Suspension of Belief

L had borne in mind the exercise every morning, and he worked with octaves in music every day, but the exercise did not make sense for him except as a loose metaphor. Of course when we tried to do something and used will power we got to resistance, and then we either gave up - apathy might be stronger than will power - or we pushed through and got a bit further.

EXERCISE “ To explore the octave in our activities on a daily basis, and see if there is that discontinuity in the process that concords with the octave.”

Ralph Nelson Elliott 1871-1948

Ralph Nelson Elliott had tried to do a similar thing with trading, called the Elliott wave, and he devised very complex diagrams to represent three steps forward and two steps back, and then the pattern carried on further and stepped back again. It was fractal, as there were smaller wave forms within the larger ones. There were many stock market traders who followed it, although Elliott himself thought of it in a spiritual way, as a law which applied to everything. L felt that the exercise did not ring true, and did some research into Gurdjieff's writings, in which he found octaves were not mentioned except in Chapters 40 and 41 of Beelzebub's Tales where the usage appeared metaphorical.

T had experienced computer crashes at work a few times over the month, wiping out a lot of work she had done. She swore at the computer, and there was tremendous resistance to continuing, which would entail redoing the work that had been lost. It was on those occasions that she recalled the octave idea, the need to apply extra energy to advance beyond resistance. It was like getting back on the horse again.

Leonard Cohen 1934-2016
At album launch event, 13 October 2016.

N said that he wrote songs, and had found the exercise of significance for him in tracking points of resistance to getting his songs done and "out there", even if it was only a metaphor. He had been inspired to do it during the previous month as Leonard Cohen had died and Bob Dylan had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. N had been writing these songs for twenty years but not actually progressing it. First of all he signed himself on to a songwriting course which took place over a weekend. Then went to a networking event at which hundreds of people attended, and exchanged business cards with lots of interesting people, but very soon the critical point was reached as to how much more energy could be put in, because he was busy with his normal work, so he was now at that bit of the octave where he needed to get over to the next stage.

Mikhaíl Bulgakov 1891-1940

RG had tried to accept the Law of Octaves in her routine in everyday life. What she had found herself was that she would start something with so much enthusiasm, and then stop. Then she asked AG what it was all about because she was lost. AG said that understanding the Law of Three and the Law of Octaves, was often difficult for us because we did not know how and where to look at them. He had mentioned already about the book Gödel, Escher, Bach because of its literal content regarding the two theorems of Gödel which were easily understood in that book. Observing Gurdjieff's teaching through the extraordinary logic of Gödel was an incredible emotion. To use a musical example, it was like opening a Schenkerian fifth on reality. To use a Zen expression it, was like being aware, to be observing through the Buddha's eyes. At least, as far as he was concerned, he found reading The Master and Margarita very useful, because in it, in his addition to the Russian classical literature of Stalin, in the intellectual suffering of Bulgakov, there was a much more profound reading key that went to implement the Laws of Three and Octaves. One could comprehend the two additional shocks that allow Margarita to die in order to be born again. In this rebirth, in this going through the moon, in this moon metaphor, finding that centre of feminine gravity that each one of us is aspiring to.

Homer Simpson encounters the octave.

Responding to L, N said that he had first learnt about the octave from reading Ouspensky. He did not know how much there was about it in Beelzebub's Tales. He thought these concepts might have come originally from Pythagoras, and that they might have been thought of as a growth concept. Things did not go along linearly, as we all knew. L said that we must beware of taking the octave metaphor too literally. The previous chapter of Beelzebub's Tales had talked of the danger of people following a set of rules too closely. It described monks abusing themselves, and their families too, by believing in something too strongly, and following a leader; and Gurdjieff could see people following him, and maybe Ouspensky who had already separated from him. L said he worked with octaves when writing music. It was a hard grind of work, to be receptive to inspiration and then to transform it using harmony and counterpoint into music with emotional content which moved the heart. This was a mysterious process but not a mystical one.


The Meeting continued with the Reading from Beelzebub's Tales, Chapter 22.

 

With acknowledgments to Harold Good
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... If you please, if you please, your Right Reverence,” Ahoon interrupted Beelzebub, and rattled off the following:

Allow me to report to you, your Right Reverence, some information which I happened to pick up concerning just that growth of those same Tibetan mountains about which you have deigned to speak.
...

So, dear Ahoon,” commented Beelzebub, and he added, “Thank you for this information…. Glory be to our CREATOR… what you have just said will probably help to destroy in my presence the anxiety which arose in me when I first constated the abnormal growth of those said Tibetan mountains, namely, my anxiety for the complete disappearance from the Universe of the precious memory of our Endlessly Revered Wisest of the Wise, Mullah Nassr Eddin.”

Wallace Stevens 1879-1955

For T the final sentence referred to the possibility that Tibetan system of thought might obliterate that of Mullah Nassr Eddin, which she supposed to be Islamic. C asked why the Tibetan mountains should have abnormal growth. T thought that the mountains might be a metaphor for growing spiritually and believing in oneself to the extent of going to extremes. Gurdjieff symbolised that in the previous reading by the monks who queued up to be incarcerated for the rest of their lives. L said it seemed that Gurdjieff wrote simultaneously on three levels. First the superficial, in which mountains might grow higher. Second that of personal psychology and ego, in which mountains might symbolise the growth of beliefs. Third that of group psychology and superego, in which the connotation might be the growth of religions. D asked if it was possible to dismiss all these beliefs, or would that result in going mad? RM said it was possible to say I believe it, but I don't know it. This reminded L of the poet Wallace Steven's concept of the "supreme fiction".

... After returning to the planet Mars I soon became interested there in a work which the three-brained beings of the planet Mars were just then carrying out on the surface of their planet.

Clearly to understand in what work it was there that I became interested, you must know, first of all, that the planet Mars is for the system Ors, to which it belongs, what is called a ‘Mdnel-outian’ link in the transformation of cosmic substances, in consequence of which it has what is called a ‘Keskestasantnian-firm-surface,’ that is to say, one half of its surface consists of land-presence and the other of ‘Saliakooriapnian’ masses; or, as your favorites would say, one half of it is land or one continuous continent, and the other half is covered with water.

So, my boy, as the three-brained beings of the planet Mars use for their first being-food exclusively only ‘prosphora’—or as your favorites call it, ‘bread’—they, for the purpose of obtaining it, sow on the land of half of their planet what is called ‘wheat,’ and as this wheat derives the moisture it needs, for what is called evolving Djartklom, only from what is called ‘dew,’ the result is that a grain of wheat yields only a seventh part of the accomplished process of the sacred Heptaparaparshinokh, that is to say, what is called the ‘yield’ of the harvest is only a seventh.

 

Heptaparaparshinokh, Robert Fripp and the League of Gentlemen.
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L thought that Mars worked as a perfect metaphor for the concept of the difficulty getting beyond the fourth stage of the octave, for a rocket attempting to go beyond Mars would have to overcome the resistance of the asteroid belt before it could reach the next stage, Jupiter. "R" said that the term Heptaparaparshinokh referred to the octave.


L said it was possible that Gurdjieff knew from Thomas de Hartmann that the seventh chord in music is often used to facilitate changing key in a way which entails the fourth note of the new scale falling back to the third. C asked why Gurdjieff cites Mars as a specific link in transformation of cosmic substances. L said this might be a poetic metaphor associating the fourth planet with the function of the fourth note of a diatonic musical scale, pointing to where more will-power is needed to go further.

As this amount of wheat was insufficient for their needs, while to get more of it they would have to utilize the presence of the planetary Saliakooriap, the three-centered beings there from the very beginning of our arrival there were always talking of conducting that same Saliakooriap in the requisite quantity, from the opposite side of their planet to that side on which their being-existence proceeded.

... Only sometimes I flew to the planet Saturn to rest, to Gornahoor Harharkh, who, during this time, had already become my real essence-friend, and thanks to whom I had such a marvel as that big Teskooano of mine which, as I have already told you, brought remote visibilities 7,000,285 times nearer.”

J wondered at the number, 7,000,285, as it is mentioned with such precision. L said that when Mars is described as half land and half water, it might allude to part of us being conscious and part of us being unconscious, and about trying to elicit things from the unconscious part to the conscious, which felt a bit like the mechanism of inspiration. Was it possible that inspiration came only from the subconscious or influences in the world, or was there an external source from another world. J thought there might be an external source within the artist. L thought that internal and external might not mean anything in these terms. J said there were different types of internal and external and to assume there was just one was usually the problem with these things. There is another side of the artist that gives the inspiration to the side which is implementing it. L said he was thinking that the road to freedom might be a door between ego and superego. J asked why there had been such concern about the mountains, and his take on it harked back to the earlier discussion about the strength of beliefs. If you were trying to eradicate your beliefs, there was a presumption, because of the patterns, that the world on which you lived was going to be a perfect sphere, it was not going to have unexplained encrustations and peaks. So it seemed to him as a comment on the impossibility and stupidity of trying to eradicate fundamental beliefs that you did not have a basis for simply because you wanted an objective pattern that did not have any input into it beforehand of belief that was questionable.

N said that Descartes had tried to question all his beliefs, and worked backwards till he came to a proposition which he couldn't doubt, which was I think therefore I am. L said it was good that N brought up Descartes because Gurdjieff asked further what does I am mean, and which I? RM got a sense from this passage that it was really about how inefficient we were. We grabbed an idea and held on to it, and it was only one-seventh of the whole picture. We did not expand our view and go further. L said that if we looked at this passage in terms of the metaphor of the individual and the group, he is talking about processes of moving ideas or intimations from one part of our mind to another, and in terms of the world cultural ideas from one part of another. RM said that inspiration may start with pattern recognition, but after that foundation the artist has to go a step beyond. Or after learning to cultivate wheat, there was a lot of scope for different kinds of food, C had been reading a new book by Carlo Rovelli, Reality Is Not What It Seems, which says that within covariant quantum fields, which move about like waves, the reciprocal action on them creates time and space and everything in it, including us and the mountains.