Sacrifice, Part II: Here With Us Now

The search for a path through life

Photo: Revelations, right hand panel, 60” x 84”, oil on linen ; painting by the author, 1996

So we seek not to just think about returning centricity to God within our lives; we need to organically change our actual nature, our attitude. This is the direction we’re leaning in. And that change in nature has to be biological as well as psychological, because the attitude that we lean into in life arises in our molecules and our cells. They are aligned to point towards the ego instead of God. A realignment of our molecular nature is necessary.

Yet let us not make this too chemical; because it begins to sound mechanical at that point, and the actual process is not mechanical in the sense of something that a formula can address. It’s our life that must change, not the cogs and gears that drive it; and, as I’ve intimated in regard to the ego, an agility is needed here.

Life is tremendously agile, and it can help us find a way if we inhabit it. Hence, Gurdjieff’s adage that one must "work in life.” We must bring the idea of the sacred into life — into ordinary life. And in order to do that, we must change the way our molecules are aligned, so that our nervous system, our physical sensation and our feelings, reawaken and have an actual sense of God here with us now.

This is essential, because the unless the inner receptivity of our being changes, the existence of God remains a theoretical proposition, and we must begin to experience it as an absolute truth in order for us to truly make anything sacred: we will not give up anything in the ego without a powerful conviction of God's existence and a complete commitment to that.

We we must go all in and cannot reserve anything for ourselves.