Dogged Determination

The Meeting began with a minute's silence, and those who wanted then gave an account of relevant thoughts and events since the previous month.

Yoga tree pose

Z had tried RM's exercise. The main part of the experience for her was a feeling that her feet got roots into the ground. This felt like a wake up call to all other times when she doesn't experience this grounding.

RM described building the one minute meditation into a program for others. His own experience showed him how his mind had been weak and didn't stay in the present. He experienced strong resistance to doing it first thing in the morning and had to battle to keep attention when he did. He has five people he has been coaching in this method. They described trying the meditation whilst playing tennis. They felt they played with the entire body. RM said the one minute felt homoeopathic, a tiny dose with intense effect, the right thing in the right amount. When he remembered to do it he experienced bursts of connection to his whole body throughout the day.

Cyril Scott

GC described having tried it for six or seven days, then his mind didn't want to do it any more and he gave in to his mind. He found the exercise easy to do. He tended to do it whilst driving in the car and got an experience of all of his body. It reminded him of  Cyril Scott, the composer and writer of "A Greater Awareness". He wrote about paying attention to everything that was upstairs in a house when you were upstairs. When you go downstairs you will remember what is there. GC said he read it when he was young and didn't know what Scott was talking about. Since he has got older he has become aware of what Scott meant. He did not know why the one minute meditation exercise triggered this association but it did.

A message from “R” read out. She was abroad at present and unable to attend this meeting.

There was also a message from B, who said he would be unable to attend a Sunday meeting for a while, because of work commitments. He was very grateful to have come over the last couple of years, and when his job situation changes, would like to return.

Statue by Antony Gormley

Although she had not managed the one minute meditation in the mornings, T had done it several times during each day, and had found it a profound experience. While walking, she would stop in the street, while the world carried on, without worrying what people would think. It made her feel like an Antony Gormley statue; it was extraordinary. She stared at wherever her eye fell. Then the wandering mind started. She experienced looking at a distant fence post whilst counting from one to sixty. She was aware of the counting when she was alert to the point in the distance and of her feet on the ground. During the first fifteen seconds the time seemed slow. She then lost concentration and awareness and it was as if time had gone fast not being aware from fifteen to thirty. Aware state and non-aware state affected her sense of time.

D described being hyper-alert through the month. He saw a documentary about psychological testing at a college. Twenty students were set a task to run up a path past a house. They had to use a counting technique whilst they were running. On the route a man was being beaten up by other men. At the end the students were asked if they had seen the man being beaten up. Fifty per cent of the students didn't see it. D said he would have noticed. He had also had to endure a fire alarm going off at his block of flats. He felt a rage against the noise. He felt he wasn't present the last three or four days. He switched it off manually and had to deal with it. He remembered that it was the first of the month and he felt calmer remembering that the Meeting would happen and was aware of the consistency of it which felt important to him.

L said that since the last meeting, he had been contacted by someone in Europe about playing one of his compositions. He had been hearing it recently in his mind, and wondered if this was coincidence. He thought it was being practised at the moment and wondered if there was a connection of some kind between creative people.

Following the contributions, time was given to responses from the attendees.

Z added an addendum to her contribution. She experienced a reluctance to focus on random points, so focused on a picture of angels on a calendar. This had been a good focus and had helped her feel inspired by the exercise. When she picked out a point at random instead, she had a stronger resistance to doing the one minute exercise. D said he found the selection of such an image for the exercise quite inspiring.

D also remembered "R" talking about the importance of the consistency of 'being here', at the Meeting. He had considered the possibility that one day the Meeting might not happen, but so far it had always been there. It had been meeting for several years. People came and went but the Meeting still happened. D asked about M. L mentioned that the monthly exercise had been outlined to him in the care home, and he had tried it, but thought that one minute was too long, and insisted on doing a thirty-second meditation. T outlined the history of the Meetings. She said she had suggested setting meetings up several years ago, knowing M's deep interest in the Work. The first Meeting, in November 2007, was in a private home, but the venue was changed a few months later to a hotel. Initially the focus was on Ouspensky and Nicoll but over time shifted to Gurdjieff.

RM said Gurdjieff is the Work. That was why he was studying all the sources that Gurdjieff got it from. He was studying why people don't want to do things that will change them. He said this was because part of them dies, and the body doesn't want to die. One moment a day plants a seed for the day. T said she experienced a resistance to focusing on a point. Once it was a bit of mould. She counted to sixty during the meditation. The mind was like a horse on a leash, which ran off but could be called back. But a second try didn't work, she felt saturated. It was shocking how long one minute could be. RM said will power was like a spring. It winds down till it is empty. The exercise was like lifting weights. After months it might be possible to do two minutes. The will power can be used for anything. The people he was coaching had reported similar experiences. L commented about the concept of short periods of meditation and said that there was a lot online about it.



Z had come across Sant Mat meditation, which was meant to be for three hours every day. She had found it excessive and extraordinary. GC said he had flirted with a Sufi group for a couple of years, where he had had his deepest experience. They had called it "shedding the accretions". He had noticed that those practicing the meditation had become softer. T had been moving between figurative work and painting from feelings, just working with shapes and colours. Figurative painting is a meditation on what is being looking at. Painting from feeling was responding to intuited colour and form and any ideas that are suggested when looking at these. The maximum she was able to do was thirty minutes. There was so much accretion about art, with selling and exhibiting, but essentially the act of painting for her was a meditation. D said it was a cliche that to be creative an artist had to suffer. He had taken some writing to a director, who wanted changes. D thought the changes would ruin it, but they agreed to differ. He was going to rewrite it.

RM talked about the story of the hundredth monkey. L said that he investigated this claim when it was mentioned in a recent Meeting but the reported results have not been corroborated.

T commented about the Sheldrake's morphic resonance theory.

GC asserted that Gurdjieff had got his teachings from the Egyptians. RM added that Gurdjieff got it from the Sarmoung Brotherhood. L said that although there was a design similar to the enneagram found in Sufi teachings, the enneagram as taught by Gurdjieff appeared to have originated with him. RM said it had an earlier origin, and L said he would be interested to see the historical references.

GC said that concentrating on a point didn't work for him, rather he meditated on feeling every part of the body. He described this as "awareness without definition", with the idea to stop everything and to see everything. He said, paradoxically, that his focus was not to focus. In Zen meditation the meditators are taught to focus and when it becomes visible in their posture that they have lost focus, they get hit to refocus. GC commented that it is easier to keep focus driving in the car because of the obvious consequences of not focusing. He deliberately practiced in the car because of wanting to remain alert to the journey and to avoid the experience of traveling many miles without recall. When not in the car he was aware his mind played games with him all the time. He strived to not have anything in the mind. His mind wanted him to lay down for a bit and his mind wanted him to leave the mind alone.

L commented that one meditation practice was to be there and not focus on anything, and wait for the ego to go away. Another meditation practice, which M had advocated, was to focus on something. This meditation was to develop will power, with the idea that any practice that boosts will power was useful. RM gave a terminology to describe three different meditation practices: attentive meditation, reflective meditation and passive meditation. The one-minute meditation was an attentive meditation practice. GC quoted "discipline is the path to freedom". RM emphasised that it is not the length of the meditation that is important, it is the depth of it. The state of mind of a realised person was one of complete awareness. He said that this is what Gurdjieff termed "Objective consciousness". The Gurdjieff teaching was to learn to remember yourself. Z said that the work was to investigate what the self was that we strive to remember.

It being after 9:45, the Meeting then resumed reading Beelzebub’s Tales, from the beginning of Chapter 17,The Arch-absurd.

... that function called 'the instinctive sensing of reality,' ... is already entirely lacking in the presences of the three-centered beings breeding on the planet Earth ...

All ... are categorically certain that all the said phenomena arrive on their planet completely, so to say, ready-made, 'directly' from their own Sun . . .

... except for certain beings who existed before the second Transapalnian perturbation there, absolutely no doubt whatever concerning this certainty of theirs, has ever, as yet, crept into a single one of them.

Keystone at Gilgal Garden,
Salt Lake city

Z said she had no idea what Gurdjieff was talking about. GC asked what the phrase Transapalnian perturbation meant. D asked if the use of the phrase arch absurd in the title was significant. L thought the title suggested the reaction readers would have on starting the chapter, and was thus artful. It was also interesting that the metaphor of the arch linked to comments from RM in the previous meeting describing short meditations as a key-stone.

To ensure there were regular periods of discussion on the text, D suggested a two-minute limit for reading. This was agreed upon, with the proviso that paragraphs be continued to the end. The reading continued:

Anubis

... not only does nothing like 'light,' 'darkness,' 'heat,' and so on, come to their planet from their Sun itself, but that their supposed 'source of heat and light' is itself almost always freezing cold like the 'hairless-dog' of our highly esteemed Mullah Nassr Eddin.

"In reality, the surface of their 'Source-of-Heat,' like that of all the ordinary suns of our Great Universe, is perhaps more covered with ice than the surface of what they call their 'North Pole.'

GC said the narrative was becoming like Private Eye, just a joke. L said that the physical sun is hot, and just as hell in Dante's Inferno, the description of the sun as cold is to be looked at as a linguistic metaphor. T queried if there was any significance in Gurdjieff's alllusion to a hairless dog.

Following the reading, there was discussion about which exercise to undertake during the coming period, and it was decided to continue with the one-minute attentive meditations.

GC said that if attention is put on the whole body, the whole body, in time, tingles. RM said it is important to focus inside and outside. In the tree metaphor, being aware of the outer branches and treetop while at the same time the roots; the self is where the body meets the roots.