D had been to visit M, who was in Casualty at the hospital, having had a fall at his residential home. He went to visit M at the Care Home a couple of days later. M was in a big room, sitting straight - he would suddenly slip away, wondering who he was. D was wondering again, how much the Work helps with old age.
L said he had found B's exercise, with the hands, good. He had remembered that a similar exercise had been tried before, suggested by GC, involving focusing on other parts of the body. He hadn't done it before going to sleep and hadn't experienced the hands coming to mind during the night. This exercise seemed to be testing the point that the dream and the day are both part of our existence. He was not sure the exercise from the extract is from Gurdjieff. There are no references to it anywhere else. The exercise reminded him of a to-do list - we can forget what we are planning to do and are reminded when we see the list. It is symbolic of the possibility of a single common identity within a person.
"R" said she had been teaching, watching her student, giving attention. The student was trying to do what her fingers are automatically able to do. "R" does not have the means of transmission of her skill. She is left handed, so most people do it differently, and so she has to do it differently. She has had to learn more about patience. There are two factors involved. A tendency to be lazy, and a tendency to be impatient.
B had found the exercise to be like the one with keys, but there are more opportunities to be aware of hands in the new exercise. His interest in his work, acting, seems to have changed. His coming here doesn't seem to have to be integrated into everything, and so it becomes more significant to him.
RM had been away for a couple of months, on a cruise to the Baltic Sea and the Northern Lights. It was a continuation of previous cruises.
He had been asked to do more meditation classes, of which he did about forty. His technique of meditation involved doing two things at a time. Like counting and being aware of a part of the body. This helped him and his pupils become more aware. He had been asked when he was coming back on his next cruise.
T realised she had been painting her hands as part of her work on a self-portrait, but there was in fact only a fleeting connection with the exercise, which had seemed at first as a gift but was in reality very difficult to do. Other times she remembered was at the sink, washing up.
The message from BS was read out. [Omitted at the request of BS.]
The Meeting then moved to responses to initial contributions.
Responding to D, RM said that it is irrelevant whether the Work helps with old age. The important thing is how he responds to the present.
D asked "R" about the link between her account of teaching and the hands exercise. "R" said her hands had perfected fine jewellery techniques with thread and beads. She can do it without thinking, but to explain it means putting attention on it, and being receptive to other people trying to learn. Eventually it becomes second nature, but initially there is a lot of fumbling. T said that when she is doing something with her hands, there is something else observing. Some other presence that we are trying to make more of. In order to be present, it seems we have to be aware of that as well.
D said he was wondering whether, for M, there would have been any difference if he hadn't done the Work? T asked D if he was asking what is the point of the Work or what is the point of someone's life? She said "Whether or not you do the Work isn't going to stop physical death. The Work isn't to prevent something in the future, it is about how we are living in our present. We are all going to die, whether we do the Work or we don't." RM asked D who he was responding to. "R" said that she values that D was responding with feeling.
Responding to B, L wondered, although he had found the exercise useful, whether it had a direct link with Gurdjieff. The author Carlos Castenada described exercises given to him by his teacher Don Juan, which have been associated by some writers with Gurdjieff, although L has been unable to find any corroboration for a link. Although Don Juan might not have existed, the books are no less wonderful. He was reminded of the earlier popular esoteric writer Lobsang Ramba (original name Cyril Hoskin), and Max Erhmann, whose great poem, Desiderata, written in 1927, is believed by many to have been written hundreds of years before. RM said that, similarly, the name Lao Tse may be made up. T commented that Gurdjieff made up Beelzebub, a fictional character in order to speak his ideas through the character and his stories. D said he had been reading The Daemon, by Anthony Peake, which describes everything as being a hologram. Time and space and man.
RM said that this ties in with C influence. If you meditate deeply, you can link with any part of the universe. There is a scientific theory that the universe is made up of holograms and so are our minds. Higher consciousness is called the right brain. Doing these exercises is trying to get inside the right hand side of brain. D said that if you can connect with this Daemon, it knows everything, and works in symbols. He mentioned how famous scientists who had slept on a problem and got the answer.
"R" said she had had a strong reaction to the contributions of BS, and talked of the importance of practice as opposed to thinking. The moments of presence are the important ones. L said that formulas as used by BS are useful, and formulas of this nature had been used by the psychoanalysts Wilfred Bion and Jacques Lacan. The accounts were an honest report of his experiences.
At 9:45 the Meeting resumed the reading of Beelzebub's Tales.
“...It must be noticed that the twelve ‘Krentonalnianrevolutions’ of the said Moon do not correspond exactly to a single ‘Krentonalnian-revolution’ of their planet round its sun and therefore they have made some compromise...
“But as in general, my boy, you do not yet know of the exceptional peculiarity of this cosmic phenomenon Time, you must first be told that genuine Objective Science formulates this cosmic phenomenon thus:
“Time in itself does not exist; there is only the totality of the results ensuing from all the cosmic phenomena present in a given place..."
B said it was hard to understand time and space anyway, even without the long words. RM was reminded of Heinlein's novel Stranger in a Strange Land whose Martian protagonist, Valentine Smith, encounters difficulties in communication with people on Earth. T talked of languages being social constructs and meaning something when everyone speaks the same language but that when you don't know a language the sounds can be heard said but no meaning is communicated. When we speak in our own language we experience it as if it exists in a real sense and this experience is bolstered up by others, but language doesn't exist in any real concrete sense, language is symbolic existing in and between people.
D asked if the long words were there to wake us up. The words were very creative. B said that he always feels there is something of use, even if he doesn't understand it, in this book. T gave, as an example, the word trogoautoegocratic. "R" said that they may have been put together from languages he knew, like Armenian and Russian. T found that the mixture of foreign words and every day language makes her want to read them. B said that he got the same feeling as with BS's contributions; hard to understand, but a gut feeling that there is something there.
“Thus, my boy, uniquely Time alone, or, as it is sometimes called, the ‘Heropass,’ has no source from which its arising should depend, but like ‘Divine-Love’ flows always, as I have already told you, independently by itself, and blends proportionately with all the phenomena present in the given place and in the given arisings of our Great Universe."
D thought this described appositely the hologram of which he had been speaking earlier.
“ ... although according to our time-calculations you are still only like a boy of twelve ... yet according to their subjective understanding ... you have already existed by their time-calculation, not twelve years but the whole of four thousand six hundred and sixty-eight years."
L thought this passage highlighted that time is subjective. For example, a mayfly lives only for a day. Yet he saw a slight flaw in Gurdjieff's writing. He has Beelzebub living on Mars for a long period, apparently experiencing time normally, but at his rate of experiencing time, sunrise and sunset would alternate immediately, the sun streaking across the sky every minute. "R" said that their experience of time would have adjusted to local conditions.
"R" had recently watched a programme in which Brian Cox discussed some of the concepts in Doctor Who. It had been hard to understand but was very good.
RM had been on a cruise. People were on average in their seventies. All remarked how fast time goes. He told them it's just that they have more ways of falling asleep. Concentrating on something for two minutes makes time slow down.
Before closing the Meeting, there was a discussion on what exercise to adopt for the ensuing month. It was decided this would be to pay immense attention to the hands, once a day, for one minute.
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