Z said that she always seems to be a month behind with the exercises. She has started to squirt washing up liquid with her right hand instead of her left. She has been standing on one foot and observed that her whole body seemed to come alive! She felt quite conscious with this exercise, and had found it very useful. She has done it a few times and will continue.
RM had been involved in a long term project attempting to rewrite the Tao Te Ching in his own words, in order to try to get meaning from it. Its attitude to ideas is that they are mostly untrue things that we acquire, which crystallize into gospel. How true we believe things are! People like to hear ideas, and what they believe builds on that. What he is trying to do now is work on being present, on exercises like wherever he is standing to deliberately go slightly off-balance. He is realising how fragile we are as human beings.
T had been following events in Syria. In the current chapter of Beelzebub’s Tales, Gurdjieff describes warfare as what humans do to each other. She had seen a current photo from Egypt of a woman a holding up a white stick and confronting a boy soldier, his gasmask pushed to the top of his head and wearing body
armour. It seemed as if she was talking or shouting in earnest to him and he appeared to be listening to her; she had his attention. It showed a human interaction amid fighting and at the same time showed each in role, playing their part in the wider dispute, each identified with opposite sides. T had also been trying the exercise of putting the key in the lock of the front door with the other hand when she arrived home and had failed every time remembering only before or after the event. D had been thinking that the environment is important. He is reading a book on creativity. As he had mentioned in previous Meetings, there were four major things disrupting his environment. He had to deal with a fire alarm that kept going off, and an intercom three times a day. He thought it was a form of creativity being aware of the outer and the inner, being aware of feeling irritated by things around him. How did people live in Afghanistan? It is difficult enough in King's Cross. He couldn't be born into that sort of stress. Last month had been creative for him because he had resolved three of the four outer irritations (leaving only the fire alarm to be dealt with), and grappled with them and felt calmer for doing so.
L had tried the exercise set last month, and had found it very hard to remember to use a different hand to open the front door. He had remembered to do so on entering the building for this Meeting. The difficulty with this exercise demonstrates to him that his belief in his free will is an illusion. The balance exercise was useful too.
BS, in his message from India, talked of [Removed at the request of BS.] ( According to Sikh scriptures, one moment is equal to 24 seconds).
M said he has had experiences of odd absences of memory. All he knows is that he is not conscious. He has had lapses in memory. There is an inner change on a certain level that he has noticed. He is resolving his own personal problems to do with will. Will is an aspect of consciousness.
There being no further contribution, the remaining time until 9:45 was devoted to responses.
D began with a question for M as an older person. We are doing this Work. How useful is it? How does it help? M responded that the Work had changed his consideration of things. He has been asking himself “What is your will?” A whole new panorama had opened up. “What is your will? What are you actually doing?” He was looking at it from a different point of view. Will is a proof, if your will is in action. The only thing that counts is what you've done. The will has to be active. The idea is an important part, you can have wonderful ideas but you have to have the power and the will to make the ideas happen. The will is the Go button. D said that what M was saying was a revelation. Losing memory is not always negative. M said that if you lose a part of memory, you are a spectator, and you are trying to get the memory to work. L said that if we are not in the present, we are experiencing long periods of forgetfulness. D said that he can't remember what he did the day before. Most of the time he is doing and thinking about something, but it is not important. He feels more aware now. He feels he is being productive.
Responding to D’s comment that he could not have been born into the stress of Afghanistan, RM recalled asking a Buddhist monk in an ashram how he would have coped had he been born into a busy environment. The monk replied that he would not have been born into such an context.
RM questioned what it is we are producing. He found his perspectives changed as he became more conscious, he observed but did not judge. He felt an ongoing momentum, but was not sure about productivity. He’s failed at this, he’s failed at that. He recalled the allegory of the sandcastle.
The sea comes in and washes it away. What does the builder have left? It is the builder who is built, not the sandcastle. He referred to a concept which he had encountered in the Freemasons, which he described as “building the temple of you”. It's not what you do, it's the way that you do it.L gave a geometric description of two different world views. The Occidental is straight line thinking, a goal-directed, purposeful view of history. The Eastern is more circular, there is repetition, reincarnation, karma, what goes around comes around. He quoted the Zen Master, Hsin Hsin Ming, Before Enlightenment, Chop wood carry water. After Enlightenment, Chop wood carry water.
“R” said that Chapter 10 of The Fourth Way, by Ouspensky, was relevant here. It maintains that we cannot do, and don't do, anything. D referred to the book by Camus on this theme, A Happy Death.
At 9:45 the Meeting resumed its reading from Beelzebub’s Tales.
"It is necessary to premise just here that at the period of my first descent in person on to this planet, the organ Kundabuffer was no longer in the three-brained beings who interest you.
“And it was only in some of the three-brained beings there that … one of the consequences of the properties of this organ … had enabled them very easily and without any 'remorse-of-conscience' not to carry out voluntarily any duties taken upon themselves or given them by a superior. But every duty they fulfilled was fulfilled only from the fear and apprehension of 'threats' and 'menaces' from outside.
The Meeting again discussed what the term kundabuffer meant.
RM said that the kundabuffer organ was a protective measure, to safeguard the planet and the life on its surface.
At the close of the Meeting, it was decided that the exercise for the coming month would be to do one thing each day, having decided what it would be at the start of the day. A point would be scored for each day that this was successfully accomplished.
