Changing Scale
Changing Scale
From our friend Lindsey V. of the New York Center.
If there is anything in the world that people do not understand, it is scale... It is only in higher states that we have the scale and relativity to see our daily life as material for our work on self-remembering. — G. I. Gurdjieff
One evening at a gathering with friends, someone was reading Walt Whitman’s poem Song of Myself. At the moment the line Walt Whitman, a kosmos, of Manhattan… was read, one of my closest friends walked into the room, and it struck me: What if Glen is a cosmos? I knew I didn’t know what that meant, but the question created a moment of presence. A cosmos is vast, and as Whitman says elsewhere, contains multitudes. I was brought out of my usual complacent state, where I think I know, into a state of curiosity and presence. Scale can do that.
Correct scale is to value presence above everything. — The Teacher
Gurdjieff taught that with objective consciousness it becomes possible to see and feel the unity of everything. In our ordinary state of consciousness, we perceive separate objects, separate events, separate people, and, above all, a separate sense of self. A larger scale reveals relationships and shows us that we are intertwined with the universe. The idea of scale helps us break out of our identification with ourselves and the assumption that our small personal world is the center of everything.
Thich Nhat Hanh, the Vietnamese Zen master, introduced the idea of interbeing. He explains it using an example of a piece of paper. Looking deeply at a sheet of paper reveals a floating cloud, because without the cloud and rain, trees cannot grow to make the paper. The cloud and the paper therefore “inter-are.” The Sun and the Earth likewise are present in the paper, if we know how to look. Ordinarily, we buffer our interconnectedness with our fellow human beings and with planet Earth. The current news of devastating floods and out-of-control wildfires can be heartbreaking and overwhelming.
We can know much more than we know ordinarily if we study things…on different scales. — P. D. Ouspensky
Ouspensky taught that two principles are essential for understanding our situation: relativity and scale. Things cannot be understood entirely by themselves; their significance depends upon their place within a larger order. This is relativity. The Fourth Way maps our relationship with worlds both above and below our ordinary scale: cells within the body, human beings, humanity, the Earth, planets, the Sun, stars, galaxies, and beyond. To facilitate this, Gurdjieff introduced cosmology, the Ray of Creation, in which human life is placed within a vast hierarchy of worlds and energies. Self-remembering brings that cosmic perspective back into the immediacy of ordinary life.
Relativity is the key to understanding. — The Teacher
On a visit to China, I was once standing in front of a giant statue of the Buddha carved into a cliff wall. The woman next to me spontaneously said, I feel so small. Human beings seem to have intuitively understood the importance of this experience for thousands of years. The scale of sacred architecture often deliberately makes us feel small. Walk into a Gothic cathedral with its soaring arches, an Egyptian or ancient Greek temple with its tall, massive columns, or beneath the immense dome of a mosque, and there is a felt sense of our smallness. The architecture subtly undermines the assumption that everything revolves around us. Pride and ego require us to remain at the center of our own world. A change of scale offers another possibility: for a moment, we can forget ourselves and be present.
The night sky can produce the same transformation. Over the years, when visiting friends in rural California, I noticed that I could not remain open to looking at the night sky for an extended period. On dark, clear nights, the stars were incredible—bright and numerous, like jewels. I would look upward and appreciate the beauty and then involuntarily look away, as though buffering myself from the vastness of the experience. Over time, with work, my relationship to the night sky has changed; this buffer has gradually dropped away, and I have felt the freedom to remain present to the night sky.
As we awaken, we begin to recognize multiple scales at once. Seeing their interconnection brings relativity. We can experience the smallness of our human scale without feeling insignificant, while presence brings the understanding that we are all mysteriously participating in the whole.
Wisdom tells me I am nothing. Love tells me I am everything. And between the two my life flows. — Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
Night sky, Bureau of Land Management, Wikimedia Commons.
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