Seeing Things as We Are

“We do not see things as they are. We see them as we are.” —Rabbi Shemuel ben Nachmani

I’m writing this newsletter as election results tick in via my computer. I am already disappointed, as I was hoping for a firm and wholesale rejection of a party that seems extreme and is intent on delimiting rights. I wanted to be validated that we all want the same things, and can agree on how to get there. And yet, no. It’s always more complex. And so I’m sitting here, swallowing my anxiety, wondering how it will fully shake out in the coming hours and days. Simultaneously, I recognize that we’ll have to dust ourselves off and keep going.

A few weeks ago, I went to a retreat with Carissa Schumacher, where she advised us that what powers us is what we power: In short, if we are powered by fear or anxiety that’s the energy we feed in the world. It is difficult work not to submit to these powers: For one, they are highly contagious and in many ways, self-feeding and self-fulfilling. She advised us to recognize when they are emergent in our bodies and then, quite simply, to turn them off. Next, we must actively choose to be powered by love, trust, innocence, joy, balance, acceptance, and compassion instead. Like muscles, these must be exercised. One by one. Week by week. I spent the past two weeks working with compassion. And this week, appropriately enough, I’m working with acceptance.

Here’s what I will say: This is hard. On Halloween (Compassion), I yelled at precisely six kids. Or maybe more. (I do not like Halloween, particularly when teenagers start mowing down toddlers to get Twix. As my friend Jen commented, it can seem more like a hold-up than a holiday.) And acceptance, for someone like me who struggles hard not to control everything, is proving even more difficult. I don’t want to accept Ron DeSantis. But we have to hold the space, and we have to pull everything up. There is so much paranoia, distortion, and dark energy in our midst: We cannot let it suck us down.

I know I’ve been yammering on a lot about vibration and Gurdjieff lately (that post is here). But I thought I’d elaborate here on the denser realms. To reiterate, this is the wonderful Episcopalian priest Cynthia Bourgeault’s description of Gurdjieff’s work (he can be quite indecipherable), specifically the Worlds that he articulates. I highly, highly recommend The Eye of the Heart, which is a full exploration of his philosophy.

Per Bourgeault, here are the Worlds in brief:

World 1: “World 1 is the Holy Absolute. The Godhead. The ‘inaccessible light,’ the holy impenetrable, ineffable, unknowable…”

World 3: “World 3 is the primordial ternary, whereby the Godhead—ever indivisible and unmanifest—brings himself into ‘perceptivity and divisibility.”

World 6: “This world launches the inaugural leap into outward manifestation…where consciousness ‘condenses’ into ‘psychic force’ and begins to move as an actual energy stream, creating, animating, and shaping the created order.”

World 12: “World 12 is the Christic.”

World 24: “Is the world of presence, where the outer forms of physical materiality are illuminated from within by the light that pours from World 12 and above, and where human consciousness—awake, three-centered, and having passed that first conscious shock point (which it supremely tends and mediates)—fully inhabits this physical world, takes instructions reliably from the higher realms, and participates fully in the required cosmic exchange. This is the world of conscious man or woman—‘man number four’ in Gurdjieffian terminology—who lives awake and willing right there at the junction point where the ‘two seas meet,’ infusing the staleness of the lower worlds with the vivifying energy of his or her authentic presence.” 

World 48: “It is the world of philosophy, ethics, and religion; the world of intellectual striving and cleverness and of industry, curiosity, science, technology, and the arts—in other words, the first fruits of civilization as best we know them. It is the world of high rationality. The world of high egoic functioning and self-reflective consciousness. … But for all its giftedness, it still falls just below the first conscious shock line; hence, it is still, in Gurdjieffian terms, preconscious and ‘asleep.’”

World 96: “World 96 is the ‘formatory’ world, as Gurdjieff calls it, where everything operates on autopilot, in clichés and thought-bites: stale, conditioned, habitual. There’s not even any real thinking that goes on here, as there is in World 48; it’s all recycled opinions and stereotypes. In Gurdjieffian terms, this is the world of personality, the world of ‘not-I’; of all that is artificially acquired and that obscures our real essence. It is monochrome, repetitive, and boring—uncreative, stony, and inanimate; the lowest world in which human consciousness can even barely hold its shape.” 

World 192: “World 192 represents the hell realms. It is the world of the deeply disordered, anguished, and psychotic, the spawning ground of evil and the demonic, where consciousness has lost all spaciousness and congeals toward an unbearable density.”

While I talk about these Worlds at length here, these worlds exist on continuum, ever-present. There are elements of World 24, World 48, World 96, and World 192 present around us—the lower, denser realms are the siren song for our fear and anxiety. We must pull up. The magical part of exercising our balance, compassion, and acceptance is that there is a call-and-response: I promise, having worked with these “powers” for a few weeks, that once you embrace that energy, you will see it reflected back everywhere.

Thanks, as always, for reading.