Esteemed Reader: Nature/Nature | August 2024 (2024)

This summer has been particularly delicious for me. An unknown impulse has coalesced a ritual of going outside around sunrise. I listen to the panoply of birdsong and cicadas and distant traffic, feel the dewy grass under my bare feet, and let the morning sunlight and verdant green of trees touch my eyes.

I see that my body relaxes as I stand in the grass, so much so that I can bear the curious ants crawling up the skin and hairs of my legs. My body finds its balance, leaning neither forward nor back, with an easy verticality atop the attractive horizontal plane of earth. I sense that the soil below my feet is alive, teeming with fungus, plants, and insects.

Something in my nature seeks and awakens with this contact. It becomes active and allows thoughts, worries, and tensions to relax. The contact completes a circuit with the sensation of my own nature as part of a large body of nature. The force of this quiet, powerful essence grows, and the veneer of conditioning is allowed to relax.

I see that to say "my nature" is a contradiction—for it is not my nature but the acquired appurtenance of personality that claims things. I observe that the personality (which comes from the Latin word for mask) is an invention. The truer seat of individuality is in my nature, and it doesn't claim anything. It just is. Nevertheless, language requires that I use the acquisitive form to convey the sense of distinction between the nature that is expressed in my particular being and nature that is part of the larger body of the biosphere and beyond.

I watch with amusem*nt as the personality attempts to claim experience for its own. It makes a genuine sense of unity into a product that can be transferred, communicated (ironically, even as this missive is doing right now). So I sit with this contradiction and try to experience both together. I stay in contact with my nature through attention to the sensation of my body. I notice tension in my back and allow it to relax. I notice my mind thinking about the plane I have to catch later today, and let it relax. In this I see the spasmodic movements of the personality provide useful fodder and foil for returning to contact with my essential nature.

From this fleeting, silent connection with my own nature, I see that beings of every kind—plants, animals, humans—are healthiest when they live the inherent design of their nature. Each needs the right conditions, food, breath, impressions. When these are available the individual being will benefit, and related beings in the ecosystem will also benefit.

Each being needs a particular kind of work or striving to be healthy. A tree needs to reach toward the sun, be whipped by wind, and shoot roots into the soil. A chick needs to peck its way out of its shell and be born. Each being strives according to its nature, and by its striving not only becomes more strongly itself, but also becomes a greater contributor to the ecosystem of which it is a part.

Every being expresses its ingenious and beautiful design as part of a vast tapestry of intelligent life which clearly extends beyond the surface of the planet. Common sense dictates that the whole cosmos is alive, at a scale we cannot fathom from the perspective of our limited scale of existence.

A step for humanity in general is to relax enough to behold the incalculable intelligence and integral beauty that is transmitted through nature. The Gnostics called the harmonic intelligence which operates through every form of life Sophia, a living wisdom expressed in infinite forms. The harmonious pattern and logic of Sophia is not learned. Rather I can perceive the harmony with awe when, as William Blake wrote, "the doors of perception are cleansed."

What is the inherent contribution of a human being within the body of nature? And what is my purpose in particular? This question is a koan or Zen riddle, in the sense that it is unanswerable as an explanation. It can only be answered as a natural result of striving to live according to one's nature. All the genuine spiritual traditions had the aim of assisting in realizing this answer through practice appropriate to the time and place of their arising.

Author Jason Stern will open a new inner work group in the Fourth Way tradition of G. I. Gurdjieff. Join the introductory group meeting, 21st Century Seekers: A Practical Work for Being, Thursday, September 19, 7pm, 64 Plains Road, New Paltz. Harmoniousdevelopment.org.

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About The Author

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Esteemed Reader: Nature/Nature | August 2024 (2024)

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About The Author

Jason Stern

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