The Quantum State of Being, Part III: Sensation and Quantum Being

Human beings are built with the capacity to sense the action of inner gravity within Being. This is an essential function in order to understand what it means to be human; it’s impossible, for example, to understand even the very first thing about Gurdjieff’s chemical factory and the ingestion of impressions from anything but a theoretical perspective without it. The human being has to acquire this permanent center of gravity — Gurdjieff, in his early years, called part of its function “magnetic center” — which Jeanne de Salzmann referred to as a permanent sensation.

 The word sensation can be misleading, because while this “permanent” sensation manifests as a sensation, without considerable experience, one doesn’t understand that what one is sensing is the gravitational attraction within the molecular and atomic state of being that arises as a direct result of the transition from the quantum to the classical state. 

Conscious labor is a relationship with the gravity of Being.

The more Being one acquires, the more concentrated an awareness of that force becomes. Attractive forces function within the physical body to collect and concentrate what Gurdjieff called “higher hydrogens.” 

 Permanent sensation, which is actually gravitational sensation, gives the organism a physical sense and awareness of its place in the rate of creation. This is because the personal gravity of individual Being anchors one as an individuated manifestation of consciousness. 

That is to say, the action of Gurdjieff’s “I am” performs the same function within Being as the function of universal (fundamental) consciousness at the root of classical reality. 

When “I am,” I recapitulate and participate in that same action on my level. This takes the indiscriminate, undifferentiated (what Gurdjieff called automatic or mechanical) action of consciousness and places it within a field of forces where it has responsibility. Described in physics terms, my wave/particle function has collapsed and I'm now either a wave or particle; but this is oversimplification. The most essential character I’ve acquired isn’t that of a force, function, wave or particle. 

It’s a function of responsibility: an ability to respond. 

Unformed, I’m passive and have no such ability. 

Formed, I become active. 

On a cosmological scale, quantum and classical reality are the holy denying and holy affirming entities that interact with God’s consciousness – the reconciling force — to create everything that is.

 My inward sense of gravity—my ”conscious labor”—places me within Being. Living and functioning more fully as a human being brings an additional set of challenges, duties, responsibilities, and complexities, during which I must never lose that sense. It’s what creates “I am” before anything else happens. 

 One can understand directly from one’s personal inner experience how gravity creates Being within each thing and creature. Gravity isn’t just some physical force that holds things down, makes them full, and pulls them around each other in orbits. It’s the force of intelligent relationship itself, the organizational principal around which all Being is created. Physics hasn’t been able to tie it into  theory because it’s an action of Divine Intellect, not particle physics. 

It’s care; it’s compassion. 

It is, furthermore, the action of Being within its own relative sphere of influence.

 Planets are intelligent beings on a level higher than our own, as are suns; and that human beings function, in the case of the earth, as one of the organs of the Earth’s perception. This understanding was built into many ancient traditions and cultures according to varieties and flavors of interpretation that appear to be allegorical to us today. Yet almost all of them were based, at one time or another, on active perception of the intelligent functions of inner gravity. Every legitimate esoteric and initiate society throughout history has understood this question the same way, even though it has been expressed in a wide variety of theological vehicles from primitive to sophisticated societies. We can’t recognize this today; it was recorded symbolically instead of using mathematics and technical instruments, which is what we are accustomed to associating with “real” knowledge in today’s world. True understanding exceeds the boundaries of any physical science.

If we’re looking for a unified field theory, in other words, it doesn’t lie in the technical analysis of the forces. Consciousness is a greater force than computational mathematics. We should remind ourselves, as we analyze our world that mathematics is not a “real” thing in itself, but rather a descriptive tool to order and assess phenomena which by their very nature far exceed the action of the tool itself.

Wishing the best for you on this day,

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.