Photograph by the author
To begin to live deeply enough to be truly human will break one’s heart.
This happens when one senses the whole of life, and everything it is. This sensation, which ought to be a natural and inherent one in every human being, is almost entirely atrophied in man.
Gurdjieff’s system of inward development was meant, among other things, to re-awaken this capacity in man. The re-concentration of the particles of God, the Sorrow of His Endlessness, in man, has the inevitable and entirely objective result of awakening this capacity. Yet even within the Gurdjieff work itself this subject is poorly understood and rarely spoken of, simply because folk don’t ever develop the capacity for it. One could perhaps even become a Superman and fail to understand this one most essential point.
That’s the danger of being a Superman.
There’s no blame to be assigned here. The tendency in every spiritual work is to indulge in theory and philosophy, rather than coming to terms with the simple, ground-floor activity of Being, which is where the concentration of Divine Love and Wisdom can take place.
How many times have I said it? Until it becomes boring, perhaps, yet one cannot say it too much: only through the initial impulse of organic sensation can this capacity be re-acquired and developed. Even then, many years of hard inner work lie ahead. One has to be willing to suffer; and no one wants to suffer. Human beings want satori, we want nirvana, we want liberation: but no one wants suffering except as a temporary condition to be tolerated on the way to these wonderful inner places collectively described as “freedom.”
The medieval Christian mystics—who had, to be sure, their own flaws and misunderstandings, including some obsessively myopic perspectives—at least knew that suffering lies at the core of the human experience. Gurdjieff wholeheartedly resurrected this altogether unpopular idea in Beelzebub’s Tales, starting with the Buddha’s teaching of intentional suffering.
Yet perhaps even we self-inflected, over-wise Gurdjieffians overlook the fact that real intention comes from God alone; and that intentional suffering, to the extent that we experience it (only possible, remember, through Grace alone) belongs to God and is an experience not of our, but of God’s, Being.
This idea of intentional suffering, which ought to be a daily practice, not a theory, brings us closer to the intimacy with which we ought to receive this infinitely precious material substance called life, which flows into us from the deepest part of Being.
Life ought to be concentrated, not dissipated—and yet we dissipate. If we truly receive life—if we receive it organically, if we receive it in all its capacity for conscience (the collective and instantaneous sensing of all that is) then what we receive is suffering, which is the essence of creation.
One instant of this sensation carries more inner value than any other kind of impression; than any thousand other kinds of impressions, because it is an indelible impression of Truth, which cannot be brokered. Truth breaks the heart; and if there is one instant in all of mankind’s spiritual history that encapsulates the absolute essence of this Truth, it’s Christ’s crucifixion. The image of that moment summarizes not just the human condition, but the condition of creation itself, with all of its Glory, its courage, and its contradictions: suffering, tolerance, sacrifice, and Love, the material physical, and the Divine, all together in one instant.
The symbolic value of Christ’s crucifixion, in other words, transcends Christianity itself, which is nothing more than a reflection of Truth. Christ’s life and action were of God, not of man; and although we filter all of it through this vehicle called Christianity (just as other teachings have been filtered through their own material forms) the objective Truth of it belongs to God and transcends the form.
In any event, I think to myself here not of Christianity and its form, but of suffering and its Truth. Our hearts (our feeling capacities) are the most sensitive and finely tuned of our perceptive faculties; and without the finer kinds of information that can—nay, must— flow into us through an open action of them, we do not and cannot learn what we must about life and the fundamentally compassionate work it calls us to.
We’re called to discover two things: our own selfishness, and the fundamentally compassionate alternative to that, which does not belong to us but to God’s Being.
In these two discoveries we’re given the opportunity, should we be willing to suffer it, to participate “with Christ” in the living action of Being which joins the Divine Will with the material world.
Why this is and must forever be an action composed of intense spiritual suffering is perhaps too complex to explain; only the wordless action of Being explains it, and does so in mystery.
Yet one thing is certain: that wordless action begins in suffering. It begins with a broken heart, in a broken universe that only God’s Love can heal.
The final installment of this seven part series publishes on Dec. 12.
May your heart be close to God,
and God close to your heart.
Lee
Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.