A continuity of feeling

January 28, Amiens

In the action of self-remembering, there’s a question of how we experience continuity, that is, the continuous action of Gurdjieff’s “I am.”

The prayer “I am... I wish to be” is the Old Testament prayer Moses encountered: “I am that I am,” the Lord said to him. 

This continuity of “I am” begins in sensation. As Gurdjieff said in Wartime Meetings, organic sensation is what creates our individuality. 

Yet this isn’t enough.

It’s a continuity of feeling that we ultimately lack; and that continuity of feeling, that feeling-awareness, can’t develop until after sensation unifies the physical sense of being-continuity. Much material has to be deposited and concentrated for that to take place; as we are we may take it in, but too often we subsequently dissipate it. The sensation of Being certainly helps with the ongoing action of concentration; yet unless we’re willing to intentionally suffer our feelings as they arise, it’s insufficient. 

To suffer one’s feelings is, to put it in Jeanne de Salzmann’s words, a demand; an imperative that’s perhaps more than we’re ready for.

Hence the prayer of the New Testament, Lord have Mercy. In this sense the Old Testament is the primer on the active physical body of Being (organic sensation) and the New Testament the primer of the active feeling body of Being: of Love, of which true feeling is exclusively composed. 

Simply put, the myopia of day-to-day being, the fragmentary existence of self-awareness, is in the end a discontinuity of feeling... of love. If the organic sensation of Being creates our individuality, it’s the organic feeling of Being—emotional awareness—that fulfills it. Without organic continuity of feeling, we don’t sense life enough... no matter how much we may sense it in the first place. All the sensation on the planet can’t play the role of feeling.

The body of voluntary feeling arises in the same was as voluntary sensation. Feeling becomes an active, willing participant in Being, as its own force—not a force under the “control” of the ego, which never “controls” even ordinary emotion in any truly meaningful way. Impulse too often overrules rationality in our ordinary ways. 

Yet true, voluntary feeling never overrules—it’s not in its nature. Voluntary feeling is not a creature of the ego; it exercises mastery over that portion of ordinary being by virtue of its integrity alone, which is much more powerful. An inner alignment takes place in which ego knows its place as a servant.

The continuity of feeling leads us into a landscape of feeling that connects the various moments of our life through a constant feeling-sensation of Being. We no longer come and go; feeling connects each moment to the next in partnership with sensation. 

That feeling is suffering. The center of gravity of pleasure is in the body; the center of gravity of anguish is in the feeling. When present, the two balance one another. 

Together, organic sensation and voluntary feeling lay a foundation for an inwardly formed, intelligent sense of self. This intelligence is formed not by outside influences but by inner awareness of Being. The center of gravity in life becomes internal. 


May we discover our Being, grounded in God.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.