Tracy Cochran

“It is only when we get beyond fantasy, beyond wishing and dreaming, that the real conversion takes place and we awake re-born….for reality is the goal, deny it how we will,” wrote Henry Miller (and thank you to Josh Baran who posted it on Facebook so it could circulate in the world anew).  “When the individual is wholly creative, one with destiny, the god-feeling is so intense everything beats with divine rhythmn. ”

In the documentary “My Architect,” a Yale professor describes the architect as artist, as someone who had the feeling and capacity to wish to serve what we call god without sparing himself (my paraphrase).   When I  watched this scene last year I wondered why I had never before thought of Madame de Salzmann as an artist–she was a musical prodigy as a girl.   Why had I never thought of Gurdjieff as artist?   Not just the Movements but all the forms he brought were created.   It occurs to me that to make the kind of effort that Madame de Salzmann describes in The Reality of Being it is necessary to live experimentally, like an artist, willing to abandon fantasy and allegiance to the false self to risk a greater wholeness.   Miller sounds strikingly like de Salzmann when he speaks  of “the moment of supreme individuation, when the identity of all things is sensed.”  In such a moment “the umbilical cord is cut–there is neither longing for the womb or for the beyond.  The sure feeling of eternality.  Beyond this there is no evolution, only a perpetual movement from creation to creation.”

Isn’t this what it must mean to serve God, to help His Endlessness, however you conceive it, to be one with Reality?