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:

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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.

The Quantum State of Being

Announcing a new monograph available for purchase at the below link:

The Quantum State of Being

The material in this book will be published free in the blog in April, May, and June of this year. I'm selling advance copies in book format to help fund ongoing publishing projects related to important historical Gurdjieff materials.

The project is about to enter a stage which requires additional consultation, which will be expensive.

Readers who contribute by purchasing will be making a contribution to material of considerable significance.

As readers know, I make almost all of my material available for free. I can only say this is an exceptional project, and any support that can be extended is appreciated.

Thanks for your consideration.

Wishing the best for you on this day,

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.

Gurdjieff Reconsidered

Jan. 31

I just finished reading Roger Lipsey’s new book, Gurdjieff Reconsidered, which I was fortunate enough to receive an advance copy of.

First of all, let me say that anyone interested in Gurdjieff and his ideas ought to buy and read this book. It's a deeply sensitive, intelligent, and cogent re-examination of the man and his teaching; along the way, one encounters more than a few very carefully selected gems.  It’s probably impossible to distill the essence of a teaching this vast; yet somehow, the book manages to come close enough to doing that. Perhaps I'm less than wholly objective here; Roger is a friend of mine. Yet I can’t think of anyone more qualified to undertake such a mission. 

The book speaks for itself. Go read it.

 One of the impressions I came away from this book with was how utterly impossible it is to convey exactly what the Gurdjieff work is for; how it works in a human being, what it produces. 

I’ve been writing about that in my diary here online for over 12 years; and yet I think it’s safe to say I’ve never written a single thing that can accurately express what takes place when one’s inner life — along with an awakened sensation and an awakened feeling— is transformed. Reading words, we’re invariably left with intellectual impressions of transformation — descriptions. In and of itself, this is not a bad thing. Yet if we don’t have impressions that are gained through the intelligence of sensation, and impressions that are gained through the intelligence of feeling, we don’t know what the whole point of Gurdjieff’s teaching was; and although you can read the words that say that here, only your own organism and its voluntary intelligences can embody this teaching in any active way. 

 The whole point of the impressions we take in is to deepen our experience of our life. Ultimately, it can indeed prepare a place for the master: not some external guru,  but the Lord — or, as Jeanne de Salzmann said, Le Seigneur.  

We have the possibility of becoming a dwelling-place for something very different than what we think we are in our ever-fertile and ever-febrile imaginations; and this is, without any doubt, the essence of esoteric Christianity.  

Wishing the best for you on this day,

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.

Seated Within Being

From the Tympanum at St. Foy in Conques

Photograph by the author

I make an aim to be so deeply seated within my Being that even my least manifestation is rooted in it.

No matter how deeply I sense myself, I discover—in moments of opportunity—that there is always a yet deeper level of sensation, of physical and cellular awareness, that I have almost no connection to and rarely experience. 

Each time a new experience of this kind emerges, I’m surprised. I didn’t know that a yet deeper level— one which is even more alive—existed at all, let alone that I could be related to it and am generally lacking in that ability.

This sensation of self is primal; it lies beneath everything the mind thinks, and it begins before the place where the mind arises. It has, in addition to its rooted physical qualities, a character of intelligence; and it carrels within it a feeling of real love for Being; for this Being, the one which I’m gifted to participate in.

There is the possibility, if I’m seated within Being, to allow even the most superficial of reactions and identifications to run their course and play themselves out without entirely abandoning a sense that I am. 

That sense is wordless; it stands within, steadfast, like the fisherman when a large fish strikes his bait. 

The fisherman stands firm, allowing the fish to run, the line to spill itself out into the ocean, waiting for the precise moment when the fish finally pauses—exhausted, having used up its resources. 

At this point, the fisherman— who is exquisitely, organically attuned to the play of forces between Being and reaction—applies just the right amount of tension to the line. 

An exact relationship between the fish and the fisherman is re-established, by instinct—and the fish is brought back under control. Pulled back towards the inner center of gravity. 

My reactions can be like this; but only if I find this seat within Being, this place of gathered inner force which is superior to the mind.

Wishing the best for you on all days,

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.

The Universal Enneagram in paperback

The Universal Enneagram is now available in paperback on Amazon.com.

An intelligible restraint

The Devil, at St Foy in Conques

In the end, as we encounter and digest the things people say… and write… about their own inner work and inner work in general, we need to form a sound judgment about whether the things we hear and read are in fact reasonable or not.

The word sound derives from the German gesund, that is, healthy; and judgment is the ability to come to considered decisions and come to sensible conclusions. I won’t bore you with the convolutions, but consider may come from the Latin sider, —star. In other words, a considered judgment is perhaps one more informed by the stars, or, in alignment with heaven, than by thoughts tangled up in one’s own thick wad of inner chewing gum.

If we buy this explanation—and I am not telling you to, I’m merely putting it forward—then we need to carefully think over whether what we hear about inner work is aligned with heaven or its less compassionate counterpart. This isn’t, in the end, all that hard to do, in my own opinion. That which is loving, intelligent, sensitive, caring, and humanitarian in its impulse and its root is heavenly. That which is angry, selfish, aggressive, narrow, and arrogant inclines more towards hell… however you may want to interpret that word, metaphysically or otherwise. 

So when we read things we can discern their center of gravity quite quickly, as long as we’re making a legitimate attempt to assess the material instead of starting out with a predetermined negative (or positive) point of view.

This leads me to a comment about the many internet spaces devoted to Gurdjieff discussions (this space is, quite intentionally, not a forum for discussions of that kind) and the rambunctious and even rancorous tone that such discussions sometimes take on: divisive and oft even accusatory.

This is not, in my own experience, the best way to work. Conflict is not of itself a bad thing; but inner work is meant to bring folk together, not divide them. It ought (yes, ought) to engender a gentler and more attentive form of love towards one another. Not rage and dissent. To be sure, anything can happen between folks; but an organic sense of being promotes compassion over all other qualities. That compassion can, surely, be sorely tested; and there are times when one has to exercise utmost restraint in order to avoid lashing out at individuals who seem to have set themselves the inner and outer task of being nasty in one way or another—whether towards others in general, or those in the Gurdjieff work more specifically. 

I’d like to remind readers that none of us know each other all that well; and this is especially true of those of us who only know one another through the internet, and have never sat, for example, in a room together for even one minute. Hurling accusations towards others in this environment is a deeply misguided action, because the folks who do such things have, objectively, absolutely no idea whatsoever about—in my own case— ”what I'm really like,” or what my interests are. One can spend decades, for example, married to someone and despite that proximity understand—and one will, if one works—more and more deeply that one doesn’t even truly understand much about one’s spouse, for goodness sake. 

We’re mysteries to one another. We might consider respecting that more.

So how can folk exchanges posts on the internet or email possibly presume to think they know anything, really, whatsoever about the other? This simply isn’t possible; and sound and considered judgment ought surely to take this into account first. 

If that were done, perhaps an appropriate humility would prevail.

But, you see, it doesn’t, because generally speaking people just aren’t working; they are reacting, they are posing, they are blathering, and getting overexcited, but they are not working, which requires an inner repose within the texture of Being that has nothing whatsoever to do with slinging trash talk at one another online. 

Everyone who engages in this is demeaning themselves in one way or another. 

We all demean ourselves in one way or another from time to time, of course; but the point is to try from an inner point of view, through the sensation, to discover an intelligible restraint.

Wishing the best for you on each of our days,

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.

World: Illumination

Hell (right side), from the Tympanum at Abbey Church of St. Foy, Conques

Photograph by the author

 It turns out that the word world perhaps contains more information than I thought it might about the nature of entering into our work. Gurdjieff used the word in a sophisticated way to indicate important aspects of Being.

Our world — our experience of life through time — is created first through our inner being, our organic sensation of ourselves. It is then maintained (held within the hand) through a sense of touch, a physical inner contact or thread of awareness which is maintained through time within Being. 

We can’t truly appreciate what life means—what the word world means—unless intellect and sensation are active and engaged within Being. Until that happens, we’re limited to the psychological, temporal, and material explanations of the ideas of world. 

World needs, instead, to become a physical, emotional, and intellectual experience whose three aspects acquire equal weight within perception. 

This needs to take place as a sensory engagement, not a thought process. It may begin with the intention of intellect, to be sure; but the intention has to become alive within each of the three parts that have a wish to participate. There must be an intention not just of the mind, but an intention of body and an intention of feeling to accompany it. These three forces need to be balanced; and since they are essentially unequal to begin with, it’s a delicate matter. The intellect alone, which wishes to orchestrate these affairs, can’t manage the affairs of the body and the affairs of the feelings—simply because it knows nothing of their capacities. It’s a separate intelligence. It is only one, in other words, of three different worlds that exist within a human being, all of which need to combine harmoniously in order to create the fourth estate, the fourth way.

Until we understand this more directly through an organic sensation of our being, which is the fundamental texture that can tie our individual fragments of awareness together, everything we see is like being in a dark room that is occasionally illuminated by the flash of a strobe light. 

When that happens, we see everything in the room and are perhaps enormously impressed; but then our awareness slides back into a darkness that allows us to stumble around without helping us to establish sane relations between the various inner objects that surround us. These objects, by the way, are the various fragments of our own being, which are disconnected. We keep bumping into them, often painfully.

Knitting together the tangled yarn of our awareness with sensation gradually allows a whole piece of cloth to emerge. At this point inner illumination becomes more regular. If sensation becomes relatively permanent, the light will be turned on in such a way that we can see the whole world — our whole inner room — without the fragmentary snapshots which have plagued us for a lifetime. 

This is an uncomfortable experience. The fact is that we’ve been bumping into objects in our room for our whole lives without knowing what they were. Taking them for granted, and assuming that they both belong in the room and that all the pain they are causing is necessary and acceptable in one way or another. Turning on the light of awareness within our inner room through a relationship with organic sensation allows us to begin to deploy a faculty of discrimination — mediated by feeling — that allows us to acknowledge where we actually are. 

We discover the world in which we live, the inward world, not the outward one. And it’s this inward world which we urgently need to illuminate: everything else that takes place both inside us and outside us depends first and foremost upon that illumination.

 Instead of focusing, however, on this understanding of this inner world which is begotten not made, and has the potential to receive the force of Christ and God as a master and resident—not a concept or thought process—we always focus on the outer world, and believe that everything we need to achieve and understand is attached to that.

Wishing the best for you on this day,

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.

World: Maintenance

Heaven (left side), from the Tympanum at Abbey Church of St. Foy, Conques

Photograph by the author

Gurdjieff’s interest in Being— which we’ll take, for the purposes of this essay, to be the fundamental ground within which consciousness arises and manifests— begins with the premise that it is created—not made. 

We hereby refer to the passage from the rite of Holy Communion describing Christ as begotten not made, that is to say, procreated or born, not fashioned using outer materials.

 This is important from both a spiritual and a psychological point of view, because what it says to us is that the human being  and Being itself, is not fashioned, at its root and in its essence, from what takes place outwardly. This fundamental understanding of esoteric Christianity can be found throughout the works of Meister Eckhart; his insights on the matter are nearly indispensable. 

Humanity is born, procreated, from the very essence of Being itself: begotten from an inner life, not made by the outer one. This vital (life-giving) distinction draws a line between mechanistic rationalism, the idea that everything is fashioned by the material and rests only on the material for its reason for existence and being, and metaphysical humanism, the understanding through organic experience that everything in being is created, not made. 

We find ourselves in a dialogue here about whether the material gives birth to life, or life gives birth to the material. (See Emmanuel Swedenborg’s comments on the matter, which are definitive.) Worlds are not fashioned through and by the material, but fashioned through the subtle and inexplicable nature of the soul and of consciousness and being itself. It cannot be otherwise. This creation, begotten not made, reveals the essential nature of both Christ — God as a force in the world — and our own essential nature as vicegerents of God. 

 Our world is created. This is what the inner life of man consists of, the creation of our world, and from Gurdjieff’s perspective it functions according to laws which we must understand. The first law which we have the capacity to understand is the law regarding the fact that we are begotten, not made — that we are the seeds of a force expressed through the existence of humanity, both individually and collectively.

I live, as you do, directly within the experience of this world — my ”man–age” — which I become responsible for—must manage, meaning to handle, or touch.  

That is, engage with intimately. 

It is only through a direct and tactile experience of my creation, the arising of my consciousness through an inner force in every moment of existence, that I can begin to have any direct understanding of what it means to engage with the laws of world creation: the creation of my being. This takes place strictly in an inner sense, and it arises as a force before I encounter anything within the outer world. 

The outer “world” contains the third-order meaning of the word world, that is, a cosmos or a set of events that is external;  yet let us remember, as we continue this exploration, that the word world always applies to man and time, or, consciousness and the perception of impressions, so even the tertiary meaning of the word world is dependent upon a human force. Objects, events, circumstances, and conditions which are perceived are all utterly dependent on human perception in the first place. Human perception as an experience of awareness exists apart from the material (is meta-physical) and all of what is physical and perceived is irrevocably dependent on the existence of a human to perceive it (humanism, the fact that all consciousness and perception is dependent on a human force.) 

 This primacy of human force, which mechanistic rationalism calls anthropic,  that is, of man, can never be divorced from discussions about the universe, because the discussions themselves are dependent on man for their prosecution, even if one attempts (laughably, from a philosophical point of view) to remove him from the argument while having the discussion. 

That may seem like an intellectual twist; but the primacy of human force, the fundament of organic Being and the organic experience of Being, is not solely intellectual in its essence. It’s composed of all three of the forces that create a human being— body, mind, and feeling. 

We begin by inhabiting this place of awareness wherein we are in a body, are able to think of that, and have feelings about it. These forces are created, not made. When we encounter the world around us, outside us, that third-order world of things, we do so from the place in which we are born within Being.  

Our perception creates this world we call the experience of being human; and the more deeply we are invested in that initial experience—the more clearly we see how it precedes the existence of all other experience through an organic relationship to it—the more clearly we can see what Gurdjieff’s laws of world maintenance consist of.

 The word maintain is derived from the Latin manū and tenēre,  which mean to hold in the hand— bringing us back once again to this tactile requirement of intimate inner contact. 

We must needs touch ourselves from within with a sensory quality that transcends intellect alone— that is physical— in order to maintain, to grasp, the nature of our inner and our outer life. It is this intermittent direct contact from within that enables our ability to evaluate the impressions that flow into us, and the way that we see our lives — our attitude.

Wishing the best for you on this day,

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.