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.