Enslavement and Obedience

I say of virtue that she has an inner work: a will and tendency toward all good, and a flight from and a repugnance to all that is bad, evil, and incompatible with God and goodness. And the worse an act is, and the less godly, the stronger the repugnance; and the greater the work and the more godlike, the easier, more welcome, and pleasanter it is to her.

—Meister Eckhart, The Book of Divine Comfort, from The Complete Mystical Works, p. 540

I see my slavery to my functions. Perhaps I also see that a force from another level is here. But if this force is not engaged, if I am not related to it, my functions will take the energy, and I will be even more enslaved than before. 

There must be voluntary submission, a voluntary obedience. I wish to stay in front of this insufficiency. I do not see it enough, I do not feel it enough, I do not suffer from it enough. To feel this lack calls a more active  attention. It is as if a door opens to a much finer energy.

Jeanne de Salzmann, The Reality of Being, P. 218

The action of good and evil is reflected in the corresponding laws of slavery and obedience. 

We’re all under law of one kind or another; there’s no choice in the matter as an overarching principle. Even the archangels are under laws; and creation itself—which is perforce a greater entity than the archangels—is under a total of six laws.

Humanity is under 48 laws; paired, they form 24 opposing sets of principles or influences. Those influences, in turn, beget octaves of their own natures. We can take one example, obedience and enslavement, to examine the question.

The angelic octave of obedience can be construed thus: material (physical) obedience, emotional obedience, obedience of thought, obedience of spirit (being), obedience of sacrifice, and obedience of intelligence. The classic biblical story of obedience is Abraham’s obedience to God in the sacrifice of his son. We know at once from the nature of the story that Abraham had developed himself to the level of the obedience of sacrifice at the time of the story. This is the note in the octave (law) of obedience that influenced his decision to comply with the apparently horrifying command. In the story, his son represents everything he acquired at the note below, that is, his Being—which was born of the obedience of body, heart, and mind during the progression of the first three notes. 

Obedience is voluntary—and this is what differentiates it from enslavement, which is involuntary and compulsory. The principle of voluntary (evolutionary) verses involuntary (entropic) force is a ubiquitous one in the world of 48 laws; there are 24 voluntary laws and 24 involuntary laws. In Gurdjieff’s terms we refer to the involuntary laws as mechanical laws; the voluntary laws are angelic and conscious, that is, they involve and require a voluntary choice for their influence to be invoked. We should furthermore note that agency plays an essential role in the action of all the 24 angelic laws: the individual must make a choice, exercise agency (see Emmanuel Swedenborg), in order to come under those laws. De Salzmann’s notes in The Reality of Being speak a great deal about voluntary versus involuntary action; and in fact her notebooks are largely about the effort to come under this voluntary set of angelic laws through the concentration and intensification of Being, which imparts agency and makes voluntary action—good— more possible.  

Enslavement, on the other hand, is the opposite: its actions are involuntary and dictated by  descending forces, which act mechanically to drag one "down," that is, away from Being. In traditional and Christian religious terms these forces are termed demonic; in Gurdjieff’s terms they’re mechanical; either way, they lead to enslavement, because choice is steadily taken away as they act.  

We love what is good to us; and so if we love evil, we become the lover of evil and the embody properties of evil. Redemption may always be possible; but it’s by no means guaranteed. Make no mistake about it, however; we never own evil. Insofar as it’s present, evil owns us in exactly the same way that insofar as He is present, God owns us. A human being can’t have two masters; and so one is owned by either God, or the Devil (who is not a single individual, but any and all individuals owned by evil.) 

This ownership by evil is traditionally represented in stories about selling one’s soul to the devil: that means allowing evil to own one’s inner self in order to gain outer material reward. The stories are told as if the devil takes one’s soul only after death; but the fact is that the devil takes one’s soul from the instant the decision to go with the evil is made. If we are not obedient to God, we’re enslaved by evil.

Another way of considering this is that evil is transactional, whereas good is unconditional. The good does not ask for recompense in exchange for obedience. The good always volunteers to be good because to be good is right; whereas the decision to be evil always has to be accompanied by a form of payment. The directions of commitment are material and physical (i.e., transactional) or spiritual and metaphysical (i.e., loving, and without expectation.) We make decisions of this kind all day long without being aware of it; and in this regard Gurdieff insisted we must be aware of our intentions, and what we do.   

May your heart be close to God, 

and God close to your heart.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.