Art and Heart

After a silence of one minute from 9 am. to establish the mood, most of the attendees gave an account, for up to two minutes, of relevant experiences from the previous month.

Z wished to comment on two things. Firstly, the technical phrase, "negative emotions". She used it for recognizing them when they were happening in her, and when she recognized them it helped her let go of them. Secondly, she tried the exercise of postponing an action. She chose a wish for some gratification; for a few seconds she was aware of resistance, and the desire to do the action at once.

P sent a message by email that she will not be attending for a while and thanked the Meeting for the times she has attended.

RM said he had used desire to remind self to be present, and found that the more he did this, the more it triggered self remembering. He is also using things he does every day to trigger remembering himself, like brushing his teeth. He is becoming more environmentally aware and this is helping him remember where he has put things down! He is more attentive to doing things. He is experiencing immediate results of being mindful.

B said he was in love! It is wonderful and lovely and all consuming. He has an invigorating desire to work and be awake. He cannot work out how best to maintain romance and love and being present.

D was very aware of M not being at the Meeting. He has been reading David Smail's How to Survive Without Psychotherapy. He writes about a precondition that is set, that doesn't go. D has been aware of this idea and his own experience of precondition. He found this enlightening. He had a question about old age. Does this Work benefit us in old age? "R" wasn't there, but it was a question for her.

L has been having a busy time with art events. He finds it is hard to be in the present with  a lot of activities. He had been on holiday. He has been experimenting with a new system of "to do" lists which acknowledges and uses procrastination as a tool to help the process of getting things done. The system tends to focus you back to what you are supposed to be doing. The author is Mark Forster. It reminds him of a natural process and he gets a sense of waves washing pebbles away. The waves are the continuous small actions that are gradually wearing away at the "stones" of the to-do list.

T said she had been more involved in making art available, which had been taking her away from doing the art. She was remembering herself less, and was more out of control - it was knocking her off balance about being present, and taking her away from doing the Work. She asked how it was possible to be in the present while doing other things in the world with other people.

Time was then given to responses to these contributions, prior to continuing with Beelzebub's Tales at 9:45.

Responding to B, N said that in the first three months the hormone of love overtakes you; it is called oxytocin. Take it and enjoy it. D described this time as a time of feeling consumed. B described it as feeling engulfed. He felt he would drown in it. It was affecting his work. All he wanted to be doing was writing poetry. He will do his work at some point. For him, art and deep anxiety seem linked. Z said that she has a long term partner. She finds it easier to focus on her partner than to work on herself. She comes back to herself regularly from focusing on others.

In response to D, RM said that the true self is eternal.  By creating layers we are imprisoning ourselves. That is the problem. The self is an accumulation of layers. D said that the layers of emotion, ideas, concepts, beliefs we have are preconditioned from childhood. He had thought he would be able to change his negatives to positives through psychotherapy. But they don't change. Preconditioning stays. The idea is to become aware of and accept the negative and the positive.

Following on Z's comments, RM advised to use that desire to remember oneself. To say to oneself, "this is me experiencing it". The observer is the real self. The journey is remembering oneself. GC said that the true self is nothing. L said he finds it helpful having a list system. When he has a desire he puts it on the list first. He is what he does, rather than what he thinks or talks of doing. The list anchors him in reality. When he drops anchor he doesn't go anywhere. He stays still in himself.

The reading from Beelzebub's Tales then continued:

..."NOW let us return to those three-brained beings arising on the planet Earth, who have interested you most of all and whom you have called 'slugs.'

In a humourous, and terrifying, depiction of ceremonial persecution, Gurdjieff writes:

"Provoked by such an incident as your thus insulting them, if everything was rather 'dull' with them at the given moment, owing to the absence of any other similar absurd interest, they would arrange somewhere in a previously chosen place, with previously invited people, all of course dressed in costumes specially designed for such occasions, what is called a 'solemn council.' ...If they should then decide – of course, as always, by a majority of votes – that you are guilty, they would sentence you according to the indications of a code of laws collated on the basis of former similar 'puppet plays' by beings called 'old fossils.' ... The most 'important' beings will decree to all the other beings that in all their appointed establishments, such as what are called 'churches,' 'chapels,' 'synagogues,' 'town-halls,' and so on, special officials on special occasions with appointed ceremonies wish for you in thought something like the following:"That you should lose your horns, or that your hair should turn prematurely grey, or that the food in your stomach should be turned into coffin nails, or that your future wife's tongue should be three times its size, or that whenever you take a bite of your pet pie it should be turned into 'soap,' and so on and so forth in the same strain."

Gurdjieff wittily has Beelzebub make a similar faux pas as had his grandson, by using a different unflattering epithet to describe the inhabitants of Earth.

"Do you now understand to what dangers you exposed yourself when you called these remote three-brained freaks 'slugs'?" Having finished thus, Beelzebub looked with a smile on his favorite.

Before ending the Meeting, it was decided that the exercise would be, when looking at or giving attention to something, to simultaneously be aware of an area at the top of your head (when doing so a slight tingling sensation might be felt there).