The Perception of the Soul, Part II

Degrees of Sensation

Illustration: detail from the Beaune Altarpiece, Rogier van Der Weyden.

The perception of the soul is thus.

The various degrees of being-sensation belonging to each of the being-bodies, first flesh, and then spiritual, are very sophisticated organs that receive the impressions of the world around us. All of the first level of impressions are received by the ordinary sensation of the flesh body. To call those sensations "ordinary" is really insufficient, because even the ordinary sense of touch in the flesh body of earth is an absolutely extraordinary phenomenon, so complicated that science doesn't yet understand it. How the body comes into contact with something and instantaneously conveys its texture and feeling to the brain, and then allows the body to react in response to it, is basically unknown. The neurological and physical pathways, even the chemicals that allow it to take place, haven’t been successfully identified and mapped, and the speed of the mechanism isn't explainable. In fact, there are esoteric perceptual organs involved; and grace is always present in every sensation. But we'll get to that.

Our ordinary impressions are a means of perception meant to do something Gurdjieff would have called "filling a shock” in the cosmological column, the system of energies that exists from the bottom to the top of the cosmos. As such, they contain higher substances which we don’t process effectively— or otherwise use inappropriate ways. Above all other things, we believe that they serve our own pleasure; they thus become, to us, addicting substances. Devotion (attachment, identification) to them creates barriers to the impressions our higher being bodies ought to be receiving, as well as the formation of the higher organs that can perceive them. Hence, in a single sentence, asceticism—a practice that partially counteracts this obstacle.