The Art of Receiving
The Art of Receiving
From our friend Lindsey V. of the New York Centre
When impressions begin to fall on us to a deeper level, we begin to live in an entirely new world. — Maurice Nicoll
I recently read Patrick Bringley's moving memoir All the Beauty in the World (2023), and it left me thinking about how beauty and fine impressions can transform us. Following the death of his beloved brother, Bringley left his promising career at The New Yorker to become a security guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. For ten years, he spent his days surrounded by some of the world's greatest works of art. What began as a refuge from grief gradually became an education in seeing, feeling, and receiving life. The paintings did not change, but his relationship to them did. Through deep engagement and awareness, he discovered a different way of experiencing beauty, suffering, and the world around him.
Every object, well contemplated, opens up a new organ of perception within us. — Goethe
Although Bringley was not practicing the Fourth Way, his experience illustrates Gurdjieff's teaching that impressions are a form of nourishment, as essential to our inner life as food and air are to our physical existence. In his Food Diagram, these three forms of nourishment enter the human machine as different grades of matter or energy, which he called hydrogens, ranging from coarse to increasingly fine. Each can undergo a process of refinement, but our mechanical functioning limits this transformation. The further transformation of impressions requires what Gurdjieff called the first conscious shock: self-remembering. By becoming simultaneously aware of ourselves and what we experience, we begin to transform impressions rather than merely reacting to them. This is the beginning of the inner alchemy of awakening.
Here the profound lesson of reception, nor preference nor denial. — Walt Whitman, Song of the Open Road
Ordinarily, we receive impressions through the filters of our likes and dislikes, memories, expectations, and judgments. We react before we have truly seen. Whitman suggests another possibility: receiving impressions without immediately accepting or rejecting what comes to us. In Fourth Way terms, this requires conscious attention without identification with our reactions.
Gurdjieff taught that we can receive and produce much finer energies than those that ordinarily nourish our mechanical lives. These subtler energies are associated with the functioning of higher centers and the possibility of a more conscious life. We might experience something of their quality while noticing the first spring daffodils, listening to moving music, or feeling genuine compassion. Such moments invite us into presence, provided we are awake enough to receive them. These impressions can also have a healing quality, quieting habitual thoughts, softening emotional defenses, and awakening gratitude, wonder, and compassion.
Some impressions invite presence, while others need to be transformed into presence. — The Teacher
There are also impressions of extraordinary intensity and refinement. We might encounter something of their quality when standing before the immense power of Niagara Falls, hearing a great symphony, or experiencing the depths of human suffering and love in Shakespeare's plays. Such experiences suggest the profound emotional and spiritual impressions we may gradually become capable of receiving as our sensitivity develops. Yet finer impressions require something of us. We need to learn to stay present with their intensity without escaping into thought, sentimentality, excitement, or distraction. Our machine is accustomed to coarser energies, and finer ones can be difficult to sustain. My teacher tells of entering a magnificent Italian cathedral as a young man and experiencing ecstatic emotions. His higher centers were present, and he knew not to become lost in the many ‘I’s, even the beautiful ecstatic ones.
Working with impressions is more than seeking beautiful experiences; it is a gradual transformation of our being. Through self-remembering, the conscious transformation of suffering, and non-expression of negative emotions, we learn to conserve energies ordinarily lost in mechanical reactions. As our capacity to receive impressions grows, so does our sensitivity to beauty, to others, and to the influence of higher centers. This is what makes Bringley's experience so moving. He did not escape suffering by surrounding himself with beautiful objects. Rather, through years of quiet attention, he gradually developed a new relationship to beauty and grief, one that allowed him to return to life with a deeper understanding of himself and the world. There is an art to working with impressions: learning to receive, digest, and transform what life continually offers. Awakening does not require extraordinary circumstances, but the capacity to receive the extraordinary within the ordinary.
What is visible opens your eyes to what is invisible. — Anaxagoras
Young Woman with a Water Pitcher, Johannes Vermeer, 1662, Metropolitan Museum of Art
Comments