A World Without the Above

How wonder is lost when human constructs flatten the mystery of existence

One of the deepest difficulties we encounter when confronting education, human knowledge, and the many forms of conditioning that shape us is that modern society has largely lost the habit of referring anything to a higher order.

It speaks endlessly of humanity, society, identity, rights, utility, progress, equality, welfare, productivity, and self-expression. But it increasingly avoids the greater questions. What is Man? Why is he here? What is his place in the order of the universe? What, if anything, stands above him, and what in him is capable of responding to that?

This loss is not merely intellectual. It is existential, and it changes everything downstream of it: the aim of education, the meaning of culture, the whole direction of a human life.

Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, in The Social Construction of Reality, gave a powerful account of the way societies create and maintain a shared world of meanings. Human beings do not merely live in the physical world; they live within a socially constructed one, a “consensus reality” that tells them what is real, what is important, what is permissible, and what is unthinkable.

This works at many levels. It can be as narrow as an insular teaching method, where a pupil is inducted into a closed system of assumptions and never once invited to question them. It can be as broad as a social ideology—political, economic, sociological, educational—that quietly draws the borders of acceptable thought. And it can appear, more subtly still, within the very religious and spiritual circles that imagine themselves concerned with higher things.

That last point requires some care, because such circles do explicitly speak of God, spirit, salvation, enlightenment, liberation, transcendence. Yet even there the higher question can slip away. A spiritual tradition can harden into another social construction, another protected bubble, another inherited consensus reality. Its beliefs get wrapped into a political, social, cultural, or economic ideology and then pasted over life as a filter. The language remains “higher.” The functioning is not. It has become collective conditioning under a better name.

What I am pointing to is wider than any single ideology, institution, or tradition. All these bubbles of consensus reality, secular or religious, drift toward the utilitarian. They exist to maintain a particular social order, a group identity, a system of values, and so they answer only practical questions. How should people behave? What should they believe? What is useful, what is acceptable, what keeps the machine running?

What they do not do is open the larger questions of human existence.

Those questions have been progressively sidelined, and in some places effectively forbidden, by the great ideologies of the modern world. Marxism, capitalism, socialism, liberal democracy, nationalism, and their many descendants appear to be at war with one another, yet they share one remarkable feature: every one of them places Man at the centre. They are, at root, human-centred systems.

In their public forms they rarely ask what is higher than Man. They ask how Man may organise, feed, govern, liberate, enrich, equalise, and express himself. These are not trivial questions. But once they become the highest questions, Man is left with nothing but his horizontal existence, and the vertical dimension simply disappears—a social and psychological Flatland.

The irony is that systems promising freedom, equality, justice, or prosperity tend to arrive at strikingly similar results, in which the many become subject to the few. Under collectivist systems the State swells into the sacred object, the unquestionable authority, the substitute God. Under capitalist-democratic ones the unspoken gods are material success, consumption, and power, and it is often those with the fewest scruples who rise most efficiently through the machinery. The outward slogans differ; the inner structure is much the same.

This is what happens when nothing higher than humanity is acknowledged. A human system cut off from the higher question cannot stay humane for long. It begins by promising Man everything and ends by measuring him—by what he produces, what he obeys, what he consumes, how much power he can be made to serve.

The so-called Age of Reason only intensified the process. Reason, in its rightful place, is a noble faculty. But sever it from higher perception and it becomes a closed instrument: it can analyse, classify, measure, and manipulate, and still it cannot say why anything exists at all. It describes processes. It cannot account for Being.

Modern science, at its best, is more humble than many of its popularisers. It admits profound mysteries—the origin of life, the emergence of consciousness, the nature of light, the behaviour of matter at extreme scales, the interior fires of stars, the depths of black holes, the astonishing complexity of a single cell. The modern secular imagination then does something curious with these mysteries. It turns them into temporary technical problems. We do not yet understand, it says, but give the method enough time and it will explain everything.

Perhaps it will explain a great deal more. It has already explained much. But explanation is not understanding. Mechanism is not meaning. To describe the processes by which life develops is not to answer why there should be life, order, intelligence, beauty, and consciousness at all.

The existence of one living cell is already an unfathomable miracle. That such order and responsiveness and intelligence should exist at the microscopic level ought to stop us where we stand. Yet astonishment is precisely what the modern mind hurries to suppress. It prefers to domesticate the miraculous by naming the mechanism—as though a named mystery were no longer a mystery.

When we abandon the search for something higher than ourselves, we do far more than reject a religious proposition. We cut ourselves off from wonder, from conscience, from the possibility that Man is not yet complete as he is—and from the quiet intimation that something in us belongs to another order altogether.

In Gurdjieff’s language, this is not merely a theological matter. It touches the whole question of Man’s possible evolution. Man, as he is, is unfinished. He is not yet a real “I” but a plurality, a machine, a creature moved by habit, imitation, fear, vanity, suggestion, and sleep. And if there is nothing higher than ordinary humanity, then there is no measure by which he might ever see his own sleep. The sleeping world becomes the standard of wakefulness.

This is why the loss of the higher question is so catastrophic. Strip away the higher authority, and morality becomes whatever a society can be talked into. Strip away the higher order, and education becomes mere training in adaptation. Strip away the higher aim, and freedom shrinks to the multiplication of desires; strip away any higher sense of Man, and childhood becomes the slow covering-over of what was most essential in it.

For a child still has wonder. A child still stands in some direct relationship with mystery—not because childhood is pure in any sentimental sense, but because the crust of social construction has not yet fully hardened. Here is the tragedy: education, which ought to protect and deepen that wonder, more often teaches the child how to lose it. It covers the God-spark over with ideology, ambition, anxiety, conformity, and second-hand morality.

We then persuade ourselves that the great struggle is the one between competing human systems—left and right, capitalism and socialism, conservatism and progressivism, tradition and modernity, religion and secularism. But the deeper struggle runs at right angles to all of these. It is between a life closed to the higher question and a life opened to it.

And for that, there must be real teaching. Not instruction, not information, not encouragement, not socialisation. A teacher of children who has no relationship to anything higher than society risks becoming a conditioning machine, however kind and intelligent and well-intentioned they may be, because they can only ever serve the existing consensus reality. A real Teacher points beyond the bubble, and under such a Teacher, disciples learn not merely what to think, but how to see, how to question, how to stand inwardly before the mystery of existence.

Humanity speaks endlessly of equality, democracy, fairness, and the levelling of distinctions. On the social plane, these ideas have their place. But existence itself is not flat. Nature is hierarchical—not in the crude political sense, but in the cosmic one. A child depends on its parents, life on Earth depends on the Sun, the Sun belongs to the galaxy, the galaxy to its clusters and superclusters: orders within orders, scales within scales, dependencies within dependencies, everywhere we care to look.

Humanity could not exist without the Sun, nor the Sun without the galaxy, nor the galaxy without still greater structures. And beyond all this—what? Randomness? Nothingness? Quantum fluctuation? Blind mechanism? An accident so vast and so precise that it gives birth to stars, cells, consciousness, conscience, longing, prayer, music, and the question of God?

The mind boggles at the lengths to which humanity will go to deny anything higher than itself, while the very stars shining down upon it speak of mysteries beyond conception.

The Creator—Gurdjieff’s ʜɪꜱ ᴇɴᴅʟᴇꜱꜱɴᴇꜱꜱ—must be crying for his lost children.