The Axis of being, Part III

Rocamadour, France

I spoke earlier this week about acquiring an understanding of our emotional part — which, in its higher aspect, is our capacity for feeling — as the axis of our Being. 

This goes back to the root of all action within life, which begins at the molecular level with a care for how things are, a care for the effort to be, a caring about the current state of things and the future. 

As I explained some time ago in this space, cells have molecules in them that care about whether the other molecules are correctly arranged; and this is the essential expression of an inner wish for order at the lowest level of Being within life. 

I’d like you to think about this carefully, because mechanistic rationalism — which proposes that there is nothing but material, and no actual motive force behind it other than sheer action – would have us believe that caring is an accident of matter. If we begin there, then caring on any level is basically meaningless—without any real purpose— and the premise of metaphysical humanism rejects this idea entirely. 

Caring is the essential quality of matter — the action of care, which is connected to wish, is a force that manifests within the emanation of the particles of God. Every particle cares; every particle seeks partners in caring.

We are built of this factual circumstance. Everything we are arises from it. We are, in other words, both creations of God’s care — we contain it within ourselves in these particles — and expressers of that care both to ourselves and to one another. 

If we do not embody that care, take responsibility for it, and represent it both within ourselves in the way we care for ourselves and outside of ourselves and the way that we care for others, we do not fulfill our Being-duty.

 We find a comment from Meister Eckhart on this need for care:

Three things especially are needful in our works: to be orderly, understanding, and mindful. 'Orderly' I call that which corresponds in all points to the highest. 'Understanding' I call knowing nothing temporal that is better. 'Mindful' I call feeling living truth joyously present in good works. 

—Meister Eckhart, The Complete Mystical Works, Maurice O’C Walshe. Sermon 9, p. 87

 This idea of being orderly, understanding, and mindful relates to the physical, intellectual, and emotional parts of our being. 

To be orderly is to have a good physical order. This is what those tiny molecules that repair incorrect arrangements in ourselves are doing. 

Understanding is needed to do that: this is the discriminatory faculty of intellect that can see the difference between what is ordered and what is not. 

To be mindful is to have feeling, to care.

 So we see how even in the supposedly ignorant European Middle Ages, esoteric understanding was keenly attuned to an awareness of the three centers and how they function; and we see, furthermore, that mindfulness is a quality of the emotional center, of feeling. 

This is because feeling operates at the highest rate of vibration within our Being and has the greatest capacity both to help bring order, discriminate, and to do good, which is the Godly purpose behind all being in the first place. 

That's why Meister Eckhart ends his comment on mindfulness the way he does.

 I doubt it's possible to do any better job than Meister Eckhart did to summarize this so briefly and so perfectly. Yet we need to do a great deal of pondering and inward examination within ourselves in order received this intelligible and feeling knowledge he's presented. 

If we don’t finely tune our awareness of our various parts, and invest ourselves more thoroughly within them, we never develop the capacity to see how everything that we are turns around the axis of Being. We eventually grasp it from an intellectual point of view, there's no doubt; but if we refuse to engage deeply in both ordinary emotion and in the capacity for feeling which is developed through a better connection in the centers, and we refuse to immerse ourselves most completely in these processes, we are unable to become more human and to understand what humans are; and, furthermore, our suffering is never well understood, even though it ought to become the key to who we are and how we behave both inwardly and outwardly.

Wishing the best for you on this day,

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.