What it costs

  

Peregrine falcon breakfast leftovers,

Piermont pier.

April 23

Some notes on real feeling

Until one has an experience of real feeling, the distinctions between real feeling and emotion are unseen. We have emotions, yet we think they’re feelings. 

Emotions, however are only about themselves; and feelings are about everything.

The price, the amount of effort, that it takes to make everything as it is and put it in its place is enormous. Take, for example, the fact that it took nearly 3 billion years of evolution on the surface of this planet to get to the point where human beings were walking on it. DNA plays the long game; it’s designed to do so, and it has a patience so legion we can’t begin to fathom it. Yet from the beginning, what it is already has what we are built into the scaffolding of its own Being. We speak about DNA forensically, as though it were something separate from what we are; yet it’s all of what we are, and everything that we produce — all our technology, philosophy, science, everything — is born of DNA. 

We walk about all day long acting as though this were so ordinary it needn’t be considered; as though DNA were just one more cool thing we have discovered. It is, in fact, exactly the opposite; we belong to the world of DNA, it doesn’t belong to us. Human beings are like this with everything; we serially appropriate the world and all its parts to serve our own selfish desires.

Stop for a moment and consider the fact that we live in a universe where the natural and inexorable tendency is for everything to fall apart. Yet DNA, this miraculous little molecule which is found in every living organism of a certain scale (all things are living, but never mind that for now) spends all of its time — absolutely all of its time — putting things together, and not just putting them together, but making sure that they are able to form increasingly, even astonishingly and perhaps impossibly, complex relationships with one another. Ask any molecular biologist: the complexities in a single cell exceed all of the computing ability currently installed on the planet. Probably by a wide margin. This, in a tiny little thing so small that it can only be seen under a microscope. It’s as though we took all of the computers on earth and all of their abilities and shrank them down to the period at the end of this sentence. 

They work, moreover, with their own power supply and come with their own IT department, which is exponentially smarter than all the IT departments on the planet put together — although that isn’t perhaps saying much, as anyone who has interfaced with IT departments will know.

Back to this question of cost. If we have a real feeling — which is another thing that DNA produces the possibility of — we’ll at once understand the enormous cost, the incredible amount of effort, that has gone into creating, supporting, and maintaining this set of conditions. We, as human beings, are gifted with this body which makes possible the flowing-in-of-life in the most extraordinary way. The body is potentially sensitive to harmonic vibration from an inner point of view, where the organs of the cells themselves sense it and propagate it. This is called an inner sensation— I call it the organic sensation of being —and it’s a miraculous property in and of itself,  born of a level of Being we do not understand but are nonetheless a part of.

Any real sense of the price of life and Being brings sorrow and contrition. These are fundamental organic properties of a real sensation that attracts a real feeling. One sometimes hears, from those who understand these questions, the word “gratitude,” but gratitude is insufficient. Gratitude is thanks for that which is “pleasing;” and to say that the organic sensation of Being is “pleasing” is far too superficial for any real consideration. 

The reason that sorrow and contrition are so firmly installed at the base of all Christian practice — real Christian practice, that is, not the ersatz versions of Christianity that have been pasted on billboards and used as ATM’s— is because they’re the only real feelings appropriate to the position we are in. One needs to read the confessional found in the service of Holy Communion many many times, to take it into one’s heart and discover it within the marrow of the bones, in order to understand this properly. The confessional needs to be understood from an inner, not an outer point of view: and to do that not only engages the beginning of real feeling, it calls us to a sense of our own nothingness that can’t be acquired otherwise. Sorrow is the action of a deep distress, produced by what Gurdjieff called remorse of conscience; and contrition is the wearing down of what we are, the grinding of our contradictions against one another that produce a heat through friction. This is not a blast furnace of immolation, but that slow heat which can gradually melt what we are until the contradictions and the actions of all of our inner parts learn to cooperate with each other, to blend into a single greater whole.

The slow heat of DNA, the structure of life and the way it creates its own environment within which to build, is the analogy for this on the molecular level. If one studies Swedenborg’s doctrines of correspondences, one will understand that his principle of correspondence extends not just into the gross characteristics of the world we see through our eyes and hear through our ears and touch with our skin, but extends into the molecular and chemical nature of the planet, and of Being itself. Swedenborg, one of the foremost scientists of his own age, would understand this immediately; yet we’re not truly equipped to comprehend things on that level, so perhaps it’s not that important. 

The important thing, then, would be to see the way these principles penetrate everything, in order to understand that the world is a much more whole and single thing than we comprehend within the divisive nature of our psyche. The coarse substance of the psyche is designed to pick things apart in the same way that nature is designed to take things apart through the action of entropy. 

In this sense we can understand that our outer psyche, which appears to be building things, is actually an agent of decay. What builds comes of the soul; and this is a very different creature indeed.

Well, this little soliloquy has, as usual, expanded itself into many crevices. My original intention this morning was to discuss how much things cost, because I see that few folk really contemplate this. 

Suffering is a measurement of how much things cost; and although I'm provisionally entitled to live within this Being and take in the flowing-in-of-life for granted, so to speak, it’s not enough if I want to be a real human being. An adult goes beyond taking things for granted — that is a child’s attitude — and begins to contemplate what things cost. 

This is an action of sobriety, in which continence, intelligence, and evaluation take on new meanings. It is, to be true, an action that only comes with age; and at the same time this action comes, we must still live as the same fools we are.

Perhaps the best we can hope for is to become more mindfully foolish; within that action live the beginnings of sorrow and contrition, after all.

These are my thoughts for this morning.

...Are we here yet?

Be well.

Warmly,

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.