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.