To Remember Love

Hi there. This is Lee van Laer, and you're listening to the podcast Idiots and Fools, discussions about the Gurdjieff work, life, and everything else. 

David and I didn't get together to record an episode this Friday, so I am faced with the onerous task of being an idiot and a fool all by myself. Fortunately, I have a lifetime of experience in being an idiot and a fool almost all the time, so I suppose I'm up to the job. 

While I was recording the morning five this morning, I was reminded of the experience I sometimes have of very clearly seeing, within the energy of the body and the being body themselves that what I call wish isn't my own. 

Almost everything that flows into me which I call wish in my mind, is not real wish. My mind and the desire of my ordinary body, my disordinary body as I would call it, are all formed from parts of me that are attracted to the outside world, and I am perpetually filled with wishes, thousands of them, Every single part of me has its own wishes, and they are all in fragments. The body has a wish to eat, especially things that are sweet, perhaps. My mind has a wish to indulge in thinking that runs in circles around ridiculous matters that I have no control over, most of which don't even actually affect me in this moment. but are simply creatures of my imagination racing around in a circus ring madly with no intention or purpose. And my emotions have wishes, most of which involve acquiring things for themselves so that my self-importance and self-value can be bolstered with various kinds of stroking. 

There is another wish I often talk about to myself and to others, this so-called wish to be. I think that I can be, and in fact, the classic saying in the Gurdjieff work is, I wish to be. 

But what is it really that wishes to be? Me as I am? Perhaps by now, after a lifetime of working, I've begun to see that that creature of me, the creature of Lee, doesn't have a real wish of its own. It is like a caged hamster running on a wheel. I don't have a real wish within me as I am. 

So how do I acquire a real wish? What would that be? 

For myself, I usually come back in contact with the energy of the body, which can become permanent and will bring a different kind of perception and organization to being, because that energy aligns the molecules of being in a different way than they are aligned in ordinary life. 

Within this energy, I see at once that it has its own wish. A peculiar thing, because it does not seem, in a certain sense, to be a living creature of the outside world. No. No. It isn't like that. It is the living creature of the inner world. There is a creature, by which I mean a thing of creation. In this case, not even quite a thing, but we'll get to that perhaps. Something of creation is that is alive from within creation that does not arise in the organisms of creation or the things of creation but is instead somehow directly related to the action of creation itself.

So, this energy which is alive I think of as a creature; and yet it's not quite a creature. It is instead the force from which creatures are born. 

I could say that plants and trees and people and animals and birds and rocks and earth are made of this energy, perhaps, but it's subtler than that, because cells and molecules and atoms are made from this energy; and even quanta, which are the smallest energy packets in the cosmos, are not this energy of themselves but arise from it, because this energy—which consciousness and awareness come into relationship with—comes before creation. And for reasons that will never be well understood and that cannot be explained no matter how hard we try, this energy comes before creation and everything arises from it. 

Our bodies were designed to receive direct impressions of this energy, direct impressions both of its existence, its presence, the way that it touches being, its force, and its action. 

Yet none of these qualities that our bodies are designed to sense through the atomic and molecular equipment of impressions, none of these qualities are as important as the qualities of this energy that rest in love and goodness; and beyond those two very good and even very great things, so great that no measurement can be taken of them whatsoever. Beyond them lie all of the other real feelings that we are capable of having. 

And the moment that I come into a deeper relationship with this energy, I see that as I am, and perhaps as I will ever be, I am not even worthy to touch the hem on the robe of many colors. I'm not up to it. I don't even have enough in me after a whole lifetime to give enough good thanks for this gift of being which I have been given through love, through goodness, through mystery. 

How can I confront the impossibility of this circumstance? That everything I think I know and everything I do is insufficient unto the moment of the day, unto the moment of this time alone or any moment in any time. I do not know. It's as simple as what Walt Whitman said. I do not even know why the grass is green. 

And here I am. I don't know what I am doing. No matter how hard and fast and with how much force I think I know what I am doing, I arise from mystery with a purpose of being and goodness and love that is much greater than anything I think I am doing. 

I don't know where I am. I don't even know who I am. I have collected a whole lifetime in me and I carry it with me in suitcases everywhere so that I can feel important. And yet, if I stop for a moment, I realize that not only do I have to put the suitcases down and leave them behind, I have to go forward naked into a light that terrifies me and a mystery I cannot comprehend; and for that I will need all of the trust—what little there is in me—and all of the love (and of this I know there is too little.) 

I will have to take these things alone with me forward into that great light which brings the gift of this life. 

And perhaps if I am fortunate and the wish lives more in me, this great wish of which I speak, perhaps better things will happen than what I am capable of alone. 

When I reach a moment like this one, where I speak of such things, I do see what an idiot and a fool I am. And I tremble in contrition; I brush up against what it really means to have remorse of conscience, not just for the deeds I do and the thoughtlessness with which I live, but remorse of conscience for the nature of my being itself, which could be so much more. 

If this work within life is not to open the heart to such things, then I do not know what it is for. 

And in fact, I am sure, more sure than ever, that while I know nothing, I do know that it would be well for me—and everything that there is—if I opened my heart more to what flows into being from beyond where we are and what we are. 

To open the heart. 

To offer great prayers of thanksgiving. 

To remember love.