What is Death? Part IV

Death is too big to swallow, but it certainly swallows all of us. One can only describe it from a single perspective – that is, one's own. While attempting to organize it in relationship to the ideas of metaphysical humanism, I've put it in a larger context—yet it’s still my own context, no matter how large the circle inscribed around it is.

In order to bring death into a more immediate practical context, I'm going to have to refer to points I have made before about Gurdjieff’s teachings. At the very end of Beelzebub’s Tales, our friendly neighborhood fallen angel remarks:

The sole means now of saving the beings of the planet Earth would be to implant in their presence a new organ… having such properties that every one of these unfortunates, during the process of his existence, should constantly sense and be aware of the inevitability of his own death, as well as of the death of everyone upon whom his eyes, or attention, rest.

Only such a sensation and such an awareness could destroy the egoism now so completely crystallized in them that it has swallowed up the whole of their essence, and at the same time uproot that tendency to hate others which flows from it—the tendency that engenders those mutual relationships which are the chief cause of all their abnormalities, unbecoming to three-brained beings and maleficent for them and for the whole of the Universe.

This particular organ, as I mentioned in The Sixth Sense, is our sensation of Being—not the conventional sensation of the body, that is, the one whereby if we hit our thumb with a hammer, it hurts. No matter how refined that kind of sensation may become, it's not the same thing as a permanent, active sensation of Being, which has the function of an organ. 

An organ works at all times, not just once in a while. Imagine, for example, if your lungs breathed only when you noticed them. Well then. The game would be up right away, wouldn't it? The point of an organic sensation of Being is that it is permanently and perpetually functional. Folks spend many years, even whole lifetimes, in esoteric disciplines learning the most rarefied kinds of stuff you can imagine. Yet even if they’ve heard of it—and not everyone does, not by a long shot—they confuse the idea of organic sensation with ordinary sensation and basically have no idea of the difference.

I intended to make some remarks about practical work in regard to death here, and I will try. 

One has no hope of understanding the foundation of life without such sensation. While Gurdjieff did not spell it out in so many letters, the understanding permeates the direct oral tradition of his teaching relentlessly and in every direction. 

Organic sensation of being brings with it, by default, an exact constant sense and awareness of the inevitability of our own death. It’s built into the premise. It’s impossible to precisely explain this without the experience.

The presence of death within life is a natural consequence of the nature of life itself. Death is, in fact, the metaphysical premise upon which life is already based when it arises. The installation of an active—a creative, rather than fearful—intelligence in regard to death leaves us dwelling in the present moment with respect and humility, and a proper valuation life – exactly what the Sanskrit  word dharma means. It does this not by means of reasoning, but intuition. It does it not by means of philosophy, but life experience. It does it not by means of indoctrination, but demonstration. It does it not by means of intimidation, but love.

This question of intimidation in regards to the matter is interesting, because I think we’re all intimidated by death. Paradoxically, it's only through an encounter with the active sensation of life that we can resign ourselves to our condition. That alone brings an absolute counterweight to the fear of cessation. 

It reminds me of words I’ve repeated many times; yet before I repeat them this time, I’ll mention how I first heard them. 

For most of my career, I’ve traveled to Asia. During the exercise of this vocation, there have been countless times when I was out of the country for one or another vital event of some kind. In May of 1990, when Jeanne de Salzmann died, I was in Taiwan. I heard the news only on my return. This was in an age when email did not exist, and phone calls overseas were expensive. (In other words, the dark ages.) 

When I got back, my teacher Betty Brown told me. As I recall, she told me on the phone, and then wanted to see me in person. We met in a restaurant called Burger Heaven up near the New York City Gurdjieff Foundation. Burger Heaven used to be called “the Annex.” 

Betty met me there and we commiserated although, in hindsight, I was entirely unable to appreciate the gravity of the loss. Although I was hardly new to the Gurdjieff work, I never had the opportunity of working directly with Mme. de Salzmann that so many of my contemporaries had.

Betty handed me a little slip of paper. It was folded; I opened it. On it she had written, 

Be there in relation to a force. Then it doesn't matter so much, what happens.

According to her, this was the last comment on the work that Jeanne de Salzmann left us. It serves, perhaps more importantly than her remark, there is no death, to remind us that we have to put our service to life and to Being first, without any thought to our death, other than its obligatory nature and the help it gives us in remembering our place. 

We do not need to devote thought to our death. We can, however, devote sensation—and, ultimately—feeling to it. 

These wordless qualities of an alternate intelligence have so far proved for me to be far more help in preparation for that moment than all the collective things I can ever think up.

May your heart be close to God, 

and God close to your heart.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.

What is Death? Part III

In addition to the inward breath of each individual consciousness, which draws the very fine particles of divine love back into concentrations of awareness—in reciprocal action both dilatory and contracting –there is an outward breath. These inward and outward breaths are metaphysical, because they originate in a place beyond the material reality that manifests them, and feed that same metaphysical Being. 

The physical universe is what Gurdjieff would have called the ”first” being-food of God’s nature, corresponding to what feeds his metaphysical body. But the intellectual-universe and feeling-universe are what feed God’s intelligence and love. These properties do not depend on mechanics for their action; they depend on agency. That is to say, unlike the physical aspects of reality, which are inexorably lawful and objectively mechanical, these aspects of reality are volitional and involve discrimination and choice. 

Gurdjieff described these two metaphysical foods of God’s Being as conscious labor and intentional suffering. 

Conscious labor feeds the metaphysical intelligence of God’s Being through effort; this serves the same purpose that the physical food of air serves the human body, and qualifies as what Gurdjieff would have called the second being-food.

Intentional suffering is the third being food of God, serving as the finest level of vibration available through experience. The pinnacle, in Gurdjieff’s cosmological order, of human responsibility was to take on a portion of the sorrow of God. What he did not so directly say, but eventually becomes self evident from any close analytical reading of his entire oeuvre, is that this is also a food for God. 

At the time of death, the individual concentrations of these various foods are completed in the life form engaged in the action. There is, in other words, a metaphysical "result.” Many esoteric  traditions recognize this. The Sufi masters believed that nothing can change in a man after he dies; and Swedenborg said much the same thing. The quantity and quality of what has been re-concentrated in Being, in other words, is set and established at the time of death. A soul – of whatever quality — has been formed. This is not a one-dimensional process and there are of necessity many varieties of souls. The structure of organic life from the underpinnings of microbiology up to creatures the size of elephants and whales is a correspondent physical entity reflecting the nature and quality of all the different souls that can form. This is worthy of contemplation; worldwide, so called ‘primitive” essence-based cultures, including the native and supposedly naive (by the standards of western classicism) North and South American cultures, reflect this in their folk tales and their art. These understandings are so ubiquitous and consistently similar in worldwide culture simply because mankind originally understood these principles by inward nature, not by outward intellect.

We can draw what happens after death with a rather broad brush dipped in the pigments of Swedenborg's palette. There is an analogous digestive system which takes this ”food” of Being, these concentrated particles of divine love, and moves them to the parts of divine being that they can best serve. Some are moved to places where the service is of a higher level (heaven) and some are moved to places where are the food has turned out to be less useful (hell.) You can see from this corresponding analogy that re-concentrated manifestations of Divine Being can serve in an extraordinary variety of ways ranging all the way from preserved individual manifestations of useful agency (angels) to complete dissolution (the biblical term for this is "being cast into the fire.”)

All of human descriptions of heaven, hell, souls, reincarnation, immortality, and so on are nothing more than facsimiles of what is true. This is why (and I report this story directly from someone who was there when it happened) when one of his pupils ask Gurdjieff in person whether reincarnation "was true or not,” Gurdjieff replied, “Is true. Not exact—difficult to explain. But something like that.” This is in contrast to Gurdjieff's writings about reincarnation, which were no doubt penned in order to dissuade the naïve from any superficial beliefs about the reliability of such ideas.

The essential point to return to here is that the function of death is deeply tied to the metaphysical regrowth of God’s Being. To draw yet another corresponding analogy, think of all the bacteria in our own gut who, while living their individual lives—which on their own level are just as filled with selfhood, urgency, and drama as ours are –ultimately serve a life so far greater than themselves that they can never have a conception of what it is. Each of our own cells is in a similar position. The Hindu conception of dharma as conforming to law and responsibility, as well as the Buddhist conception of the same word as a comprehensive truth, both apply here. Scale does not affect the character or the action of law; it just affects its mannerisms.

I'm sure by now you're bored. All this metaphysical crap, you probably think to yourself. What does it mean to me? Basically, I just want to know what happens when I die. 

What does it mean?

Those of you who feel this way about the subject have my sympathies. I wrote the entire book on Metaphysical Humanism simply because I was trying to understand what meaning is in the first place. I did that because when I first thought to myself, what does this life mean? one very early morning while I was walking down at the spot where the Sparkill Creek enters the Hudson river, I realized that it wasn't just what life might mean that was a question for me. 

I didn't even know what meaning was. 

And without, I thought to myself, understanding that, I can't even begin to answer the question.

Well, I am sure you’re saying to yourself by now, all very well and good, but I don't want to read a long book about what meaning is. And I sympathize with that too. I wrote the book, and I don't want to read it either. By now, I have had those thoughts and I am done with it. 

...Sort of, mind you, because the questions continue to expand, which is why we have this essay. 

But I am going to try and drop kick this football over the goal posts in the next essay, and speak directly to this question in a more practical way. 

I have no idea if that will work; each essay is an experiment in what will happen next. 

So we will see.

May your heart be close to God, 

and God close to your heart.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.

What is Death? Part II

If there is no death, on this level, at the very least, there is something quite like it: and because this level is a reflection of universal law, both physical and metaphysical, what looks like death to us must have its metaphysical counterpart. Put in these terms, the question at once becomes a much larger question than simple questions of the ego and its construction or dissolution.

Of course, those “simple” questions are difficult to dispense with. We can talk about how interested we are in the philosophical or religious implications and meanings of death; but we never actually mean we’re interested in death itself. What we’re interested in, rather, is our death. Because of what’s at stake, removing the subjective element from any discussion of death is impossible.

What seems incomprehensible to us is that there is an end to ourselves. That there’s an end to everything else? Well, sure. But us?

Me?

The fact that we willingly and even eagerly submit to a terminus at the end of every day by going to sleep, which provides a lifelong education in the question of death—at least in terms of the immediate—is forgotten. We locate ourselves in the center of a world that exists, and that's the end of it. To that extent, each of us is the autocrat of our own little cosmos. To conceive of the end of that world or ourselves—an absolute cessation of existence—is almost impossible. The only reason we accept the act of going to sleep is because we accept its relativity. 

Yet because this idea of death is possible, and because its existence itself verifies it as a thought in the mind of God, we can be relatively sure that the idea concerns even God himself. Although it remains unspoken in any outright sense, Gurdjieff's Beelzebub directly ponders the question of time in the context of death; time erodes God’s place of existence, and without it, we must presume, He will not just become a homeless waif. He will die. This, by the way, places Beelzebubs Tale’s at the center of the classic writer’s dialogue: the book is, in the end, about love and death. The passage quoted in part one underscores this fact: for Gurdjieff, time merely serves as a stand-in for death, who – as is traditional—arrives in disguise, hidden and unexpected. Death is a bone buried deep in the book.

The word dharma is used in Hinduism to denote dozens of different concepts, all of them related to a path of right living – a proper order. Roughly speaking, then, it implies a conformity to universal law, which is presumed to be constant (not impermanent, at least as measured against human affairs.) Death, being in conformity with that same law, is an inexorable part of the dharma. 

In Buddhism – whose doctrine of impermanence might appear to be utterly discredited by the very idea of eternity, but perhaps not, and maybe we’ll get back to that question—the word dharma has been expanded to indicate “all-encompassing truth.” In its literalized sense, taken within the narrow terms of the practice itself (and not its aims, which are commensurately vast) it retains its sense of a higher authority, as generally applied to mean the teachings of the Buddha, which are presumed to encompass all of cosmic law and order and, indeed, all truth.

Either way, we cannot escape the comparison to the alternate title of Gurdjieff’s Beelzebub’s Tales, that is, All and Everything—or, if you will, the dharma.

All this discussion about dharma brings us to a central point about the question of death. Death is not a phenomenon; it is an authority: the one authority that it is impossible to excuse the ego from submission to. The ego can excuse itself even from the authority of God and the devil: but death has the final say on authority. Perhaps that is why it's feared. You can argue with God; you can argue with the devil. But you can't argue with death. 

There are some few peculiar legends that speak of arguments with death, but few of them end well. Even the ones that do only put the matter off. Contrasted against this are the innumerable teachings on immortality of one kind or another; to a fault, one might say, the vast majority of human beings over the course of humanity's existence have believed that the soul—an essence of being – persists after death. Whether the soul is a will-o'-the-wisp like the shades of Hades or an absolute reincarnation in heaven or hell of the former being, as Swedenborg maintains, matters little.

From the perspective of metaphysical humanism, the persistence of the soul is inevitable. That isn't because the soul itself is persistent, but because of several aspects of created reality and the metaphysics that rule it. 

First of all, every soul is a re-concentration of the originally dispersed particles of Divine Love that formed the universe. By something rather less than a coincidence, this conforms entirely to Gurdjieff’s description of the universe and Divine Love itself. Not, as followers might have it, because "Gurdjieff was right," but, rather, because it is true. Divine love is a permanent and indestructible quality that lies outside time – and Gurdjieff correctly and precisely differentiated between the two in the aforementioned passage. While Gurdjieff’s book is highly original, the understanding is not — it permeates all of Emmanuel Swedenborg's work and creates the very foundation of his premises about our existence. Gnosticism, mysticism, and schools of initiation going back to pre-classical times have all taught the same thing on this subject. There are many flavors of this mustard, but it's all ground from the same seed.

Since Divine Love originally dispersed itself throughout the cosmos in the act of creation, it has been engaged, on the level of creation, in a cyclical and time-based contraction and dilation of its levels of concentration. The action of physical law alone illustrates this as a material principle without the need for further discussion. Yet physical law alone cannot explain the reasons for this action, which is ultimately metaphysical in nature. We need to turn to laws governing intelligence and feeling in order to understand the threefold action which leads to contraction and dilation of Divine Love. 

Keep in mind, as we do so, that this contraction and dilation is actually the action of the lungs of heaven breathing existence and creation in and out. This action of breathing, which feeds the divine intelligence, is exactly like the breathing of lungs in human beings. (Those interested in the analogy between the human body and the body of God should read Emmanuel Swedenborg's extensive and interesting commentaries on the correspondence.)

Like air, the collected impressions of perception, when concentrated in Being, contain fine particles of intelligence brought into new types of relationship. These particles, when drawn inward into Being, create increased concentrations of awareness and experience, which then attract more like materials. (See The Quantum State of Being.) Collected together in an organism, these concentrations of awareness represent what we call “life,” along with its corollaries, "consciousness" and "intelligence." All of these are just re-concentrations of God’s own original being. (See The Reconstruction of the Soul.) The inward breath of any single life re-concentrates that being for the length of that lifetime; it’s the inward breath of the soul that draws God back together in an individual and responsible, yet microcosmic, act of Love. 

I say it’s an act of love, because the action originates in love and its re-collection is loving simply because its origin is loving. Even if it expresses aspects that appear to be unloving, these are a matter of perception and not truth. (That is an important matter that requires a discussion much too long for this essay; but those interested in pursuing the question might start with Sri Anirvan’s Inner Yoga, specifically the chapter Buddhi and Buddhiyoga.)

In the next section, we’ll discuss the outward breath of Divine Love, which is, on this level, death.

May your heart be close to God, 

and God close to your heart.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.

What is Death? Part I

Here we’ll look at one of the most essential questions of the human condition, which has plagued human consciousness since it arose. Both an absolute condition and a seemingly impenetrable barrier, there seem to be as many opinions about death available on the planet at any given time as there are individuals.

Yet if we begin to understand time differently, and begin to absorb the question of eternity not as a theory, but part of the marrow of the universe’s bones, a different picture of awareness and intelligence begins to emerge. There is a breathing in and out of intelligence and awareness; it diffuses and concentrates itself rhythmically, which is a process we see emulated and recapitulated in an infinite number of physical processes. The physical reflects the spiritual; that is, the physical is a mirror of the metaphysical. Emmanuel Swedenborg recognize this and wrote about it at great length, calling it doctrine of correspondences. Interestingly, he said that ancient people such as the Egyptians understood this doctrine well, and that all of their— to us—mysterious and extraordinarily evocative art was an illustration of its variations.

The idea of the physical as a mirror of the spiritual, of course, is not a Swedenborg original; it’s Platonic and even pre-Platonic in nature, since the recognition of this fact has been alive in spiritually competent beings since spiritually competent beings first arose on the planet.

Coming to terms with death and its nature, as well as its meaning, begins with the question of spiritual competence. To be competent means to be fit or proper; to conform to requirements. Death begins within life as a requirement. It’s impossible to separate it from life, so it is the same thing as life. 

It's just a part of it that doesn't seem to make sense to us.

Yet individuals with spiritual competence have, it seems, always found a way to come to terms with death and accept it. Death does not just inhabit the physical spirit that life arises in; it is equally a metaphysical entity with a metaphysical counterpart that corresponds to its physical existence. We can know this because under the terms of metaphysical humanism, all of the reality is merely a piece of clay into which the spiritual has been pressed, leaving an impression. It is a dynamic, eternal, and evolving impression, but it is always a reflection of God's Being; and not itself unto itself alone.

In order to approach a more intimate embrace of the nature of death, we might begin with permanence. The Buddhist doctrines teach that there is no permanence, that everything is impermanent; and of course mechanistic rationalism teaches much the same thing. Yet all of these observations are derived from observations of the natural world, not its metaphysical counterpart. Metaphysical Humanism demonstrates that the natural physical world is a derivative reality; and so we can’t understand death less we understand it from its metaphysical perspective. It’s equally impossible to understand a metaphysical event’s reflection in the natural world unless we understand the laws that govern it. 

As I pointed out in the original exposition of metaphysical humanism, there are three sets of laws that govern natural or material reality as we understand it, and two of them are metaphysical. Gurdjieff actually indicated this to his pupil P. D. Ouspensky when he explained that Man's "higher being-bodies" were not physical bodies, but “astral-intellectual” and “astral-emotional” bodies. He didn't use those exact terms (which here basically mean “of the stars”) but it captures the gist of his teaching on the matter in the sense that these higher bodies are metaphysical entities. They are on a higher level that is not physical in the way we generally understand the word. And because they are not physical bodies, they are not under physical laws.

In understanding death, then, we must attempt to understand it from the perspective of metaphysical law. We need to understand not just the physical fact of the cessation of existence of an individual being within the natural world, but also the intellectual and emotional law that govern that same apparent cessation of being.

Before we look at that in more detail, let us briefly touch on the fact that our impression of impermanence, which I brought up just a bit earlier, is already entirely wrong. From a metaphysical perspective, within eternity—which lives outside of time –there is and can be no death. The existence of all creation within eternity guarantees its absolute permanence. The experience of impermanence is a subjective one arising from the perception of time from within its action.

This should be considered in regard to Gurdjieff's discussion of time in his magnum opus, Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson. In the book, time – which Gurdjieff refers to as the merciless heropass —causes the substance of God's place of existence to erode, provoking him to create the universe. Gurdjieff’s comments on time come up rather early in the book (page 127) and state:

Only Time alone has no sense of objectivity because it is not the result of the fractioning of any definite cosmic phenomena. And it does not issue from anything, but blends always with everything and becomes self-sufficiently independent; therefore, in the whole of the Universe, it alone can be called and extolled as the ‘Ideally-Unique-Subjective-Phenomenon’.

Thus, my boy, uniquely Time alone, or, as it is sometimes called, the ‘Heropass’, has no source from which its arising should depend, but like ‘Divine-Love’ flows always, as I have already told you, independently by itself, and blends proportionately with all the phenomena present in the given place and in the given arisings of our Great Universe.

Several intriguing things emerge from this passage, which otherwise amply illustrates my point that the perception of impermanence is subjective. The first is that Gurdjieff compares time to Divine Love, which, by the way it is described, is almost certainly a reference to Emmanuel Swedenborg’s teachings on the subject; and the second is that by comparing it thus, he de facto assigns time the status of qualities that are emanated by God; even though he later outright states that God Himself is not in absolute control of time. Hidden here is, perhaps, the idea that, like human beings, God has parts of himself that turn out to be unmanageable. The idea is at the very least intriguing, and would underscore the idea that in even the most irritating particulars, man is a perfect reflection of God – right down to his numerous imperfections.

But let's get back to the subject of death. The point, once again, is that impermanence is a subjective impression. Within eternity, the concept of impermanence is meaningless. Impermanence can be inferred only in the presence of time. In this sense, already, we encounter Jeanne de Salzmann's well-known comment: there is no death.

But if there is no death – what is there? There is something.

May your heart be close to God, 

and God close to your heart.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.

Life-Before-Life

April 19, Sparkill.

The Redwing blackbirds are singing outside my window. The Piermont marsh has a relatively large flock of them—in the thousands, to be sure. They have a habit of moving out of the marsh en masse just as the sun breaks the horizon. They do this by a form of consensus: in the minutes just before dawn, they exchange in a fluidly raucous chorus that gets louder and louder as sunrise approaches.

Astonishingly, there is a single moment where suddenly the entire flock becomes silent, as if by complete agreement with one another. This happens every morning – it isn't a coincidence, like the rare times in a filled room where suddenly, by accident, the whole room become silent. There is an intelligible intention behind their silence.

They are silent for just a moment. Then, suddenly, the quietly explosive sound of thousands of wings beating the air erupts, and the entire flock begins to take flight. It's a breathtaking moment; I've been in the marsh time many times to observe it.

Those who know me well know I write a lot about metaphysics and spirituality. Some of it is quite complicated; and yet there is nothing truly complicated about true practice of Being. The birds are engaged in it; and we can learn from it.

The word intelligent means, in Latin, understanding. That word in turn is constructed from two Latin roots, -inter, between, and -legere, to choose. So we discover – and perhaps we shouldn't be surprised, if we ponder it for a moment – that intelligence consists of making a choice between two things, that is, discrimination. This is one of the essential functions of awareness; and in the case of the birds, we see that both as individuals and as a community, they have a moment at the beginning of their day – just a moment – where they all choose to be silent together. Perhaps it's just an instant; but it is an essential instant. A moment of recognition before action.

This moment of silence before action is a valuable practice; and it's what I engage in each morning, what I often write about here.

Kasyapa, one of the Vedic masters, said the following:

Undisturbed am I, undisturbed is my soul,
Undisturbed mine eye, undisturbed mine ear,
Undisturbed is mine in-breathing, undisturbed mine out-breathing,
Undisturbed my diffusive breath, undisturbed the whole of me.

This is the moment of life-before-life, the moment of awareness that contains life inwardly but has not yet admitted it outwardly. It is an eternal moment with in our awareness: it's always there in us, preceding the arrival of our outside impressions.

This awareness of Being is an exquisitely fine and soft clay into which the outward world impresses itself, leaving a mark. The difference between this clay and a potter’s clay, however, is that this clay is eternally new and capable of receiving the impressions of the outer world over and over again. We could liken it to an endless series of Babylonian cuneiform tablets, inscribed with a stylus: all within our Being, a huge library of impressions.

Life-before-life awaits; it awaits in silence, it awaits in stillness. It's free of opinions and beliefs. It is available to discriminate. It is available to choose.

Part of what is available to be chosen is the newness of life as it is, rather than the previously inscribed version of it. If I inhabit myself undisturbed, I have the option of receiving this newness of life.

This is a tricky thing, but there is a way to inhabit the undisturbed life of the soul and receive life while participating very actively in it. Stillness and action are part of the same world. What needs to be recognized is that action, while vital, does not effectively inform (inwardly form) stillness.

Stillness, however, can perpetually lie at the root of action and inform it—because it is already inwardly formed.

In this way, the inner can inform the outer, but the outer does not truly inform the inner. This is because what is inward is forever the origin of Being; and the outer is what forever follows it.

So, today, as every day, I search for this undisturbed moment in me which is always available. My intelligence, my discrimination, my ability to choose begins here.

How will this life be today?

I'm prepared to see it.

May your heart be close to God, 

and God close to your heart.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.

Metaphysical Potential, part II

In discussing the concept of metaphysical potential, its importance in the scheme of human experience and inner development can't be overstated.

This morning, my wife was trying to understand the concept. In order to grasp its implications, we had to begin with a discussion of the behavior of photons at the quantum level, where they behave as both waves and particles. This curious phenomenon has been known since the early days of quantum studies, and I remember my grandfather — one of the founders of quantum theory — explaining it to me when I was a child.

Quantum theory is all about metaphysical potential. The wave/particle duality is a direct reflection of the nature of physical reality as it is constructed. 

Put in the terms of metaphysical humanism, waves are spiritual, and particles are natural. Reality (Meister Eckhart’s Creation, which means, basically, everything that is or could be, all that we are capable of knowing or understanding) is a blend of both of these qualities; and human beings are equally the same blend of both things. 

The fact that we are made of quanta, each and everyone of which embodies this duality as a present fact in the very act of existing in the first place, demonstrates the way that both the spiritual and the natural interact within Being at every moment. 

In every instant, all of Being has a freedom to determine of itself the nature of its manifestation: spiritual or natural. Metaphysical or physical. These qualities are not contradictory; and their expression is never separated. (Remember that one can never properly express the spiritual simply by the crudely simplistic approach of rejecting the natural.) Yet an act of conscious choice is necessary in order to resolve the nature of the moment. It may be spiritual; it may be natural. Perhaps it's a blend of both. But if I am passive and simply inhabit a preconceived construct of Being, the decision is made not consciously but, as Gurdjieff said, mechanically.

So what I want to discuss this morning is the idea of freedom in relationship to metaphysical potential. 

Metaphysical potential establishes the rule that all metaphysical properties of human consciousness are embedded in the fabric of reality of itself. 

 It also establishes an inviolable rule that a freedom of choice always exists in the instant before reality manifests. It's a cosmological law.

The metaphysical potential of the present moment, as well as all moments, rests in the state of perfect stillness and nothingness which contains all possibilities; it is only in the arrival of consciousness that a determination regarding that potential is made. The Free Will Theorem demonstrates a potential in every situation and in every instant that is free – it is not determined by what came before.

It is in no way overstatement to remark that Jeanne de Salzmann’s personal notebooks about her lifelong inner effort (currently published in a highly edited form as The Reality of Being) are a record of her effort to come into contact with this shared metaphysical potential. 

To come into contact with the instant before anything exists, where inner freedom is still present. 

Every single remark that she makes about freedom—and there are quite a few of them, because this was a very large part of her own personal aim—is in direct relationship to the question of what happens before time, in this inherent freedom from cause-and-effect. Our assumptions, our habits, our association and our experience draw a set of blinds down between us and an initial state of experience that still contains the freedom expressed in the quantum fabric. She speaks of this repeatedly in many different ways.

In the same way, every one of Meister Eckhart’s sermons comes in one way or another to grips with the question of metaphysical potential, which, as he also repeatedly says, must always be invoked by stripping us of everything we are. (Eckhart and de Salzmann have much in common.) If we read Eckhart closely and often – a necessity, since his insight is of a much higher order than our own—it's only in a complete abandonment, paradoxically, of both the spiritual and the natural state that we can reach our metaphysical potential, which is embedded not in our own thought, but in the very thought of God itself. This paradoxical abandonment of even the spiritual itself—something it is quite likely did not please the Catholic Church at all—lies simply in the fact that even our conception of the spiritual is already of the natural. 

Insidious, that; and yet we must ultimately come to terms with the facts: we are wrong even about the things we have right. 

There is nothing ridiculous about the idea that we are capable of inhabiting this place: spiritual masters of one kind or another have spoken about it for millennia. Each one of them, however, brought their own intuition as fractured by their own psyche. We all suffer from this deficiency.

Some of our modern insights into the natural world, especially the world of quantum physics, have finally provided questions that speak more clearly to the exact nature of this freedom and what it consists of. 

Metaphysical potential is the key concept in exploring this from a practical point of view; and it restores our responsibilities as conscious beings to engage with nature in a radical act of unknowing, which is a profoundly spiritual and metaphysical — not natural and material — action.

 So we can fairly say that the game has changed; it is just up to us to recognize it.

May your heart be close to God, 

and God close to your heart.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.