Just a Thought

EXERCISE “To notice each day if and when you experience something or do something or behave in a way that is authentic and to observe if there is any association with isolation or fear of isolation.”

T's understanding of authentic was to be the author of what she was doing, to be the motivator of her action. She observed during the month that this was a rare occurrence. Most of the time she was doing things because that was the task set her by her employer or because she was reacting to what she thought other people required or needed from her. She observed being the author of her actions and experience only a few times and this happened during the time she regularly scheduled for her own painting and nobody else was requiring her to do it. This was the time and place where the potential for authentic behaviour, being the author of her own action, could happen. This was also the time when she observed the most resistance to making the task happen, resistance kicked in with a vengeance. She generally experienced insidious self-generated resistance to organising herself to actually stand at the easel and paint. She associated this difficulty with the anxieties and fears that arose from turning her back on other people and being on her own with her task which was necessarily isolating.

The only way to be an author was to be alone with the task. Even with the circumstances in place, the studio, the materials, the time, the conviction, there was still the battle with distractions from the task, distractions that arose from nowhere and suddenly became all important to give attention and time to, I'll just do this before getting to the studio, and when in the studio, I'll just do this before standing at the easel. But then after the resistances to painting were overcome and the painting commenced, that's when she experienced a sense of authorship of having arrived somewhere where she was challenged at a deeper level than usual to be true to her own experience and level of understanding and to construct something from that position. This place was another form of battleground but on a different level. The challenge was to being true to what she perceived at the present time and not to respond or react on assumption of what she perceived of the same subject before. The challenge was to construct something from the coal face of the current encounter. This work could only be achieved alone and the challenge of the difficulty of doing it made her sweat. There was a personal battle going on or a relationship or a responding to the experience of being a human being in the phenomenon of the world.

The film directed by Jake Auerbach, "The Last Art Film" interviewed Michael Craig-Martin, Professor of Fine Art at Goldsmiths, who passionately described his message to art students. "Once you don't have an art school behind you, nobody cares whether you get up in the morning, nobody cares whether you do a painting, even your best friend, even your parents, can only care a limited amount. Nobody really is that interested in this until you've done it." He emphasised that the Art student should be under no illusion that what they do matters to the world of others. The artist before they have made anything is never acknowledged and it's only after the event of creating something, after they've done the work, and not before, that there is any possibility of acknowledgement. An artist has to be self-motivated and has to face aloneness with the task. T remembered at art college, one of the students, who was doing a lot of work painting from life, saying, "The artist's life is a lonely Om". She didn't like it much at the time, and she didn't like it now.

L said that for him the exercise had been very similar to the previous one, which had been to notice ourselves lying. And when we were lying, we were not being authentic. Very often, also, it was to do with isolation. The fear of isolation made us pretend to be what we were not, or to fit in to whatever social expectations happen to be. We could see lies in advertised commodities, for example decaffeinated coffee, which he was not sure made sense, although he sometimes had it, but obviously coffee should be caffeinated. He would see people walking, sometimes very swiftly, or with a peculiar gait, and it seemed to him that this might reflect ego, something in the mind, it was not a natural state. He had noticed that he sometimes had his tongue between his teeth when he was not thinking straight, or when his mind was getting diverted. In art, he had been trying to compose music more authentically, and he had been doing this by singing in to a multi-track recorder from inspiration, and then trying to represent that as authentically as possible by copying, transcribing it. That was like painting from life, bringing to this world, as authentically as possible, mysterious inspiration, which came from we knew not where.

N had found this a very difficult exercise. As L had said, it related to the previous one to a certain extent about lying. Because we spend so much of our time lying, and it becomes a habitual thing, it was hard to actually experience authenticity. He was not sure though that all authentic experiences were necessarily ones in which you felt a sense of isolation. He thought sometimes you could feel a sense of liberation, a joy in being authentic. He thought part of what this work was about was actually to step outside all of that conditioning. Whatever religion you were, whatever social class you were born into, to be able to see the world differently and detached from that, this for him was part of what this work was all about, and to realise it was purely an accident of birth where or how you had ended up in this world. His experiences during the month had been ones of trying to step outside his social conditioning, and see the world differently from that perspective. Sometimes there might been feelings of isolation, or fear which came along with that, but other times there had been a lot of liberation.

Abraham Maslow 1908-1970

T started the responses to the contributions, saying that she had been touched by N's comments that it was sometimes a liberation. T experienced this for just one second, while sitting on a bench in the park in the sun. She wasn't doing anything, and it took her by surprise. N asked T if she could describe that state a little more, and T said she could not, it was an impossible thing to chase, no matter how many meditations you did a day. She wondered if N had any examples of his description of either of those states. He said that there was a feeling of great meaningfulness and significance. Quite often there had been a lot of work prior to one of those experiences, a state impossible to chase. It comes as a gift, you can't expect it, it just descends. Maslow called these peak experiences.

JE said that if you were thinking or moving in a different direction from everybody else, you could feel very isolated. L agreed, saying that if that feeling became very strong, then it might impel to go back into the herd. In animals which moved in herds, there would be one or two which did not, but most joined the herd, and there were reasons for that, it was easier to get food if you were part of the hunting pack. That happened in human life, it was easier to get food if you joined one of the standard professions or jobs. N spoke of a book published in the 1950's called The Lonely Crowd, by the sociologist David Riesman, who discussed why people felt very lonely and would give up their freedom to join authoritarian groups or cults. T thought that we all fantasised that there was a tribe to which we were supposed to conform, but maybe it was a survival instinct from millennia ago to be together so that at least one person survived the trials and tribulations of being in the stone age.

J quoted the ancient Greek saying Know Thyself. While isolation as a word had pejorative undertones, but if it was a case of separateness because you wanted a detached, more correct perspective, that was something different. If we had considered our position in relation to the customs that surround us, then the departure from the norm should not be something that either frightens us or gives us a feeling of isolation, but was rather a comment on our conditioning and our personality rather than the actual problem. T said that the alternative word was solitude, which was less pejorative. It had a ring about it which suggested you ought to enjoy it. C said that the three letter root sol appeared in each word, associated with solo. To her isolation was active, something chosen, whereas solitude was something felt.

J asked how sophisticated did Gurdjieff say you had to be before doing this exercise. How could it help a terrorist who has only become one because he was bored. L suggested imagining that when people came through the door of the Meeting, they left their personality behind. Religious belief would likely drift away, and there would be no question of any belief in violence in pursuit of a religious conviction. Some essential qualities might be left. G asked L if he could define essence. L was not sure how much he could demystify the mysterious. If you took off all the wrapping, what was left inside? Perhaps it could be built on.

P said, on the subject of what is the essential person, at lot had been written over many millennia, and he was sure that Gurdjieff had incorporated some of this into his writings. In the tradition he came from, which was very ancient, there was a difference between essence and the secondary personality. Essence was seen as something changeless, which required uncovering. Nothing was required to be added to it. In Sanskrit, essence was called jiva or pramana, it was the soul. Personality consisted of acquired characteristics. Our anxieties, our nervousness, our neurosis, our joys, our pleasures - a sense of identity - and they would change from body to body. "R" said that P had been the first person to mention "body", and in fact Gurdjieff gave the body great importance in the sense of physical presence and experience related to the body. The Know Thyself in terms of ideas was only because we had a body which could do the thinking, and we did not respect enough what the body was for. Gurdjieff offered an idea of how to experience things which was to do with being present, and in those moments it was possible to have that solitary understanding.

The Meeting then continued with the reading from Beelzebub's Tales, Chapter 21, page 231.

With acknowledgments to Harold Good

For the first days, the aforementioned terrestrial professionals of that time who had chanced to arrive there did nothing but gratify to the full their inclinations, which had already become inherent to their presences in respect of the destruction of these one-brained beings of their planet...

... when that second catastrophe occurred to your planet, then many of the beings who chanced to be saved from the continent Atlantis, chiefly those who already had relatives and kinsmen in that Pearl-land, also gradually collected there.

P asked if this was supposed to be true. N replied that it was fiction, but there were a lot of symbolic references. L said that the present section described how humans killed oysters for their pearls. It followed earlier sections in which reforms were made to reduce the killing of animals for sacrifice and later for food. L said that Gurdjieff had written with great compassion about the plight of animals. GC said it was wrong to deduce from this that Gurdjieff had advocated vegetarianism, and in fact the man had been a big meat eater. L asked how he could be sure the accounts he had read were true. "R" said she had personally met people who had enjoyed meat meals cooked by Gurdjieff. L said the passages in the book were attributed to a character, Beelzebub, and were thus not necessarily Gurdjieff's own views. However it was easier to be a vegetarian now in North London than in the Caucasus a hundred years ago. T wondered if the talk of the planetary body was a metaphor for the human body and that the something "catastrophic" was something that had happened to the individual human being, or humanity. We were born into the world and then something cataclysmic happens which affects us for the rest of our lives.

...But it turned out that amongst the beings of this third group of the continent Ashhark, there were at that time several peculiar 'Havatvernonis' or 'Religions' all based on different, quite independent what are called 'religiousteachings,' having nothing in common with each other.

...Before continuing to tell you about the three-brained beings breeding just on that part of the surface of the planet Earth, it is, I think, necessary to remark, even if briefly, that there existed and still exist, ever since the time when the practice of having peculiar being-Havatvernonis or Religions began to arise and exist among your favorites, two basic kinds of religious-teachings.

P thought this was outdated, as he thought that in 2016 it was known that they were all based on the same fundamental principles, and were contradictory only superficially. JE disagreed, thinking that Gurdjieff was deliberately referring to the external practices of different religions. J thought that Gurdjieff was very much anchored in his time with his preconceptions and had not escaped into his essence. He thought a lot of it was not 2016 thinking. P said that the Internet enables people, with just a click, to learn what Gurdjieff had to travel for two months on a camel to find out about.

...It was just then that the aforementioned Sacred Individual was sent to them who, having been coated with the planetary body of a terrestrial being, was called, as I have said, Saint Buddha.

...During my detailed studies of the mentioned religious teaching I also clarified that after this Sacred Individual had become finally coated with the presence of a threebrained being there and had seriously pondered how to fulfill the task that had been laid upon him from Above, he decided to attain this by means of the enlightenment of their Reason.

GC asked what the final sentence meant. "R" said it meant that rather than setting an example, he would explain things. P thought it was a reference to Buddha.

Following the reading, an exercise suggested by GC was adopted for the coming month, to notice each day a thought which seems to arise of its own accord and try to see where it comes from.