A Harmonically Distributed Sensation—Part II

Pediment of the sarcophagus of the abbot Raymond de Montpezat, 

Moissac, France

When we investigate the question of sensation, we need to begin very low down within the body, and within Being. 

Not quite sure how to explain this. 

Let's try this, which is inaccurate but close: 

none of the effort to establish a solid foundation of Being "begins" as such with the higher rates of vibration energy that we're capable of receiving. 

This higher energy can feed the foundation of Being; and because it is such a powerful force, when we encounter it, we always look up towards it because it’s wonderful—and we never knew that such bliss was available. 

One may become hypnotized by avidity, the idea of getting more of that.

What we too often fail to do is look downward, to what we stand on. 

 It’s worth  referring here to Matthew 16, in which Christ told Simon that he was Peter (the rock) upon which he would build his church. This rock is the foundation of one’s harmonic sense of Being, one’s organic sense of Being, and it recognizes the emergence of Being from the living nature of God through our sensation.

 We can think of God all we want. Human beings have been doing that for thousands of years. 

But it's not enough to think of the living quality of God as a force. One must sense the living quality of God as a force. Swedenborg called it the inflow; Jeanne de Salzmann called it an influence. Either way, it's the living force of Being which arrives within our molecules first, and then concentrates in ourselves, increasingly, as a slowly but steadily intensifying vibration-of-Being. 

A study through one's own intimate sensation will directly verify that this vibration emanates from the sacred Om, the fundamental tone of the universe (from which Gurdjieff’s sacred chant Aieioiuoa, the foundation of the vowel-based language of the angelic kingdoms, also emerges.) It carries within it the very life-force of Being itself, sometimes referred to as prana. We all know of Gurdjieff’s written contempt for the word; yet ignore his superficial dismissal. The actual Gurdjieff practice is in fact very deeply invested in the effort to come into contact with this living force of Being than his writings indicate.

We can only cultivate such an inner impression looking downwards. By forming a relationship with the level below us, upon which we then stand within our Being.  

This level rests in the permanent sensation of Being, from which all other inner manifestation must arise. 

It doesn't rely on words or concepts in order to sense and receive impressions of the world; it rests within perfect silence and stillness to receive impressions. Once it's awakened, it's inviolable, and isn't touched by the mind and its nonsense. 

Meditation exercises may bring people to a temporary sense of this. From my experience, they get awed and excited about it, because they had no idea that such a depth of inner Being and sensation was available. Even the least contact with may produce an excessive counter-reaction if it isn’t properly developed; and that has the paradoxical effect (often described by people who are struggling with this question) of undermining it and causing it to dissolve. The ego overpowers and steals the energy that the physical center needs to sense itself. 

If one understands the question from the other end of this particular stick, that is, through an awakened and permanent sensation, one can even see this happening— another aim of the work, although it can’t be clearly seen except "from the other side." De Salzmann attempted to explain this in her journals, which give some helpful indicators about the kind of work that's necessary.

Of course, many preparations don’t help... we meditate. We go to collective events where we all get together and share a pool of generated energy, which helps. Then off we go to our own individual life and we discover that there is no durability to our sensation. 

We can’t stay connected to it.

I bring up this question of looking inwardly down into the details because it is so essential. Sources as diverse as Meister Eckhart’s last sermon and Peter Brook speak of such matters; yet the discussion of it is, in a certain sense, parenthetical and outwardly directed. 

Just paying attention with the outer parts to the texture of the wood on one’s desk or the way that the shadow of the eyeglasses falls on it is not enough. 

Something has to take place before this. An inward attention, wholly contained within Being in an action of pranayama.  

That action does not take place through the intellectual mind. It has to begin within the sensation.

Wishing the best for you on this day,

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.

Easter weekend

Just a few notes from my walk on the Piermont pier on Good Friday.

Considering how God's Grace can flow into us. This is a true thing, and worthy of all to be believed.

Our only duty is to receive our lives. There's no greater blessing. No thing in life can ever be greater than life itself.

The Kingdom of Heaven is truly within. No need to look elsewhere for understanding.

There's no better place to be than with God.

Wishing the best for you on this day,

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.

A Harmonically Distributed Sensation—Part I

If one doesn’t develop a permanent sensation that’s harmonically distributed throughout Being, one can’t begin to work. 

One instead spends one’s life thinking about work and intermittently “waking up” (it isn’t really waking up, but it’s called that, because it’s a marginally heightened state of awareness) to the fact that one is actually doing almost nothing.

There's an irony in this state of doing almost nothing. Gurdjieff said “man cannot do;” yet we still think we can do this and that in regard to work. 

Seeing that we’re doing almost nothing isn’t working. Working consists of having an active awareness between and within the various centers.

Having a  harmonically distributed sensation which isn’t localized or forced is absolutely necessary. It represents the awareness of the physical parts of Being. They’re the anchor of actual awareness. If we don’t develop this capacity, we find ourselves nowhere, doing nothing. We think about doing; we see we’re not doing. That’s about it: a circular mill of self-involvement with no real exit.

We’d rather dwell in the lofty castles we build in our minds than in any ordinary place in the body, so we usually just move up into the clouds and sit around there enjoying the view. It's necessary to focus instead on where this capacity arises and how we can cultivate it, before we do anything else. 

 It’s true—some folk object to attempts to “explain” such matters. The word comes from the Latin explanare,  based on planus, “flat,” or “plain.” To explain something is to make an idea, situation, or problem clear to someone by describing it in more detail or revealing relevant facts or ideas.  

We can't be truly effective in our exchanges by asking endless questions and letting them hang in the air like slowly deflating balloons. Instead, effectiveness is born by making an effort within relationship to do what “explaining" means in the dictionary definition above. 

The word “plain” itself has a lot of interesting meanings, and we can take a look at what it means to “explain”, that is, come or emerge from plainness, if we examine some of them.

As an adjective, it means not decorated or elaborate — simple or ordinary in character. In a single word, unembellished.

Of a person, it means unpretentious.

It can also mean easy to perceive or understand — bestowing clarity.

It can also mean simple.

The point is that to explain means to come from a simple place in oneself and offer one’s Being to the situation at hand. 

To assert that it means figuring everything out or knowing everything and then telling others about it is simply wrong thinking and an incorrect understanding of the word itself. The word does an excellent job, if its meaning is rightly considered, of indicating how we ought to exchange with one another when speaking about our work:

 We should come from a simple place in ourselves and offer observations about our work.

So, my dearest reader. Back to this “explanation” of sensation. 

We work with others attempting to better understand the nature of sensation and how it arises, because this is an essential question that repeatedly comes up. 

The question’s a difficult one, because there’s no textbook that tells us, do this and that, and you'll develop a permanent sensation.  The nearest thing approaching that would probably be, if there is anything, Jeanne de Salzmann’s The Reality of Being. But it can never be the last word on the subject; every new generation has the responsibility to do their own serious work in this area. 

Wishing the best for you on this day,

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.

Live within, part II

To live within means to draw oneself back into oneself.

 From this place, I have the capacity to receive, sense, and feel the goodness of life as it flows into me. 

This is a grace that is granted.

I want to remember today to receive this grace, and to remain present to the goodness of life.

Wishing the best for you on this day,

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.

Live within

Tuesday, April 16

Don't try to be yourself. Live within yourself.

We spend far too much time trying to be ourselves. Trying to be this, trying to be that. We're always either trying to be what someone else expects us to be, or what we expect ourselves to be.

We try to remember ourselves. We try to do exercises. And so on.

Again — don't try to be — live within. 

I don't want to say too much more about that, just ask you to sense yourself and live within your life as it is, not through some false kind of trying that arises in the mind.

Wishing the best for you on this day,

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.

The Axis of Being, Part IV—Formlessness

Rocamadour, France

Now, I must grapple with some very difficult matters that are going to be truly much harder to explain that what has come before. 

Formlessness has, like all other aspects of manifest reality, a tripartite nature. That is, it has affirming, denying, and reconciling properties.

 There is a formlessness that precedes all creation which is perfectly ordered. 

The instant that it encounters creation, it becomes formlessness in its ground state within creation, which is completely disordered. 

Perfect order and perfect disorder exists, in this way, as mirror images of one another: one in God and the other in creation. They are identical and yet opposite.

Creation, the instant it manifests, begins to move back towards perfect formlessness, which we call God but what is in fact an ultimate order that, although apparently dispersed in creation, has never truly surrendered itself at all. It has merely changed its aspect relative to our capacity for understanding.

I understand that this is a big idea; and perhaps these big ideas aren’t so good for our personal work. We need to encounter them and ponder them, but we should certainly discard them as often as possible and turn back into our scrutiny of our inward state of Being. That action, after all, is the most essential action we can undertake relative to our responsible in the return to perfect formlessness. After we appreciate the beauty, complexity, and extraordinary nature of all that there is in terms of these ideas, we should come back to the experience of self, which creates the fabric, the texture, of what it means to be human.

 I have a responsibility to order myself within myself as a mirror of God’s Being. 

I do this within the context of what stillness I can discover in order to receive the higher influences that can help me grow in this way. 

If I get too caught up in the intellectual ideas of order and disorder, form and formlessness, I'm taken away from the physical vibration of my molecular Being. Even though my efforts in the intellectual area seem honest, there's an insincerity in them, because already I have forgotten that the intelligence of my physical being and the intelligence of feeling are absolutely necessary in order to bring me to the understanding of life I wish to have. 

I have to continually discard everything that is in orbit around me and come back to this perfect, orderly formlessness which can receive something more true about my life.

If I engage in this action correctly, perhaps I begin to touch the true nature of formlessness, which delivers a real feeling – humility to the core of my being: one in which I see how small I am, how little I know, and how absolutely as possible I ought to discover a loving, intelligent, mindful, and compassionate approach to other beings. 

Indeed, if I have even a taste of this, I see that I could throw out every single concept, every cosmological and philosophical and theological understanding, and still have every shred of my true Being left intact, because my true Being belongs to God and has an essence rooted in these actions towards myself and other beings.

The difficulty with humanity in general, including myself, is that we know about all of this from a theoretical point of view, and yet we never learn how to manifest it organically, which is where all the real force of our true Being could be expressed. 

Gurdjieff used to say that human beings had extraordinary capacities for Being, capacities so great that it was impossible to understand them.  He sometimes used to brag about how he used to be able to concentrate his power to kill a yak from miles away, and so on. 

This leads us to mistakenly believe that he was referring to magical psychic powers, metaphysical abilities of hypnosis and mind over matter, and so on. That is to say, that he was referring to things that could bring us special metaphysical power over the world or others.

My impression, so far as I understand — and that is, of course, limited — is that all of the real extraordinary capacities he was speaking of involve love in one way or another. 

There can be no doubt that love is the most extraordinary quality any human being can manifest; without it, we are not even human, as so many manage to conclusively demonstrate in the world around us. 

Our purpose is to develop a greater capacity for love, along with a greater appreciation of all the love that has been invested in the least thing around us in creation. To become vessels for that substance as it concentrates, and to offer it generously not just to ourselves — and that is, with spiritual intellect, necessary— but to everyone around us. 

If we see a lack in ourselves, and we truly begin to see it clearly, the lack isn't so much related to a selfish wish for "my" inner development. It's related to our lack of love. The true nature of formlessness is secretly related to love, because both in its perfect and its imperfect state — its completely ordered and its incompletely ordered state — love remains indefinable, formless, and all-powerful, since it is what both God and His creation are made of.

 As I have done so many times throughout the course of my life, I turn back to this question of what it means to be loving, from an organic point of view. 

If I am not asking myself this question at every moment, —

THEN I am not working.

Wishing the best for you on this day,

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.

The Axis of Being, part IV—A Better Connection to Feeling

Rocamadour, France

 Many years ago, my teacher Betty Brown pointed out that we can’t work directly with feeling; and while there's a great deal of truth to this, when feeling undertakes its proper role as a voluntary support for our work — one that arrives on its own, rather than superficially showing up when we poke or prod it in one way or another – then very different things begin to happen, and our capacity for receiving our inner work changes. 

So perhaps we could say our feeling can work directly with us.

But before all of that, I would just like to remind everyone that to live very carefully and attentively within sensation, with the clear and intimate attention to detail that a molecular sensation brings, already we create a ground of Being, a fertile and fecund field of material, within which mindfulness and feeling have the ability to manifest.

This means attending very carefully to the tiniest details in our lives, and being present as much as possible within each passing moment to the simple things that need to be done then. 

If I bring a relationship to my Being and my sensation to the action of breaking open an egg, of picking up the newspaper, of seeing the responsibilities I need to attend to at each moment this day, I'm already better fulfilling Being-duty, meeting the responsibility of my life in a new way that is somewhat deeper than the way I do it when I'm just reacting to everything around me and my centers are not collective participants in my action.

I suspect that as you read this, there's a colossal struggle going on in you due to the intellectual habit of trying to grasp this set of ideas with the mind, which obstacle constantly interferes with our sensation itself. Sensation ought to have an entire range of motion within Being at this instant that can have an action contributing to a deeper understanding on this point. For the time being, you'll have to accept this, because we all labor under these conditions, whether all the time or from time to time. 

But there needs to be an awareness of the concept first; and then there needs to be a better connection to feeling which begins in stillness.

Understanding that we can’t escape from conventional emotion and its requirements — that we have to be immersed in it and suffer it, that we can’t sit on a pedestal above it — is the same as understanding that we cannot escape from the agitation of the mind. 

It is, however, possible to form a silent core of Being that emanates from deeper in the heart and the center of Being than all the superficial actions in orbit around the center of my Being. 

Meister Eckhart speaks a great deal about what is created versus what is God’s, and when he does this  he is indicating the difference between the outer — that which is in orbit, and does not belong to my inner planet — and the inner — which belongs to the emanation of God within Being.

 I’m going to quote a rather lengthy section from sermon nine below, which has been considerably edited to try and focus some of the complex meaning in it a little better for this conversation:

The masters say that God is ready to give every man full satisfac­tion of all he desires, both of reason and of the senses. That God gives us satisfaction of mind and of the senses can be clearly distinguished… Satisfaction of the senses means that God gives us comfort, joy and contentment - and over­indulgence in these things does not occur in God's true friends in their inner senses. But mental satisfaction is of a spiritual nature. I call that mental satisfaction, when the summit of the soul is not brought so low by any joys as to be drowned in pleasure, but rather rises resolutely above them. Man enjoys mental satisfaction only when creaturely joys and sorrows are powerless to drag down the topmost summit of the soul. 

'Creature' I call whatever a man experiences under God. 

…Life understands better than delight and light… whatever, under God, man can attain to in this body, and in some ways more clearly than the eternal light can. For the eternal light makes known oneself and God, not oneself apart from God; but life makes one known to oneself, apart from God. 

When one sees oneself alone, it is easier to tell what is like and unlike. 

St. Paul makes this plain, and so do the pagan masters. St. Paul in his ecstasy saw God, and himself in spiritual fashion, in God, and yet each virtue did not there present itself clearly to his vision, and that was because he had not practiced them in deeds. 

By practicing the virtues, the masters came to such profound dis­cernment that they recognized the nature of each virtue more clearly than Paul or any saint in his first rapture. 

 Eckhart makes it quite clear here that the inner and the outer, the spiritual and the ordinary, coexist and are both necessary for real understanding. 

When he refers to a condition where “man enjoys mental satisfaction only when creaturely joys and sorrows are powerless to drag down the topmost summit of the soul,” the mental satisfaction he speaks of is that stillness which empties itself of what is created. 

This ”mental“ satisfaction ( by mental, he means of the higher or spiritual intellect) is the beginning of a condition whereby we are prepared to receive what comes; and it is this stillness, which begins in the vibration of molecules (paradoxically, the more active the vibration, the more stillness arrives) and spreads itself into a certain indescribable silence within the part of the mind that is not touched to the world. This prepares us for the receiving of real feeling, which will be — should it take place — the first real contact we have with any truth in the context of divine Being.

 Perhaps there seems to be another paradox here: understanding does not necessarily involve intelligence as we understand it on the ordinary level. In fact, real understanding, which prepares us for feeling, cannot be reduced to intellectual formulas and it cannot be stuffed into forms, since the beginning of its nature is formless. 

Wishing the best for you on this day,

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.

The Axis of being, Part III

Rocamadour, France

I spoke earlier this week about acquiring an understanding of our emotional part — which, in its higher aspect, is our capacity for feeling — as the axis of our Being. 

This goes back to the root of all action within life, which begins at the molecular level with a care for how things are, a care for the effort to be, a caring about the current state of things and the future. 

As I explained some time ago in this space, cells have molecules in them that care about whether the other molecules are correctly arranged; and this is the essential expression of an inner wish for order at the lowest level of Being within life. 

I’d like you to think about this carefully, because mechanistic rationalism — which proposes that there is nothing but material, and no actual motive force behind it other than sheer action – would have us believe that caring is an accident of matter. If we begin there, then caring on any level is basically meaningless—without any real purpose— and the premise of metaphysical humanism rejects this idea entirely. 

Caring is the essential quality of matter — the action of care, which is connected to wish, is a force that manifests within the emanation of the particles of God. Every particle cares; every particle seeks partners in caring.

We are built of this factual circumstance. Everything we are arises from it. We are, in other words, both creations of God’s care — we contain it within ourselves in these particles — and expressers of that care both to ourselves and to one another. 

If we do not embody that care, take responsibility for it, and represent it both within ourselves in the way we care for ourselves and outside of ourselves and the way that we care for others, we do not fulfill our Being-duty.

 We find a comment from Meister Eckhart on this need for care:

Three things especially are needful in our works: to be orderly, understanding, and mindful. 'Orderly' I call that which corresponds in all points to the highest. 'Understanding' I call knowing nothing temporal that is better. 'Mindful' I call feeling living truth joyously present in good works. 

—Meister Eckhart, The Complete Mystical Works, Maurice O’C Walshe. Sermon 9, p. 87

 This idea of being orderly, understanding, and mindful relates to the physical, intellectual, and emotional parts of our being. 

To be orderly is to have a good physical order. This is what those tiny molecules that repair incorrect arrangements in ourselves are doing. 

Understanding is needed to do that: this is the discriminatory faculty of intellect that can see the difference between what is ordered and what is not. 

To be mindful is to have feeling, to care.

 So we see how even in the supposedly ignorant European Middle Ages, esoteric understanding was keenly attuned to an awareness of the three centers and how they function; and we see, furthermore, that mindfulness is a quality of the emotional center, of feeling. 

This is because feeling operates at the highest rate of vibration within our Being and has the greatest capacity both to help bring order, discriminate, and to do good, which is the Godly purpose behind all being in the first place. 

That's why Meister Eckhart ends his comment on mindfulness the way he does.

 I doubt it's possible to do any better job than Meister Eckhart did to summarize this so briefly and so perfectly. Yet we need to do a great deal of pondering and inward examination within ourselves in order received this intelligible and feeling knowledge he's presented. 

If we don’t finely tune our awareness of our various parts, and invest ourselves more thoroughly within them, we never develop the capacity to see how everything that we are turns around the axis of Being. We eventually grasp it from an intellectual point of view, there's no doubt; but if we refuse to engage deeply in both ordinary emotion and in the capacity for feeling which is developed through a better connection in the centers, and we refuse to immerse ourselves most completely in these processes, we are unable to become more human and to understand what humans are; and, furthermore, our suffering is never well understood, even though it ought to become the key to who we are and how we behave both inwardly and outwardly.

Wishing the best for you on this day,

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.

Our longtime Work friend Wendy's grandson has Leukemia and is in need of medical funding.

Please consider donating, and spread the word throughout your local community by sharing this link:

Lee Jepson's leukemia fund

Warmly,

Lee

The Axis of Being, part II—Emotions

Rocamadour, France

Photograph by the author

When I think of our emotions, I think of Bosch’s Temptation of St. Anthony, which lays out a visual map of an inner emotional landscape. Temptation, after all, is always an emotional experience; the word is derived from the Latin temptare, meaning to be tested. 

What is tested is our desire; what we wish for. 

So much of our life revolves around this particular part; it’s the axis of Being. The question is whether that axis is located outside of us, in external things; or inside of us. It can sometimes be hard to distinguish the difference, because when we’re identified with the external it appears to be the internal. Hence the importance of learning to discriminate quite carefully between inner and outer events and qualities. 

Given that fundamental question about the locus of our desire, we see that it already begins with confusion. This becomes even more difficult to sort out when we’re confronted with the many different inner and outer currents and eddies of desire, which are so succinctly laid out in Bosch’s Temptation. They exist both inside and outside of us; and the influences that bring us into contact with them are both higher and lower. 

This is why Jeanne de Salzmann says we live—we exist, we are—within a field of forces. Those forces are hardly just intellectual—the intellect alone doesn’t move us, it just assesses. And they are not merely physical: physical forces are just the stuff of which things are made. It’s our Being that is critical here, and that being arises in its utmost essence as an emotional or feeling-force. 

This is where the movement in life arises; it's what propels us towards or away from this or that. We’re drawn towards that which we feel is of greater value (worth more) and repelled by that which we feel is of lesser. Being forms around these motivators.

The difficulty with the human psyche, and the soul itself, is the relative complexity these confluences and influences of desire create. At any given moment we exist as a summary of lived pasts and potential futures, each one of which undergoes evaluation in a constantly changing sea of relativity whose weather is created by my attitude.   

This sea of forces requires constant navigational decisions; it’s only with clear foresight and an objective evaluation of where I am now, the conditions that surround me (both inner and outer) that I can decide whether or not to go this way or that—whether I decide this from an inner or an outer point of view.

Of course inner navigational decisions have the potential to be influenced by higher forces; but that’s a question to hold off on for a moment. Emotional center, as it stands, has a responsibility to the present moment within ordinary life that cannot be edited out, or simply upgraded to a religiously oriented, transcendental form of feeling. If that “worked,” people would be decent to one another; and we aren’t.

Emotional center as it is has a range of responsibilities it has to fulfill in order for the most ordinary functions to be executed; and pretending that we can conduct a life, any life, without that part is eventually revealed as an absurdity. Meister Eckhart comments:

“Now our good people declare that we must be so perfect that no joy can move us, we must be untouched by weal and woe. They are wrong in this. I say never was there a saint so great but he could be moved. Yet on the other hand I hold that it is possible for a saint, even in this life, to be so that nothing can move him to turn from God.”

—Meister Eckhart, The Complete Mystical Works, Maurice O’C Walshe. Sermon 9, p. 88

It reminds us as well of Marpa, who taught his pupils that everything was an illusion. When his son died, it’s said, he underwent an emotional meltdown.His students asked him why he was so upset, seeing as all of life is an illusion. Marpa’s reply was that while it was true, his son’s death was a super-illusion. That is to say, it was so great an event that no philosophy could transcend the intense emotion that accompanied it.

It’s not so simple, you see, to transcend emotion. Within the range of our three centers, it's the most powerful set of forces that acts on us; and we ignore this at our peril, whether the peril is a simple one of ordinary life, or something much more fundamental that leads us into more spiritually damaging territory. 

 I would caution the reader, then, to avoid pretending any ability to occupy a piece of territory that does not come into contact with this intimate and difficult question; even if we should by some apparently superhuman effort succeed in doing so, we are shirking our responsibilities in this life. 

Our task, instead, is to look at the question quite squarely in the face from within ourselves and see how our life and our Being turns around this access.

Wishing the best for you on this day,

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.

The Axis of Being, part I —Is Life Worth Living?

            

The Black Virgin, Rocamadour, France

I recently made the comment to a friend that having words and insects around me was part of what made life “worth living.”

Their reply was that life isn’t “worth” living—it just is.

This didn’t sound quite right to me, and so I thought I’d examine the question.

The statement is one of those statements that purports to be communicating something profound and important, as though it had an inherent authority greater than the idea that life has a value that makes it worth participating in. 

Let us presume it’s meant to indicate that life has an authority of its own that exceeds and transcends valuation.

Is that in fact true?

This question goes to the heart of what I’ve been attempting to investigate in my essays on Metaphysical Humanism. What is meaning? How does it relate to value? If everything just “is,” and meaning and value are completely arbitrary (or even non-existent) entities, should we then conclude that all things are both relative and, in the end, entirely pointless?

The essays on Metaphysical Humanism examine much of this in detail, but a particular point perhaps a bit outside of that scope comes to mind here.

Anyone who has had an episode of depression knows the difference between what it means when life is felt to be worth living and when it isn’t. To pretend anything else is sophistry; our emotions are a very real and integral part of our lives and of life itself. Life wouldn’t even be life as we understand the word unless emotions were in play; they are real forces which have a real impact, and they can’t be so loftily discounted with a philosophical wave of the hand as though they were insignificant or unimportant in the grand scheme of things.

This kind of thinking— that there’s no inherent value to life, and no way to meaningfully sense it—is all too common among those who think too much, at the expense of the other parts. It marks a mindset which feels that hard data triumphs all other functions of perception. 

Emotions are notoriously difficult to boil down to data points; why not just edit them out of the picture by discounting them as insignificant? This is exactly what one does when one makes statements like the opening one. It’s actually a way of devaluing life itself, by removing it from a field of meaningful discourse. It doesn’t look like that, of course; it’s cleverly disguised as an objective philosophical premise. 

This examination of the emotional part of life deserves more scrutiny in regard to who we are and how we are; it connects to our inner world and helps form it. 

So the next set of essays will relate to those questions... in my usual, perhaps rambling, way.

May life be worth living for you,

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.