Narrative, Part II—Narrative and Scale

May 31 2021

In order for both individuals and societies to function in a healthy way, narratives on a larger scale are necessary. This is where mythology comes into play; religion and even politics can be equally powerful in this action. Yet narratives on a large scale, in human beings, are surprisingly subject to paranoia. Narratives built on threat carry great power because they use the negative force of emotion to drive themselves; it always takes more force to create and sustain a positive narrative than a negative one, because the tendency with all things is to go down.

Narratives built of the smallest things, incremental narratives, are almost always built from the moment and its immediate experience. The body-consciousness, within an organic sensation, is always the receiving place for immediate experience. It never moves past the scope of immediate experience because it’s built to live breath by breath, touch by touch, sight by sight within the present moment. 

It’s in the incremental construction of narrative within the present moment, the gentle and far less influenced action of intellect and emotion within the body of sensation, that we discover the most valuable narratives. They’re small things that bring our attention back to the interaction between our Being, life, and nature. The residence in the body consciousness its residence in life itself, not narrative. It’s immediate. The Bhagavad-Gita is a narrative of enormous scale; the dishes consist of me taking a dirty fork and washing it. Thinking about the Bhagavad-Gita may inspire me in one way or another, but it’s never going to do the dishes; and in my attention to life, it turns out it’s far more important to know how to do the dishes, to wash my laundry, to sweep the floor, than it is to know about vast armies from ancient cultures fighting each other while they contemplate philosophy. 

This is probably why the story of the Zen monk who knows how to sweep the kitchen, to all appearances a simpleton, properly becoming the abbot of the monastery is such a durable one. It’s more important to know how to sweep the kitchen that it is to philosophize. Philosophy is an action of the intellectual and emotional narrative; sweeping the floor is an act of simple body-consciousness.

In Gurdjieff’s Paris 1944 meetings, it’s commonplace for those attending to bring up big philosophical questions; and Gurdjieff’s response is always the same. He tells them they’re not at the meeting to philosophize, and that no one is interested in it. Always, always, he points the students back to exercises and an attention to the present moment. Almost all of the exercises, with a very few and decidedly esoteric exceptions, are exercises in an awareness of the body-consciousness. 

Gurdjieff, in other words, was dedicated to drawing people back into a body-consciousness understanding of life first. He always told his pupils, in regard to philosophy, that such things were to be discussed “later.” This is because he wanted them to develop an investment, a residency, in body-consciousness first, before anything else was attempted. This illustrates his vision — in his own narrative — of the primacy of body-consciousness over the other two forms of mind. In this model, mind is composed of three things — intellect, feeling, sensation — but there’s an order to this composition. The base of the triangle runs from sensation to intelligence, with emotion at its apex. 

I say that it runs from sensation to intelligence because the origin of the three-part mind begins always and first in sensation. When we consider sensation, we usually believe that we should use the intellectual mind to contact sensation; and in fact it’s nothing of the kind. This formulation is exactly upside down. What’s necessary is for sensation to contact the intellectual mind; Being needs to begin there and move into intellect, not the other way around. 

Even the simplest inversion of our assumption about intelligence contacting sensation will immediately reveal the very different function that takes place when sensation contacts intelligence. By the time that happens, sensation is already a living thing and has reacquired the independent agency that’s been taken from it over the course of a lifetime. Once sensation is the primary locus for the receiving of life through body-consciousness, then intellect joins it. These two functions create a fertile ground for the receiving of what is called real feeling.

Again, this takes place in the smallest of actions, not on the grand scale of historical and international — even cosmological — narratives. Attracted as we are to the grand narratives of the cosmos, we don’t see that the tiniest thing is that grand narrative. If we were able, through body consciousness, to see the cosmological scale of the tiniest action, this would be a really big thing. We might then be drawn towards that which can truly help us: a mindfulness towards the smallest action.

Not long ago, someone spoke of moving into a new house and having all their things packed in boxes. At the end of the moving-day, exhausted, they wanted to some food; but they didn’t have the simplest things available to them, because all the cutlery was packed in a box and they didn’t know which one it was. Exhausted and hungry, this friend went to a neighbor and asked to borrow a fork, knife, and spoon; and when they received this cutlery from the neighbor, a friend of theirs who lived in the building they’d moved into, they felt a powerful and deeply rooted sense of gratitude for these simple tools. 

A whole new appreciation of having a fork, knife, and spoon took place.

This is an example of how our understanding of life can realign itself. A new, higher feeling arises in us which contains no narrative, but, rather, a truth of the moment. That always resides first in sensation; then in intellect. Only after these two are joined in an orderly way does feeling enter. 

It’s true that in general, impressions of this kind form by accident and almost always expectedly; yet the cultivation of the body consciousness can fundamentally change the accidental nature of that experience. Because the proper natural order is for sensation to come first, once it begins to do so, it gently and gradually re-harmonizes all of the molecular vibration being in such a way that these experiences are far more common. We become more interested in sweeping the floor than our Napoleonic vision of our lives.

 Be well today.

Warmly,

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.