World: Maintenance

Heaven (left side), from the Tympanum at Abbey Church of St. Foy, Conques

Photograph by the author

Gurdjieff’s interest in Being— which we’ll take, for the purposes of this essay, to be the fundamental ground within which consciousness arises and manifests— begins with the premise that it is created—not made. 

We hereby refer to the passage from the rite of Holy Communion describing Christ as begotten not made, that is to say, procreated or born, not fashioned using outer materials.

 This is important from both a spiritual and a psychological point of view, because what it says to us is that the human being  and Being itself, is not fashioned, at its root and in its essence, from what takes place outwardly. This fundamental understanding of esoteric Christianity can be found throughout the works of Meister Eckhart; his insights on the matter are nearly indispensable. 

Humanity is born, procreated, from the very essence of Being itself: begotten from an inner life, not made by the outer one. This vital (life-giving) distinction draws a line between mechanistic rationalism, the idea that everything is fashioned by the material and rests only on the material for its reason for existence and being, and metaphysical humanism, the understanding through organic experience that everything in being is created, not made. 

We find ourselves in a dialogue here about whether the material gives birth to life, or life gives birth to the material. (See Emmanuel Swedenborg’s comments on the matter, which are definitive.) Worlds are not fashioned through and by the material, but fashioned through the subtle and inexplicable nature of the soul and of consciousness and being itself. It cannot be otherwise. This creation, begotten not made, reveals the essential nature of both Christ — God as a force in the world — and our own essential nature as vicegerents of God. 

 Our world is created. This is what the inner life of man consists of, the creation of our world, and from Gurdjieff’s perspective it functions according to laws which we must understand. The first law which we have the capacity to understand is the law regarding the fact that we are begotten, not made — that we are the seeds of a force expressed through the existence of humanity, both individually and collectively.

I live, as you do, directly within the experience of this world — my ”man–age” — which I become responsible for—must manage, meaning to handle, or touch.  

That is, engage with intimately. 

It is only through a direct and tactile experience of my creation, the arising of my consciousness through an inner force in every moment of existence, that I can begin to have any direct understanding of what it means to engage with the laws of world creation: the creation of my being. This takes place strictly in an inner sense, and it arises as a force before I encounter anything within the outer world. 

The outer “world” contains the third-order meaning of the word world, that is, a cosmos or a set of events that is external;  yet let us remember, as we continue this exploration, that the word world always applies to man and time, or, consciousness and the perception of impressions, so even the tertiary meaning of the word world is dependent upon a human force. Objects, events, circumstances, and conditions which are perceived are all utterly dependent on human perception in the first place. Human perception as an experience of awareness exists apart from the material (is meta-physical) and all of what is physical and perceived is irrevocably dependent on the existence of a human to perceive it (humanism, the fact that all consciousness and perception is dependent on a human force.) 

 This primacy of human force, which mechanistic rationalism calls anthropic,  that is, of man, can never be divorced from discussions about the universe, because the discussions themselves are dependent on man for their prosecution, even if one attempts (laughably, from a philosophical point of view) to remove him from the argument while having the discussion. 

That may seem like an intellectual twist; but the primacy of human force, the fundament of organic Being and the organic experience of Being, is not solely intellectual in its essence. It’s composed of all three of the forces that create a human being— body, mind, and feeling. 

We begin by inhabiting this place of awareness wherein we are in a body, are able to think of that, and have feelings about it. These forces are created, not made. When we encounter the world around us, outside us, that third-order world of things, we do so from the place in which we are born within Being.  

Our perception creates this world we call the experience of being human; and the more deeply we are invested in that initial experience—the more clearly we see how it precedes the existence of all other experience through an organic relationship to it—the more clearly we can see what Gurdjieff’s laws of world maintenance consist of.

 The word maintain is derived from the Latin manū and tenēre,  which mean to hold in the hand— bringing us back once again to this tactile requirement of intimate inner contact. 

We must needs touch ourselves from within with a sensory quality that transcends intellect alone— that is physical— in order to maintain, to grasp, the nature of our inner and our outer life. It is this intermittent direct contact from within that enables our ability to evaluate the impressions that flow into us, and the way that we see our lives — our attitude.

Wishing the best for you on this day,

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.