World: Illumination

Hell (right side), from the Tympanum at Abbey Church of St. Foy, Conques

Photograph by the author

 It turns out that the word world perhaps contains more information than I thought it might about the nature of entering into our work. Gurdjieff used the word in a sophisticated way to indicate important aspects of Being.

Our world — our experience of life through time — is created first through our inner being, our organic sensation of ourselves. It is then maintained (held within the hand) through a sense of touch, a physical inner contact or thread of awareness which is maintained through time within Being. 

We can’t truly appreciate what life means—what the word world means—unless intellect and sensation are active and engaged within Being. Until that happens, we’re limited to the psychological, temporal, and material explanations of the ideas of world. 

World needs, instead, to become a physical, emotional, and intellectual experience whose three aspects acquire equal weight within perception. 

This needs to take place as a sensory engagement, not a thought process. It may begin with the intention of intellect, to be sure; but the intention has to become alive within each of the three parts that have a wish to participate. There must be an intention not just of the mind, but an intention of body and an intention of feeling to accompany it. These three forces need to be balanced; and since they are essentially unequal to begin with, it’s a delicate matter. The intellect alone, which wishes to orchestrate these affairs, can’t manage the affairs of the body and the affairs of the feelings—simply because it knows nothing of their capacities. It’s a separate intelligence. It is only one, in other words, of three different worlds that exist within a human being, all of which need to combine harmoniously in order to create the fourth estate, the fourth way.

Until we understand this more directly through an organic sensation of our being, which is the fundamental texture that can tie our individual fragments of awareness together, everything we see is like being in a dark room that is occasionally illuminated by the flash of a strobe light. 

When that happens, we see everything in the room and are perhaps enormously impressed; but then our awareness slides back into a darkness that allows us to stumble around without helping us to establish sane relations between the various inner objects that surround us. These objects, by the way, are the various fragments of our own being, which are disconnected. We keep bumping into them, often painfully.

Knitting together the tangled yarn of our awareness with sensation gradually allows a whole piece of cloth to emerge. At this point inner illumination becomes more regular. If sensation becomes relatively permanent, the light will be turned on in such a way that we can see the whole world — our whole inner room — without the fragmentary snapshots which have plagued us for a lifetime. 

This is an uncomfortable experience. The fact is that we’ve been bumping into objects in our room for our whole lives without knowing what they were. Taking them for granted, and assuming that they both belong in the room and that all the pain they are causing is necessary and acceptable in one way or another. Turning on the light of awareness within our inner room through a relationship with organic sensation allows us to begin to deploy a faculty of discrimination — mediated by feeling — that allows us to acknowledge where we actually are. 

We discover the world in which we live, the inward world, not the outward one. And it’s this inward world which we urgently need to illuminate: everything else that takes place both inside us and outside us depends first and foremost upon that illumination.

 Instead of focusing, however, on this understanding of this inner world which is begotten not made, and has the potential to receive the force of Christ and God as a master and resident—not a concept or thought process—we always focus on the outer world, and believe that everything we need to achieve and understand is attached to that.

Wishing the best for you on this day,

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.