A Spiritual Framework

(Introduction to the Series)

When we look into ourselves, we find a muddle: an amorphous, random series of interspersed thoughts, sensory perceptions, emotions, and mental images. Even to make such a list is to give our inchoate inner world more structure than it seems to have. The major structures in our life are all external: the world around us exhibits stable characteristics, as does our body. If all we had was our inner world, we would be utterly lost.

Yet for those most important questions of meaning and purpose, we intuitively know that our inner world plays a key role, even as those questions elude our understanding. There is a way through: the way of spiritual practice. By engaging with some of the untold varieties of spiritual practice that have been devised by people to shine a light within the recesses of the spirit, within the labyrinth of our inner world, and on the relationship between the inner and outer reality, we can seek to make sense of it all. It is the practice that matters, that enables us to see, to be, and to ascend the ladder of the spirit. Yet it helps to know, even theoretically, that there is a ladder. It helps to know the layout of this unknown inner world: its size and shape, its layers and levels, its contents, pathways, methods, materials, obstacles, opportunities, and signposts. It helps and inspires us to have such a map to guide us through the landscape of the spirit. Many maps have been put forth, but with varying effectiveness.

There is a map that does not contravene existing maps, at least not the true ones, the major ones. This is a map that fits our times, that offers enough detail to at least in part be confirmable in our own experience. Any good scientific theory must be testable, otherwise it is philosophical and subject to debate. For a useful map of the spirit, we need to be able to verify its elements as we travel the path it outlines. Such a map was presented by G.I. Gurdjieff and elaborated by J.G. Bennett, two giants of 20th century spirituality. Like any valid map of the spirit, it serves as a support, an inspiring and clarifying support, for the actual practices that they taught, placing the practice within a spiritual framework that lends external guidance and meaning until those are discovered within.

With the right framework, it becomes much easier to communicate about spiritual matters and inner work. With the right framework, we have a clearer vision of where we are, where we wish to go, why we wish to go there, and how to do so. The value of a framework lies solely in its effectiveness for supporting that communication and enabling that vision. Otherwise, if it does not really support our inner work, it is just a collection of abstract concepts, perhaps holding some intellectual appeal, but essentially, as Gurdjieff cheekily put it, “pouring from the empty into the void.”

The framework of our visible, knowable universe is spacetime. As we move into the worlds of the spirit, we need to prepare to transcend the spacetime framework. There are many layers to that transcendence. At its simplest, it means that in some aspects of our inner world and in some states, we come into a timeless space. How can that be? The spiritual framework has more dimensions than spacetime.

In our inner work, we see that the substance of our inner world is more like energy than matter, and that there are different kinds and intensities of inner energies, and that much of spiritual practice revolves around energies: perceiving, receiving, not wasting, accumulating, transforming, blending, shaping, and inhabiting the various types and levels of energies. Some energies are best understood and experienced in light of the higher dimensions.

Which raises the question of who is using these energies? Who sees what we see and does what we do? Who chooses what we choose? What makes a table be a table, stay a table? All of which opens us to exploring the realm of will, from the fractured will we find as ourselves, all the way up to our connection with the Divine. The higher dimensions make room for will in the world and show us where it is. The framework includes the descent and ascent of will.

This spiritual framework of dimensions, energies, and will enables us to address the questions of purpose and meaning, enables us to understand where we are and where we wish to go, enables us to understand ourselves and our psychology, and centers us squarely in the middle of the unfolding spiritual drama of this universe we are born into.

In the coming weeks, we will explore this spiritual framework in some detail and in our experience.

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