A Broken Heart, Part III: The Concentration of Desire

So we see in the flawed doctrine of eternal damnation, which erroneously turns damnation into a thing of sorts—a physical place in which crude tortures take place—a rough approximation, in physical terms, of an actual metaphysical state of non-refinement, in which the particles of God’s Being, although collected through the impressions of Being, never become distilled into a concentration of finer substances. My self-will is what prevents this; in the stubbornly temporal (not eternal) ego-experience of life and Being, even my suffering is about me and how I suffer. Gurdjieff’s emphasis on objectivity (read, non-judgment) bears close examination in relationship to this. When I sense inwardly and organically (conscious labor) and when I feel inwardly and organically (intentional suffering) these two faculties have a property of objectivity to them. They are already touched by the concentration of the Divine from within; and they lead the way towards a greater, more objective, understanding of Being through Grace; for insofar as “gold” (refined particles of Divine Being) is present, so more gold can be acquired. Gold begets gold; or, as was said in the Gospels, To he who hath shall much be given.Those who do not have are thrown into the fire; yet this expression is a bit off the mark, because what really happens is that the fire never acts on them. 

We can understand this, if we wish to, from the perspective of the enneagram. It’s a whole system; and yet it’s typical to become stuck on the right side of the diagram, in which an endless cycle of the forces of material desire and power trap us without developing the force needed to pass from fa to sol. To do that, the fire of remorse needs to be lit; only then does the dross of our ordinary sin begin to be burned off. In this action, our sin itself becomes more concentrated (lesser sins burn easily, but greater ones endure.) 

The more concentrated the remaining matter of our sin becomes within us, the greater anguish it causes; the greater the anguish, the greater the remorse. So one sees one needs one’s sin if the inner flame that spurs us towards the Lord is to become hotter, hot enough to concentrate our desire sufficiently. 

This concentration of desire is a principle theme for Hadewijch, Catherine, and others, and should not be discounted in the same way their prosecution of eternal damnation ought to be.

Part IV of this seven part series publishes on Dec. 3.

An additional note to readers:

...New installments from The Inherent Wave of Being— A Treatise on Metaphysical Humanism will begin Jan. 2020. 

If you haven't read the original series of posts, it published between September and November 2018.

May your heart be close to God, 
and God close to your heart.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.