What is the action of impressions as they enter and form Being?
Most of our life is formed from an intellectual experience of being; the results of this are apparent all around us. If you like the world the way it is, you can be satisfied with intellectual being.
Those who see the world as lacking will seek a different motive force for Being; and this is only possible to discover through the transformation of impressions.
As impressions gather within the magnetic center of man, they need to be swallowed deeper into Being. This takes place through a struggle to recognize one's own nature. Every spark of recognition creates a crumb of objective grief. And in the end, it's only to the extent that I swallow my objective grief that I can grow.
Objective grief has nothing to do with ordinary grief the way we experience it when it manifests as a result of outward conditions. Objective grief arises in the center, in the depths, of Being, as I see what my ordinary (Gurdjieff called it
mechanical) being and manifestation consists of. If a man or woman truly chooses to experience the "struggle between yes and no" (as Gurdjieff described it) within themselves, objective grief arises. This force is closely related to remorse of conscience, and, indeed, is actually produced by it.
Objective grief is a substance that acts, not an opinion that forms or an emotion that is experienced. And this particular substance is a form of inner medicine that must be swallowed over and over in order to have its necessary action.
When we speak, in the Episcopal and Catholic catechism, of not being worthy to gather up the crumbs from under Christ's table, one metaphorical way of understanding this is that we do not have a worthiness within ourselves to swallow these crumbs of objective grief that are created in us. True intentional suffering is the coming to objective grief through remorse of conscience, and being
intentionally willing to suffer it through the act of ingestion. This is an inner act of swallowing, that is,
actively receiving, the experience.
Such grief is objective because it is unattached to anything other than my lack, which is the fundamental truth of existence in the absence of divine influence. One must learn to absorb, experience, and tolerate one's continuous manifestation in this absence, and the inner and outer consequences it leads to. In Hinduism and Buddhism, the process is referred to as
karma; yet the ubiquitous abstract understandings of it, based on the multiple philosophies extant within these disciplines, are too complicated. In the end they have little to do with the actual inner experience of this process. The inner nature of the process has been gradually forgotten over the centuries as the teachings, and the teachers, focused more and more on its outer consequences and actions.
The laws of karma, like so many other matters of the soul, relate to our
inner manifestation.
It's this question of inner manifestation and our direct, uncompromised experience of it that, if acutely observed, can lead us to a deeper and more sensate experience of objective grief. The sensation is unmistakable; it is a sensation that goes to the marrow of the bones, well past the area where verbal rationalizations can touch things.
Because it ultimately arises from the right ingestion and fusion of impressions, objective grief can't manifest without a rightly formed magnetic center. Although it is a comprehensive sensation and experience, its center of gravity lies in the center of the spine. It has the effect of softening the heart
granthi, the knot at the center of Being that must be dissolved through the experience of one's own nothingness.
May your soul be filled with light.