Touched by Better Angels

Touched by Better Angels

Recent posts have discussed the necessity to release our unnecessary or imaginary suffering because it saps the vital energy that we need to fuel Higher Centers. Opinions, negative emotions, identification, imagination, false personality, and many other artificial ailments in the lower centers that we secretly enjoy must be sacrificed in order to work in the Fourth Way. G. I. Gurdjieff strongly states that, “A man will renounce any pleasures you like but he will not give up his suffering,” and instructs that, “it is necessary to be free from suffering.” Gurdjieff further muddies the water with a seeming contradiction by saying that, “Nothing can be attained without suffering but at the same time one must begin by sacrificing suffering.” Real and voluntary suffering united with efforts to self-remember are those that can produce higher states and lasting results. However, in order to work with real and voluntary suffering we must first give up our imaginary suffering.

Great grief grieves most at that would do it good.─ Shakespeare, The Rape of Lucrece

Several years ago, one of the deep impressions and insights about suffering came to me through reading in The Theory of Celestial Influence by Rodney Collin. In his book, he explained with clarity the practical, psychological effort to make, when experiencing real and voluntary suffering or pain in the lower centers. I have returned again and again to his advice and have found the effects astounding in my personal work. In the midst of facing suffering and pain, Collin recommends holding firmly to self-remembering. Trying with all one’s strength to sustain a higher state for the duration of the suffering – divided attention between the lower centers and using the energy to sustain a higher state. He says, “What is important is the attitude which accompanies,” suffering and pain, “and if they are sufficiently intense, such attitudes will remain with him for the rest of his life.” Collin gave me something to “do” – something higher to reach for – while suffering, rather than lose all the energy in anger, tears, blame, identification, etc.

Thoughts are but dreams till their effects be tried.─ Shakespeare, The Rape of Lucrece

Collin used the analogy of processing photographic film. He says suffering is a kind of fixative, similar to a mix of chemicals used in photographic processing to stabilize the image. Suffering as a fixative has the capacity to fix more permanently whatever is uppermost in my heart and mind while experiencing suffering. Throughout the years when suffering would come to me – as it inevitably does for all of us – I would try to make self-remembering my highest effort and thereby try to create a more permanent tendency to evoke Higher Centers. In the intense photograph of Abraham Lincoln, I feel his suffering in his gaze and yet something else is there, strong enough to transcend and stabilize his image.

Pain pays the income of each precious thing.─ Shakespeare, The Rape of Lucrece

February 12th was Lincoln’s birthday, and we are fast approaching the Presidents Day Holiday, so I am reminded of the intense real suffering that President Lincoln lived through. He was under immense pressure as President, his wife – whom he loved – was by many accounts psychologically unstable, his son, William, had died and he felt the burden of young men’s lives lost in the bloody battles of the Civil War. During his Presidency, Lincoln turned often to Shakespeare in his free time and had an intense love of Shakespeare’s plays. A few months after the death of his son, he once quoted a few lines to a Union Officer from the Life and Death of King John. The character is Lady Constance – who also loses a child in tragic circumstances. Her lament is heart-wrenching and surely touched the depth of his own suffering.

Lady Constance: “Grief fills the room up of my absent child, Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me.”─ Shakespeare, Life and Death of King John

When he finished reading these two lines, Lincoln stopped and asked the Union Officer, “Did you ever have a dream of a lost friend and feel that you were having a sweet communion with that friend, and yet a consciousness that it was not a reality?” What consciousness or reality might Lincoln be hinting at? Other than the Bible, the writings of Shakespeare were Lincoln’s constant companion and perhaps the underlying source of Lincoln’s reliance upon higher influences for the transformation of his sorrow.

The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.─ Conclusion of Abraham Lincoln’s First Inaugural Address

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Abraham Lincoln, photograph by Alexander Gardner