Resolution and Being, part V

By simplifying the relations between my various inside parts I become a better steward of myself. I learn to let go; I let each distressing and complex event pass into a new and simpler form in which it simply is, and I allow myself to move into it, through it, and onwards— as best I can.

9. To reduce, transform, or change to something else.

10. To untie or loosen.

My inward life can be transformed. It’s certainly changeable: as Jeanne Salzmann once said, the only thing I can change is my attitude. 

By untying and losing these inward knots I’ve twisted myself into, many new things can become possible. In doing this, I’m conforming more generously to the actual conditions around me, which are also in a constant state of change.

11. To answer or to solve, as a question or argument.

12. To remove, clear away, or dispel– for example,  as in doubt

13. To decide, to determine what's up.

14. To determine or decide upon.

I'm engaged in a lot of inner arguments. Almost all of them revolve around this belief in resolution of one kind or another. Most of them are attached to my outward circumstances. If I look at myself quite carefully, I see that my inner arguments are seldom actually directed at how I am inside: I don't look at the individual parts of myself and ask them about how they’re behaving, what their relationship to one another is. Instead I look at what's going on outside of me—and argue with myself about that. 

With this suggested inner action—this approach to an inward resolution of Being—I’m interested in trying to clear up my inward doubts about what is taking place by removing and clearing away the complexities, the demands for permanence, the assumptions, the tyranny. 

I want to determine what's true now.

I want to take responsibility for how I am inside, right now.

15. To free from doubt or complexity; to bring certainty, clear understanding.

This now obsolete meaning of the word resolve –common, according to the OED, in the 17th century –most ably illustrates the hope born of an effort of inward awareness. It describes what Gurdjieff would have called an objective state. 

There are those who argue that such a state is functionally impossible for human beings; yet it’s an absolute fact that when the 3 centers are acting in conjunction with one another, at higher energy levels– through their voluntary abilities —objectivity of this kind is normal. This is a true resolution—a resolution of awareness, which is not attached to any outward thing, but has the ability to move within all outward things: to be fluid, to maintain (on this microcosmic level) efforts towards the properties of God which can be manifested within life: Wisdom, Mercy, Endlessness. To form relationship.

Together, exercised within awareness, these three properties of being create a higher expression of that unique and inexpressible property…

which we call Love.

All of this bears repeated examination. Once it becomes clear that Being is not a destination, but an action, and one releases one's inner obligations from the rigidity instilled by a constant demand to resolve everything, a new inner relaxation becomes just a bit more possible. 

Of course—especially here—I should never expect perfection. I’ll always need hell in order to maintain heaven. It's the balance between the two that matters; and if there is anything I ought to keep my eye on, it’s this.

Wishing the best for you on this day,

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.

Resolution and Being, part IV

The human psyche, the essence of our soul, must become a measuring tool of not of things, but of process, if we wish to understand what Being means. In this sense, even the word Being itself is deceptive. The word, after all, is a very simple noun with this brief etymological mention in the Barnhart Concise Dictionary of Etymology: 

“from earlier use meaning existence, developed from verbal noun be.”

To be is an irregular verb, whose etymology has a metamorphic character. Like what it describes, the word itself has been constant movement throughout its use in the various Germanic tongues that coined it. Being is not a thing; it is an action. When I say I wish to be, or I wish to have Being, I am not referring to something tangible which I can have and hold. My wish is for a state of action, an ability to act. 

That action takes place not within the simple field of consciousness, which even a worm or a molecule occupies; it takes place within a field of awareness, that is, a capacity to observe and evaluate.

This, then, is what struck me as what it means for anything to have a resolution: it means to be aware. 

The only resolution that can ever truly exist within life is this resolution of awareness: my being, the action which I take. 

It's the resolution of now.

That can be resolved in an inward sense alone; I have the capacity to be aware within myself. This, in this moment, is an absolute and objective resolution; not a subjective one. It’s objective to the extent that my awareness is detached from the presumption of resolution in the physical world: the world of objects, events, circumstances, and conditions. There will always be movement and change here; and there will always be desirable and undesirable outcomes and consequences. Yet there will never be resolution there. The only resolution that can be achieved is this inward resolution of awareness.

At the same time that this becomes evident to me, the requirements for living within the material world and all of the deceptively attractive “resolutions” it offers — every one of which must be attended to, often even with passion and conviction –are brought into question. 

Taking that into account, I’ll revisit my abbreviated Oxford English dictionary list of meanings for the word resolution and see how each one of them, in one way or another, applies to this question:

1. To melt or dissolve, reduce to a liquid or fluid state.

2. To disintegrate, to break up, separate into constituent or elementary parts.

3. To soften. To disperse or dissipate.

Within the action of awareness and being, I attempt to allow all of the solidity of the experience of what I call myself to gently melt or dissolve, becoming more liquid and fluid. What “I” am now is strongly integrated; a rigid structure that actually needs to be broken into pieces in order for it to be better understood. Those elementary parts all have an important values, but they need to discover a new, different kind of relationship. 

I can become softer; my experience of myself can thereby become more permeable, like a liquid that receives all of the things that take place, easily moving from one state to another in the same way that water flows and penetrates what it encounters. 

I can let go of this solid creature I believe I am, this one who demands all the absolute answers, and make more of an effort to inhabit the moment in a gentler way.

4. To slacken or relax, as in the limbs.

I can allow myself to relax. I give myself permission to let go of a bit of the physical tension and anxiety I constantly feel when confronted with this demand for one resolution after another. It's a foregone conclusion I won't get all the resolutions I seek; anyway, most of them are sheer fantasies in the first place… why not just try and take it a little easier here?  Within myself, perhaps I can allow myself to Be instead of trying to force a resolution of Being.

5. To cause to pass away.

6. To separate a thing into its component parts.

7. To reduce by fundamental analysis into more elementary forms principles or relations.

8. To pass into another form or into simpler forms.

It's all right to let each moment go; to welcome it, taste it, release it. 

Things with me need to be taken apart, removed from the complexities of my beliefs and insistences. Simplified. I need to sort them out, to see them individually for  what they are, rather than believing in the structures they have created. By seeing, through a concise and more objective awareness, all of these elementary parts of myself, I begin to appreciate what a patchwork my psyche is, and how careful I might choose to be about assuming responsibility for each piece of it. 

Wishing the best for you on this day,

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.

Resolution and Being, part III

As an individual, my own psyche is deeply rooted in the same kind of action: I have an overall wish, both personally and in terms of my own culture, for things to be resolved in favor of the good. My spiritual quest is just as invested in this wish as my ordinary being; perhaps even more so, because it begins with an absolute assumption that such a thing is possible.

Yet this insight that I had on Wednesday night calls that all into question; the nature of the cosmos is such that there is no resolution. Although there may be a good and a bad, although there may be love and hatred– these things are truths within all conscious beings –there is no final answer to the conflict, no end point to the story.  

Ahem. 

Human beings don't think this way. Apocalyptic visions such as the end times where everything is sorted out are a standard fixture in mythologies and religious practices; even within the context of the battle between heaven and hell, we want it all to end, and most of us (we hope) want Heaven to win. Yet there’s an obvious contradiction in this wish; heaven can never be heaven without a hell to struggle against. In this peculiar condition, Heaven needs hell in order to exist; it depends on it. 

I won't pretend to offer resolution to this philosophical conundrum; its very existence helps to prove the point of this essay. The idea that everything can end once and for all with a win for the good guy is childishly naïve, an attractive place for lazy thinkers to rest while they watch the clouds go by. The requirement for the active thinker, the one with the real wish for Being, is not to reach the end but to be willing to live within the story, which is endless.

To participate in the process.

The old saying goes that all things must pass; but perhaps it might be better said, all things continue. When Gurdjieff referred to God as, among other things, His Endlessness, he was referring to exactly this property. If God's most essential emotional property is His Mercy, His most essential physical property is His Endlessness. Assigning the third property of God to Wisdom, we see that God is Wise, Merciful, and Endless. There’s an eternal state; but there is no resolution. Endlessness alone guarantees that. 

So here we have God’s metaphysical condition.

I am a reflection of that same metaphysical condition, being a reflection of God’s Human being; and so I am subject to the same conditions. I need to be in front of hell in order to reach for heaven; nothing ever ends. Perhaps this is the source of Gurdjieff’s admonition to engage in constant struggle.

All philosophy aside, however, what I saw in myself on Wednesday night was that there is a deeply ingrained, subtle part of myself that absolutely believes in resolution. 

This part is rooted so deep in my being that it’s part of the very fabric of what I am: a field of unseen energy from which all of my action arises. It makes the assumption before anything takes place that resolution is possible. It not only makes that assumption, it demands that I seek resolution; and it equally demands of the world that the resolutions that are achieved satisfy me. 

Perhaps, here, I come up against the essential engine of selfishness Swedenborg so firmly believed we must work against. Gurdjieff, by the way, absolutely believed in exactly the same thing: a wish we have for ourselves is ultimately worthless, because it does good for no one other than us. It is only the wish for other people, with the heart, that can bear real fruit.

Yet even in this, there is a wish for resolution: a wish, in a certain sense, for that which cannot be, but for which I must nonetheless strive. Even if I wish for the good and wish it for all, it presumes a destination.

And the insight that I had on Wednesday night inferred quite clearly that there actually is no destination –at least, no destination within the world of objects, events, circumstances, and conditions. Every result, every resolution, is highly temporary, dependent on circumstance, and subject to revision. There’s no “single” object, event, circumstance, or condition; all of them only exist in relationship to one another, and no one of them can be at all without its partners. All of them are constantly changing their relationship to one another in a movement that takes place from instant to instant. In this sense, they are as ephemeral as the stuff from which atoms are made. Atoms are not made from things; they are arisings of relationships between energies. 

Wishing well for you on this day,

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.

Resolution and Being, part II

Cloisters, Abbey of St. Hilaire

In some way, subtle and difficult to define, with every future event that my being forecasts and imagines, there is a belief in resolution –that is, I believe a satisfactory ending for that particular imaginary situation can be reached.

The situation’s even more complex than that, because my imagination forecasts both things that will definitely happen (unless I die) such as eating a meal, or getting home safely and going to bed, and things that almost definitely won’t happen, such as winning the lottery, and so on. 

My imagination, in other words, has the capacity and the habit of forecasting both the possible and the impossible; and unless I have sufficient awareness to discriminate between the two, it’s likely to confuse me, sometimes in disastrous ways

And what's the function of this “imagination?” Well, it serves as an agent for resolution; that is to say, it prepares me to make decisions and take actions that will lead to resolutions in the sense of solutions, answers to questions. 

So I have a psychic function, which uses both intellectual, emotive, and physical elements of Being, that is designed to serve resolution. This particular capacity relates especially to the physical life of the body, and ordinary requirements for being, such as getting food, forming relationships, reproducing children, and so on. All of these various actions require intermittent resolution of one kind or another– some frequently, some only a few times during a life, but there’s always an underlying—and perhaps overbearing—aim and goal. 

And there’s always this presumption that things can be resolved, that is, something which is imagined can be attained. That attainment, furthermore, is always viewed as a form of ending, because it answers the two main questions posed by the imagination– what will happen, and what do I do about it?

The imagination is a creature that takes on its own life. It frequently operates without any direction (this is BTW the source of inward creative function) and it produces all kinds of material which may continue to repetitively churn itself out long after its purpose has already been served. (Obsessive-compulsive disorders center around this mechanical activity of the imagination. Everyone has some features of this disorder, but in a self-serving action of denial, society only tips its hat to the most obvious clinical manifestations.) 

This part has a great power, because it helps to drive life forward; and in the absence of any awareness about that power or the function itself, it can take over my life. I need, in other words, enough force of Being to not live in my dreams and my imagination. This is worth examining more, because it is strongly connected with Gurdjieff’s teachings about sleep.

Before I move on to the personal psychic consequences of this belief in resolution, I just want to point out how strongly our literary and mythical arts are connected to the idea. Speaking as an editor, I’ve pointed out many times that what is satisfying in storytelling, drama, mythology is the laying out of conflict and the achievement of resolution. Story lines that don't follow this very broad requirement are somehow deeply unsatisfying; and no matter how the modern world has attempted to divorce itself from this trajectory by creating fashionable open-ended stories that begin nowhere, stay nowhere, and go nowhere—all with much sound and fury—storylines without a resolution always seem to ultimately fail. Compare high-quality productions that ultimately go nowhere, such as HBO's The Sopranos, with its repetitive resolution of small stories without any true resolution to the whole series, to Breaking Bad, which follows a relentless downward slide into disaster. Breaking Bad’s trajectory, negative though it is, finds a fair portion of its genius in achieving the resolution that The Sopranos never quite finds. 

It is going somewhere. 

It ends. 

Existentialism alone turns out to be a very weak partner in dramatic contests: it's too one centered, too intellectual. From a certain perverse point of view, with human beings, we sense it is better to end badly than to never end at all. 

Perhaps this peculiar and inverted understanding of meaning is what leads to so many apparently senseless acts of violence. We want our myths –our stories about what life means –to be resolved. The satisfaction we seek is a highly emotional one: its source, in other words, lies beyond mere existence, in a realm that can't be defined by facts alone.

More often than not, the most satisfying stories – and these are the ones that overwhelmingly prevail in literature and the arts–are the ones where good triumphs over evil. There is something so deeply satisfying about this that it's difficult to explain using conventional psychology. The soul of mankind itself has a wish for this kind of resolution: that the better thing will happen. The fact that the better thing is all too often profoundly subjective hardly matters; and cultures form their identities around agreement on what the better thing is, which is part of the whole point of myth in the first place.

Wishing you good on this day,

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.

Resolution and Being, part I

Menhir of Conozoules

I was driving across town last Wednesday night, headed towards the Gurdjieff Foundation. If New York City is the heart of the universe on earth, The Gurdjieff Foundation is at the heart of New York: an open secret, a place of intentional stillness at the heart of the great city where everything pauses, where the silence of the soul quietly makes itself heard.

How can I describe these December evenings, which contain perfections too sublime to measure? One drives through Central Park, stone walls looming up on either side, the bright lights of the city glittering like stars through the bare branches of the trees… it's always an experience filled with atmosphere and mystery, a bubble in the midst of time between places.

East side, West side. 

Job, Gurdjieff work. 

A moment of suspension. Eternity defined not by its expanse, but by its limitations.

This time around, however, for a moment a different dimension opened around me. Everything that could possibly be was in this dimension, all of it in movement, somehow simultaneously compressed into a single instant— and also opening expansively throughout time and space, as if it included, with ease, the entire nature of the universe. 

I don't like to use overblown phrases like that, but it seems necessary in order to describe just how deep and wide this dimension of existence was.

In this single instant, I had the distinct impression that nothing could be resolved. Not just in this one moment, but ever. This was a doorway into another universe, a comprehensive dimension of existence and understanding that opened for one nanosecond and then closed again: but within it were all things.

In order to explore this moment in more detail, I resolved to take a look at what the word resolution means in the first place. I did so; and I was surprised. So, etymology first, and other  impressions afterwards.

The word resolution quite literally means, in its own right,"re– solution," in the sense of something that is dissolved, broken into parts. It derives from the past participle in Latin resolvere; and that, in turn, is related to the Latin solvere, which also means to disperse, dissipate, and loosen. Hence we have a word which means, in English, to find an answer to (solve) or wrap up (resolve)– both implying a bringing together of various disparate elements into a whole—which had a nearly opposite meaning at one time.

We can reconcile the apparent contradiction by understanding that if we take many different elements, let's say, different soluble powders, and put them together in water–a solution – they are unified. They become whole in a new way. Yet the word resolve is far more complex than just that; it evokes many questions about just what we actually mean when we use it.

It's an unusually rich word. Running through the definitions in the Oxford English dictionary, we discover the following meanings:

1. To melt or dissolve, reduce to a liquid or fluid state.

2. To disintegrate, to break up, separate into constituent or elementary parts.

3. To soften. To disperse or dissipate.

4. To slacken or relax, as in the limbs.

5. To cause to pass away.

6. To separate a thing into its component parts.

7. To reduce by fundamental analysis into more elementary forms principles or relations.

8. To pass into another form or into simpler forms.

9. To reduce, transform, or change to something else.

10. To untie or loosen.

11. To answer or to solve, as a question or argument.

12. To remove, clear away, or dispel– for example,  as in doubt

13. To decide, to determine what's up.

14. To determine or decide upon.

15. To free from thought complexity; to bring certainty, clear understanding.

The way that I conceived of the word’s meaning on Wednesday night related to the idea of solving problems, of reaching an end to things. An ending in which things are explained, in which satisfactory answers are found, in which loose ends are tied up and one finally knows or understands something. 

In order to attempt to get to the bottom of that, allow me to explain a little further.

There’s something in me that thinks, with all of my being, within all of everything that is happening to me, that the various situations in life can be resolved. I’ll get the merchandise I am manufacturing shipped; I’ll make the money I hope to make; I’ll have the conversations I want to have, feel the feelings that are satisfying, eat a good meal that is properly cooked. 

In a nutshell—I’ll get the girl. 

Wishing the best for you on this day,

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.

A Tissue of Awareness

Abbey of Villelongue

Photograph by the author

Eventually, the awareness of sensation begins to form substances within the physical body that are of the physical body but bring new organic capacities to it.

The awareness of sensation is connected to the development of the astral body; but without getting into the metaphysical principles here, which are admittedly important, one needs to discuss the function what else sensation can help take place. 

Practical matters.

We all know that we have three centers – at least, those of us who have study this question seriously have eventually developed some capacity for understanding how we dwell within one of the three centers most of the time; and perhaps we have even developed a capacity that can see each of their operations separately.

Sensation helps to grow a tissue within the human body that connects the centers. That tissue is a physical thing, a new and different network of neurology that consists not just of physical nerves, but roots that grow through the body. 

And what, you might ask, do we need these supposed roots for?

These roots are quite physical things, energetic pathways that form between the centers. The tissue is a connective entity that allows the centers to communicate with one another in a quite different way. When Gurdjieff speaks of the idea that the three centers come together to form a fourth entity, he is absolutely correct: and yet what he doesn't explain is that this entity can't form or exist without the connective tissue that allows them to coexist as equal awareness is.

Some readers of this piece, even experienced students of the Gurdjieff method, may argue that one can't actually see the differences between the centers or be precisely aware of them, and so on. I had an highly experienced friend tell me recently that all this was subjective and that we're just making it up. (!)

If you're having this reaction, your work on the question has been theoretical so far and you need to throw away everything you understand and start over. Or just leave the Gurdjieff work; it has done and can perhaps do little for you. You're possibly better off somewhere else, perhaps a Zen practice or whatnot.  And may God truly bless that new effort.

There is nothing theoretical about this question; and unless one has a truly three-centered experience, one doesn't at all understand what the function of an awareness of sensation and an awareness of feeling bring to the table. 

These two particular awarenesses are essential functions of the beginning of Gurdjieff’s intentions for us; and nothing that is truly awake or aware or conscious ever takes place in a us unless the active awareness of these two other centers begins to participate.

Even after the active awareness of sensation begins to participate in a voluntary way in the action of Being, and feeling begins to enter, the growth of any substantial amount of connective tissue between the centers takes many years. There may be ways to accelerate it; but one always runs the risk, when doing that, that the tissue will not form in a harmonious way. It is a quite delicate thing and it needs time to grow and form the right connections between the parts. There are 10,000 different ways this can go wrong. The best way to approach it is to engage in a gentle, intimate, and attentive inward work over many years and allow this particular capacity for conductivity to grow naturally. It has a much better understanding of the way to connect the centers than any theoretician, guru, or Yogi can bring, because it is inherently intelligent in its own right.

When I say that this connective tissue is composed of roots, I mean it quite literally. Once these roots are properly developed, they become an integral part of organic sensation. There is no need to search for them or attempt to invoke them; they’re as natural to the action of awareness as roots are to a plant. The analogies with the natural world of plants are nearly endless, because as they form, they form symbiotic relationships with the essential components of inner awareness, incl. molecular awareness, in the same way that plants form relationships with bacteria and fungi. 

These relationships become sustaining forces in the growth of Being. In the same way, they draw the water of awareness upwards into the centers, feeding them with substances that help them to grow, to spread their leaves, and to blossom. 

This is just a description of the physical process. The connective tissue I speak of is an energetic entity that also helps to inwardly form all of our psychic and spiritual life. It makes contact with all of our memories and begins to weave our inner life and all that we have ever been together into a single whole through the network it creates. The energy of our Being begins to flow along these roots and weave our inward life together in exactly the same way that piece of fabric is woven. 

We begin to inhabit ourselves –this fabric is something that we wear to clothe our psyche, but we wear it inwardly. We begin to see that the the Emperor with no clothes was always an inward entity in the first place, not an outer one; and that what was always lacking in the first place was this connective tissue, which is not an entity in its own right, but a means of communication between the parts.

Wishing the best for you on this day,

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.

The critique of the three parts

Abbey of Villelongue

Photograph by the author

Gurdjieff explains, in Beelzebub, how the three primary forces of the universe begin to “criticize” one another when under the influence of the emanations of the most holy sun absolute, or other suns.

This may sound like an obscure cosmological concept that needs no further examination from the perspective of our level, but that isn't the case at all. The important point to consider here is that he was giving us an analogy between cosmological principles and the function of the three centers as we understand them; that is, the ability of each of the centers to function as an independent entity, with a fully conscious and functional mind of its own, and the ability to criticize the actions of the other two centers.

If one doesn't have a practical understanding of how this function operates, one can't possibly understand any of the premises of Gurdjieff's work from anything but an intellectual point of view; and that by itself is entirely deficient and insufficient, because although it can know a very great deal about Gurdjieff's work, it cannot understand it properly.

First of all, we need to understand that the intelligence of sensation and the intelligence of emotion are entirely whole and functional intelligences which are quite different than that of the intellect. The intellect is functionally unable to take either of these two roles on and perform it effectively. 

Secondly, we need to think about what it means to criticize. This means, in its overall context, the ability to observe and evaluate. Not to find fault with; although that could certainly become part of the process of evaluation. 

So we need to understand that only speak of observing ourselves, we can't just think of observing ourselves from the perspective of a single whole “I” which observes all the parts; we have to first consider the idea that each of the parts is a whole "I" in its own right, with the capacity to observe and evaluate the function of the other two parts.

What this means is that I need to see and evaluate the functions of my intelligence and my feeling with the awakened capacity of sensation; I need to see and evaluate my sensation and my intelligence from the awakened capacity of feeling; I need to see and evaluate my feeling and my sensation from the awakened capacities of intelligence.

These awakened capacities are not just what is call "conscious;" they are aware — that is, they function within a field of watchfulness that's quite different than just knowing and being conscious.

Once again, it's necessary to understand these intelligences and the way in which they function by living within them—living within the awakened capacity of these parts. Although this is certainly a fragmentary experience at the beginning of anyone's inward work, it can eventually become a more powerful influence. Then we begin to see not just that our awakened sensation anchors our Being; we also begin to observe from within it, to (for example) truly see the mind and the feeling as independent entities from the perspective of the sensation which we inhabit.

This can also be done with the feeling; if it arrives—a special condition under most circumstances—it, as well, can see and sense and watch the other two parts, intellect and sensation, from within its own capacity. 

So my awareness has this threefold action; and I need to learn exactly how that functions and understand that before I presume to think that I "know" this or that, or that I "understand" this or that. If these capacities become aware, I discover that I probably don't know anything; and I probably don't understand much of anything either. The three faculties, acting in a concert of awareness and critique, balance one another in such a way that it tends to put us into a state that the Gurdjieff work conventionally calls "question."

Now, perhaps we ask ourselves, what's that all about? 

It could well be that our understanding of these various capacities as awakened and aware entities in their own right is relatively weak, or merely just a concept that we have absorbed and attempted to digest with our intellectual parts. 

So there needs to be an effort to become much more sensitive within and acquire a better understanding of this which is based in practice and not just through our theories.

I think that part of the issue here is that the mind thinks it knows everything — and, in knowing everything (which it doesn't) it believes it understands everything (which it emphatically doesn't). There are important capacities of intelligence (a property that belongs to each of the centers, not just one of them) that cannot be understood through the intellect alone. Indeed, the center with the greatest capacity for the sacred is feeling, which is in its essence, the ability to sense and form a relationship with the levels above us. 

We can't do this without our emotions; and yet they have to be raised to a level of awareness rather than just reaction. Reaction is mechanical or reflexive; awareness is watchful and discriminating. Even after decades of attempting to strike an intelligent (three-centered) balance between these three parts, the feeling part is a delicate mechanism which can only function in the presence of energies fostered and offered by the other two parts. This support structure is what we attempt to create when we bring the mind and the body together; without the support structure, no feeling. 

And without feeling, no right sense of God, which is an essential aim of inner work.

Wishing the best for you on this day,

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.

Organic Happiness, part 3

Abbey of Villelongue

Photograph by the author

Relationship and satisfaction arrive as a result of my alignment with God’s will and purpose, which may not be expressible in words, but take up residence in the body and in the Being and in the feeling in a way that cannot be comprehended by the intellect. 

The intellect can observe; the intellect can participate; but the intellect does not have the skill or the insight necessary to create these conditions.

What does create the inner conditions is another question; but it certainly isn’t outer events. So if I expect happiness to come from listening to a great song, or falling in love, or making some extra money or eating some good food, I can agree that this is the case; but only to the extent that it creates temporal happiness, which is highly subjective and completely subject to the whims and circumstances of life as it happens. It isn’t real happiness; it’s temporary happiness. 

Spiritual happiness, on the other hand, is objective happiness. 

It penetrates throughout the entire realm of the soul and all of its awareness; it comes from God and acts within us. Perhaps it’s asking too much to live life as though this were the kind of happiness that mattered; yet I find it far more central to the question of life. Within the context of my ordinary and outward life, there’s no doubt, I am happy or unhappy from moment to moment; yet that never seems to be where life is primarily located to me. 

My true happiness arises from where life arises; from the condition of my soul and not the circumstances of my life. Although I may need to remind myself of that from time to time when life begins to appear overwhelming, I’ll never forget it for as long as I am in relationship with the higher energy of God’s Grace.

 As a consequence of this, when people ask me if I’m happy, I’m never quite sure what to say. Do I try to explain to them that it is only within the condition of Grace itself that true peace of the soul can become available? Folks would find this tiresome rather quickly.   Maybe even instantly. 

So I try to say as little as possible about having a relationship with God, unless someone asks about it. 

It’s a sign of the times that hardly anyone ever asks about this. Now, it’s true, folks in the Gurdjieff work ask about it; but outside of that context, having a real inner relationship with God is of almost no interest to anyone.

Yet if I don’t love God first, I don’t think there is any real happiness in me.

Wishing the best for you on this day,

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.

Organic Happiness, part 2

Abbey of Villelongue

Photograph by the author

Whenever I’m touched by the least portion of Grace, nothing else matters. It is not that it loses what value it has, but rather that I see everything through its relationship to Grace and its action in the soul; and even this one single instant of a connection with God—should I be so fortunate as to receive it— renders all things valid, satisfying, true, right, and meaningful within the context of Being. 

This is called the Peace of God which passes all understanding (Philippians 4:7); but it’s only conferred by starting out with a right inner relationship to God.

 This is, in a nutshell, organic spiritual happiness; and organic spiritual happiness is a blend of many different feelings which all exist simultaneously. 

My friend R. (who is, by the way, a professed atheist) presumed to dumb it down and just call all of it “love;” but this is too simplistic for me, because each feeling we have is a thing unto itself. They may all be fractions of this greater thing called God’s Love — that is of course true — yet God’s Love takes on so many magnificently different aspects in its manifestation within the soul that to call it one thing somehow cheapens it, renders it one-dimensional, since we associate the word love so easily with things of the world, failing to understand its breadth and depth.

This blending of many, many different feelings is described by Gurdjieff as conscience (take note he did not call it love here) as the experience (I’m paraphrasing, because I feel lazy and I don’t want to look up the source quote) of having all the possible different feelings one could have about anything, experienced at the same time. 

What he’s trying to explain with this is a spiritual experience, not a temporal one: and he’s furthermore describing what one might equally call “happiness,” because conscience – should it ever manifest in an individual in a right way — is in complete and absolute alignment with God’s own wish, and brings us to a moment wherein we feel all things at all contradictions are resolved. 

There is a wholeness of experience embedded in this moment. That can only happen, of course, when the inflow is present; one has to be under a higher influence. When we are truly aligned, through God’s gift of Grace, with his will — ah, then we are truly happy.

In the many years I worked at Silver Lake with Frank Sinclair and other folks from the Gurdjieff work, Frank always referred to this as an inner alignment. Of course he wasn’t unique in this particular remark; but he brought it quite deftly, and with considerable intelligence. The traditional hand movement, perhaps considered an affectation by those who don’t appreciate such things, is a vertical hand moving downward in front of the body — a position that will probably be familiar to Buddhists as well. It indicates the verticality (another word Frank uses frequently) of the moment, the action of a higher influence passing down through us. It equally indicates alignment, the movement of that usually tangled piece of our awareness, a knotted fishing-line within us, into a straight line that has a weight at the end.

This particular analogy (my own) is quite apropos, but the point of it isn’t the alignment of the fishing line, which has become straight and has what the Buddhists would call ”right attitude” when the inner alignment takes place. It’s the weight at the bottom of the line that makes a difference. If I'm attracted to the alignment, rather than the weight that creates it, my attention may not be in quite the right place. 

There has to be a weight within Being, a personal center of gravity, that attracts this vertical descent of the energy of Grace; and the weight of that attention, the gravity (or, if you will, magnetism) that it creates is what matters. That is a place of residence, and although it allows movement in any direction, it does not consist of movement itself, but is rather an absolute stillness.

I defy anyone who’s experienced this to say that that absolute stillness — and the alignment that it creates — are anything other than relationship and satisfaction, that is, real happiness. 

Unattached happiness.

Sparkill, Nov. 23, 2018

Wishing the best for you on this day,

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.