The Sacred and the Profane

In the spirit of the previous month’s exercise, several attendees arrived wearing hats.

For L, hat wearing had made no difference, however he had been more aware of and enjoyed seeing other people in hats. In addition, during the month, he had done an exercise which required third force, the 30 day minimalist challenge. Each day of June he had cleared a number of things equal to the calendar date. By the end of the month 465 items had been thrown or given away. The flat still felt cluttered!

T normally did not wear hats as they made her head hot. She only possessed hats she had purchased on holiday. A straw hat had no strap, and tended to fall off. It amazed her how many people wore inconvenient hats. She had become aware that wearing a hat made her self-conscious, feeling she wasn’t blending in, that she was no longer comfortably invisible but was drawing attention to herself through clothing which was typical of the conventional sexist experience of the female being identified solely by her outer appearance in relation to men.

N said he liked hats, especially in winter. He thought Panama hats lent a sense of style. In his work, he could not wear a hat, though some at the work place were required to wear a form of headgear. In synagogue which he sometime attended, hats were not out of place. He thought that people in London were open to anything.

GC had started shaving his head long before it became fashionable, and had been wearing hats for many years. Therefore, for the exercise, he had decided not to wear a hat, to shave all facial hair off, and to grow his hair. He started getting headaches from the sun, so the hat went back on. He went to the barbers for a shave, and didn't like how his hair looked, so that also went. He was still without facial hair, but didn’t know what it proved.

D said he hadn't known about the hat exercise. He wanted to talk about mindfulness. His play had been successful but there was always a “drop” afterwards. He had been trying to be in the present all the time, which had helped him. The "downer", the anti-climax was not so keenly felt. He had been reading Will Young on how mindfulness helped him re his depression. He had heard on the radio that mindfulness was now being taught in the schools. Optimistic people were using it. CBT had also helped him this past two weeks.

RM had not done the hat exercise. He was intensely working on a book, of which he had already written forty chapters. He had reached the realisation that we did not have free well. He had tried to explain this to others, but this was sometimes difficult.

Lawrence Durrell
author of The Alexandria Quartet

J had bought his cork hat on Bondi Beach, after which he was the object of attention, being incorrectly identified as a caricature of an Aussie. Another hat in Margate, combined with an audacious T shirt, drew a different impression from people. Hats had a way of making him rethink the type of person he is, but through history people have realised that, like Napoleon. But the purpose here was to break out of habitual thoughts. He recalled Scobie in The Alexandria Quartet puffing at his pipe while deeply asleep. He thought it had been a good exercise.

After the contributions, the Meeting moved on to responses.

Following on comments by RM about mindfulness, D said that the continued use of the practice after his project had finished had led to boredom. There was a gap. RM said that when a project stopped there could be boredom, a space which the mind wanted to fill, in which you could find out who you really were. DM said people try to escape from themselves. RM said it was not about stepping back from who you are, but letting go from what you thought you were.

Responding to N, T said she could never wear a hat to work because she did not want to stand out there. GC asked if she was defined by other people's opinions, to which T replied, sadly, yes, the opinions of others had had a huge influence on her, and it was continuous work in order to counter this.

Charles Chaplin
Actor, Composer, Director.

Following on J’s experiences in Australia, N related that he had spent some time living in Germany, and went out of his way to walk around with a hat and walking stick and sometimes a cane. This likewise attracted a lot of attention because he represented the proverbial caricature of the Englishman. For him the most interesting people he met were those who stepped out from the norm. His experience of the exercise was that it was an enjoyable, playful and creative thing to do rather than one of feeling fearful of being noticed.


On RM’s comments about not having free will, L thought it was more complicated. We could strip away what we are not to find what we are, which might build up will power to achieve some things. We might then realise we had not been free in doing those things, and do more stripping away, getting to a truer identity, and then do more things. There were people who consistently did things against the norm, and very significant things. For example Elon Musk, who founded Paypal early in his career, went on to establish the Tesla Motors which was making excellent electric sports cars, and who was working on a long term project to establish a city and civilisation on Mars, where he intended to spend the last period of his life. In L's opinion, these were things that nobody would ever do unless they were using free will. L said he thought that part of the Gurdjieff Work was to build up will power and the oomph to do something and follow it through. The exercise of giving away things every day of the month till 465 things had gone was an exercise in will power. D asked if L was saying that mindfulness helped to achieve things by stepping back from them. L said no, giving an example of trying to start a car on a cold day. If the second attempt did not work, it was best to wait a few minutes to avoid flooding the engine. That was like mindfulness, but if you didn’t turn the key again you would not get anywhere. At a third try, revving the engine a little, the car might start and you could then drive somewhere. Mindfulness without action would go nowhere, but might help if action followed.

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

During my visits to the Kaltaani there, I met a number of beings, among whom was one I happened to meet rather often.

This three-brained being there, whom I chanced to meet frequently, belonged to the profession of 'priest' and was called 'Abdil.'

… he was well versed in all the details of the teaching of the religion then dominant …

… the function called 'conscience' … had not yet been quite atrophied in him, so that after he had cognized with his Reason certain cosmic truths I had explained to him, … he became, as it is also said there, 'compassionate,' and 'sensitive' towards the beings surrounding him.

DM and L wondered if Abdil was a cypher for Ouspensky. T thought he found a glimmer of humanity still remaining in somebody who was completely in a conformist role and was teaching the doctrine. L thought that conscience was linked to compassion. GC asked what was meant here by conscience and compassion. L said that conscience is an appreciation of what was good and bad. Compassion is an empathy for people and creatures who are suffering. This passage spoke about the propensity of priests to do things like sacrificing animals. T asked where conscience came from. L thought that conscience might be born into human beings and drummed out of them by education or to the contrary strengthened by education. RM said it came from a sense of what you believed was good or bad. T asked where did beliefs come from. If it was from learned behaviour as a child, then it depended on how your parents’ consciences were. N said that this was the complicated thing about Gurdjieff work where we were trying to get to an objective truth. The text seemed to be suggesting that conscience overrides all cultural ideas of right and wrong. For example, in parts of the Islamic world they believe in honour killings. something which was horrendous to us, but they believe in it strongly and could not understand why we didn’t. L gave a quote from the scientist Stephen Weinberg: With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things.  But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.

The reading continued.

With the same aim, these favorites of yours of that period even divided the beings of all other forms into 'clean' and 'unclean.'

'Unclean' they called those forms of being, the destruction of whose existence was presumably not pleasing to their gods; and 'clean,' those beings, the destruction of whose existence was, presumably, extremely agreeable to those various imaginary idols whom they revered….

... the strong usually brought the less strong to be sacrificed; as for instance, a father brought his son, a husband his wife, an elder brother his younger brother, and so on. But, for the most part, 'sacrifices' were offered up of 'slaves,' who then as now were usually what are called 'captives,' ...

Yoko Ono
White Chess Set

L thought this was probably referring to the practice which developed into the kosher and halal classifications of food. N said there was a theme of duality here, a distinguishing between pure and defiled. He said that a number of anthropologists had written on societies which divide things into groups like that, for example Claude Lévi-Strauss in The Raw and the Cooked. Hinduism, Judaism and Islam all have these divisions, and it was interesting to consider whether this may reflect divisions within our own minds. T said that even now at ceremonial civic occasions, people were split into those who had to stand behind certain lines marked out on the floor and some ranks had remain behind the line, whilst higher ranks walked past. N thought it was interesting how we made this division - perhaps it was a manifestation of our split minds. L said that Yoko Ono had addressed this in her chess art, in which she made all the pieces the same colour. She was currently exhibiting at MOMA in New York. In this audio clip she described what it was like to play the game of chess thus adjusted - the differences between people could dissolve into laughter. J could not see the sense behind Yoko Ono's idea.

Abattoirs marked by red dots
Source: Google Maps

He also thought that Gurdjieff was showing up the idea of animal sacrifice, to placate a god, as totally idiotic. L said that Gurdjieff was describing the remote past as a way of describing the present. Although we think of animal sacrifice as something we grew out of, it was still widespread in some parts of the world. L also asked in what way did slaughtering an animal as an offering to a god differ from slaughtering it for dinner. Abattoirs are everywhere.

D had found that if he challenged somebody's belief, they would get defensive, but if they later realised they were wrong, they started to experience guilt. He wondered what guilt was. RM said it was self-judgment of what you thought you had done wrong. L said that in the Catholic religion, children were taught original sin, that human beings were born guilty. Little children were so malleable. T had read a report about FGM (Female Genital Mutilation) in Africa. A charity had started to give food, education and clothing to families who agreed not to do it. Children protected in this way by the charity would sometimes get harangued by the other village children as unclean. GC said that they did the practice because it was their culture, why should they not? T said this was an example of objective morality, a human being was being hurt and mutilated and this was wrong. L said he had a problem with it. He himself had been mutilated (in the Jewish religious ceremony of circumcision) as a defenceless baby of eight days old. He considered it was child abuse and he thought that it was wrong. Were a charity set up addressing this issue in the Jewish community in the UK, those families who opted out of the traditional practice would face pressure from their community. Just as in Beelzebub’s Tales, it was easier to see an issue remotely in Africa than closer to home. GC said that Gurdjieff talked about it being the strong who sacrificed the weak, and was keen on the metaphors of eating and being eaten. He asked what people took from that. J thought this was a valid point. If you abstracted all the surrounding ritual and explanation and justification, how wonderful were religions? You could not imagine the lamb taking the lion to the slaughter, or the captive taking his captor to be sacrificed. It was a a strength thing, a power game.

… I often talked on various subjects with this mentioned friend of mine, the priest Abdil …

… he also took me for a being of his own planet…

From our earliest meetings, whenever we chanced to speak about other beings similar to himself, his responsiveness and experiencings about them always touched me deeply. And when my Reason made it quite clear to me that the function of conscience, fundamental for threecentered beings, which had been transmitted to his presence by heredity, had not yet become quite atrophied in him, then there gradually began from that moment to arise in my presence and as a result to be crystallized, a 'really-functioning-needful-striving' towards him as towards a kinsman of my own nature.

T wondered if that was suggesting that if somebody has a conscience then there is a universality about it. N thought so - there were all these moralities in the world that were subjective, but when you get to a certain level of consciousness, conscience is there; it can be recognised in certain circumstances. It was very hard to determine what was conscience, rather than responses programmed from what was our own man-made civilisation.

Firstly, by destroying the existence of other beings, you reduce for yourself the number of factors of that totality of results which alone can form the requisite conditions for the power of self-perfecting of beings similar to yourself; and secondly, you thereby definitely diminish or completely destroy the hopes of our COMMON FATHER CREATOR in those possibilities which have been put into you as a three-brained being and upon whom He counts, as a help for Him later.

GC could see the futility of the external religion, but was not seeing the futility of the internal religion. L said that the anthropologist Mircea Eliade spoke of closed religions, whose adherents did not see their religion as such, but as part of reality. For animists in Africa, ancestral spirits occupying animals at night and revisiting the living was part of the fabric of their experiential reality.

Mircea Eliade

In contrast, open religion was the general experience in the West. RM thought that we did exactly the same. L agreed with RM. He thought we had the equivalent in our culture; it was very pervasive and we did not see it as religion. We saw life beginning with education, leading to 30 years of employment, which went with the buying of property which was then passed on to children. Anybody who did not conform to this was excluded from those considered to be successful. When the inner logic of that began to fail, as currently in Greece, there could be a lot of friction. N said that all points of view were partial, whether scientific or otherwise. There was no such thing as a completely  objective, impartial  view of the world. J thought that Gurdjieff was trying to say just that, implying that by looking down he somehow had a level of his own which was objective. How did Gurdjieff know what those common hopes of our “common father creator” were? T said it was the character in the book, Beelzebub, speaking. GC thought Beelzebub was a mouthpiece for Gurdjieff here. J didn’t know why the character was called Beelzebub in the first place. Did she think this was a reference to being devil’s advocate? T said yes, she did. GC said the book could be thought of as a koan. The more you thought about it the more you realised that you couldn’t think about it. He quoted Kierkegaard: Life is a mystery to be lived, not a problem to be solved.

As there had been much discussion of conscience during the Meeting, it was decided that the exercise for the ensuing month would be, as suggested by N, that if guilt be felt, or a conscience response experienced as opposed to a conventional morality response, to make a note of it for the meeting and then let the thought go.