Resolution and Being, part III

As an individual, my own psyche is deeply rooted in the same kind of action: I have an overall wish, both personally and in terms of my own culture, for things to be resolved in favor of the good. My spiritual quest is just as invested in this wish as my ordinary being; perhaps even more so, because it begins with an absolute assumption that such a thing is possible.

Yet this insight that I had on Wednesday night calls that all into question; the nature of the cosmos is such that there is no resolution. Although there may be a good and a bad, although there may be love and hatred– these things are truths within all conscious beings –there is no final answer to the conflict, no end point to the story.  

Ahem. 

Human beings don't think this way. Apocalyptic visions such as the end times where everything is sorted out are a standard fixture in mythologies and religious practices; even within the context of the battle between heaven and hell, we want it all to end, and most of us (we hope) want Heaven to win. Yet there’s an obvious contradiction in this wish; heaven can never be heaven without a hell to struggle against. In this peculiar condition, Heaven needs hell in order to exist; it depends on it. 

I won't pretend to offer resolution to this philosophical conundrum; its very existence helps to prove the point of this essay. The idea that everything can end once and for all with a win for the good guy is childishly naïve, an attractive place for lazy thinkers to rest while they watch the clouds go by. The requirement for the active thinker, the one with the real wish for Being, is not to reach the end but to be willing to live within the story, which is endless.

To participate in the process.

The old saying goes that all things must pass; but perhaps it might be better said, all things continue. When Gurdjieff referred to God as, among other things, His Endlessness, he was referring to exactly this property. If God's most essential emotional property is His Mercy, His most essential physical property is His Endlessness. Assigning the third property of God to Wisdom, we see that God is Wise, Merciful, and Endless. There’s an eternal state; but there is no resolution. Endlessness alone guarantees that. 

So here we have God’s metaphysical condition.

I am a reflection of that same metaphysical condition, being a reflection of God’s Human being; and so I am subject to the same conditions. I need to be in front of hell in order to reach for heaven; nothing ever ends. Perhaps this is the source of Gurdjieff’s admonition to engage in constant struggle.

All philosophy aside, however, what I saw in myself on Wednesday night was that there is a deeply ingrained, subtle part of myself that absolutely believes in resolution. 

This part is rooted so deep in my being that it’s part of the very fabric of what I am: a field of unseen energy from which all of my action arises. It makes the assumption before anything takes place that resolution is possible. It not only makes that assumption, it demands that I seek resolution; and it equally demands of the world that the resolutions that are achieved satisfy me. 

Perhaps, here, I come up against the essential engine of selfishness Swedenborg so firmly believed we must work against. Gurdjieff, by the way, absolutely believed in exactly the same thing: a wish we have for ourselves is ultimately worthless, because it does good for no one other than us. It is only the wish for other people, with the heart, that can bear real fruit.

Yet even in this, there is a wish for resolution: a wish, in a certain sense, for that which cannot be, but for which I must nonetheless strive. Even if I wish for the good and wish it for all, it presumes a destination.

And the insight that I had on Wednesday night inferred quite clearly that there actually is no destination –at least, no destination within the world of objects, events, circumstances, and conditions. Every result, every resolution, is highly temporary, dependent on circumstance, and subject to revision. There’s no “single” object, event, circumstance, or condition; all of them only exist in relationship to one another, and no one of them can be at all without its partners. All of them are constantly changing their relationship to one another in a movement that takes place from instant to instant. In this sense, they are as ephemeral as the stuff from which atoms are made. Atoms are not made from things; they are arisings of relationships between energies. 

Wishing well for you on this day,

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.