The "Stop Exercise"

The meeting opened with each present giving an example of relevant experiences from the previous month, as D had suggested at the August meeting.

M said he experienced feeling awake more often. T asked for an example. M described how he had left his flat without a set of keys he needed, but almost immediately remembered his purpose and returned to collect them.

T related that having missed a meeting, she felt out of touch, but that her real work is being done when she paints. She has instituted a system with a thirty minute timer. At the moment it goes off, she has to stop. This reminds her of Gurdjieff's "stop exercise", as she has to stop irrespective of where she is at. It's not about the painting, it's about the use of attention.

RM agreed, and recounted that when working on a farm as a member of a Gurdjieff Group, people were told to keep attention on the work, not on the expectation - a gong would sound and everyone would stop and observe their feelings. While working in this way time can seem to stretch. When elderly people say time passes quickly it is because they spend more time asleep. If they say they only need four hours sleep a night, it is because they spend hours of the day "asleep".

L suggested that the slow passing of time indicates that a person is awake.

RM said that he thought it likely that Gurdjieff never stopped working.

L said that since the previous meeting he has come to consider the possibility of a fourth mind - creative or artistic - in addition to the instinctive, emotional and intellectual. Sometimes things slot into place or take shape over weeks, months or years in making art.

D said that a songwriter might sometimes get a tune instantly while doing something completely unrelated like driving - jot it down and it becomes a hit.

RM thought it was a matter of bisociative thinking.

D said Colin Wilson's view in The War Against Sleep was that Gurdjieff did not consider imagination.

Turning to his own experience during the month, D recounted that he has moved house. He had to get rid of a lot of books which he found very difficult. He realised how much attachment he felt to the books, and how much he valued one in particular, an original copy of Beelzebubs Tales which he had never read, and rescued from the black bags of those to be thrown away, which even charity shops were not interested in - he thought that there is a huge destruction of books going on.

RM described an exercise he has developed to help him wake up. He has been trying to find ways (like seeing how many lamposts he can count while walking before falling asleep), and has worked out a mantra designed to create a rhythm in the mind of awareness and attention: "Every cell of my body glows with attentive awareness - with every step I take my body glows with attentive awareness ...". He has found that his memory has been improving since, and has learnt to recite twelve Shakespeare sonnets. Each sentence has come to feel like a single dictionary entry. He recited one:

Look in thy glass, and tell the face thou viewest 
Now is the time that face should form another; 
Whose fresh repair if now thou not renewest, 
Thou dost beguile the world, unbless some mother,
For where is she so fair whose unear'd womb 
Disdains the tillage of thy husbandry? 
Or who is he so fond will be the tomb 
Of his self-love, to stop posterity? 
Thou art thy mother's glass, and she in thee
Calls back the lovely April of her prime: 
So thou through windows of thine age shall see
Despite of wrinkles this thy golden time. 
    But if thou live, remember'd not to be, 
    Die single, and thine image dies with thee.

D said it reminded him of Gurdjieff's writing in Beelzebub's Tales, and wondered where Shakespeare had come across the ideas.

RM said the sonnets contain Rosicrucian teachings.

M asserted that they and the plays were written by Francis Bacon.

RM said that Bacon could not publish plays under his own name as it would have been considered inappropriate for a senior official to be a playwright.

As so much time had passed in going through the month's experiences, L suggested that a timer system be introduced from next month, five minutes per person, and this was agreed by all present.

The Meeting then turned to reading from Beelzebub's Tales, Chapter I, The Arousing of Thought.

...always and everywhere on the earth...that definite utterance understandable to every even quite illiterate person, which in different epochs has been formulated variously and in our day is formulated in the following words: "In the name of the Father and of the Son and in the name of the Holy Ghost, Amen."

M asked about the meaning of the phrase, saying that he thought the "Holy Ghost" was a reference to Gurdjieff's concept of Third Force.

L said that there is often some thing new to notice when coming back to the text. In this case the phrase "always and everywhere" seems to be an echo of the title "All and Everything" of the collection of books beginning with this paragraph.

M recalled an account of Gurdjieff being asked if anything of substance exists after death. In response Gurdjieff asked if there was anything of substance now.

T described a conversation she had recently heard on a bus. A mother asked her little boy "What do you want to eat?" The boy was not interested in food and asked what he was going to do after she died. This was an aware question, and who is willing to help such a child with thinking about it?

D remembered being a child in an institution, looking at the stars, and wondering what was up there.

RM wondered why the old Beelzebub's Tales edition was being used rather than the newer one, as he remembered Gurdjieff students being enthusiastic about it before publication.

L read the section of the July meeting's account where this was discussed.

RM said he would like to prepare a list of basic principles of Gurdjieff's teachings, and thought this would attract and help new members.

L said there were several informative links on the webpage, and another could be added to link to the list.