Notes on the Inner Meaning of Conscious Labor, part I

Intellect's object and lodgement is essence; not accident, but pure unmixed Being in itself.

Meister Eckhart, Sermon 3

If I were to rephrase this in other terms, I might say: 

Intellect’s aim and center of gravity is essence; not automatic association, but residence within its own unadulterated nature.

 In any event. As is so often the case, I find myself taking notes based on extended experience and the results of pondering its essential nature.

The term conscious labor — a unique invention of Gurdjieff’s, playing a central role in his explanation of the law of octaves and the nature of what human beings are required to engage in in order to develop spiritual Being— has many meanings according to level. It is, unfortunately, the natural tendency to interpret this within the context of the mind and automatic association.

 I say this because of the powerful and nearly unavoidable habit, sometimes weirdly believed to be the only and even absolute approach, of using the intellect to try to understand the Gurdjieff work in particular and spiritual work in general. 

You cannot know God with the mind; that is, at least, with the average mind of every day being. God is not rooted in thought or ideas, nor is God found within comparisons and associations. 

Hence the apophatic tendency, which is to find God by defining everything that God is not: He isn’t, apparently, anything. At least not anything material. The point is that you can’t think your way into heaven — yet this is what we always try to do. As I’ve put it recently to many others, I demand a prenup — an agreement beforehand that everything sacred will submit to my intellect as it arrives, and, as long as it agrees to do that, well then, we’ll agree to conduct this search for the inward understanding of heaven together. Just on my terms, that’s all. Heaven has to arrive without me giving up what I have.  If this reminds you of the parable of the rich man entering the kingdom of heaven, there we are.

 Conscious labor carries a meaning related to the development of a higher rate of harmonic vibration within Being.

The development of a permanent sensation of Being — an understanding of one’s Being that’s firmly grounded in the sensation of the cells and molecules, in the vibration that takes place within the living reception of life in the body — is the foundation of a harmonic vibration for conscious labor. The body receives life: Swedenborg’s inflow,  de Salzmann’s influence. While what’s called “higher energy” — Eckhart’s Holy Spirit — is the force of Grace itself, the physical vibrations it imparts, which are slowly concentrated over many years, enhance and deepen this harmonic vibration of Being.  Anyone who doubts that the nature of being itself is fundamentally grounded in vibration has ignored everything quantum physics teaches us; no more really need be said on that subject.

The first aim of any extended spiritual effort must be to understand this from an organically intelligent point of view. 

Zen Buddhism calls this “having the marrow” of the inner work — that is, one doesn’t just ”have” (that’s how they say it)  the flesh, blood, or bones—each of which is a product of the fundamentals of sensation — one has the marrow, which is the place from which it arises, in the same way that the marrow of our bones creates blood. It’s the heart of the matter, and the essential place from which all of the life that flows into the rest of Being arises. We could liken it to a base note or undertone that anchors the sounding of an entire symphony; we could liken it to the beginning of mortality, which expresses itself as its own, opposite, life, in the root of our Being. There, life and death are inseparable.

 This is a physical vibration, not a thought. It can’t be reduced to thought. It can’t be grasped by thought. Yet it begins in the fundament of intelligence, so it expresses itself as intelligence from the instant that it’s encountered. And it exists before “my” Being: it's that selfsame essence within which intellect ought to dwell, an unspoken essence of intellect that is first itself, without any words. Intelligence before the words: a vibration of Being.

This relates to conscious labor in the following way: to engage with this vibration, to have it concentrated within Being, is to receive the emanations within the solar system of the sun itself, which are (for our purposes) eternal; the sun is always emanating at one level or another. It creates a baseline; everything that’s harmonically aligned with this solar emanation of energy vibrates along that same baseline. 

The fundament of spiritual Being depends on a vibration — an organic sense of Being — that first acquires the capacity for vibrating at that baseline. It then receives a wide range of energies that vibrate at higher levels, as the sun does the work it can and must do to help raise the rate of vibration throughout the rest of the solar system.

Wishing the best for you on this day,

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.