After observing that L's contribution had been recorded to an audio computer file, everyone else present agreed they were happy to have their contributions thus recorded, to help a more accurate report on the website. "R" noted that Gurdjieff did not allow note taking in his groups, which meant he was putting the demand for listeners to pay attention. L said he could well understand that, but thankfully a few people did report what had transpired. "R" said they had reported from what they remembered, and that is what Views From The Real World is.
L said that he usually does not make available live recordings of his performed music, preferring to encourage people to actually attend the performances. Conversely accurate computer rendering, of all the instruments in his orchestral compositions, is freely available on the Internet at all times.
The next person to give an account of his thoughts about the previous month was D. He goes down to the community room where he lives to use his iPad because that is the only place he can get wifi, and he's noticed that he is more occupied in doing things and finds it harder to sit still and do nothing. This used to be easy for him but something in his mind or psyche had shifted. He had been considering a quote from Osho, "Be realistic: plan for a miracle." Now there is the constant pressure to check for email, he feels he has lost some peace that he used to have.N had tried the exercise and had neither experienced success in bending the spoons. He had tried generating heat from his hands and various other things which he had thought might help. He had only had success with this sort of thing in group settings (walking on hot coals) and in the context of hypnosis (putting a needle through his hand), without any ill effects and without any pain. He doesn't know what triggers those things. Obviously there is an ability within us at some level to do extraordinary things - there are cases of people lifting cars to rescue someone trapped below. But we cannot call upon this ability at will, there sometimes has to be a trigger event of some kind which compels it, and he did not know what would trigger the event of being able to bend spoons or forks.
The contributions completed, the Meeting moved on to the responses.
D spoke of Uri Geller whom he had met once. He asked if the spoon bending was genuine or just a trick. L said it certainly looked genuine but unless we personally witness it we could not know. He had seen an illusionist imitate it, by bending the items, but Geller just seemed to touch them. L pointed out that he does tend to do it on television. D remembered the radio show where Geller said he would start people's watches. It worked for one of his watches which hadn't been working (it stopped again after two hours.) For D it came back to what Osho says, Be realistic: plan for a miracle. He had been sad following the end of a relationship. Osho had said that a person who is sad has depth. Happiness is the leaves and branches of the tree, and sadness the roots. L said the human condition is basically sad, as we are all born and we know we are going to die. But that is very hard to live with, and we have all manner of religions promising eternal life, or reincarnation, or some other way out of it, and that is definitely linked to the warfare that goes on, as it has done for a long time, so it would be better just to accept the condition or state that we are all in, and make the best of it, because the world is beautiful and we can make some great things while we are here. He thought that the sadness was the root of a lot of art. He said that even if technology made life extension feasible, the human condition would still be lonely should it transpire that we are the only self-aware species. This does not mean we have to be personally sad. Even at the speed of light it would take dozens of years or centuries to explore nearby star systems. D thought we have not evolved emotionally. L agreed there would be no evidence of this until we see wars stop. D recalled Freud's thoughts on human nature in a 1915 essay, " ... our fellow-citizens have not sunk so low as we feared, because they had never risen so high as we believed". "R" said that sadness is very necessary, and is probably the main presence for us of the denying force, and we are three forces, not two. D said that sadness and melancholy is looked on in Japan and China as beautiful, but here it is a negative thing. N said that is true of quite a few cultures, for example in Brazilian music they often talk about melancholy, and in England itself, Richard Burton published The Anatomy of Melancholy in 1621. D again commented on the persistent media exhortations to think positive. "R" said Gurdjeff had not said "be positive". N said Gurdjieff had advised not to express negative emotions (which is often mechanical behaviour, which we should observe if we notice ourselves doing it), and that is an important step forward. L's take on the notion of being positive in popular media, is that it comes down to being resolute. N spoke of Gurdjieff's concepts of internal and external considerations. L said that the pressure in the UK and America for people to get on the property ladder instils a sense of fear, which feeds external consideration, and the pressure is less in mainland Europe. "R" said that considerings happen from a different perspective for the person who is trying to wake up.
N responded to L about synchronicities, which also interest him. He had an extraordinary one during the last month. He had joined a new firm, and was talking to someone who turned out to be from the same university and college. That was the first coincidence. This person was an expert Japanese speaker, and N thought it would be good for him to meet an old friend who was at a Japanese bank, whom he had not been in touch with for a long time. He had been intending to get in touch with an old friend to introduce him to a new work colleague. He thought about this person during the week, and had to go into the office one Sunday. At four he was hungry and went out to get a sandwich. On Sundays that area is very quiet, but as he was coming back across the road, someone shouted out his name, and it turned out to be this very person that he wanted to see. L said he had recently had a conversation about his ideas that the techniques of dream analysis can be applied to real life, which can have many of the qualities of a dream, possibly because it might be a dream. In dreams there are lots of synchronicities - in a dream everything is there for a purpose. With his patients Freud would look for the reason for every symbol in a dream. The same can happen in life - why did that person appear as N was going for the sandwich? If it had been a dream, then it would be easy to explain. That was partly why the conscious walking was interesting, because symbols may arise en route and possibly be subject to analysis. L had experienced many synchronicities, and had also found they tend to cluster in time. D asked if L was saying it was not coincidence. L thought there was no scientific way to validate the phenomenon of synchronicity, so scientifically we should assume there was no significance. "R" thought synchronicities might however have personal significance. N said that Jung talked about synchronicities as being acausal, outside the laws of cause and effect, and so tend to be outside the scientific community's interest from that perspective, but that is not to say that there is not a deeper reality that the synchronicities reflect.
At 9;45 the reading of Beelzebub's Tales continued, Chapter 18, The Arch-Preposterous.
...Between Gornahoor Harharkh and myself there was also a special connector, through which we could easily communicate with each other while we were inside the Hrhaharhtzaha, from which the atmosphere was pumped out to make a vacuum.
One end of this connector also, by means of appliances that were on the helmets, was fitted in a certain way to what are called my organs of 'hearing' and 'speech,' and the other end was fitted to the same organs of Gornahoor Harharkh.
Thus, by means of this connector between my subsequent essence-friend and myself, there was set up, as again your favorites would say, a peculiar 'telephone.'
D queried where the people being described were. L said they were on Saturn, and that Gornahoor Harharkh was the raven friend of Beelzebub.
It is very interesting to notice here that to each end of that appliance ... two independent connectors, also of wire, were led, and through them, what are called special magnetic currents flowed from outside.
As it was afterwards explained to me in detail, these connectors and the said special 'magnetic-currents' had, it seems, been created by that truly great scientist Gornahoor Harharkh in order that the presences of learned three-centered beings—even those not perfected to the Sacred Inkozarno—might, owing to one property of the 'magnetic current,' be 'reflected' for their own essences and that, owing to another property of this current, the presence of the mentioned objects might also be 'reflected,' so that thereby the perception of the reality of the said objects might be actualized by their imperfect organs of being-sight in a vacuum containing none of these factors or those results of various cosmic concentrations which have received such vibrations ...
"R" said that the name of the contraption was an onomatopoeic depiction of laughter - Hrhaharhtzaha - and might be poking fun at this earnest experiment to get rid of all the external impressions we do not want by pumping them out, which is not a wholesome environment for us to maintain life in, as if it would be possible to live without the random impressions which come in all the time, and only intentionally communicate, which is rather a joke. L said that the described procedure seemed to be getting rid of not only ego, but also anything familiar at all, including memory and any presumptions.
N had found the references to magnetism in these passages interesting as there is talk of having a magnetic centre in the Work. "R" thought it may connect with the idea of synchronicity. L said it was also quite Platonic, because it suggests the physical form is something which grows around a form which isn't physical, but has three centres, and in terms of evolution may have grown over a very long time.
From the moment that my essence began to perceive impressions directly and to constate independently that, from what was proceeding, there was being entirely destroyed, as it were, in my common presence, firstly, the parts of my planetary body, and then, little by little, also the localizations of the 'second' and 'third' being-centers. At the same time, a constatation was definitely made that the functioning of these latter centers passed gradually to my 'thinking-center' and became proper to it, with the consequence that the 'thinking-center,' with the increasing intensity of its functioning, became the 'uniquepowerful- perceiver' of everything actualized outside of itself and the autonomous initiator of the constating of everything proceeding in the whole of my presence as well as outside of it.
L thought he was describing a transformative experience when he was experiencing not only himself but everything else too. "R" said the head later took over. D was reminded of Mark Williams the snooker player, who defeated Ronnie O'Sullivan recently for the first time after many years, after being on a diet and becoming very fit, which seemed to have demonstrated a synthesis of the physical and the mental. In cases like this, the physical affects the mental. L said that Gurdjieff had written in complex paragraphs which were very hard to understand. "R" added that this was also not in his native language, and that he had written mostly in Armenian and had a whole team of people helping him to put it into readable English. L said we could read Beelzebub and think this doesn't make sense and ask why we were doing it. He was reminded of the coming world chess championship, which was to start the following Saturday. There would be two experts on the broadcast trying to explain what was going on. It is very hard to understand what the experts are saying, as their understanding is so much more developed than their audience. The champions try to put it across, but it can be in a very complicated way. When one of the contending players makes a move, that neither of the experts has anticipated, even these experts will be unable to fully understand. At the end there is usually a news conference in which the players will try to explain what happened, in some cases to journalists who don't know the moves.
But actually the champions can't communicate an explanation, because they are so far ahead of the experts who were interpreting it, who in their turn were ahead of those who were trying to understand the game from watching the screen. That is what Beelzebub's Tales might be like - how can Gurdjieff put it over when he is coming from such a remote place. N thought that masters such as Gurdjieff are for spiritual development like coaches for a sport, and any great performer has strong mental, physical and emotional components in their skills. L commented that when sports champions age physically too much to compete at peak levels, they often teach what they have learnt about psychological discipline in presentations for businesses.
...I have adapted these three independent apparatuses in such a way that, there in this absolutely empty space, we can obtain from those secondary containers for the required experiment as much as we wish of every active part of Okidanokh in a pure state, and also we can at will change the force of the "striving-to-reblend-into-a-whole," which is acquired in them and which is proper to them according to the degree of density of the concentration of the mass.
And here, within this absolutely empty space, I shall first of all show you that same non-law-conformable phenomenon which we recently observed while we were out-side the place where it proceeded. And namely, I shall again demonstrate to you this World-phenomenon which occurs when, after a law-conformable Djartklom, the separate parts of the whole Okidanokh meet in a space outside of a law-conformable arising and, without the participation of one part, "strive-to-reblend-into-a-whole."
Having said this, he first closed that part of the surface of the Hrhaharhtzaha, the composition of which had the property of allowing 'rays' to pass through it; then he pulled two switches and pressed a certain button, as a result of which the small plate lying on that table, composed of a certain special mastic, automatically moved toward the mentioned carbon-candles; and then having again drawn my attention to the Ammeter and the Voltmeter, he added: "I have again admitted the influx of parts of the Okidanokh, namely, the Anodnatious and the Cathodnatious of equal force of "striving-to-reblend."
L's interpretation of this was that three parts of consciousness had been separated and distilled, purified, and then there had been some sort of calibration of the potency of each, and then they had been brought together. This was a theme that had come up a few times. "R" recalled Gurdjieff's expression "striving to re-blend". N said that after the re-blending perception was from a new perspective.
There was a discussion on an exercise for the coming month. Two were decided. Recording synchronicities over the next month, and to put hand-cream on the hands, sensing the hands while putting it on, being a physical sensation as well as a symbol of care for the body. N suggested the idea of having three exercises per month, one that concentrates on the head, one on the body, and one on the emotions, and to see if they could be blended into one.
