A Broken Heart, Part VII: A Coda on Suffering

Neal and my mother

October 2019

Vis a vis the task of pondering I set myself on this China trip—which has an organic quality that is developing its own independent line of inquiry, not the one I assigned to it—I  come to a juncture where the intersection between judgment and suffering becomes a question. 

Not, mind you, the preconceived notion of suffering as a torture inflicted by God for sin, but suffering as a voluntarily shouldered burden.

This is the way in which Gurdjieff conceived of it: an inherent property of creation which we have not only an ability but a responsibility to shoulder. Our discrimination and any action of judgment that ensues ought, in other words, to begin from this premise; without it, nothing objective can be obtained. If there is justice, it begins with an understanding of this suffering. If there’s compassion, it equally begins from this instant of suffering. It becomes, in essence, the point of creation, because anything that proceeds—any action, any feeling, any attitude or choice—without incorporating this instant that inwardly forms the seed of compassion necessary for each moment fails to begin its life within creation with the most essential information needed in the action of discrimination.

Christ’s two great commandments are adages that form their center around this question. The essential Love he says lies at the heart of the two commandments is an action of compassion; and that compassion is informed by sorrow. Love formed from the organic, compassionate receiving of Sorrow can never be formed in a wrong way: it’s selfless, because the particles of its substance are direct emanations from God, not blended with any other substances. There is no admixture.

Students of Beelzebub’s Tales will recall that what “broke” the cosmos was the admixture of the particles of God’s Being with other re-concentrated particles of God’s Essence, which, once they re-entered Heaven, began to alter the character of Heaven itself and inevitably dissipate it. It was the purity of God’s Being that was affected; and hence the need to separate out all the results of creation into a subsidiary place of residence called Purgatory, where all the souls created by God are forever segregated from His Being. 

The mystery of the veil between God and creation, a veil which lawfully can never be penetrated (see Ibn al Arabia’s Bezels) is a result of this necessary separation. 

The privilege and obligation of creation is to receive the eternal sorrow that arises because of this gulf between God and His own creation; God loses an essential part of His very Being in order to create the world, and it can never be regained. 

This action is reflected in all of the subsidiary actions of creation; we experience a piece of it in parenthood, as we let go of ourselves and what we are on behalf of our children. (Long subject that deserves a book of its own, I cannot go into it here.)

The point is that experiencing this sorrow, if it is done deeply enough, creates an essential compassion that unerringly points the soul in the direction of right action, simply because its impulses then arise from and develop in a direction formed by the pure and unmixed particles of God’s own Being.

This is why intentional suffering forms the core practice needed for spiritual development.

We cannot rightly judge unless we first suffer.

We cannot rightly discriminate unless we first suffer.

Without first suffering, in this instant, our impulses towards others will always be selfish and unworthy.

Look around carefully and see the world. Do you see how this is? 

I need to see it every day, and suffer myself in this condition, as well as the suffering of all others. We don’t suffer alone, we suffer together, on behalf of all creation. And it is this suffering—this action that begins with a broken heart—from which all impulses and action ought to arise.

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

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.