This morning, I got out at 5:00 am and walked the
famous dog Isabel atop
the Palisades in darkness.
There was a deep fog across the cliff tops. The trees loomed as night-black presences; I turned off the flashlight to let the whole impression soak in unadulterated. It was tempting to imagine ghosts and dark figures in the mist, but aside from Isabel (who sports her own special little doggie flashlight on her collar) I was alone.
For some strange reason, the universe seemed even
more present than it does on clear night when the stars are out; and I can't explain why this was the case. Wrapped in a shroud of fog, I felt closer to the cosmos, more a part of the galaxies and stars, than I usually do when I can see them.
Gurdjieff unerringly pointed us at the essentially cosmological nature of our existence by placing the action of his masterpiece
Beelzebub's Tales to his Grandson on a spaceship.
The move was unconventional for its era, to say the least. But, like all of his enterprises, the choice was quite intentional. He wanted us to remember, first and foremost, that all of our actions take place within the context of a cosmos, the universe, and not just within the limited context of our tiny egos and the even tinier planet we live on.
We are admittedly tiny particles of this cosmos, but the universe cannot exist apart from its particles: we are inextricably related, and our manifestations help build the entirety of the cosmos.
From the point of view of scale, particles as tiny as we are seem insignificant: and indeed, to us, individual molecules seem equally unimportant... even though a scant few of the wrong ones can kill us. But all of Reality is built of this tininess, this unseen-ness of things; in fact, almost everything that exists is actually invisible, seen from any single level. The universe, from any conscious perspective, consists mostly of the unseen; and yet we try to
see, as though there were a remedy for our insufficiency.
No matter what we do, God continues to hide behind the drapery of infinity. And we are, in our essence, cosmological phenomena; although we seem to be small and limited, our Being itself extends into the entire realm of physical manifestation: a single field of expression of infinite aspect. Although ego attempts to disconnect us from it, I'm not at all sure it succeeds; except psychologically, which is a minuscule piece of territory, hardly tangible when measured against the whole.
Hosannah.