EXERCISE
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RM asked what the exercise had been. He intended to stick with things that worked for him. He did a one minute exercise every day and had been doing it for some years. Domhnall Gleeson demonstrates a variant of the exercise, in the movie "About Time" (2013), directed by Richard Curtis. |
N had found it a more complicated exercise to do than trying to remember himself by counting lamposts. He had been trying to diet, and had been using that as a Gurdjieff technique. He had also had quite a lot of dental pain in his jaw, and was trying to see if there was a way of becoming present to the pain and through this to see if it became less intense.
D had been suffering from bronchitis, and all the teachings had gone out of the window. He described how bronchitis had slowed him down. While walking to the Meeting he had had to stop half way and get a bus. He was starting to wonder if his lung was damaged. He had been thinking again about his earlier problems with his bipolar friend, and the television next door, two major things in his life (which were very sad) and seeing them from a different perspective after reading Barry Long, who said we put too much emotion into our likes and dislikes. He had realised the emotions he was feeling were depleting him of energy, and had had to step back from them.
L had done the exercise. The first time he did it, he locked the door twice. The next day, on his walk to work through a park, he walked round an area of it twice. The third day, it being a cold morning, he cleaned condensation from the car windows, and then did it again. This made it a better job and he was more conscious about doing it. Another day he repeated his timed meditation. He had come to realise that doing his meditation at the same time every day was getting to be a bit of a habit. So he had moved it to a to-do list and did it at whatever time felt appropriate or convenient. Meditating at different times of the day made it feel more meaningful, and made it more likely he would have those moments of mindfulness more often during the day. He thought it was very important for developing a magnetic centre to have a to do list, so that planning and tasks done aggregated around one external thing, even though they originated from different I's.
J said that an exercise he had been trying recently was making sure his wallet was in his pocket twice before going out, which made it less likely to forget it. Having a purpose justified it. To do it as a set exercise adulterated its value. Was the purpose of counting lamposts to become conscious through that walk, or was it to become conscious but allow that consciousness not to interfere with a train of thought? He suggested that the purpose might be slightly other than it seemed to be.
"R" had tried doing something much more slowly and what she noticed was the constant appearance of laziness and impatience. Since her wish to try the exercise was as part of studying and observing what was going on in her, which was also going on in all her companions, that was where its value was, not whether she succeeded or not. She did not do a lot of walking so did not encounter many lamposts.
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| Lucy, from Finchley, admires the only lampost in Narnia. (From The Chronicles of Narnia, C S Lewis and Walt Disney) |
T had found that she could not plan to do anything twice. What happened was that she would be going to get something and find that she was going to the wrong place. Usually she would have negative thoughts about that, but this month she consciously repeated the mistake. This happened several times during the month and she started using it as her gateway into the exercise.
JE had come to the Meeting looking to be more focused. She had been in the School of Economic Science when a teenager, and had done a bit of meditation. She was looking for something very practical to focus her. She had tried the lampost exercise. She noticed one in her street at nighttime, and at that moment realised how beautiful the street was, with the light shining on the bricks.
The contributions were followed by some time for responses.
"Back to life, back to the present time, back from a fantasy." Back to Life, by Carol Wheeler with Soul II Soul (1989) |
L thought the interesting thing from J's account was how far he went to in counting lamposts before he forgot he was counting. J said he had not actually conducted that exercise because he now had a dog, and lamposts could not be ignored, and wondered if there was a different question he could answer on that theme. L said the lamposts were a very good way of testing how quickly the transition from being aware to daydreaming happened. |
J asked why there was the presumption that the alternative to being conscious of the immediate, and perhaps not very interesting aspects of the world you were moving around in, had to be day dreaming?
D found he did too much thinking. He had had to stop half way up the hill because he was breathless. He had been concentrating on his breath but then had become aware of the sun, and the whole idea of being on this planet, took him away from his pain and breathlessness, and he started to calm down and breathe better. If we were not present, we were absent, because we were not in touch with the rest of the universe. RM said there was another element to it - was what he was thinking now relevant to being present and to what he was doing now. That was a discipline. N related to what D was saying about emotions - there were so many in the wrong place. "R" said that Gurdjieff stated throughout Beelzebub's Tales and many of his talks that we were put here on Earth for the purpose of transforming course substances into finer ones, and not just to improve ourselves but also for something much greater. N said we were trying to become more efficient machines. As we did this we were also transforming the world, and other energies as well, so therefore we were playing a role, perhaps unconsciously. "R" agreed, saying that the influence percolates like osmosis whether we were intentionally doing it or not, but she was not sure that we got more refined. Rather, she thought that we were always at the beginning. N said he saw this in his work as a lawyer. Sometimes people could be very litigious about things, and he would try to get to the heart of the issue, and often it came down to emotion in the wrong place, and he would suggest an alternative approach. He thought you could either add to the worlds woes and conflicts, or you could try to reduce them. "R" said that one day we might reduce the amount of war.
What "R" had said, in her contribution about impatience, had reminded D of his experience with bronchitis. You really had to respect it and be patient. If you forgot about it and acted as if you were better, you might relapse. You had to allow time for the body to heal itself, which it did if you allowed it enough time. T said she could relate to this. She had a painful left shoulder which made it hard for her to put her jacket on the usual way, but she kept forgetting this and her habitual way of putting on the coat kept over-riding the pain-free way of putting the other arm in first.
| Responding to J, L asked who was the person counting the lamposts and who was the person daydreaming or thinking things out, and were they the same person? J thought this was a statement rather than a question. | The Woman with Seven Personalities - Interview on the Jensen Show |
For RM it was a question. One part of him would say he was going to get up at 6 in the morning, but another part of him would say no, he was going to get up at 10 past. Another part would feel guilty. Suddenly all these I's would start appearing in contrast with each other. A lot of the Gurdjieff work was about trying to bring all these I's into one centre.
L said that there was only one I in control at any given time, so there is the illusion that there is only one, though there is no reason to think that there is only one. It becomes a problem when it develops into a multiple personality disorder, and then they become very distinct.
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With grateful acknowledgment to Harold Good
| That island on which Mister God Himself and the deserving souls exist is called 'Paradise,' and existence there is just 'Roses, Roses.' All its rivers are of milk, their banks of honey; nobody needs to toil or work there ... |
...The other, smaller island, to which our Mister God sends for their further existence the 'souls' whose temporary physical parts have been idle here and have not existed according to His commandments, is called 'Hell.'
All the rivers of this island are of burning pitch; the whole air stinks like a skunk at bay.
... It must be noticed that although the custom of Sacrificial-Offerings was also flourishing at that period in the country of Maralpleicie, it was not on the large scale on which it had flourished in the country Tikliamish.
RM said the religion was an attempt to make people wake up. So if they were not present it would be hell, and if they were present they would get their rewards. "R" said it was a system of rewards and fear. RM saw parallels with a Muslim view of paradise. T thought the passage was describing a system of social control. L said it specifically mentions the practice of animal sacrifice, and that it was not as prevalent as in the previous country Tikliamish. But it was still bad, so as before he seemed to be focused on the treatment of animals. J said that it says that the entire edifice of religion is nothing more or less than to take advantage of man's superficial aspects. L thought it was a very male oriented view of heaven. N thought it was to protect the king's tax income. People were led to believe they would get their hemp or opium in heaven but they were not to have it while alive. "R" said it was a substitute for conscience.
... Just then I invented that those spirits in 'cap of invisibility' who, as it was said in that great religion, watch our deeds and thoughts in order to report them later to our Mister God, are none other than just the beings of other forms, which exist among us.
It is just they who watch us and report everything to our Mister God.
But we people not only fail to pay them their due honor and respect, but we even destroy their existences for our food as well as for our Sacrificial-Offerings.
... It is very interesting to remark here that the information that serves on the planet Earth for the rise of a holy place is usually due to certain Earth beings called 'Liars.'
This disease of 'lying' is also very widespread there.
On the planet Earth people lie consciously and unconsciously.
And they consciously lie there when they can obtain some personal material advantage by lying; and they unconsciously lie there when they fall ill with the disease called 'Hysteria.'
D said it was interesting that we lie to ourselves, and to others to keep the peace. RM said we lie generally to preserve a belief that we have and to indoctrinate everybody else into it. Sometimes we knew that it was a lie. "R" said that in any case words were pretty inaccurate. D was more interested in the issue of lying to ourselves. When he was ill he was impatient to get well.
RM found it particularly interesting how people of a religion of good and bad develop a righteous way of doing things. He thought vegetarianism was an example of such a practice. L said that in the text Gurdjieff had moved from criticising the practice of animal sacrifice to criticising killing of animals for food. This was a theme Gurdjieff kept returning to. There were those who said that Gurdjieff advocated eating meat, but after researching this it was something Osho said, which has been repeated on the Internet a thousand times, although it is without corroboration. "R" said that Gurdjieff cooked meat for his followers all the time. RM said that he ate it too. T said that just from the reading of the book of Beelzebub's Tales, within this book the author's main character talks very compassionately about other beings. He does not use the word animals, but refers to them deliberately as beings.
But the most peculiar of all was the custom of paying attention to the voices of beings of various forms.
...And so, my boy, what our Ahoon so mischievously reminded me about concerned just that custom, which developed there in the city Gob, of attaching significance to the voices of beings of various forms and particularly to the voice of what are called 'donkeys,' of which there were then, for some reason or other, a great many in the city Gob.
... as soon as the sound of the voice of the donkey was heard, all who heard it had to flop down immediately and offer up prayers to their god and to their revered idols and, I must add, these donkeys usually have a very loud voice by nature and their voices carry a long way.
...Having thus become convinced that there also, among that second group of beings of the continent Ashhark, I had succeeded so easily in uprooting, for a long time, the custom of Sacrificial-Offerings, I decided to leave
Following the reading, there was a discussion on what exercise to adopt for the coming month.
"R" said that one of the things mentioned in the last few pages was lying, and that would be a really valuable thing to set oneself to be reminded by, if you noticed yourself lying. JE said Gurdjieff wrote of two types of lying - the conscious one and the one where people fall ill with hysteria, which made her think of what leads to wars like the the tension between North and South Korea. J said that the wise king was a liar of the first kind, whereas the people who somehow create the holy places, were not liars in the same way, they were hysterical. L agreed that the king was a liar for the first reason, because he was losing his input of taxes from the workers. RM said it was all for the best intentions because he felt he had to wake them up. N said he did not want to wake them up to stop the drug taking, he wanted to manipulate them for his own ends, to get them back into their normal jobs and thus money back into his coffers. So he created another lie. RM thought it more appropriate if each person chose their own exercise. "R" said it was useful to have a guideline to start with. It was decided that the exercise would be to notice oneself lying. N said it would also be interesting to observe other people lying to you, and to see what were the tell tale signs of a liar.
