Drawn Down Into God

Capital at  Eglise Notre-Dame, Cunault

Using acanthus leaves to detail elaborate levels and interactions of divine energies 

Notes from Aug 17/18, part 6 

Hadewijch’s  roots of Charity, the foundational source of love, are drawn down into God.

 What does this mean?

 Gurdjieff told Ouspensky that a human being must develop in both directions in order to become whole; no connection to the level above a human being can develop without a corresponding and equally powerful development to the level below him. In saying this, he touched on the many ancient mythologies which view the metaphysics of the soul as a tree whose branches reach into heaven and whose roots reach deep in the earth; yet those roots reach for God the below human being in exactly the same way that they reach for God above him, because God creates all levels and exists in equal measure within each one of them.

A human being cannot be charitable unless the roots of their being, the sensory contacts which feed themselves on the basis of a man’s or woman’s existence, are developed in love. That love must be fundamental as an inner source of nourishment, not a love of the world and its things, but a love that begins before the world exists.

 This is a delicate matter, this question of going down into God, but it brings us to the physical questions I raised in The Quantum State of Being. God is not just an abstract conception; God is the physical substance of which the universe is made — love itself – and that substance can be concentrated within any of the beings that exist on the various levels of the cosmos. Concentration, however, cannot develop without the attendance development of sensation and feeling, which constitute the root of the tree and its branches and leaves. Our own being becomes the trunk, a vessel which creates a relationship between what is below us and what is above us and allows the spiritual energies of the cosmos — embodied in our planetary and solar existences — to flow up and down, exchanging their materials. Gurdjieff’s law of reciprocal feeding comes to mind here; such work is our role. We are here to help the hanbledzoin, the essential force of the universe on our level — love — circulate. Gurdjieff contended that this concentration of force helps to form what he called the Kesdjan, or astral, body. Put in more straightforward terms, we form a connection between the moon and the sun which becomes an experiential conduit for sacred energies. The fact of this was well known to ancient societies and we see remnants of it widespread in their symbolism across the planet. It remains a completely misunderstood enigma to modern man, because the vehicles for developing this kind of sensation and feeling have been almost entirely lost.

  Human beings, across the planet, grow up in the remains of our religious societies believing that man needs to reach out to God. Never, aside from Gurdjieff’s teachings, do we hear that we need to be drawn down into God; yet in any sane model of the cosmos the sustaining force of God’s being must, inevitably, be just as present beneath us as it is above us. The image of the Virgin Mary standing on the lunar crescent, a common symbolic trope in the Catholic Church, is a reminder of this.

 This idea of God as a sustaining force that supports us physically in our manifestation as creatures needs to become a living experience for. It becomes an organic reminder of our subservient position on this planet, rather than a theoretical proposition. 

 Our charity, if we have any — our  intelligent compassion, our intelligent generosity, which ought to be part of the birthright of every human being – is rooted in this condition of being drawn down into God. That is to say, real feeling,  real intelligent feeling, which is what charity consists of, has its roots as well and the experience of sensation.

 Virtue and charity are grounded and have roots. The expressions themselves, most certainly chosen by intention when Hadewijch used them, bring us closer to the earth, like the ancient Sanskrit terms for spiritual work: tantra, the loom— always made of wood –, and kunda,  the vessel, always made of clay. 

Spiritual work is grounded. It has gravity. The relationship to God begins within our spiritual gravity. This brings us back, once again, the relationship between actual gravity as it manifests within the universe and the nature of gathering its sacred materials back into spiritual centers of gravity. In the case of human beings, these spiritual centers of gravity are intelligent and have the capacity for agency. That agency, according to all the great teachings, ought to be virtuous and charitable – that is, it ought to be good, and it ought to be sharing and caring for others. Agency that goes in the other direction, that of selfishness, is, as Gurdjieff would characterize it in his essay on the meaning of life, unintelligent – he called it mechanical, but one might just as easily label it stupid. Wishing the best for you on this day,

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.