Hush and Brush

The Meeting began at 9am with a one minute silence, and then most of the attendees gave an account, for up to two minutes, of experiences since the previous Meeting.

Leonard Cohen meditating, 1995
Photograph: Neal Preston

T had been reflecting about the suggestion from "R" in the previous Meeting that the paint brush of the artist or the pen of the creative writer might be baggage as well as everything else - for her it is essential. She wondered whether her practice in painting was robotic, mechanical behaviour as well. She was unsure if she had remembered the assertion correctly but it had stayed with her. She requested a response later after the individual contributions. She has experienced, when drawing and painting, an awakening of sorts, and the thought that the act of painting was another form of baggage getting in the way of becoming more aware seemed undermining of the creative process as a method of awakening to a higher consciousness. If writing or any of the creative arts were baggage or luggage, then she wondered what was left for becoming more aware, other then meditating 24/7, i.e. doing nothing 24/7. She sited the example of Leonard Cohen who had gone to a Zen monastery for five years but had come back out and was singing again.

Z had been trying the exercise, and observed anxiety three times, but it did not disappear. She had found, however, that she had been able to surrender her impatience upon observing it.

B had experienced quite a good month, with periods when he felt he was more aware, but he could not sustain them, and he wanted some mechanism of waking again.

D had read research which showed that reading the news had a negative effect on readers and he couldn't understand why the newspapers focused on the bad and the disastrous, and why people read them. He knows that he himself is drawn to such stories.

L had observed again a parallel between the sections read in Beelzebub's Tales and events in the previous month. The description of a comet striking Earth was paralleled by the meteor exploding over Russia. The part which describes setting up a colony on Mars was followed by reports of projects to do that, and in fact recruitment had just begun for one of them. And in the Meeting itself, reading of the Law of Falling and the Law of Catching Up, seemed exemplified by the fact that the April reading repeated what had been read in March, but did not get as far, and likewise part of the discussion covered the same ground. Perhaps this was the Law of Falling at work, and we were now engaged in the Law of Catching Up.

[Removed at the request of BS.]

The remaining time until 10:30 was devoted to reactions to the initial comments.

L responded to BW by suggesting he use the smartphone app Mindfulness Bell to jolt him into wakefulness at random intervals.

"R" said, in response to D, that there is a paper called, "Good News", but it is dull - no news is good news, but bad news is always more exciting and interesting than happy news, and stops people in their tracks.

Following on from Z's comments, P said she had also attempted the exercise of sacrificing anxiety on the altar of consciousness, but it had not worked for her as she experienced the anxiety state continuing. She asked what it meant. RM said that the altar of consciousness was being aware of one's own body as the altar, the seat of self-remembering. The body is also the very place where anxiety occurs. Something outside of ourselves grips us with fear. If attention is brought to the body, the seat of consciousness, and attention is brought to self-remembering the body, the very act of self remembering kills off, dissolves anxiety. The mind cannot be aware of the physical body and what is outside of the body at the same time. One negates the other.

D, responding to T, mentioned that David Bowie had also spent a period studying Buddhism.

At 10:30 the Meeting resumed the reading of Beelzebub's Tales, continuing from the point reached the previous month.

The two moons of Earth, fragments cast off from a cosmic collision, were described:

"Of these two fragments, the larger was named 'Loonderperzo' and the smaller 'Anulios'; ... in most recent times the larger fragment has come to be called Moon, but the name of the smaller has been gradually forgotten.

"As for the beings there now, not only have they no name at all for this smaller fragment, but they do not even suspect its existence.

"It is interesting to notice here that the beings of a continent on that planet called 'Atlantis,' which afterwards perished, still knew of this second fragment of their planet and also called it 'Anulios,' but the beings of the last period of the same continent, in whom the results of the consequences of the properties of that organ called 'Kundabuffer' – about which, it now seems, I shall have to explain to you even in great detail – had begun to be crystallized and to become part of their common presences, called it also 'Kimespai,' the meaning of which for them was 'Never-Allowing-One-to-Sleep-in-Peace.'

Z queried about the meaning of Kimespai, and D asked about the kundabuffer, and whether that word was related to the Sanskrit word kundelini. T spoke about the term planetary bodies as a possible metaphor for the human condition and if so the Kimespai, the crystallised Kundabuffer may be referring to the natural consequences of procreation, children who are often a shock to the parents system, for example "never allowing one to sleep in peace" from babies through to adulthood.  RM spoke about the value of kundebuffer, and how Gurdjieff had been keenly aware in his groups that some people, when opening up to the work and passionate about it, had become suicidal. Responding to D, "R" said that the term kundebuffer referred to a component of an energy system. RM said that the Bhagavad Gita and Ouspensky have different languages to describe the same things.

Following the reading, there was a discussion on which exercise to adopt for the coming month. D suggested the double-sided arrow. L pointed out that this had been chosen before for the exercise, and in fact was not from Gurdjieff, but devised independently by Ouspensky. RM suggested a self- remembering exercise from Gurdjieff: to hold back doing the thing wanted at that particular moment - on feeling a desire to do something, to stop and not continue the desire, experiencing what it feels like to resist doing the activity wanted. Time limits were discussed - the possibilities were to stop for one minute, five minutes, or to stop going for a thing altogether.