindless interactions of materials. The universe is a place that begins in God and within the presence of God, and each one of us expresses that within our own mindfulness.

I offer this moment to you from within my own stillness and my own mindfulness to remind you of what is true, and how Being forms everything from within God. This simple phrase reflects the exact truth which cannot be transcended by any material philosophy. Being forms everything from within God.

You have a right as a creature who has been gifted with Being within this creation to experience the great presence which has created us; to take it into your heart and your soul through the flowing in of God into being which is a natural event, more natural than any nature which science can bestow upon mankind. There is, in fact, no other nature; and its perfection is a truth so durable that no matter what happens, if you receive it within you, you will know truth better and know truth deeper than any set of intellectual facts that can be gathered together to prove one thing or another. There is no proof in truth; it is of itself, and not of an objective that justifies.

To know this truth is to know sadness, and how it can fill us with the love of creation and Being in the same way that God is filled with that same exact love. The world begins in sorrow and discovers joy. Did you know this? If it were created any other way, there could be no joy. It is bound to sorrow in the same way that the sinew is bound to bone. This is a good thing, because it is what builds the bones of the universe and helps them move. God’s love puts flesh on these bones and thus Being arrives within us as a whole thing, which can breathe and live and feel and think.

There are mysteries here too deep and extraordinary to write of. 

You can only know them within the bones of being, inside their marrow, where truth is a thing of the blood in the spirit, not the mind and its turning nature.

I will just say this for this morning. It is enough.

Go. and sense, and be well.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.

Ethics, Music, and Beauty

Yesterday, when I got up in the morning, the question came to me of whether there is an ethic expressed in music. 

It’s a difficult concept to come to. After all, music is a language without any words; it is the language of the feeling. In this sense, there’s a high standard in music; music, at its heart, ought to be beautiful. While the interpretations of beauty are often subjective — even Leonardo da Vinci himself pointed out that extraordinary ugliness represents a special kind of beauty — human beings, whether secular or religious, have little doubt that beauty is real. Beauty emerges from comparative: it is excellent, it stands out from the rest as being more pleasing. It has an aesthetic quality. I think you’ll agree it’s hard to imagine a person who’s repelled by everything; just about every living creature has attractions of some kind, and some of them are aesthetic.

In fact, we might say that all attractions are ultimately aesthetic. The word aesthetic derives from the Greek aisthesthai, meaning that which is perceived. 

Beauty is, in other words, that which is both perceived and considered through evaluation to be better than other things that are perceived. It emerges from an action of discrimination. That discrimination takes place in perception, in observation.

In our essential nature as vessels into which the world flows, all creatures which are alive take place in perception of one kind or another. This is in the nature of life; as I explained yesterday, a tablet of soft material into which impressions are engraved. In the case of human beings — and probably, one might presume, other creatures as well — the act of perception includes a reciprocal action of discrimination, in which things are evaluated and ranked in an order. This is where the idea of ethic enters, because ethic is derived from another Greek word, ethos, which means nature or disposition, but extends itself to the concept of customs, of morality, a moral order.

Thus it is nearly impossible to separate the idea of ethics from the idea of order; and beauty is a consequence of the ordering or ranking of things. All of these are tied together in a single action that takes place in a human being when they see something that appears to be beautiful.

By the time we appreciate beauty, and think to ourselves, “that’s beautiful,” the evaluation has already been made. It takes place in a subtle place that cannot be picked apart by psychology or physiology. It is an action of the spirit. It would be impossible to teach any algorithm this action, because algorithms are creatures of mathematics and not of the soul. We may know, for example, that an algorithm is beautiful in the way it expresses a mathematical truth; but the algorithm can never know that of itself. It would have to be told. Yet in man, and in other creatures, the appreciation and perception of beauty is part of our nature. When a bird chooses their mate, a significant part of the decision is made by how beautiful the mate is. This is true of many animals. A selection by preference takes place. We focus on that in regard to sexual reproduction, but selection by preference is the predominant action of agency in its relationship with the outside world; in other words, the soul is drawn towards what it loves the better. Swedenborg made much of this in his evaluation of how human beings operate from within.

Yet this selection by preference, this evolution of beauty and its accompanying aesthetic and ethic ( right or natural ordering), does not belong to mankind. It is a thing much greater than we are; and one need only appreciate the extraordinary aesthetic of nature and the creatures and objects it produces — take a look at a gem beryl crystal, for example, or praying mantis that is indistinguishable from a leaf —to understand that beauty and its accompanying satellite natures are inherent. They arise with or without man. The same beauty that man perceives today was present 70 million years ago during the age of the dinosaurs. It is certain that dinosaurs, during that era, had their own appreciations of beauty — the extraordinary crests that some of them developed, as well as the now confirmed fact that they bore coats of striking feathers identical to those of birds today —and none of that beauty was there for man. It existed unto itself.

In this way, we know that beauty exists unto itself, and is not just for us. We also know that it bespeaks an order related to this selection by preference, which is the universe in search of its own beauty.

Music, in its own right, speaks of this ethic. It is not the ethic of man, however, which seeks to impose one set of values on another persons in order to regulate their behavior. It’s an ethic free of such constraints, free of the intellectual prisons we build for ourselves. Feeling, left entirely to its own action — which is in a certain sense what music does — creates an extraordinary world of its own that centers around this idea of beauty, which is instinctive within human beings. It is also a shared language; the inflections of minor keys, for example, are understood by all humans to represent a certain kind of sadness. You can feel this; one doesn’t need words to explain it. Certain vibrations affect the human nervous system in that way, because this is how feeling works. It doesn’t need thought to regulate it. Rather, it regulates thought; or, at least, it ought to.

Getting back to Leonardo’s observation that ugliness is also beautiful, we see that beauty is in the “I” of the beholder. Not the physical eye; this is just a machine, although one in and of itself of great beauty. It is in the personage that perceives that beauty resides; it arises from relationship with what is perceived. There is a deep mystery behind perception and love; certain objects have greater beauty than others in any discriminating hierarchy of aesthetics, and among aesthetes— those who appreciate beauty as a primary interest — there is often broad agreement about what beauty consists of. Some of this is formed by culture; but a deeper part of it belongs to the collective unconscious of mankind, and beyond that and even deeper part belongs to the spiritual being of mankind, that is, it resides in the soul itself.

All things, in their essence, are beautiful, even things that seem horrible to us, because all things in creation emanate from the spiritual entirety of God. All things are created through love, exist within love, and emanate love. Love, furthermore, contains its own opposite within it in a fundamentally loving way, which is another mystery of the spiritual life that can only be penetrated through great suffering and acts of perception too deep for the ordinary mind to encounter or explain. I can’t explain myself except to tell you here that it is quite true and worthy of contemplation.

The point I am working towards here is that both the hierarchy of aesthetic order and complete indifference to it are necessary. Beauty inhabits its own octave, in which each note of the octave represents a different level. Every one of them is necessary in order to construct the octave. It is a whole thing that cannot be dissected with the rational mind;but, like the musical octave, songs and symphonies can be created with it. Some of them will be dissonant; it is in the nature of any octave to have the capacity for producing an extraordinary range of relationships, each one of which is a valid expression within the movement of the notes.

This may seem like a rather wide-ranging material relative to the question of whether there is an ethic in music or not. Yet I think that all of these things need to be considered in the question. Any ethic presumes the existence of the good; and I defy anyone to conceive of a world where the existence of the good can be denied. Even a bad person ( as measured by others) believes their own badness to be the good. Within the context of material creation, goodness is relative; and this is where we discover hierarchies, comparisons, and rankings. Yet there is a metaphysical goodness, a goodness of the spirit and the soul, that represents a higher truth; and music can come to that objectively, because it doesn’t belong to the rational mind. Feeling, which is what music touches, has a more sensitive and nuanced ability to understand. The very fact that that understanding isn’t in words is what makes it strong and gives it depth. It stands alongside sensation in this regard. Both of them are representatives of the good.

What that means can only be explored spiritually, and not deductively, by deconstruction, rationalization, and so on. It may, however, with enough examination, provide an interesting new center of gravity from which to consider music.

Go. and sense, and be well.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.

Goodness

June 14

This morning, the clock quietly marks time in the office.

Despite the irritations and insistences of my ordinary parts—the restlessness of the body, the wandering nature of the associative mind—there's a stillness at the heart of being where things begin.

I receive life.

I often speak of the goodness of life, of how the very action of life flowing into me has a quality of a finer nature regardless of what it is that’s received. The kingdom of heaven involves being present to that finer quality of vibration which flows into Being through life and awareness.

I'm part of that; I can participate. I don’t have to set myself apart from life as a creature that can do things, that is in control of this and that and has to have achievements to validate itself. I can just Be. This is actually more than any achievement; it belongs to the goodness of life, not me, and I just align myself to it.

Thank God this is possible. It changes everything.

After I participate in this at the root of Being, I can then do everything else as I always and naturally do; but it’s already transformed, because it begins by drinking this goodness which is the water of life as it flows into being. It's the water in the desert that Moses found; it comes from the stone, the foundation, of my Being, the bedrock that supports and holds up everything that life is.

As I drink this water of life into me, quite gently and without any effort to do anything else but be there for it, a food flows in from the impressions of Being. This food is the truth of the goodness of heaven, which feeds life. It's the manna that sustains Being in the midst of the desert. I thought I would go hungry; my fears begin there.

But I won't.

It occurs to me how different the world would be if we were all preoccupied (occupied before our actions) with a wish to just be good, ordinary human beings. Not magical, powerful beings, but just beings with an intelligent and active wish to be good towards others and to appreciate the value of this life we’ve been given. If I examine my actions I see that too much of me fails to start in this place, on this level. Whether I'm doing it inwardly or outwardly, too much of me is devoted towards the idea that I should climb mountains and be a king of this or that. I don’t remember to just fulfill my ordinary responsibilities and meet my duty with care and attention. I’m busy dreaming about the great things I can be or the great things I can do.

In the meantime, the great thing that flows into me, life itself, gets ignored.

Can I see that I think I’m more important than life? This is where all the problems begin.

It’s worthwhile to come into relationship with this finer vibration of life itself, and ask myself, what is life? How am I now? I can do this all day long. It changes my relationship to life and I see how I just don’t know and cannot know what will happen next. I have to accept the conditions now, not reject them and try to to direct them.

If I accept the conditions I’m in now, their goodness influences me more directly.

If I'm under the influence of the goodness of what takes place now, I correspond to it; my own Being reflects it. In this way I become good through goodness, instead of trying to be good through myself. In fact, I don’t know what to be good is; I keep thinking I do, but all this is part of that same ego that thinks it knows everything.

If I become good through goodness, I begin to understand what it means when the Lord’s prayer says, Thy will be done.

I begin to see how I resist the goodness that is offered: always thinking I know better. It is strange that we humans are universally and eternally offered a goodness to inhabit, right in front of us at every moment, flowing into our bodies as the water of life and the manna of heaven, and we just say no to it. That’s not good enough. We want something better than heaven. Better than God. Better than goodness.

Even more strangely, we think we know what is better than heaven, better than God, better than goodness. Every day we pose and strut and act like we know more than the great teachers who brought us these messages. We critique them as though we knew more than they do about God and goodness.

This is the reality. When we are faced with things that are better than us, instead of recognizing them, keeping our mouths shut and bowing our head to receive their goodness, we race about shouting them down. This happens in every life as an individual; when we see it happening in the world at large in our society, it is nothing more than the collective, much louder noise of our individual beings.

Ah, then we get upset at how loud and dissonant it is. We don’t realize we are just listening to ourselves at greater amplification.

These are just my thoughts and impressions this morning. I’ll go forth into life and have to suffer some of this behavior myself. It’s not so easy to be free of it. I can’t think my way out of it. But the more I come into relationship with myself and ask myself this question, “what is this life?” the more I may open myself, quite gently and just a little bit, to a better quality of impression, a slightly better sense of goodness and value.

Within that goodness and value of life as it flows in lies all the love of God for his creation.

Even in the midst of the worst that the world can bring, it is the first thing worth seeking. It is assured.

Go... and sense, and be well.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.