Healing Tones

* * *

* * *

“I was a hidden treasure and I longed to be known, so I created the worlds visible and invisible” (Islamic Hadith Qudsi)

ON MY SPIRITUAL PATH HEAVENWARD, I met God on His way here. On my way back earthward, I came to a place in consciousness where I know and know that I know that HERE on EARTH is where to be in order to experience the fullness of Creation in a participatory role. All said and done, I will miss this world after I depart for higher mansions in our Father’s House. I will volunteer to return for sure; maybe ask for an assignment in the East, like India or South Africa, or even South in New Zealand. There’s so much beauty on this planet, much of it untouched by humans. Yes, I will most certainly return, God willing.

I just finished reading a section in EYE OF THE HEART — a beautiful “love story” written by Cynthia Bourgeault — where she shares some of her insights and perspectives relative to this Earth plane and its role in complementing the “Ray of Creation” Gurdjieff expounds upon in his copious writings. I will go directly to her words — which include a profoundly uplifting and deeply penetrating personal experience of epiphany.

IN MY CITATION several times now of key excerpts from William Segal’s essay “The Force of Attention,” I have repeatedly called attention to his comment, “Without the upward transmission of energies through the medium of conscious attention, the world would give in to entropy.” But I have so far deliberately sidestepped the sentence that directly precedes this assertion and is in fact essential to its interpretation.

The full paragraph . . . reads as follows:

Attention is not only mediating; it is transmitting. Giving and receiving, God speaks to man. Receiving and giving, man speaks to God. Just as man’s structure needs to be vivified by the infusion of finer vibrations, those very same vibrations require the mixing of coarse material for their maintenance. Without the upward transmission of energies through the intermediary of conscious attention, the universe would give in to entropy. In man, the smallest deformation of a balanced attention closes down this two way communication. (bold emphasis added)

I have called out the critical sentence in italics because now is the time to address it directly. What is this “coarse material” that is somehow needed for the maintenance of the cosmic equilibrium, and what is our part in furnishing it? And note that by “our” I am not speaking in this case simply about us human beings, but “our” in the sense of the lower realms themselves. What part does “coarseness” play in maintaining the Ray of Creation? Why is mi, our beloved mixtus orbis, not simply a cosmic folly or illusion, but a vital player in the whole unfolding?

. . . . Axial religion — the term now commonly used to designate the great efflorescence of spiritual breakthrough and insight that sprang up worldwide in a remarkably compressed time period between roughly 800 and 200 BCE — is generally weak on this point. Across the sweep of the great sacred traditions (with the notable exception, perhaps, of shamanism) we encounter a pervasive sense that “here is not home.” Whether you call it exile, fall, or illusion (the three prevailing assumptions in the combined metaphysics of East and West), there is a deep unease about this condition of embodiment and a general assumption that coarseness is itself an impediment to the full attainment of the enlightened state. That should probably be stated much more strongly: not only an impediment, but the impediment, the chief roadblock.

On the maps of consciousness we have been exploring, “coarse” (a.k.a. “gross”) is always at the bottom, and given the overall Neoplatonic skew of axial metaphysics, there is an almost inevitable tendency to equate density with a “fallen” condition. “Gross” in the physical sense — roundly corpuscular — quickly melds into “gross” in the emotional sense — vile and repulsive. My own teaching in these pages has of course drawn on many of the traditional metaphors (ladder of ascent, Great Chain of Being) reflecting these built-in biases; it is virtually impossible to enter the metaphysical conversation without them.

But is this really an illusion, this beautiful, fragile constructal zone we briefly inhabit and water with our tears? Christianity in its finer moments intuited that there might be more to the story — “For God so loved the world that he gave his only son,” in the venerable words of John 3:16. At its epicenter it carries an unquenchable certitude that something goes on here of such inestimable worth that even the formless Infinite would be compelled to take form — “make himself an element,” in Teilhard’s rendition — in order to uphold and sanctify this preciousness on its own terms. But this totally on-target mystical intuition could never fight its way upstream against the flood tide of world-hating and body-denying metaphysics that surged out to meet it. More fundamentally, the problem was — and remains to this day — that from within the metaphysical givens at hand, it was impossible to say why that love was so tendered in the first place. So the question was sidestepped. “Giving his Son” became instead the consummate demonstration of the preeminent divine agape, and our human role was simply to adore and obey.

Gurdjieff made a heroic beginning at a new metaphysical paradigm in which something can actually be seen. Although few of his admirers have had the gumption to wade into those spiraling hydrogen chains portraying the ostensible biochemistry of the Trogoautoegocrat, his model can at least be applauded for what it is: a brilliant attempt to demonstrate on an empirical and material basis what contribution our mixtus orbis makes to the greater cosmic equilibrium. From behind all the intricate detail there emerges an overall picture of the biosphere — organic life on earth — as itself a crucial stabilizing and mitigating influence in the overall planetary harmony. The “coarse material” is our own organic existence here in this tiny corner of the Megalocosmos, and what it contributes (whether by conscious donation or involuntary reappropriation) is a vital part in the overall homeostasis that allows anything to be in the first place. Gurdjieff’s sweeping vision of a single, intricately interwoven cosmic “self-specifying system” in which everything has its unique role to play still seems to me a far stronger vehicle for the arousing of genuine human conscience than the standard theological models emphasizing the total self-sufficiency of God and the essentially gratuitous nature of our human existence here.

My own response will again return us to theological language — though hopefully not to a replay of those same old scripts. I want to begin directly with the question itself: What part does “coarseness” play in the overall dynamism of manifestation? What does it contribute to the mix that would be missing or inexpressible without it? And, if you will permit me, I would like to ease into this question by way of a story. It’s actually a picture as much as it is a story, a picture burned onto my heart during a rather extraordinary fifteen minutes in a concert I attended many years ago.

I had gone that afternoon with a friend to hear the de Pasquale String Quartet offer an all-Beethoven program at the Delaware Art Museum. These brothers four — William (first violin), Robert (second violin), Joseph (viola), and Francis (cello) — were all respectively first chairs in the Philadelphia Orchestra, or in other words, some of the finest string players in the world. They were clearly about to put their mastery to the test, for included on the program was the formidable Opus 132. This exquisite late quartet, one of Beethoven’s final works, boasts a third movement that is virtually unplayable. For something approaching fifteen minutes it simply shimmers like the full moon on the ocean, gradually building intensity but along a path so subtle as to be almost beyond the reaches of human artistry. Almost inevitably, an aspiring quartet will either play the movement too “yang,” trampling over it like an eighteen-wheeler on a golf course, or too “yin,” losing the subtle inner momentum so that the whole thing turns to mush.

Three minutes into the movement it became electrifyingly clear that they were going to nail it. They were exactly in the groove, riding the razor’s edge with an apparently effortless intensity. As the momentum steadily built, audience and players fused into a single stream of crystalline attention. The energy in the room was electric; the excitement became more and more palpable.

Curiously, however, as the energy mounted, the de Pasquale brothers seemed to get quieter and quieter, contracting into a kind of laser-like stillness. No emotion showed on their faces, not a single extraneous gesture — only the soft play of their hands on the bowstrings and an occasional blink of an eye. They had literally “melted” before the music, with only the backbone of their bare presence and their years of cumulative experience to draw down lightning from the sky. I did not know at the time exactly what I was witnessing, but I could feel its force already working in me. Little did I know that the musical icon they became for me in that timeless few moments would in turn become one of the cornerstones of my own theological understanding.

I believe, fundamentally that that’s what we contribute; what the gift of coarseness contributes. Holy denying. Second force. Gravitas. The backbone of form that draws down the lightning from heaven. Light is said to be dark in outer space until it strikes an object; perhaps that’s what finitude furnishes. The grace of materiality is that it allows something to materialize, i.e., to come into existence and self-expression, to contribute its own unique mode of being to that great single outspeaking of the name of God.

“I was a hidden treasure and I longed to be known, so I created the worlds visible and invisible” is how one of the great mystical sayings of the Islamic Hadith Qudsi pictures the primordial divine yearning for intimacy and self-disclosure that got the whole cosmogonic ball rolling in the first place. Each world along the Great Chain of Being is not merely the next step in a mathematical progression; it is a specific set of conditions that allows for the expression of some very specific aspect of the divine heart. And in fact, the word cosmos in the original Greek actually means “ornament.” If rather than seeing these worlds as beads on a chain we saw them as balls on a Christmas tree, we might better understand how each of these precious cosmoses is beautifully and uniquely artificed to bring forth some specific aspect of the divine longing to be known. The chain links drop out, and you stand like a small child on Christmas Eve, bedazzled by the wonder of it all.

So let’s explore a bit further the contribution of this particular ball called mi, or mixtus orb is. We know that these forty-eight laws by which our plane of existence is ostensibly governed make for a fairly dense set of constructual givens that most of us find reasonably irritating much of the time. But the deeper burden we bear may well be the pervasive, haunting sense that we are indeed playing in two worlds at once, the two of them in almost constant tension.

There is blessing here, but it is also a cross that we bear. That great wise woman Helen Luke says: “Wholeness is born of the acceptance of the conflict of human and divine in the individual psyche,” thereby acknowledging that the conflict does indeed exist, the one we spend so much of our lives repressing, masking, outrunning. Not only the saints among us but the sinners as well find ourselves pinioned at “the intersection of the timeless and time,” our infinite yearnings trapped inside our finite bodies. It’s this irreducible sense of twoness that may indeed drive those original axial metaphors for “exile” and “fall.” The constriction is not an easy condition to work within.

But what if there is no mistake? No fall? What if this frustrating arrangement furnishes exactly the right conditions for the expression of something that can be expressed in no other way? Suppose there is some quintessence of the divine heart that can reveal itself only under these conditions, only when thus tensioned, like a cello string pegged between heaven and earth? And if so, what might this quintessence be?

What if it is love?

Of course it is love . . . and more. It’s creation, transmutation and ascension. It’s the Phoenix disintegrating into ash and rising up out of the ashes to live another day. I will continue this meditation in my next post, addressing Cynthia’s suggestive query. The answer she offers leaves room for expansion and cosmic context. Love is, after all, the Power that drives and unravels the entire Creative Process — the Primal Love-casting that set Creation in motion. It’s the Divine Masculine’s radiant magnetism that draws forth the response of the Divine Feminine, attracting and uniting Her elements into unified patterns of diverse forms to build a Universe. It’s the “Big Bang” if you wish.

I welcome any thoughts, insights and inspirations you may have and wish to share. Until my next post,

Be love. Be loved . . . or just be your Self.

Anthony

tpal70@gmail.com.