The Unbearable Lightness of Accepting

RM had noticed that the more he was remembering himself in flashes during the day, though the problems in life did not change very much, the way he saw them did. He was seeing them as just there and an opportunity to learn. He was a lot calmer, so the world was calmer towards him as well.

N had found it a mixed experience with this process. He felt there were lots of radio stations going on in his head at times, and they didn't quite get to the frequency he wanted sometimes. He was trying to keep this thing going, and could do it for a little period of time but then it went  off or he lost it, but at least he was becoming aware of the problems of trying to maintain that level of serenity or calmness. But he agreed with RM that the more you did it, you realised that these things which stressed you were not that meaningful. It was his own problems rather than the world as it was. The world as it was was just a reflection of the world as he was, so you see that more and more as you do that exercise. It was good, but he had just become aware of how far he was from the process of having that very deep inner serenity which was ultimately, hopefully, what it leads to in all regards to life.

For L a couple of issues had arisen. He had tried out the meditation-like practice Gurdjieff had advocated daily at sunrise in Beelzebub's Tales, where he says to speak to the various parts of yourself, as if they are conscious, and to ask them to cooperate so that you yourself can fulfill what you are here for, and to let them know that if they don't, then at a later stage in life you will be unable to fulfill your composite purpose. He had found that quite interesting. It was like a meditation-plus. He thought it was worth taking it seriously and he might try to keep that going, in addition to the one minute practice.

... every day, at sunrise, while watching the reflection of its splendor, you bring about a contact between your consciousness and the various unconscious parts of your general presence. Try to make this state last and to convince the unconscious parts - as if they were conscious - that if they hinder your general functioning, they, in the period of your responsible age, not only cannot fulfill the good that befits them, but your general presence of which they are part, will not be able to be a good servant of our Common Endless Creator, and by that will not even be worthy to pay for your arising and existence.

The other interesting thing over the month was that he had read a supernatural novel by Luke Smitherd, who had a concept of a black room after which the novel was named, and in which the protagonist awakens in darkness, but for two screens through which he can see, which transpire to represent the eyes of a person inside whose head he has found himself. When this person opens her eyes, he can see what she is seeing, or if she blinks it goes dark for a moment, and he can pick up on her sensations and emotions by touching the walls. L thought this a was a good metaphor for self-observation and a helpful concretisation of the process of standing back which it entails.

"R" was able to report that she had noticed that the tendency is for her to prepare and appoint one or two moments that will come during the day when she fully intended to be reminded, but in the last few weeks she had tried something on a much smaller scale which happened more often, and found the forgetting was as much as ever, but there were also more opportunities to notice and return to oneself, and it was always on offer if it was frequent, whereas if it is at midday and goes unnoticed, then the opportunity for that day had gone. To have something on a smaller scale, like the exercises for going through doors, and using knives and forks, because they happen many times, a proportion of those times are moments of remembering, and remembering wasn't just, "Oh, I remember!"; it was returning, sensing the parts of her own body, which were constantly processing impressions, and constantly distracted by dreams, and yet it was all going on and she could notice it.

T had been applying one minute meditations during her stressful day, walking to a cafe to have her lunch, and walking back, there was a little garden en route, so she was taking her phone with and setting a timer. There had been a couple of times when she was incredibly pressurised to attend meetings for which she was late, but she thought maybe she would be sixty seconds later than normally, and it was such an island of calm, and she was proud of herself in all that rush to actually stop, because that was an achievement compared to other times. But it was also something about it doesn't matter. She would be the one that was late. Her ego had always been crushed if she was late or doing things wrong. It did feel that inch by inch she was chipping away at the old ego, and how other people saw her forming how she was, instead of herself just being herself.

All those who wished to had contributed, and the Meeting moved on to the responses section.

Following on from RM's comment that his meditations had led him to be accepting of life's problems, L said that he had an art exhibition at the moment, and one of the things was a revolving piece of music. The music goes on forever. It is a cylinder which revolves, and the music is visible on the inner wall of the material. Someone had come up to him the previous day and asked him what did it mean, what was the message, did it have a philosophical meaning or did it give any hope for mankind? L had replied that it was about acceptance. Things were as they were and they just kept going on, and it was not a panacea and did not have any message. He thought RM's remarks expressed a similar outlook. RM thought it was a good metaphor to use reality to demonstrate.

T had some thoughts on L's description of his experience with the exercise with the sun coming up, which had been one of the previous month's exercises. What she took from this, with her romantic image of the sun rising, was thinking where was she going to be when the sun rose? But actually sitting down for one minute and having that in mind, it wasn't the sun rising and looking at the sun, it was the "reflection of its splendour" to meditate on, and so she started to look round to see any light reflected, and then she realised that everything was lit up, even when you were not in the sunlight. In the daytime everything was lit and visible. So that was an extraordinary moment, to think that she was visible because of this light, but if it wasn't there she wouldn't be, not visually anyway. RM said that there was a kind of light that shone universally. It was not like light that we see, but without the light that was there he wouldn't see himself internally or any of his senses or anything - he wouldn't be - his whole being was dependent, because being, in a way, needs some inner visual acceptance that there was something here - without that light he wouldn't see it. So a question to him was, what is this light that shines inside?

N said that, just walking to the Meeting, the sun was out and it was beautiful, and he thought what a lovely day, and remembered days as a child when he would wake up and just love being and playing in the sunlight, and he thought how so little of the time that we spend on the planet are we able to think we are actually living. We are somewhere else, a lot of the time, but to be present, and enjoy a moment, can be rare sometimes. We rush around doing our tasks, and forget to think we are alive enjoying the process. That awareness disappears, life goes on, years pass.

L had been in the City a few days ago, and was looking at people and trying to figure out who was in the present and who wasn't. Most people were walking very quickly and purposefully, and he could see they were in some kind of dream about the next meeting they had to go to. Of course you can't put yourself in people's heads, but he was pretty sure that is what it was about, everything was an obstacle in the way to getting to the meeting. They certainly weren't where they worked, except for the people who were trying to sell magazines, or the people without anything to do.

Remarks by GC in previous Meetings had reminded T of a TED talk by Jon Jandai that she had recently seen: Life Is Easy. Why Do We Make It So Hard?



The speaker had abandoned a lucrative city life in Bangkok to return to his village in a rural area. He found that he was able to build a house in the countryside in three months, whereas a mortgage in Bangkok would have taken thirty years to pay off, while working long hours. The questions it raised for her were: What are you doing with your day? and why are you doing it?, and what are you missing out in terms of relationships with plants and animals, and building your own shelter?. This reminded her of GC because he had spoken in the past of the mental gymnastics we go through. GC asked T if this had anything to do with a sense of individuality, that might be lost in the city? T thought that what was lost in the city was relationship with primary activities which inform people of themselves as a human being - the relationship with the live planet rather than the manufactured one. N thought that your relationship with nature changed in the city. He had gone to live in the country for two years, moved out of London, because at the time he felt very negative about being in cities, and he noticed it was a simpler lifestyle, and people seemed to be closer to their essence in the countryside, and there were some definite benefits of living closer to nature. He had moved back to the city but needed to get out of London from time to time or just spend some time on the Heath to be around trees and plants and other forms, that brought him to a better space, he worked in the City which is a mass of skyscrapers and concrete buildings and concrete streets, and he felt that was very alienating to his spirit. However there were some things that he liked about the City as well, he did quite like an urban lifestyle but also needed to balance it with getting back to nature. He thought the soul cried out for both.

Hampstead Heath, London.

"R" told the story of how someone had told Gurdjieff that he was thinking of going to live in the country and to grow his own vegetables, and asked if it would be a good life. Gurdjieff replied that it would be, for a dog.

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

…in these peculiar religions of theirs there is very widely spread among the beings of all three groups the same custom called among them "Sacrificial-Offerings."

And this custom of theirs is based on the notion, which can be cognized only by their strange Reason alone, that if they destroy the existence of beings of other forms in honor of their gods and idols, then these imaginary gods and idols of theirs would find it very, very agreeable, and always and in everything unfailingly help and assist them in the actualization of all their fantastic and wild
fancies.

..."So, your Reverence, my request to you, as I have already told you, is … to undertake the task of specially descending on the planet Earth and of trying there on the spot to instill into the consciousness of these strange three-brained beings some idea of the senselessness of this notion of theirs."

"R" said that the original meaning of the word sacrifice was "to make sacred".

...After these Sacred Individuals had left the planet Mars, I decided to carry out the said task at all costs and to be worthy, if only by this explicit aid to our UNIQUEBURDEN- BEARING-ENDLESSNESS, of becoming a particle, though an independent one, of everything existing in the Great Universe.

GC thought there must be some significance in this paragraph. L noted that Gurdjieff used the word particle rather than the word part. T thought that the aspiration to be a particle was ego busting, as the particle is the smallest something can be. An internet search revealed that the quantum concepts of wave and particle were widely known at the time the book was being written, so Gurdjieff's choice of word might have had that connotation too.

… a third great catastrophe occurred to the illfated planet…

… Later when this second group also began to have a center point of their existence they called it the 'city Gob' and the whole country was for a long time called 'Goblandia'.

This locality also was afterwards covered by Kashmanoon and now the former principal part of this also once flourishing country is called simply 'The Gobi Desert.'

… there was present and already thoroughly crystallized in all these three-brained beings who have taken your fancy, belonging to the three enumerated independent groups, instead of that function called ‘the needful-striving-for-self-perfection,’ which should be in every three-brained being, also a ‘needful’ but very strange ‘striving’ that all the other beings of their planet should call and consider their country the ‘Center of Culture’ for the whole planet.

This strange 'needful-striving' was then present in all the three-centered beings of your planet and was for each of them, as it were, the principal sense and aim of his existence. And in consequence, among the beings of these three independent groups at that period, bitter struggles, both material and psychic, were constantly proceeding for the attainment of the mentioned aim.

… We sailed for fifteen terrestrial days and finally arrived at the capital of the beings of the first Asiatic group.

RM said that each of the three groups thinks they must be the masters of the world. T asked if it represented the three minds. RM said that good governance was about creating a balance between them; not one should dominate over the others.

Aurel Stein

It reminded T of the bible, which goes on and on and on about countries and peoples, which made her ask where was the spiritual message here, and it was actually more of a historical, geographical account. and similarly she thought that this part of Beelzebub's Tales might be a factual account as well as metaphoric. Referring to the mention of the Gobi desert, N said there was a lot of archaeological work going on in that part of the world at that stage, which was well reported, The famous archaeologist Aurel Stein had been there (Gurdjieff would have been aware of this), and some of the items he brought back were now in the British Museum. "R" said that the Himalayas were mentioned. "T" said that Gurdjieff was very well travelled, as was recounted in his book Meetings With Remarkable Men. N said Gurdjieff had gone through the Gobi desert, as was recounted in the chapter about the sandstorm. L said that as the reading went further, the numbers might make more sense too. There were three catastrophes, three groups of people, three centres, fifteen days voyaging … and in the preface ~Gurdjieff had said the book should be read three times, in three different ways.

It was decided that the exercise for the ensuing month would be to wear a hat at least once a day, especially if one did not normally do so.