The Axis of Being, Part IV—Formlessness

Rocamadour, France

Now, I must grapple with some very difficult matters that are going to be truly much harder to explain that what has come before. 

Formlessness has, like all other aspects of manifest reality, a tripartite nature. That is, it has affirming, denying, and reconciling properties.

 There is a formlessness that precedes all creation which is perfectly ordered. 

The instant that it encounters creation, it becomes formlessness in its ground state within creation, which is completely disordered. 

Perfect order and perfect disorder exists, in this way, as mirror images of one another: one in God and the other in creation. They are identical and yet opposite.

Creation, the instant it manifests, begins to move back towards perfect formlessness, which we call God but what is in fact an ultimate order that, although apparently dispersed in creation, has never truly surrendered itself at all. It has merely changed its aspect relative to our capacity for understanding.

I understand that this is a big idea; and perhaps these big ideas aren’t so good for our personal work. We need to encounter them and ponder them, but we should certainly discard them as often as possible and turn back into our scrutiny of our inward state of Being. That action, after all, is the most essential action we can undertake relative to our responsible in the return to perfect formlessness. After we appreciate the beauty, complexity, and extraordinary nature of all that there is in terms of these ideas, we should come back to the experience of self, which creates the fabric, the texture, of what it means to be human.

 I have a responsibility to order myself within myself as a mirror of God’s Being. 

I do this within the context of what stillness I can discover in order to receive the higher influences that can help me grow in this way. 

If I get too caught up in the intellectual ideas of order and disorder, form and formlessness, I'm taken away from the physical vibration of my molecular Being. Even though my efforts in the intellectual area seem honest, there's an insincerity in them, because already I have forgotten that the intelligence of my physical being and the intelligence of feeling are absolutely necessary in order to bring me to the understanding of life I wish to have. 

I have to continually discard everything that is in orbit around me and come back to this perfect, orderly formlessness which can receive something more true about my life.

If I engage in this action correctly, perhaps I begin to touch the true nature of formlessness, which delivers a real feeling – humility to the core of my being: one in which I see how small I am, how little I know, and how absolutely as possible I ought to discover a loving, intelligent, mindful, and compassionate approach to other beings. 

Indeed, if I have even a taste of this, I see that I could throw out every single concept, every cosmological and philosophical and theological understanding, and still have every shred of my true Being left intact, because my true Being belongs to God and has an essence rooted in these actions towards myself and other beings.

The difficulty with humanity in general, including myself, is that we know about all of this from a theoretical point of view, and yet we never learn how to manifest it organically, which is where all the real force of our true Being could be expressed. 

Gurdjieff used to say that human beings had extraordinary capacities for Being, capacities so great that it was impossible to understand them.  He sometimes used to brag about how he used to be able to concentrate his power to kill a yak from miles away, and so on. 

This leads us to mistakenly believe that he was referring to magical psychic powers, metaphysical abilities of hypnosis and mind over matter, and so on. That is to say, that he was referring to things that could bring us special metaphysical power over the world or others.

My impression, so far as I understand — and that is, of course, limited — is that all of the real extraordinary capacities he was speaking of involve love in one way or another. 

There can be no doubt that love is the most extraordinary quality any human being can manifest; without it, we are not even human, as so many manage to conclusively demonstrate in the world around us. 

Our purpose is to develop a greater capacity for love, along with a greater appreciation of all the love that has been invested in the least thing around us in creation. To become vessels for that substance as it concentrates, and to offer it generously not just to ourselves — and that is, with spiritual intellect, necessary— but to everyone around us. 

If we see a lack in ourselves, and we truly begin to see it clearly, the lack isn't so much related to a selfish wish for "my" inner development. It's related to our lack of love. The true nature of formlessness is secretly related to love, because both in its perfect and its imperfect state — its completely ordered and its incompletely ordered state — love remains indefinable, formless, and all-powerful, since it is what both God and His creation are made of.

 As I have done so many times throughout the course of my life, I turn back to this question of what it means to be loving, from an organic point of view. 

If I am not asking myself this question at every moment, —

THEN I am not working.

Wishing the best for you on this day,

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.