Nathaniel — concluding the discussion of lust

8:25 p.m. Shall we continue?

Two in one day? We can try, anyway.

We’ve done it before. We had a good session this morning, and I’m into it. If we do okay now, maybe I’ll type it up later, send it out tomorrow morning instead of doing a session then.

Well, we’ll see.

Are you beginning to get the idea? The vast impersonal forces animating the world are not simply mindless energy, not winds the way you think of winds in the physical atmosphere. They are closer to minds that are more fluid than yours, or perhaps we could call them subjective elements.

Meaning?

For now, meaning mostly that although you might not see their motivating forces, remember that they have them, that they are not mindless forces that just happen to be there to be taken into account. The immediate point is that 3D life may be seen as an intersection between vast impersonal forces and equally vast but very personal, very local forces. Or, let’s say, forces meeting structures, as we have said previously, the forces altering the structures, the structures to some extent channeling – steering – affecting the course of the forces.

The point here is that the sins and virtues are not things in themselves. They are not forces, not structures, but – ratios, call them, or vortices. They come into being, in a manner of speaking, when force animates structure and structure responds to forces. They, themselves, are more like side-effects or incidental forces, than like players in themselves. You understand?

More like weather than like either energy or structure?

No, that doesn’t get the idea. More like sonic booms – the effect of interaction of forces pushing through atmosphere.

Side-effects.

Of course it is only analogy. But perhaps worth pointing out, because the human mind has a tendency to objectify what it names, so that in effect a sin becomes like a person or like a pizza, a thing, rather than like an effect or an intermediary element, like a sonic boom or, say, [what is studied in] fluid dynamics. That last doesn’t quite work, but almost. Enough for the spark to jump, perhaps.

So if you experience or encourage or identify with lust, say, you are not using it, nor owning it, nor even quite being used by or owned by it. You are living it, say; expressing it; giving it access to express in form. This regardless whether you enact it; it is the flowing with it in your mind that is the sinning.

This wouldn’t be nearly so difficult to explain if it were not for the great amount of preexisting ideas on the subject that need to be cleared out in order to make room for new understanding. You’ve heard of sin all your lives, and it doesn’t much matter if you accept or have rejected the ideas around it; the result of long superficial familiarity with the ideas is a poisoned well. You can win your way to a more sophisticated understanding, but this requires that you do the work of making conscious your existing ideas (especially the ones you have consciously rejected), so that you may decide what you intend to believe. Yes, we know “what you intend to believe” sounds strange, but that is what happens.

Lust, we began to say, involves an intermingling with wrongful pride, that is, a harmful form of pride. Your current-day shorthand would call it ego-based, as though ego per se were a bad thing. But in this case ego-based pride, ego-based lust, is a bad thing, bad for you, probably bad for any others who may be involved, if any. Again, lust may manifest “only” mentally, which is like saying “only” where it really counts (in shaping who you will be) rather than in manifestation [in the physical] where it may be far more transitory, far less interior, far less close to the real you.

Gurdjieff used to speak of the various centers man operates from, and of the difficulties caused when acting from the wrong centers for a given action.

I remember reading of it, but I never made it mine. I couldn’t recite what the various centers are. The moving center is the only one that comes to mind, and I don’t know quite what it refers to.

Just knowing the concept will suffice for the moment: Use of the appropriate motor to perform the appropriate action is human functioning as it is designed to do. Use of the wrong center is a sort of twisting of the function, leading to inappropriate action and unsatisfactory results.

In the case of lust, it is the fueling of sexual energies by non-sexual motors. If pride leads you to think that the gratification of your wishes takes priority over smooth cooperative functioning of self with other or others, the result is not equals cooperating – dancing, so to speak – but, at best, people dancing to different music, or one dancing and another being dragged, or – most commonly in any case – of physical disconnected from emotional disconnected from mental. Is that much clear?

I think you are saying, we aren’t then acting out of our emotional center as we ought to be, nor out of our physical (moving?) center nor mental center, but are crossing wires and acting unnaturally.

Unnaturally meaning, not whatever sexual activity may be going on (for, as said, it may not be physical at all, but solely mental), but unnatural in the sense of using the various faculties in ways other than they are meant to be used. Driving with the brakes on, say. Swimming while wearing heavy weights. Trying to see while wearing blinders. We choose non-moralistic examples in an attempt to show that we are not judging what is done, but how it is done, in what spirit it is done.

A few paragraphs ago, I had the thought that maybe that was why Jesus said that if a man looked at a woman with lust in his heart, he had in effect committed adultery with her. It is usually taken as his advocating an impossible mastery over sexual impulses. In this context, I’d hear it as, he was saying the mental is the vital and real, the physical is the secondary and in a sense somewhat less real.

We might sum up the subject of lust this way: Any good thing may be misused, and misuse is never a good thing. Sexual energies exist. They have importance in your lives. They serve directly or indirectly to motivate you to construct your cultural structures, as Freud sensed, though he had hold of the insight from the wrong end, so to speak. And if sex is not bad, how can sexual impulses be bad, or sexual expression? Furthermore, to try to repress legitimate sexual energies and expressions is not only doomed to failure, it may lead to greater perversions of the use of the energies. You are not angels in 3D, and are not designed to act as angels. You are humans, and sexual energies encourage you to relate to each other. But there is healthy and unhealthy expression. Use your quotations from Blake.

They may not be exact, but close, anyway. One is, “Sooner strangle an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desire.”

Yes. Not than express it, but than nurse it. In other words, if you cannot or should not or will not do it, don’t keep throwing gasoline on the fire.

The other is something like “love shall show its roots in deepest hell.” Something like that.

That is, there is less difference in source than in expression. The same force that can be bent to destruction can be bent to exalted creation.

I am not sure that’s what Blake meant in context.

No matter. The point remains. To sum up, and next time we will move on to another subject: Pride is involved in sin, and how? Because it tempts you to think of yourself as if you were a unit without responsibility or connection to the rest of life. Does this hurt others? Maybe it does, maybe it doesn’t. but it never helps you yourself. It always points you in the wrong direction.

Note, we don’t address the question of the interrelation of forces flowing through and the channels you choose to open or close to them. For now, we take that for granted, because your ideas of the nature, importance, and possibilities of sin (and virtue) require updating.

And there’s a session for you, and you may type it up at your leisure.

Thank you as ever.