The Wave of Being

Natural Emotion and Spiritual Feeling, Part III

Photo: Garter Snake, Tallman State Park, April 2023

The natural emotions insist on material as the be-all and end-all of existence. They are blind to waves functions and strongly prefer that the elements in life surrounding false personhood remain fixed. We can see in this the general action of personality, which is routinely stressed by the arrival of anything that contradicts its self-inflection. This particular state of static fixedness and fixation is celebrated as a virtue by so-called conservativism; and Gurdjieff called it a form of psychopathy, the idée fixe, the obsession. False personhood fixes ideas and things within its field of vision and then insists they stay there and remain the same. The stubborn fact that this is in direct contradiction to the actual nature of things, which are all ultimately influenced by the movement of waves, is unimportant to false personhood, because the narrower range of natural emotions it’s capable of experiencing is all it knows and is interested in. Anything that is fluid, that engages in forward movement and change, that points towards a different future, is seen as a threat.