Who Watches the Watcher?

RM had continued to do the one minute meditation first thing in the morning and it had become like an internal anchor for him. The memory of the experience surfaced naturally during the day and this resurfacing triggered other moments in the day. He described it as if he had had "surface contact" with being real, as if striving to be really present for one minute was creating "working surfaces" with being real. He considered that if he didn't do this then living in fantasy would get longer and longer. Making the first minute of waking a one minute meditation seemed to kick off a process that he surmised may lead to being totally present all the time. He described seeing the effect of the first meditation on waking as the cause of further meditations through the day. He said the meditation at the beginning of the day seemed important, to be there at the beginning.

L had found GC's exercise quite interesting and he had done the exercise throughout the month from time to time. Firstly, It does help one being awake and alert, but secondly it is hard to give attention to more than two things at a time. He also said it was always good to know that Beelzebub's Tales was there. It is is a book one can keep coming back to. It has some good ideas and it is very timely as well in the subject matter of spacefarers going from Earth to Mars or from Mars to Earth, and that is all coming to fruition soon with the work of Elon Musk who hopes to establish the first colony on Mars by 2026. There has also been recent research suggesting that the collision of an asteroid or planet with the Earth created the moon, which is part of the storyline of Gurdjieff's book.



T had had experiences at times of the exercise, seeing, hearing and feeling a surface at the same time. She was aware of not counting to sixty this time, and had only faint memories of the exercise. For her it was too unstructured and less effective, but it did seem that the month had been very eventful, with weddings but also encounters with very close friends under tragic circumstances. She has been missing studio days because of important events to go to. She seemed to have lost her path and sense of purpose, although the big occasions reminded her of the name of Beelzebub's spaceship, the Ship Occasion, and of the significance of the purposeful planning of people gathering and coming together for an occasion.

Responding to RM, L said it was really interesting that we begin each meeting with a one minute silence, which is congruent with RM's practice of one minute meditations. RM agreed, saying that during the silence we had just had, he was paying attention to the door knob, while listening and feeling his feet on the ground, for one minute, and had felt very present to what was going on since then. He thought it was like homoeopathy just a little bit of the right thing in the right way, and it spreads. He calls it a keystone in the arch of consciousness. If you put it first thing in the morning it is like a keystone of the day, and then each day becomes a keystone of the month, and each month becomes a keystone of the year. T pointed out that it was fractal. RM agreed and had come to the conclusion that this was what Gurdjieff had been aiming for, self-remembering permanently. T said this relates to the question of what is the self, and if you don’t have the experience of it, which maybe what the one-minute gives you, that little drip of the real self, then you are forever remembering something that isn't the real self, and then it gets really confusing. RM recalled a question of one of Gurdjieff''s students, “What is the real self?” In the Vedic teachings, they say that if you could separate the observer and the observed, the observer would be the self. Most of what we think of as the self - we can feel our bodies, experience our thoughts - is actually the observed. The real self, the observer, we cannot sense or find. We know it is there. He mentioned the Buddhist “Path of Discrimination”, a system of long term exercises designed to expand awareness. T said she had been doing her one minute exercise at lunchtime, after eating in local gardens. She found that her tensions slipped away during the exercise and that after the exercise she felt refreshed to go back into the mayhem at work. RM said that associations are the cause of physical tension, and that being present breaks the bond between the past and the future, and as that bond is broken, the body is no longer subject to those tensions resulting from the imagined associations.

Artist William Blake, Untitled (detail)

L was reminded of a recent correspondence he had been having with another composer, who was saying that he always writes with the audience in mind. In contrast L writes the music as it comes into his mind as accurately as possible, and had come to the conclusion that for him, the music itself was the audience, the observer of his efforts. He feels as if the music itself judges or witnesses what he has done and whether he had done it well enough. From this perspective his music is a constant companion and witness during the creative process, as opposed to the usual approach of composers and songwriters who are writing with a view to a future audience. L said that his perspective raises the question of who is the observer and who the observed. Click here for full image.

T said that the word observer has the connotation of one person looking at or seeing another, which means it is a human experience, therefore a subjective experience. The word itself, by its very nature, is subjective. After one has had a one-minute awareness experience, when one has experienced a phenomenon, or perhaps even become a phenomenon, how can it be described? Words failed her.

L thought it interesting to play with the English word observe, which contains serve and the prefix ob, suggesting an element of service, but in a different way, as with a coin there is the obverse side.

RM said this can lead to reflecting on whether the body is in the mind, or the mind in the body. His understanding, after a while, becomes that the body is in the mind, which raises the question, just how big is the mind? To him, trying to describe the observer, is like trying to describe the taste of sugar to someone who has never tasted it. You can't. You have to put it in the mouth to taste it. You have to experience it. T said that to put an experience into words like, "I become the observer" reduces the experience to absurdity - reductio ad absurdum - you can't call it anything when you have had an experience where you go somewhere eternal, infinite, everywhere. But people try, and say: "that's the observer". She elaborated on attempts in the NHS to quantify the value of therapy given to people who are mentally unwell, an absurd measuring of something that is immeasurable. L said it was like trying to get the value of a work of art by putting it on scales, or even harder a piece of music. RM spoke of the challenge he finds with the word I. To him it means where he is on his journey. If Jesus or Buddha were to use the word I, it would mean a very different thing, I, God, everything, the whole universe without discrimination. But when RM uses the word, he is thinking of his body, his legs, his feet, his head, his thoughts, his associations with his body, his thoughts, his name, his history. As he becomes more aware, a lot of the things he associated with his I start to fall away. The Vedic term is neti neti, meaning "not this, not that". Whatever he sees, is not him, including his thoughts. You can only see what you are not, you cannot see what you are. This idea has been wrapped up in a lot of spiritual poetry. Shakespeare had been a master in this respect, and when he wrote about time it was as if from the point of view of the eternal. T said there is something in the Shakespeare Plays that is essentially eternal, as they are still being performed. L said that art is either eternal or transient, rather than new or old, and Shakespeare was obviously eternal. T thought that modern art is being very true to transience, and is very forgettable. She said that Van Gogh had moved to Arles to set up an art colony, and painted 200 canvases in fifteen months but sold none, leading to his psychotic breakdown. Each painting might sell for millions now, but were worthless then. He was attached to the idea of someone buying his art, rather than having the understanding that it would not be of interest to anyone because it was from his essence. People recognise the value now from the safe distance of over a century, people buy them, they can detect the essence, the eternal nature in a Van Goph painting.

At 9:45 the reading of Beelzebub's Tales continued from the point reached the previous month in Chapter 17, The Arch-Absurd.

... although in those three-brained beings ... who breed on the planet Earth, there arise ... up to the time of their complete destruction ... three being-brains, through which separately all the three holy forces of the sacred Triamazikamno ... are transformed and go for further corresponding actualizations ...

i. ... the Holy-Affirming, is localized and found in the head.

2. ... the Holy-Denying, is placed ... along the whole of their back ...

3. ... the Holy-Reconciling ...

Saturn, by Raphael

T was wondering if there was a link between the one-minute awareness exercise and the section just read. Was there a link between seeing, hearing, feeling and these three forces? RM said that in Vedic terms the three principles are Rajas, Tamas and Sattva - positive, negative or neutral. Or Father, Son and Holy Ghost. He thought there may be a connection if you think of the sattvic, or neutralising one. When you have neutralised past attachments or future expectations, you do it by being present, so the Holy-Reconciling would correspond to being present. L noticed that while Gurdjieff gave physical locations for the first two, the affirming and the denying, he doesn't for the reconciling, which suggests he is portraying it as transcendent and the other two as more concrete. This reminded RM of something he had been reading earlier that morning, that up needs down, down needs up, left needs right, and so on, but the centre doesn't need anything. The Reconciling is just there. In Vedic terms there is the metaphor of the chariot, and the hub of the wheels (representing Sattva) does not rotate. It is neutral but without it nothing can run. The Tao is sometimes described as the centre of the hub. T spoke of centring in Aikido, and L listed the four principles of Ki-Aikido. L said that if one works from a list, the list becomes like a hub, something our lives revolve about, but to which we are always linked, and which helps us move in a direction, because in that sense the list gives us wheels. T said that is why people resist lists, because a potent hub outside of themselves would undermine the fantasy that they are at the centre of their worlds. L said another reason is that a list draws us away from things that are more enjoyable and easier to do than real objectives.

The reading continued.

... And so, my boy, the process of Djartklom in the Omnipresent-Okidanokh proceeds in the presence of each of these favorites of yours, and in them also, all its three holy forces are blended independently with other cosmic crystallizations, and go for the corresponding actualizations, but as, chiefly owing to the already mentioned abnormal conditions of being-existence gradually established by them themselves, they have entirely ceased to fulfill being-Partkdolg-duty, then, in consequence of this, none of those holy sources of everything existing, with the exception of the denying source alone, is transubstantiated for their own presences.

T asked for clarification of this last paragraph, which was much harder than the preceding ones. RM suggested that this structural device mirrored the content, which was the reconciling force fails to occur and the only residue is the negative denying force.

Gornahoor Harharkh
(essence-friend of Beelzebub)

... The crystallizations arising in their presences from the first and from the third holy forces go almost entirely for the service only of the common-cosmic Trogoautoegocratic-process, while for the coating of their own presences there are only the crystallizations of the second part of the Omnipresent-Okidanokh, namely, of the 'Holy-Denying'; and hence it is that the majority of them remain with presences consisting of the planetary body alone, and thus are, for themselves, destroyed forever.

... meanwhile I shall tell you about those elucidating experiments concerning this Omnipresent cosmic crystallization ...

... I was an eyewitness ... on the planet Saturn where they were made by ... my real friend, about whom I recently promised to tell you a little more in detail.


L wondered if this implied that the carapace of ossified personality might be permanent in some cases. T thought the essence needs freedom and it can wither and die if the denying lasts for too long. L pointed out that Gurdjieff had used the phrase destroyed forever. T though it was almost like killing off your own bit of God, or like the black hole of the universe. L recalled Picasso's quote: "Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up." T said they get covered over and over by social pressure. RM said his question has always been, "Are we born realised or does it happen?" and he gets the sense that every child is born a perfect instrument to be learnt to play, and it is like an artist in the making. It has all the tools to become an artist, but it has to become one, a work of art. So you are not born realised, but are in a nascent stage and only become realised once you become the perfect artist that you were born to be, of whatever form. He also thought that the crystalisation takes place in us in the form of ideas we hold particularly dear. A strong political or religious belief can stay fixed in us for a lifetime and inhibit us constantly. So he thinks that the work we should be doing is to find out what we individually hold so dear, and what can we do to help each other to work our way through that. T thought that these beliefs often manifest in a set of underlying principles, which might, for example, be religious. L gave the example of dogmatic scientific beliefs as described by Robert Graves in his poem, Synthetic Such:

Robert Graves

'The sum of all the parts of Such -
Of each laboratory scene -
Is Such.' While science means this much
And means no more, why let it mean!
But were the science-men to find
Some animating principle
Which gave synthetic Such a mind
Vital, though metaphysical -
To Such, such an event, I think
Would cause unscientific pain:
Science, appalled by thought, would shrink
To its component parts again.

Steve Jobs
1955 - 2011

RM said he had just rewritten the whole of the Tao Te Ching, in his own words, in order to understand it better, and it says there that there are two truths that we work with One is a truth that we build up over listening to other people and our opinions and society, and because it is opinion-based, it is called synthetic. All these synthetic things we have, we defend as they are part of us, and they can be very destructive. If you have an opinion about what is good and bad, every time somebody does something which is opposite of what you think is good, you become quite angry at them. But there is another truth called the True Heart. The False Heart, based on the acquiring of ideas, relates to synthetic truth. The True Heart, is universal, it is there all the time. It's not good or bad. If you could find it, it would be like plugging into the rules of chess. They are not written down, all the rules are just there. The whole thing is just playing a game. If you lose, you are not losing anything, all the pieces go back in same box as if things went the other way. It is often described as the laws of nature. If you can plug in to the rules by meditation, you would be able to be an expert player immediately. But we don't do that. We acquire things slowly, build up over time, and are bound by that process of acquiring. Ramana Maharshi was asked "Show me who I am" by a visitor who had travelled to India from Europe. He replied "Go back the way you came." This did not mean go home, but to get rid of all the accumulated associations he had and get back to the basics of just seeing. RM believes this state is what Gurdjieff meant by C influences. T said this is the only way, and is what she had done with painting. She had gone back to using just one colour, and all the variations on that one colour which are very subtle, instead of using all the seductive obviously different colours.

Having finished Chapter 17, there was sufficient time to make a start on Chapter 18, The Arch-Preposterous.

...The cause of my first meeting with that three-centered being who subsequently became my essence-friend and by whom I saw the said experiments with the Omnipresent-Okidanokh, was as follows ...

Princess Irulan

L said he was finding RM's recommendation of Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land very pertinent here, as the concept of essence-friend seems similar to Heinlein's of water-brother. T wondered if Heinlein had known of Gurdjieff and L thought this was quite likely. T observed that correlations often come up in the Meetings between well known works and Beelzebub's Tales, most notably Dr Who. RM added that he often wondered if there was also a link with Frank Herbert's Dune novels, in the spiritual commentaries of Princess Irulan which he found deeply inspiring.


Following the reading, there was a discussion on which exercise to adopt during the coming month. RM said he had spoken about the one-minute meditation to a fighter pilot, who told him he had had similar experiences in the plane, where everything seemed to happen in slow motion. RM tried this out while playing table tennis, and the body took over and was able to move faster.

It was decided that the exercise should be to try to experience, for brief periods, intense awareness, accompanied with slowing down of time, by playing a rapid competitive ball game, attending to the moving ball and body at the same time, or alternatively a fast internet game which requires rapid instinctive responses.