Knock! Knock! Who's There?

As the minute's silence which opens the Meetings was about to start, there was a distinct knocking at the door, but there was no one there. More knocks and sounds from the door ensued throughout the silence, after which D locked it shut, to prevent it being rattled by the wind. The date happened to coincide with the anniversary of the Meeting's late Founder Member, M, who passed away the previous December. Moments later there was a further knocking at the door, which D unlocked, and RM entered.

The cause of the initial knocking was ascribed, as is usual in such circumstances, to the wind, and the initial contributions from the attendees began.

EXERCISE “To daily count lampposts while walking, and note the maximum count attained.”

L had read the account by Ouspensky of his exercise counting lampposts, and hadn't taken it too seriously at the time as he assumed it would be quite easy to count lampposts, but in practice he found it very hard. On one auspicious occasion he got to 35 but rarely made it to double figures. Again, it was a demonstration that our perception of being free-willed, conscious and awake can be an illusion. He had also carried on with some previous exercises - doing three things every day which were planned at the beginning of the day, and the alternation of minutes eating or not eating.

D said that he had his phone switched on and if it rang he would have to answer it and would go out of the room. His friend was due to travel overseas that morning, and he didn't know for sure if she was going or not, so he would have to take the call and go if it came. It was really a challenge to be a friend of hers, and he was a very good friend. Over the last 18 months he had really had to be present. Even that morning walking up the street he had really had to be present because he had so wanted to come - but if the phone rang he would have to go.

iPad case
keepcalm-o-matic.co.uk

N had likewise found it a difficult exercise. He had started off with great enthusiasm and lost it fairly quickly. On one occasion he got up to the thirties. He got a bit bored with it. He had to use quite a lot of resources of his will-power to count like that. It was not the sort of thing he could do without being consciously there and because it was not the most exciting exercise in the world he got bored with it and resisted it. One of the things that did happen in the month was an increase in consciousness at some level; he went to a jazz concert in a church, and had to wait beforehand, sitting in the garden of the church, and the church bell was ringing. Every time it rang it was as if the gong was sounding within him and he felt his whole body resonating. He wondered if it was because he had done the exercise earlier that day, and whether there might be some pay-off  in that he might have experienced something internally more strongly as a result of having done the exercise.

T had tried the exercise throughout the month. The first couple of weeks she remembered it, but in the following weeks it faded away. The most difficult part was between the lampposts, because that was when she got distracted. It reminded her of the alternate one-minute eating and not eating exercise. Each time there was a lamppost it was as if she could eat something, there was something she could relate to. She experienced the time between the lampposts as her mind trying to find something to eat. She had often gone some way down the street before she remembered the exercise in the first place. She often looked back, and saw that she had passed 2 or 3 without registering them so the score was always something like 5 out of 8, or 6 out of 8. It was difficult to be aware of what did trigger the memory to do what seemed a mundane, banal exercise.

It was one of RM's favourite exercises which he had been doing for years. He found that the most important part was in between the lampposts. It made him so much more aware of the presence of the self as opposed to the monkey-mind of attachments and things and where he was going and what was happening. If he didn't hang on to these things they flowed through him, just as a watermill did not hang on to the water. Occasionally as  he reached the next lamppost he forgot he was doing it, and the lamppost reminded him. and it was the in-between bit that was the real meditation and had given him a real sense of the difference between being mindful and being stuck with past ideas and expectations, two very clear separations, and he had found that extremely helpful for years and had used the lampposts often when walking from home to the station, maybe thirty lampposts, and it was rewarding when he had got to the station and he had managed to hold a sense of being present in between the lampposts.

J said it was not a unique experiment, it was an example of a type of experiment, and recounted a related experience from his schooldays when he was preparing for A-level in Ancient History. He had gone through Suetonius looking for the word crown as a way of remembering all the other stories. If the word crown appeared, he remembered the story. It paid off, especially when one of the  questions in the A-level exam when he actually came to be doing it was: Explain the significance of crowns in Suetonious. There were really two levels of consciousness. The exercise was also a way of being able to concentrate on two things at the same time, two equally important totems or goals, and may be a good mind training anyway. Looking for the word crown was rather boring, like looking for lampposts, but if you had another purpose in mind, if you were concentrating on something else as well, it was a mental training.

"R" said that she did not do a lot of walking because she had a bad back, and she did not need to in her daily life. When preparing in the mornings, she chose moments in the day (though she did not always remember those moments) to be aware of the flow of life energy. It was easy to immediately forget, but sometimes she could catch the flow of life energy through the body and through the feelings, and not try to grasp it but to let it continue to flow. Another thing she had noticed and made a point of looking at, was that with each breath we tended to think that the work lay in breathing in, but in fact the muscles relaxed when she breathed in to make more space. When she breathed out the diaphragm was working, and that was a sort of contradiction, in a way being caught in the middle of two different directions of energies, and to notice it as a kind of signpost. Not to interfere, with this natural process, was even more difficult.

Baruch Spinoza
1632 - 1677

Following the contributions, the Meeting moved on to responses.

J wondered if a lot of what had been discussed goes along with Spinoza's analysis of happiness, being not just about happiness but also awareness of being happy. What we seemed to be doing with the lampposts was being conscious of what was going on around us, highlighting that thinking as well as reacting in the flow.

D followed up RM's comments about attachments, and asked him how they applied to emotional attachments. RM said that these can be tested - if you were dependent on a person for your happiness, then that was attachment. If you emotionally warmed towards somebody regardless of whether they were with you or not, that was not attachment. Q said if you were interested in self-study, a relationship could be an opportunity, as best as you could, to accept yourself, and everything that went on within you, simply to see if you could have an attitude of interest and self-acceptance of yourself.

L was wondering how N had remembered to start the lamppost counting exercise. In other exercises there had been a trigger, for example opening a door with a different hand would be triggered on getting home. RM said that the idea of the lamppost itself was the trigger, because your mind was subconsciously thinking about it, even though you were not aware of it. This would often happen to him while walking, and the minute he realised he would start the exercise. T had the experience of it linking with the Meeting as well - it reinforced the Work, and was a support for it. N said it was a very good exercise as we were never without lampposts somewhere; in a sense it was a permanent exercise so as to see your level of awakeness or awareness at any particular time. T had been trying to wring some meaning from it, and the metaphor of it being a light in the darkness helped, though that was harder during the day when the lamps were not on. RM said we must not lose sight of the point that it was the level of awareness we were looking for, not the counting of lampposts which help to trigger it and remind us - it was about what you did in between the lampposts, and as people have mentioned, it's boring.

N talked of one thing that came out of this for him  He had gone to a lot of concerts in November, and had written down what people were playing. Remembering the songs that were being played helped him concentrate on the music and gave him a record of what he had listened to, so he actually enjoyed the concert again afterwards by looking over his notes. So sometimes bringing things into the intellectual centre and not just experiencing them as events could help. Memory could help, appreciation could help, a lot of other things as well, so having some direction and some extra intention when you do certain things makes a massive difference to your appreciation of them. J wondered if there was a difference between lampposts and appreciation of jazz. Was there a danger of diminishing returns because the more you did it, the more it became a habit and therefore the less impact it had, whereas with jazz, when taking notes, you were constantly being brought into the present, which was what the lamppost exercise was supposed to be about. L said that it would appear that the exercises had to keep changing lest they became new habits.

Following the responses, the Meeting continued with reading from Chapter 19, Beelzebub’s Second Descent To Earth.

But during the day I feared that the same or other unconscionable beings might commit further outrages on my friend's planetary body, so I decided at least to prevent the possible actualization of what I feared.

I therefore immediately hired several suitable beings for a great sum of money and, unbeknown to anybody else, had his planetary body removed and temporarily placed in my Selchan, that is, on my raft which was moored not far away on the river Oksoseria, and which I had not disposed of because I had intended to sail on it from there to the sea Kolhidious to our ship Occasion.

This sad end of my friend's existence did not prevent his preachings and persuasions about the cessation of Sacrificial-Offerings having a strong effect on many, even on a great many.

And indeed, the quantity of slaughterings for Sacrificial-Offerings began very perceptibly to diminish and one could see that even if the custom were not abolished completely with time, it would at least be considerably mitigated.

...I learned afterwards that this story reached His All- Quarters-Maintainer, the Most Great Archangel 'Setrenotzinarco,' the All-Quarters-Maintainer of that part of the Universe to which that system Ors belongs, and that He manifested his pleasure by giving to whom it was proper, a command concerning the soul of this terrestrial friend of mine.

On the planet Mars I was indeed expected by several beings of our tribe who had newly arrived from the planet Karatas. Among them, by the way, was also your grandmother who, according to the indications of the chief Zirlikners of the planet Karatas, had been assigned to me as the passive half for the continuance of my line.

T said there seemed to be a resonance with Jesus being taken from the tomb, going up to "The Father". She found it amusing. The passage seemed to parody the Resurrection. "R" disagreed in that this character's message was only to tell people not to kill animals, and his was not a universal movement but a private one. L pointed out that the issue was of sacrificing animals. From the animals' point of view it didn't matter whether they were killed for sacrifice or slaughtered for food. The passage seemed to resonate with the present age and highlight the dichotomy still in our culture, that abuse of animals was wrong, but killing of animals for food was seen as right. The person was martyred for preaching that animals should not be killed. Even after death there was a question of safety of the planetary body depending on the beliefs of the society.

There followed a discussion about the lengthy words, names and nouns that are frequently used. GC commented on how some of the lengthy nouns sounded mocking or satirical. N considered they were like a play on words, and seemed to call for detective processes to search for their hidden meaning. The words seemed to be a code for something e.g., Kolhidious. "R" commented that in relation to the name of the river Oksoseria, that there is a real river the Oxus, and that Kolhidious is the fictional name for the actual Caspian Sea into which the Oxus used to flow.

D wondered what Setrenotzinarco meant? T speculated that the wordplay was a nudge to wake up and GC questioned, "Wake up to what?" J remarked that names in novels, for example in Dickens, were often designed to create an impression by the sound, not the reference. For instance Setrenotzinarco seemed to hint at the word narcotic. "R" said that the books were originally written in Russian and Gurdjieff was helped with the English version by Orage and that reams had been written about the names and words. T described how the words added an extra dynamic to the text, uncomfortably provoking the question in the reader, 'what does that mean?' Q reminded the meeting that the writer's advice to the reader was to read the book three times, once straight through to oneself, a second reading to read aloud to another and a third to study it carefully and she considered that it was definitely a process. G felt cynical about this and he was reminded that in the 50's and 60's the population was told not to use soap and to use hair shampoo, probably because the companies that made the hair shampoo wanted to sell a lot of the new product. Maybe Gurdjieff wanted people to read his book?

The Reading continued.

CHAPTER 20 The Third Flight of Beelzebub to the Planet Earth

After a brief pause Beelzebub continued to speak further as follows:

...“On this third descent of mine to the planet Earth our ship Occasion did not alight on the sea Kolhidious, which is now called there Caspian Sea, but on the sea called at that period the 'Sea of Beneficence.'

"We decided to alight on this sea because I wished this time to go to the capital of the beings of the second group of the continent Ashhark, then named the City Gob, which was situated on the southeastern shore of that sea.

..."The City Gob was situated on both banks of the mouth of a large river called the 'Keria-chi' which flowed into the Sea of Beneficence and which had its rise in the eastern heights of this country.

"Into this Sea of Beneficence, on its western side, another large river flowed called the 'Naria-chi.'

"And it was in the valleys of these two large rivers that the beings of the second group of the continent Ashhark chiefly existed.

N and L wondered about the reference to actual countries, and whether Gurdjieff was talking about China and Japan, or if anyone had tried to produce a map with all the book's place names in relation to real places. This was not known.

... while the continent Atlantis was still existing and at the height of its splendor, one of the ordinary three-centered beings of that continent 'invented' ,,, that the powdered horn of a being of that particular exterior form then called a 'Pirmaral' was very effective against what they call 'diseases' of every kind. His 'invention' was afterwards widely spread by various 'freaks' on your planet, and also there was gradually crystallized in the Reason of the ordinary beings there an illusory directing factor, from which, by the way, there is formed in the whole of the presence of each of your favorites, especially of the contemporary ones, the Reason of what is called their 'waking-existence,' which factor is the chief cause of the frequent change in convictions accumulated in them.

GC wondered about the passage referring to "frequent change ... accumulated in them." There was a discussion about the meaning of freaks as used in the book and as used conventionally through the ages. GC considered that the use of the term freak referred to mad people and criminals. RM described the natural world and unnatural world, and how a freak was someone who didn't follow convention or conform to the natural world. L experienced Beelzebub's use of the word freak as affectionate, when referring to people.

J considered that the book was a folie à deux of multitudes writ large, with the writer deliberately standing apart from the planet in order to look at it from a different perspective. L agreed and recalled similar in Gulliver's Travels. R was reminded of the novel, Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein. N said that by using philosophy and anthropology, Gurdjieff forced the reader to question everything; he took what we knew as familiar, and made it seem unfamiliar. The phrase crystallising in the reason and illusory directing factor seemed to be significant.

N pointed out that animals with horns are in myths and legends, the unicorn was a symbol of mythology. The nearest humans have to horns are our nails, we certainly don't have horns in our heads. L recalled reading an article by a journalist who came across a unicorn late one night in Pimlico. GC said that horned animals were the most dangerous animals to humans. T observed that in the book, Beelzebub has a horn.

For my further tales concerning these three-brained beings who have taken your fancy, it will be very useful for you, I think, if I emphasize here that on account of various disturbances during the second terrestrial catastrophe, several parts of the continent Iranan entered within the planet, and other terra firmas emerged in their place and attached themselves to this continent, which in consequence became considerably changed and became in size almost what the continent Atlantis had been for the planet Earth before the catastrophe.

...On that 'terra firma part of the surface of your planet, not only did there exist at that period multitudes of twobrained beings of the said exterior form, namely, Pirmarals, but around this water-space were also multitudes of various kinds of 'fruit trees,' whose fruit then still served for your favorites as the principal product for their 'first being-food.'

There were then also so many of the one-brained and two-brained beings which your favorites call 'birds' that when they flew in droves it became, as your favorites say, 'quite dark.' ...

L clarified that one brained life-forms - like fruit trees - were rooted to the ground, two brained had mobility and three-brained higher mental faculties.

Sir John Collings Squire (1884 – 1958) worked for a while with Alfred Orage. To Alexander Pope's couplet: Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night: God said, “Let Newton be!” — and all was light. Squire famously appended: It did not last: the Devil, shouting "Ho. Let Einstein be!" restored the status quo. Acknowledgements and thanks to "R"

GC asked the Meeting "What is objective reality?". He had been a believer of objective reality but that had now changed. In response J asked if there might not be several objective realities. "R" attempted to define objective as actual and gave the examples of pure mathematics and pure physics, with fundamental laws. L recalled how scientists used to believe that there was an ether, a medium, a substance of space, that filled the universe and the space between the planets. Einstein then came along with the theory that the speed of light was constant and that people of different viewpoints had different experiences of reality. GC said that people were now challenging Einstein. D said that the choice for him was heaven or hell. Some days he was free of it, some days he was in it, but it was by choice. Protons and electrons were true.

Following the reading, there was a discussion on which exercise to adopt for the coming month. It was decided it would be to action and observe the experience of deliberate slowness, defined further as to do something every day at half the usual speed.

The Mill and the Floss

Mill at Gillingham, Dorset, 1825-26
John Constable 1825-26

GC had found it a chore to do the exercise with the left hand. He felt he was not doing the activity properly. As for awareness, he became aware that he was using his left hand. He had not really got anything from the exercise, as such.

T had disliked it as it was less mechanical and less easy to do - she had felt like a child again. The mind likes to know how to do things well, which she could with the right hand. The exercise enabled her to be slower and, something she wanted to avoid, more present. She had also tried eating with the left hand, which was similar - she had felt clumsy and did not like it.

L had done the exercise using a toothbrush every day. (He had also carried on every day with the previous month's exercise.) It was a good waking exercise but after a number of days had become the new habit. This led him to think that a month is too long for these exercises.

EXERCISE “To take a habit and do it differently, for the purpose of self-remembering. For example, brushing your teeth with the alternate hand.”

RM had stayed with the eating/not eating exercise. The question in his mind was, How is this changing my life? He had flashes for moments of an extraordinary sense of freedom, with problems put aside. but hanging on to the memory of that can itself be a trap. A watermill cannot hold on to its water, it has to let go and let the flow flow. If the bird tried to hang on to the air which provides its lift, it would fall down.

N had found it very awkward and frustrating, he had almost rebelled against it. After a few days he had gained more dexterity with the teeth exercise. Just as with a new language, it got easier with perseverance. He had also tried writing with the left hand, which did not get better. It made him wonder why he was doing it. The exercise brought a number of different emotions.

D had tried to do it a few times then completely forgot about it. He had had to be present the last ten days because asthma had forced him to walk slower, and to back away from doing things. He had to plan what he was going to do very carefully in terms of energy. It felt peaceful and he liked it but wanted his old self back.

"R" said that the use of the hand which isn't skilled demands that the body slows down to a pace that you can watch. There was a possibility to balance the speeds of the energies of observing the body, the actions of it, and the feelings about the wish for the activity to succeed. Bringing those three energies closer together may be closer to what she would expect when being present.

Following the contributions, the Meeting moved on to discussing them.

L responded to N's difficulty in writing with the left hand, suggesting that using mirror script, as used by Da Vinci, might have been easier. D said that the famous snooker player Ronnie O'Sullivan was ambidextrous which was very rare and significantly helped his game. He asked if using both hands affected the mind in some way? N said there were conductors who use either hand, and thought these left/right exercises were important for the Work as it is partly about balance - maybe they had a greater payoff than we realised. However maybe there is some danger in it too and he cited how young children who used to write naturally left handed were at one time told at school to use their right hand. This curtailing of natural tendency at an early age may have caused them psychological damage. N had participated in the Gurdjieff dances which were very compelling from the point of view of having to be present when doing these things. Maybe Gurdjieff was trying to teach us a few things about balancing the centres while doing things which are very difficult for the body to achieve.

T said that N's comment about society forcing children to write with their right hand was almost a macrocosm of the brain wanting her to stop using her left hand and use the right hand instead. Even the language refers to it as "right". L said the etymology of the words left and right was very interesting. T suggested that the left hand was symbolic of doing what one wants and of being the individual, while the right was symbolic of pressures from the tribe. RM said that the right-hand side of the brain is the intuitive side, which is linked to the left hand. For him  the most useful thing about these exercises was to make him do something with which he is unfamiliar because it brings him into the present.

N liked RM's metaphors of the watermill and the bird. He said that we don't often think about the medium we are in as part of our process. Gurdjieff would have said that the medium is impressions. If they stop or we try to hold onto them, the process stops.

D's description of temporarily halting his busy activities reminded L of a stop exercise but over a longer time period. D hadn't been sure the exercises would help and L said they might but perhaps only to a limited extent. The spider cannot swing far from its web. "R" asked which of their eight legs are spiders "handed", as they appear to work with all their legs at the same time. L said that recent research had shown that the brain of the spider extends into each of its legs. T thought the same might be true for humans, as neurons had been found in the stomach. Q said that our autonomic nervous system is a kind of brain.



D said that his intuition tells him that because being awake is an unnatural state the mind can't keep it up and goes back to illusion, otherwise the mind would go mad. L said that research into virtual life forms indicated that knowledge of reality as it is works against evolution. Living in a state of happy delusion was better for the survival of the species.



Q talked of Gurdjieff's concept of kundabuffer which is congruent with this research. To not be asleep is not natural, and requires an unnatural effort on our part if we want to be aware. In the Gurdjieff's story, kundabuffer is put into human beings in order that they will not be able to sense reality as it is, to ensure that life will perpetuate. D said that being present might not be useful for the procreation of the species, but it was very important for the individual to be present as many times during the day as possible.

At 9:45 the Reading continued from Beelzebub's Tales Chapter 19, Beelzebub’s Second Descent To Earth.

His colleagues began delivering addresses in their temples proving exactly the opposite of all that the priest Abdil had preached.

... At last it came to the point that the priesthood began to bribe various beings who had 'Hasnamuss' properties to plan and commit every kind of outrage upon this poor Abdil; and, indeed, these terrestrial nullities with the properties mentioned even tried on several occasions to destroy his existence by sprinkling poison on the various edible offerings brought to him.

In spite of all this, the number of sincere admirers of his preaching daily increased.

Finally, the whole corporation of the priesthood could stand it no longer; and on a sad day for my friend, a general ecumenical trial was held, which lasted four days.

By the sentence of this general ecumenical council, not only was this Earth friend of mine completely excommunicated from the priesthood, but, at the same council, his colleagues also organized means for his further persecution.

All this, of course, had little by little a strong effect on the psyche of the ordinary beings, so that even those around him who had formerly esteemed him also began gradually to avoid him and to repeat every kind of calumny about him.

T was reminded of the trial of Jesus. N said the priesthood were acting out of jealously and also out of fear for their livelihoods. L said that in his experience jealousy and fear for status (which is usually connected with money) go together.  GC expounded his three principles which helped him interpret reality:

1. Big Mind - the energy behind the universe
   
   
2. Consciousness
   
   
3. Thoughts

Thoughts create feelings, feelings create reactions. He found in comparison that the Work was cumbersome. When you cut yourself, the body healed itself without any thinking. The mind wants to think, but the thoughts are mostly no good. L said it was hard to find the reasons for the Work in the book. RM alluded to Gurdjieff's vision for his own life's work which comprised of three ideas. This vision had been read out in a previous meeting and it was in the context of his situation after strife in Russia. N said there have been revolutionary forces within religion, e.g. Martin Luther, and the authorities always try to suppress them. T mentioned the case of Matthew Fox, who believes in original blessing, and was expelled from the Dominican order for disobedience.

... Toward the end there remained with him only one very old being who had been with him quite a long time.

... Going into my friend's room one sad morning, this old man saw that he had been killed and that his planetary body had been hacked to pieces.

Knowing that I was his friend, he at once ran to me to tell me about it.

I have already told you, that I had begun to love him as one of my nearests. So when I learned about this terrible fact, there almost occurred in my whole presence a 'Skinikoonartzino,' that is to say, the connection between my separate being-centers was almost shattered. 

T thought the old man may symbolise the observer. For L the priest's dissident teachings may have represented the conquering of the superego, his murder was the destruction of the naturally rebellious ego, and what was left alive was the older person, the id. Q said this was more than a metaphor for revolution. This was about an individual, Abdil, who had received objective information from an independent source.

Following the reading, there was a discussion on which exercise to adopt for the coming month. A suggestion from "R" based on an exercise described by Ouspensky was adopted, to daily count lampposts while walking and note the maximum count attained.

Top Cat

Japanese Tea Ceremony

For A the exercise led her to reflect upon the Japanese Tea Ceremony which similarly had no practical meaning but was important. For centuries the Japanese had put this tradition between themselves and hunger and thirst. They try to condition themselves by doing this supposedly ordinary activity in a special way. She had found it hard to do the exercise in company, especially if it was of another gender.

H had done the exercise and tried to self-observe what was going on in the character and the mind, and what came up was something horrible, a monster, hard to focus on, which wanted to eat and not to stop for a minute. It was quite a revelation, and not a human thing.

After last month's Meeting D had gone home to do the exercise with the meal he cooked. He thought it was quite easy, but then forgot all about it and hadn't done it since. He had been impressed by a radio program about The Rite of Spring. It fascinated him that it had caused a riot at its first performance. He thought all the musicians would have had to be in the present and wondered if they ever did mindfulness techniques.

EXERCISE “To use a timer during one meal each day, to eat and pause eating for one minute intervals.”

T experienced the mind wanting to eat something when she stopped. When she was alone she found herself turning on the radio. She would listen to it for a minute, then eat for a minute - it felt like cheating. But there was something she had to fill. If she couldn't eat food in her mind she had to eat something. In the pauses her mind was like a train which had lost its track but still had momentum.

N had found that he couldn't do the exercise when eating with other people. So the only time was at breakfast which he normally had on his own anyway. As he was usually in a hurry at that time, to spend one minute not doing something that he wanted to do was very frustrating. He would count down a minute before eating, and then rush the food so that he would not have to do another minute.
Like everyone, he struggled with himself in terms of stopping the mechanical process of eating, trying to be present and not to resent the interruption. He had observed quite a lot about himself in that process.

L had done the exercise every day for at least one meal. In addition to ensuring some moments of wakefulness at least once a day, it actually felt a better way of eating as well. To eat for while, then pause to reflect, and then have a bit more, as if one were savouring the experience, literally.

RM had done that exercise before. It had come out of his one minute morning meditations which he practiced at the beginning of every morning, and which link together with later experiences during the day. The exercise had a strange effect in the way it stretched time. He recalled the sports driver Nigel Mansell describing a distortion of time when he went very fast in the car - time seemed to slow down.

GC had not done the exercise. He had bought a new car which had a faulty boot, and after two weeks driving it the boot jammed and could no longer be opened. His mind started to worry about what would happen if he had a flat tyre. He was not in the RAC and was not as young as he used to be. He knew these fears were nonsense in that he had never checked the boot to see if it contained a tyre. After a while, having realised the fears made no sense, they subsided, and in due course he got the boot fixed. The question was why his mind wanted to throw these things at him.

Following the contributions, the Meeting moved on to responses.

H's comments had brought to L's mind some lines from a poem Dreams by Thomas Traherne.

Things terrible did awe

My Soul with Fear:

The Apparitions seem’d as near

As Things could be, and Things they were;

Yet were they all by Fancy in me wrought,

And all their Being founded in a Thought.

Crocodile Man
by Jean Grandville 1842

L said that in our experience there may be all kinds of monsters lurking. As children we may see them as shadows or in dreams. Then as adults we put them all aside, bury them in the recesses of mind, or project those fears somewhere else. H's words made L wonder if during the pauses in the exercises, the monsters came.

D asked H why would the exercise would bring up such terrible thoughts? H said that they weren't thoughts, but more like an awareness of different I's through self-observation. One of those I's somehow cropped up during this exercise. He had seen it before when eating chewing gum, and it was a crocodile. Immediately he saw it, it  the image dissolved. And during the exercise, it was the same image. It was eating in this uncontrolled, mechanical way and didn't like being interfered with. He said that among the I's there are some that are animal.

N thought it was very interesting to consider the animalistic within us, these atavistic instincts and urges which were what was so fascinating about the human sacrifice that took place as part of the The Rite of Spring which D had mentioned. Part of what the Gurdjieff Work is about is a real civilising influence. We all have these animal instincts, and something like Tai Chi, for example, actually allows you to get in touch with some of these animalist things. You do exercises like being a tiger. We all have those things within us, and if you give them some level of self expression within a very disciplined framework, then you can have the benefits of that process without the disbenefits against mankind. He thought it very interesting that this exercise leads on to such an ability to actually see into those kinds of "I" within us.

H remembered hearing Stravinsky talk about The Rite of Spring a long time ago on the radio, and he had used these words: "I heard and I wrote what I heard. I was the vessel through which the music passed." This is a kind of non identification which he thought was at the heart of the Gurdjieff system, of disidentifying somehow. When he wrote that particular thing he wasn't identified. He was just writing what he heard. Maybe that was why it's such an incredible piece.



GC recalled Shakespeare in Hamlet  - "there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so" - and asked if this was not what we were talking about here.

A said that she had not felt stopping eating in the exercise as a sacrifice. She had done exercises with food before and the whole fact that she could control when she ate and did not eat was, for her, liberating. There was an issue of hunger and dependence - for example if you smoke, your actions are driven by that - you need to sit near the exit or a window.

RM said that what we sacrifice is the attachment to things. If you let go of the attachment then you are no longer involved in it, it just happens naturally. A said that removing the attachment would be denying a bonus energy which could be felt and channeled and used to help move in the right direction - this would give a feeling of natural calming anyway. Suppressing the attachment would deny the opportunity for this new knowledge. RM said it was not so much suppressing it - it was acknowledging it, seeing it, paying attention to it, and that attention burns it away,  it releases you from it. If you suppress it, it is still there, still powerful, whereas if you just let it be, just see it for what it is, you may realise you don't need it.

Crop circle
Windmill Hill, Wiltshire, England - 2011.

This reminded H of something from the Bhagavad Gita, about the renunciation of the fruits of action. If you did this you were disidentifying from something. Such a renunciation was both an action and a sacrifice. L said that art produced without the intention of a reward was usually higher art. RM gave the example of mandalas in the sand, and L of a beautiful crop circle. These were all transitory, and crop circles were even made in secret.

GC said there was no such thing as beauty, there was only the perception of it. We did not interact with life, we interacted with our thoughts about it. He asked whether life or experience came from the outside in or from the inside out. A said that if many people agreed that something was beautiful it gave that perception a little bit of objectivity. RM thought it was an important point that some people will find something ugly that others see as beautiful, and asked where the beauty was: in the mind or in itself? N said that this was interesting in terms of Gurdjieff's concept of objective art, and gave the example of the experience common to very many of being awed in a great cathedral.

At 9:45 the Reading continued from Beelzebub's Tales Chapter 19, Beelzebub’s Second Descent to Earth.

... But here on Earth, men have even divided beings of all other forms into the clean and the unclean.

... Why, for instance, is a sheep clean, and a lion unclean? Are they both not equally beings?

... people call the lion unclean simply because they dare not do to it what they like.

A lion is cleverer and, what is more, stronger than they.

A lion will not only not allow itself to be destroyed, but will not even permit people to approach near. If any man should venture to approach near to it, then this ”Mister Lion” would give him such a crack on the noddle that our valiant's life would at once fly off to where "people from Albion's Isles” have not yet been.

L said there was somebody in South Africa who had managed to make such a rapport with lions that he could treat them like a cat or a dog. GC said that this differs from the implications of Gurdjieff's statement.



Q queried the joke about Albion's Isles (an archaic term for Britain). L thought this reference to England and its history of involvement in most of the world reflected Gurdjieff's frustration at not being granted the right to stay in the country, where he had originally wanted to set up meetings nearby in Hampstead. There have been suggestions that the British government thought he might have been a spy some years before, operating in Tibet, who had a very similar name, Durdjieff. N said that the term Albion was also used by William Blake who had made a whole mythology about it.

GC wondered what the other attendees made of the distinction between the lion and lamb on the basis of strength. To T victims and bullies came to mind. The sheep is a pushover so gets badly treated. Some people are walkovers and get badly treated, the lion is not and does not. H said that clean and unclean related to the Jewish concept of kosher, drawn from the Old Testament. L said it varies from culture to culture. In the UK eating horsemeat is considered unacceptable, but across the channel in France it is widely eaten. N thought these were all arbitrary distinctions. GC asked what was not an artificial distinction. N thought everything was artificial at some level. L said that the discussion was now about authentic values. There were vegetarian cultures but that did not mean that the people in them were saintly. The problem was that if the people in a culture were doing what the culture told them to do, then it was a dangerous culture.

... Every being, according to its nature and to the gradation of its Reason attained by its ancestors and transmitted by heredity, occupies its definite place among beings of other forms.

A good example for clarifying what I have just said is the difference between the already definitely crystallized presences of the psyche of your dog and of your cat.

If you pet your dog a little and get it used to anything you please, it will become obedient and affectionate to the point of abasement.

...But try the same on your cat.

What do you think? Will it respond to your indignities as your dog did, and cut the same humble capers for your amusement? Of course not. . . .

Even if the cat is not strong enough to retaliate immediately, it will remember this attitude of yours toward it for a long time, and at some time or other will get its revenge.

...

No, the cat will stand up for itself, it knows its own value, it is proud, and this is merely because it is a cat and its nature is on that gradation of Reason where according to the merits of its ancestors it just should be.

In any case, no being, and no man, should be angry with a cat for this.

L thought one might conclude from this that Gurdjieff liked cats. T asked if it was a metaphor for human beings, who can be conditioned to be obedient, but are sometimes independent and automonous. L said that such conditioning represents Gurdjieff's concept of kundabuffer, from which people could struggle to free themselves. A thought this example  was tricky, because you could read into it also that submissiveness is bad, and a lot of ambition and assertiveness is good. After dissolution of the ego, you need to make a choice, and if your choice is to submissiveness, that is your choice. If you are a dog by choice, then that's OK, it doesn't make you inferior. The master and slave paradigm need not be followed, you can just be free.

Top Cat

Hanna-Barbera, 1958.

Q thought it was posible to take some of this too far and miss some of the essential value which is embedded in this, and which goes very deep to what Gurdjieff talks about as objective conscience, and ultimately about the equality of life and all beings. He goes off on these tangents that weave these separate stories but comes back to the central point, the essential value of what he is talking about here - the equality of all life and all beings and how that might possibly relate to something within yourself. For A the message was not equality, but equal value; there was a hierarchy. Q thought he was not only referring to things external to us, but also within ourselves, our own forms of life within us, our thought forms, our feeling forms, all of those things, they are equal in a sense because they are all like you. H's crocodile was life - there was a way to look at this idea of sacrifice without talking literally of animals - he was talking about forms within us, what we sacrifice of ourselves, for our so-called gods.

GC said that when he had a peak experiences, he was not there. What we were talking about was all the faces of existence that made us, but it was the negation of that which was the ultimate peak experience. We were here for three score years and ten, and the rest of the time, where were we, who were we, what were we? L remembered GC saying last time that there was hardly any matter in the universe, and maybe, thought L, there was hardly any "I" really there either. GC said that the "I" was an illusion anyway.

Is it its fault that it is a cat and that, owing to the merits of its ancestors, its presence occupies such a gradation of "consciousness-of-self”?

It must neither be despised for this, nor beaten, nor ill-treated; on the contrary, one must give it its due, as one occupying a higher rung on the ladder of the evolution of ”consciousness-of-self.”

By the way, my dear boy, concerning the reciprocal relations of beings, a former famous prophet from the planet 'Desagroanskrad,' the great 'Arhoonilo,' now already the assistant to the chief investigator of the whole Universe in respect of the details of Objective Morality, once said: "'If by his Reason a being is higher than you, you must always bow down before him and try to imitate him in everything; but if he is lower than you, you must be just towards him, because you once occupied the same place according to the sacred Measure of the gradation of Reason of our CREATOR and ALL-MAINTAINER.'

So, my dear boy, this last conversation with that Earth friend of mine produced such a strong impression on him, that for two days thereafter he did nothing but think and think.

... in the temple where my friend Abdil was the chief priest, instead of delivering the usual sermon after the temple ceremony, he suddenly began speaking about Sacrificial-Offerings.

L was reminded here, with Beelzebub about to meddle in a local culture, of an earlier part of the book in which a kinsman of Beelzebub had encouraged changes in the administration of the city of Samlios. After chaos subsequently ensued, Beelzebub was involved in restoring order.

For A, the paragraph had been about looking at another creature, even if you were above them, with compassion, and thinking they are as you once were. It brought to her mind the difference between how sin and guilt are perceived in orthodox Christianity compared to the Western Church, which sees everyone as guilty for what they have done. In contrast, in the Orthodox Church, you are pure, and you are clean.

The Milwaukee Journal, 29 November, 1938.

L recalled the story about the polish pianist and politician, Paderewski, about a spider that would descend from the ceiling while he was  practicing a specific exercise, and go back when he moved to a different one. L found this story interesting. GC said that we can be manipulated like the spider. A thought that the interaction was not necessarily conditioned. DM there was a subtle energy at work - a force. GC said there was also a hierarchy, there was manipulation it was another case of eat or be eaten, as Gurdjieff was wont to say. DM said the influence of very subtle energy like music
happens unconsciously and yet we think we are conscious beings. L said that we did not know what happened to the spider. Q suggested that perhaps it went on to build Charlotte's Web. A thought they had found a universal language both could understand. RM called it a mutual influence. L said that spiders appear extremely intelligent when building webs. N spoke of respecting difference without judgment. Q said that the gradation of reason in the universe,
by implication, applies too to human beings.

Charlotte's Web - "With the right words, you can change the world."

Following the reading, there was a discussion on which exercise to adopt for the coming month. A suggestion from Q was decided on, to take a habit and do it differently. for the purpose of self-remembering. When you change your mechanicality, something within you will come to more attention - use that energy and try to wake up. For example, brushing your teeth with the alternate hand.

Animals "Я" Us

Spider Man

L had noticed a lot of spiders webs recently, which had sparked a train of thought within him. What would happen if the spider were to become aware it was in a web of its own making. It would not necessarily help it to free itself. It was just the nature of the spider's existence. L wondered if we were like that spider. We were trying to break free from habitual behaviour. In so doing we might become aware of our own web. Regarding the exercise, it had been quite hard but he had managed to do it for the first 24 days, write down three things to do and then do them each day, but in the final week major projects meant he had missed some days.

RM had been away the previous month on a cruise, during which he ran morning workshops called "Mindfulness and the art of living". He said that the results had been absolutely stunning. He had been thinking about the difference between power and influence. The power to control people's lives was a negative power. People with massive influence did not necessarily have the power to affect people's lives directly but did have huge influence by the nature of their existence. Only by growing one's presence like a candle with its light does the world change, because it changes by its own choice.

EXERCISE “To note down three things to do every day, and to do them before the end of that day.”

The exercise had reminded N of time-prioritisation techniques he had learnt and used in the past, and while he was at work it happened anyway. It was hard at weekends or holidays when he did not have the same compulsion. There were one or two weekends when he didn't do the exercise, but once back at work continued with it as before. This raised questions for him about his approach to his leisure time and making things happen during it.

D had managed to do three things one day, but had forgotten about the exercise after that. He remembered there had been a visit from Q the previous month, who had raised questions about the way the Meetings were conducted. Q's words had led D to reflect on his own possible fickleness. In addition, the inconsideration and irresponsibility of a friend had been affecting him emotionally, and that was undermining meditation and mindfulness for him.

GC said that some years ago he had caught a bug in India and lost his sense of hunger while he was ill. This had linked to an experience during ten days in Cyprus. He had been taken to a taverna in the mountains where they had a meze. The food kept coming and coming, and he was trying everything. The next day he had lost his sense of hunger completely. But it was not like the time he was ill. He was above the hunger. He knew that he had to eat to live, but he was completely in control of it. He had hoped this development might be enduring, but unfortunately it had only lasted for about two days after he got back, but the feeling of being in control and above it all had been great. He had also experienced this in other aspects of his life at times.

HD said that it was his first visit to the Meetings. Coming from the Buddhist tradition, he was aware of mindfulness and the benefits it can bring.

Responding to N, L thought it was harder to do things at weekends because we as human beings are predisposed to follow kundabuffer, to follow instructions from a boss or a guru. At the weekend, without such instructions, it was harder to think of things to do. L was continuing to do the exercise, which seemed related to authentic conscience in that the selection of tasks might come from a deeper space.

Following HD's contribution on mindfulness, L wondered if it was a term overused at the moment by many groups of people. According to the popular press you could do a short course and learn it quickly. Maybe the Work was more about mind-less-ness, letting the ego go and letting something deeper in. D said that in contrast, will-power was a crucial part of the Work, and brought up the metaphor of ascending a musical scale. L said much was made of this in the literature, but in terms of music theory he thought the metaphor did not make sense. N said he found it a helpful metaphor for following through a project to the end. L said a similar thing had happened with colour, in that most people were convinced that there are seven colours in a rainbow, but this belief had only come about because of a statement by Newton who liked the number for mystical reasons. HD said there was no question but that there were seven, it  had been empirically tested. RM said it had been known long before Newton came on the scene, that seven was a fundamental number. L said it was preferred in the Meetings that all assertions be referenced and that things be explained in a rational way.

T followed up GC's contribution, saying that the difficulty in sustaining the feeling of saturation from eating was reminiscent of the difficulty in following through with the exercises with intention. RM said that his approach was trying to be present without intention. He said that to have three things to do at the start of the day would be counterproductive to him, as he would not know what they were until he got to them. "R" asked RM where the resistance was for him. RM said there was no resistance for him at all. "R" said that meant there were only two forces for him rather than the usual three in the Work. GC asked why there had to be three forces. Why not five?

At 9:45 the Meeting resumed the reading of Beelzebub’s Tales., continuing Chapter 19, Beelzebub’s Second Descent to Earth.

... you do not use this sacred property of yours for the purpose for which it was foreordained, but manifest it as "cunning” towards His other creations, as, for instance, towards your own-donkey.

... this donkey of yours is of the same value for the common-cosmic process and consequently for our COMMON CREATOR, as you yourself, since each of you is predestined for some definite purpose ...

L found it interesting that, just as last time, Gurdjieff is saying evolution has a conscious, premeditated direction and purpose, which is at odds with the scientific view.

GC queried the meaning of the donkey. T thought it represented the idea that the body is the vehicle for the mind. HD said there is a strong philosophical argument and scientific evidence for the proposition that the mind is a separate entity from the body but working closely with the brain from which it was separate. He thought this was hard for many scientists who were physicalist. GC said that there was hardly any matter in the universe which suggested to him that physical matter was not so important.

Planets are invisibly small compared to their orbits

Near Death Experience research
Daily Mail 7 October 2014

D said that each of us must find out our purpose and do it. Each person should know deep down what their purpose is. He himself was very interested in how he was going to die, and wanted to be aware at the moment he does. L said that the discussion kept returning to the issue of purpose, and people were more comfortable with belief in a purpose. RM said that there was no preordained purpose but there was such a thing as destiny which a person could change by becoming more conscious.

... I repeat, all beings, of all brain systems, without exception, large and small, arising and existing on the Earth or within the Earth, in the air or beneath the waters, are all equally necessary for our COMMON CREATOR, for the common harmony of the existence of Everything Existing.

And as all the enumerated forms of beings actualize all together the form of the process required by our CREATOR for the existence of Everything Existing, the essence of all beings are to Him equally valuable and dear.

L said that the final paragraph seemed to imply that vegetarianism is a good practice. RM said that it had nothing to do with vegetarianism. L said that nobody would destroy a life it held dear. RM said it was not destroying life, because one form of life gives itself up to another. L said that the animals do not give up their lives, their lives were taken by humans. RM said this was just an interpretation. L said that no animal voluntarily says "Here I am, cut my throat." RM stated that we were meat eaters just like every other animal. L said that he personally was not a meat-eater, and here RM was speaking for himself. RM said that he was speaking for himself and everybody else.

20% of 16-24 year olds in UK vegetarian
Daily Express 1 October 2014

RM said science proved we had been meat eaters ever since we came out of the sea. L said that he had raised this because a lot of people say Gurdjieff advocated eating meat, and here was an opportunity to read Gurdjieff's actual words. RM said Gurdjieff did advocate eating meat. T said that in this passage it was not Gurdjieff speaking, but a character in his book.

http://michaelbluejay.com/veg/natural.html
Research by Michael Bluejay 2002, updated 2014.

The Reading continued.

... One form of beings ... lord it over other forms and destroy their existence right and left ...

I am quite sure that if any one of them should become aware that in destroying another's existence he is not only committing an evil deed against the true GOD and every real Saint ... then certainly not one among them could with all his heart ever again destroy the existence of beings of other forms for Sacrificial- Offerings.

Goofy demonstrates argument by handwaving

Then perhaps on the Earth also would begin to exist the eighteenth personal commandment of our COMMON CREATOR which declared: "Love everything that breathes."

GC said that this passage did not say that you cannot eat meat, it just said that you cannot sacrifice animals. RM said it means it is wrong to sacrifice animals, but OK to eat them. GC said it was natural to eat them. L said he thought this was handwaving. "R" spoke of the Grace used by Mrs Staveley. L thought the provenance of that prayer and its connection with Gurdjieff was unclear.

HW said the direction of self-remembering was sattvic, and if you moved in that direction you would not want to eat meat. RM said that sattvic people eat meat. HW thought this was not the case. RM said that Ramana Maharshi advised eating meat and RM's own teacher did too, and said there was no spiritual reason not to eat meat.

Ramana Maharshi “Food affects the mind. For the practice of any kind of yoga, vegetarianism is absolutely necessary since it makes the mind more sattvic [pure and harmonious].”

T asked RM if there was any spiritual reason to kill an animal. She said that eating meat is eating a dead animal, which somebody has killed. RM said that he was prepared to kill an animal for food, though he would devolve the responsibility to someone else. He said it was spiritual because every life form gives itself up to a higher form of life. T quoted the commandment "Thou shalt not kill". HW said that was a mistranslation, and could not mean animals, and anyway there was a lot of violence in the bible. He thought it meant not murder.



Meat is Murder by Morrissey and The Smiths

GC said it was impossible to be vegetarian in a cold climate. L said it was a possibility people could make up their own minds based on their own considered values, rather than uncritically following the advice of a guru. RM said he just followed Buddhist and Sufi teachings and they were all OK with eating meat.

Following the reading, there was a discussion on what exercise to adopt for the ensuing month, and a suggestion by T was decided upon, to use a timer during one meal each day, to eat and pause eating for one minute intervals.

Conscious Conscience

N had been considering the issues raised by the exercise. He thought a lot of morality was linked to internal considering and was not linked to an authentic place within ourselves. Decisions we make may reflect the pain or stress we feel in our everyday ego, whereas if we try and work much more with the transcendental ego, the higher self that is looking and doing the Work, then we question any moral decision, and if it is coming from the transcendental ego it will be more aligned with conscience than with conventional morality.

L thought it had been a very subtle exercise. Experientially, listening to authentic conscience felt similar to hearing musical inspiration. As a composer he struggled to be true to his inspiration, and not unwittingly use a tune, or elements of a tune, he had heard elsewhere, and when he realised that had happened he would strip away the extraneous part of the tune to find the authentic inspiration. The process with authentic conscience was almost identical. The feeling of whether we are doing the right or wrong thing comes from very deeply within, and being open to inspiration was just like being open to conscience. It was as if one part of us was trying to get a clear communication with another part of us.

Q visits the USS Enterprise
Stardate 41153.8

Q said that the subject of conscience is probably equally as important as the subject of consciousness to Gurdjieff. In the chapter on Ashiata Shiemash he describes how conscience was used by Ashiata Shiemash as the one thing that is still yet accessible but unspoilt in human beings - buried in our subconsciousness, but still reachable, and so it was through conscience that Ashiata Shiemash was able to bring people that he taught to realise what they needed to do to make being-efforts, to become more as they are to be as human beings. To Q that was what conscience, in a very simplistic way, meant. It had very little to do with outward manifestations of so-called good behaviour. It had everything to do with a development equally as important as consciousness. The two go together, consciousness in the mind and conscience in the heart. Conscience is something that tells you that you need to work on yourself, in the sense that you need to develop what is potentially a spiritual being. That may result in outer manifestations, but it has very little to do with what Gurdjieff would call subjective conscience, which varies from culture to culture and civilisation to civilisation.

D had recently put on and produced a new play. It had been very hard to find a theatre that would show it. He remembered asking his older brother years ago, "Why are you more intelligent than me?" His brother said he was not more intelligent, it was that he had drive. D had realised with his new play that it was so important to him, he didn't care what happened, he would do it. He was so single-minded, it was unbelievable. He needed to express what he said in the play.

A was new to Gurdjieff, but had been talking that morning about Osho's views on conscience and morality. He felt very much in agreement with Osho who says that morality is something you feel spontaneously. If you are in a situation with a moral dilemma, and an honest individual with an authentic sense of deep morality, you will feel something, that something is unjust or that someone needs help, and if you listen to yourself, you will react to that feeling.

T said the exercise had been too subtle for her. She was grappling with a conscience issue at the moment at work. For twenty two years she had made a decision not to work full time, and always have at least a day in the Studio. Last year she took on extra work. She had been doing the extra work anyway, after hours, but then she was offered the money for two extra evenings, which on paper looked OK, but it had not been so in practice. The interesting thing was the difference between doing unpaid work because it had to be finished (which was like a spiritual exercise, a Gurdjieff exercise), and doing it when extra money had been found to pay for it, which made it a different scenario.

Following the contributions, the Meeting moved on to responses.

GC raised questions about the exercise, which explored authentic as opposed to socially programmed conscience. Q used the term objective conscience to describe Gurdjieff's concept, which comes from a totally different level.

D wanted to know what people thought of a passage from Osho which he very much liked, from God Is Dead – Or Just Missing in Action?

"God is existence. Existence is god.

It is one extreme to believe in God; It is another extreme not to believe in god.

And you have to be just in the middle, absolutely balanced, atheism becomes irrelevant, theism becomes irrelevant, but your balancing brings a new light, a new joy, a new blissfulness to you. ..."

*Search results on "self-calming" in Beelzebub's Tales

D thought it was beautiful prose. N thought Osho was a great seducer, a good writer. L thought it was sweet but might not be true. A asked if Gurdjieff was opposed to Osho's philosophy. L said Gurdjieff came before Osho and was not opposed in that sense, but there was an element of passivity in Osho's writing which is common to many who advocate meditation. A strong element in Gurdjieff's writing was about active intervention and development of will power connected to our essence. In particular, Gurdjieff frequently uses a phrase - the 'evil inner-god' named 'self-calming' * - in Beelzebub's Tales, suggesting his outlook might have differed from Osho's.

Q raised the question of what this group was for, and why members did not go instead to other organisations like the Gurdjieff Foundation. L said the Meetings did not aspire to be a Group, did not try to elevate itself to any status. The Meetings have no purpose. The attendees did not claim to know anything. There was an open admissions policy. GC said he had been denied entry to other groups. Some attendees had recently seen a film authorized by the Gurdjieff Institute in Paris, made for private distribution.  It was well-made and informative, but gave an impression of Gurdjieff as a family man, showing his mother and his wife, making no mention of some other significant people in his life. Alejandro Jodorowsky, in his book The Spiritual Journey of Alejandro Jodorowsky, says a daughter of Gurdjieff, Reyna D'Assia, told him a set of 82 principles her father had given her. Some of these principles are in the lyrics of the recent song by Laura Marling:

At 9:45 the Meeting resumed the reading of Beelzebub’s Tales, continuing Chapter 19, Beelzebub’s Second Descent to Earth.

... When GOD created you and these beings whose existence you destroy, could our CREATOR then have written on the foreheads of certain of His creatures that they were to be destroyed in His honor and glory?

If anyone, even an idiot from "Albion's Isles" were to think seriously and sincerely about it, he would understand that this could never be.

Q queried what Albion's Isles meant. T said Albion was an old literary name for England. N said that Gurdjieff had not been allowed to stay in Britain and set up in Paris instead. L said the film had not mentioned these difficulties and had Gurdjieff choosing Paris as his preferred option. Gurdjieff's preference had been Hampstead.

... It is most wisely foreseen by Him that Nature should adapt the difference of exterior form of beings in accordance with those conditions and circumstances under which the process of existence of various forms of life are pre-ordained to flow.

T thought the reference to different forms might be metaphoric and alluding to different types of people, recalling the reference to the differences between people in a remark Ouspensky attributed to Gurdjieff: "... the being of two people can differ from one another more than the being of a mineral and of an animal."

For N the wording suggested there was purpose which gives it a theological meaning rather than everything having grown up by accident through evolution. Q thought it did not need to be either/or, it could be both. The beauty of the intelligence of life was that there is clearly a deep logic to it which also includes randomness. That was true from the Law of Seven, which allows for chance happenings and endless diversity of form. D asked what the Laws of Three and Seven were. Q said they are described in the book about three quarters of the way through. L hoped that when that part was reached they could be explained in a rational way.

My Neighbour The Donkey
by Hannah Longmuir
www.hannahlongmuir.co.uk

Even as regards this own-donkey of yours, you abuse the possibilities given you by our COMMON CREATOR, since if this donkey is now compelled to stand unwillingly in your stable, it does so only because it is created two-brained; and this again is because such an organization of the whole of its presence is necessary for common cosmic existence upon planets.

And therefore, according to law, there is absent from the presence of your donkey the possibility of logical mentation, and consequently, according to law, he must be what you call "senseless", or "stupid".

To A, perhaps because he had entered the book in the middle, it seemed like nonsense so far. N compared Gurdjieff's approach to Osho's. Gurdjieff really wants us to work at it. In contrast, with Osho we can sit around dreaming all day long and wallow in it. L said that you can't learn to play the piano without practicing scales. Part of the difficulty was that Gurdjieff is describing something which cannot be expressed in common language, so he creates his own symbolic language. One of the terms he invented was "two-brained". A two-brained creature is one which has elements of emotion and volition but does not have rational thought or language. For example a donkey can see a carrot, decide it wants to eat it and move towards it. A three-brained creature such as a human being, might analyse things further before eating something tempting. An example of the one-brained beings would be plants which do not perceive or have volition in the same way as a donkey. T said that we humans too can be two-brained unless we make the effort to be three-brained. We have the potential for free will and modifying our behaviour, though we can deceive ourselves into thinking we exercise free will when we do not.

GC said that the problem was not the brain but the mind, which conditions how the brain perceives reality. N spoke of optical illusions which illustrate how the mind conditions what the brain sees, for example the drawing which can be seen as either a young or old woman.

T had recently seen a TED talk by Donald Hoffman on the nature of reality, which presented a theory, supported by experiments in computer models, that evolution favours fitness over accurate perception. In the experiments, species which saw things as they were died out.

Following the reading, there was a discussion on what to choose for an exercise. A suggestion by L was adopted, to note down three things to do every day, and to do them before the end of that day.