The Great Escape

L's experience as the mind emptied was to see images of other places - buildings and people, as if looking through a window to another world. He had been considering D's comments the previous month about the Aymara tribe, and the notion of seeing the past as if it were in front of us, and associations which flow in to the mind are a bit like that because they are normally from the past, and to be able to think freely we might need to break away from that and think of new ideas.

EXERCISE “ Choose a moment each day to let associations recede into the background to receive impressions, and notice if what comes up is associations or thoughts, and if it takes a long time or is instant.”

J thought that the main difficulty of the exercise was to be able to distinguish between association and analytical thought. No matter how long or short the process, the idea came in a flash. The question we were all posing was: where did the ideas come from? There was a presumption that we could not find those ideas within ourselves, so they must come from somewhere else. He referred the attendees to the more recent theories about the kernel of the core of personality.

N noticed that it was very hard to look at things without ideas already being in his mind. He was prejudging things, and tried to look again and see things differently, that were not seen previously. He found we lived in a daydream world where we accepted things as being out there, and when he started questioning that - Is it quite like I think it is? - different perceptions came to him, and he started to look at things in a different kind of way, almost trying to intuit them, to sense the essence of what they were about rather than his preconceptions of what they were about. The exercise for him, was about getting back to the earliest impressions of things noticed as a child, or when he looked at objects or found some mystery in them.

When "R" was trying to write something for a deadline. It was an interesting exercise to focus on an aim and try to put it into good words and communicate. This process involved the brain, but there were no new thoughts, it was all about sorting out the associations and prioritising them and then being able to put everything in order on the computer. Struggling with the computer was a challenge as well, because when she had written books before she had done them in the old fashioned way on typewriters and sheets of paper, but to appreciate herself trying to be receptive and focused on what was necessary to phrase something properly and condense it into few words (because there was a word count limit) was quite a discipline and much more difficult than it had been twenty years ago. The activity - or non-activity - sitting on her chair at her desk at her computer for hours at a time, had made her realise how deeply asleep she was on every topic except the subject of the writing.

D had been looking on the internet about so-called enlightenment and so-called gurus, some of them probably pseudo-gurus, talking about it. What he got from most of them, which he had condensed to the most important, simple thing, was that we were an open vessel, a clear vessel, whereas all the rest - thoughts, feelings, perceptions - was noise which stopped us being in the moment. He was aware how much he would lose concentration whilst listening to people, and then go back to what he was thinking. The Aymara idea that the past is in front of us puts all experience in to the now, so that the past is here, present. The future is unknown, so, to them, it is behind us, out of sight. When people said the same things they were saying ten years before, it was the conditioning mind - the past in front of them.

Pinocchio marionette by Jim Shore

RM was working on a chapter on free will in the book he was writing. He asked himself: is everything I do here now, even to a thought, consequent on something that went before it? So far he had not found anything, even to the smallest degree, that wasn't. The more he considered this and read about it, the more he came to the conclusion that we were like marionettes and did not have free will. The positive side of this was that you could let go of all opinions and go with the flow of nature. It was like riding a bike, you could not decide to ride it a different way, because if you tried it would cause a crash. He found that every time he tried to go against the natural flow it caused him distress.

Sakura (cherry blossom)

Recalling the exercise for the meeting T was aware that during the month she remembered the exercise in the first and second weeks, but after that it was gone from her mind. She remembered vividly a tree moving in the wind, but after three or four seconds without thinking, she realised what was happening and the thoughts started coming. She was shocked by how minute the time was, and it was also frightening, because she experienced for a moment something in the raw that wasn't her.

The Meeting moved on to the responses.

D said that he was beginning to agree with RM, that people did not have free will. "R" asked, bearing in mind that everything might be the result of the influences we had been under and the things that had happened, whether there was any way that we could choose only to be influenced by cleaner influences. D thought we could, but that it would take time. "R" agreed, saying it was because everything is associations. J said that there might be a presumption that we could not have original thoughts, but he saw it more like a mason choosing which blocks to build with. The blocks, like those unoriginal thoughts, are all ready-made but the mason can choose which blocks to use when building, and likewise we could have very original thoughts by using different combinations of the blocks we had, but we could not operate in a pure mathematical vacuum without actual ideas or building blocks in place already. To say that we had no original thoughts or were asleep all the time was a bridge too far. It was the synthesis between the building blocks which was the original thought. L said that in the Gurdjieff Work, there was the idea that you could have free will, but it took a tremendous effort and you could not do it for long. He had been watching an interview from the Recode 2016 conference a couple of days before in which Elon Musk had clarified a common misconception about gravity. When we see images of people on the space station floating, we might assume there was no gravity there, that they had escaped the earth's pull, but in fact the force of gravity there was much the same as on earth, and the weightless effect was produced only by spinning the craft sufficiently fast around the planet to prevent it from falling. L said this was analogous to the enormous effort needed to exercise and maintain free will. "R" said that Beelzebub speaks about the Law of Falling in Beelzebub's Tales and about how the spacecraft that he is on is travelling. N found it an interesting analogy, and said that part of the Work was finding one's own centre of gravity. The daily exercises show how difficult it is to maintain free will, and our struggle with the exercises showed us how asleep we were and as a result the Work showed us very clearly that we do not have free will, and we kept falling back out of and away from a sense of our own centre of gravity. J was unsure about the idea that effort is needed in order to produce a new thought, because inspiration can come without effort. RM said that the great freedom was to be free of your own ambitions and intentions, your own attitudes and views - the minute you were free of that, you let go to nature to follow its own course. T thought that this sounded like going to sleep, because we were responsible for our own human nature.



Following up T's memory of vividly seeing the tree for a few seconds, D asked if the fear she had experienced was partly a consequence of how busy her life was. Someone who was not busy, who spent a lot of time in meditation, might find it easier to be in the awake state, because they had already built that block. "R" said it was also possible for a busy person to have the same experience, by bringing the three centres together. D thought that the experience might last longer for the less busy person.

The reading then continued from Beelzebub's Tales, Chapter 21.

...a suitable Sacred Individual was immediately sent here, so that ... he might better explain and show you the way of eradicating from your presences the already crystallized consequences of the properties of the organ Kundabuffer as well as your inherited predispositions to new crystallizations.

With acknowledgments to Harold Good

During the period when the said Sacred Individual, coated with a presence like your own ... directly guided the ordinary process of the being-existence of your ancestors, many of them did indeed completely free themselves from the consequences of the properties of the organ Kundabuffer ...

But ... the duration of your existence had ... already become abnormally short, and therefore the process of sacred Rascooarno had also very soon to occur to this Sacred Individual, ... then after his death, the former conditions were gradually re-established there owing on the one hand to the established abnormal conditions of ordinary being-existence and, on the other hand, to that maleficent particularity in your psyche, called Wiseacring.

For T the talk of abnormally short periods was like the little periods of enlightenment she had experienced. D queried what Wiseacring was. RM read out the definition from the Oxford English Dictionary: A person with an affectation of wisdom or knowledge, regarded with scorn or irritation by others - from Middle Dutch wijsseggher 'soothsayer', probably from the Germanic base of "wit". L said that when reviewing the Meeting to work out what goes into the blog, there were some parts which were very focused on what was being read, but there were a lot of sections where the talk was of things completely unrelated and would go off track, and then the word wiseacring would then come to his mind. Everyone present provided their own understanding of the word and there was a long discussion about what it meant. J added that the use of the adjective maleficent suggested it was a particularly bad trait. He thought Gurdjieff had put the idea very well a little earlier, when he spoke of our "inherited predispositions to new crystallizations". which also related to the earlier discussion about originality and synthesis,  T thought the use of the word coated was interesting, as if it described the superficial shell you can see of somebody else, like icing. "R" said it was personality, not essence. "N" compared it with crystallisation. An object might get a shell or a coating which did not belong to the original thing itself and therefore changes it. "R" said that after crystallisation a material was no longer fluid and movable, and was difficult to dissolve. N thought it might be analogous to the start of mechanical, less fluid thinking. These thoughts reminded L of the historical psychological symbolism applied to chemistry by alchemists.

... After having said all this, Saint Buddha ... explained to them how the process of their existence must be conducted and the order in which their positive part should consciously guide the manifestations of their unconscious parts ...

RM said we had to separate the ideas of knowing and thinking. Some things were beyond our thinking but not beyond our knowing, for example riding a bike. "R" said that the body had to learn the skill first.

...One of the best means of rendering ineffective the predisposition present in your nature of the crystallization of the consequences of the properties of the organ Kundabuffer is “intentional-suffering”; and the greatest intentionalsuffering can be obtained in your presences if you compel yourselves to be able to endure the “displeasing-manifestations-of-others-towards-yourselves.”’

This explanation of Saint Buddha together with other definite indications of His was spread by His nearest initiates among the ordinary beings there; and after the process of the sacred Rascooarno had occurred to Him, it also began to pass from generation to generation.

Following the reading, "R" observed that intentional suffering had just been mentioned, and this was adopted as the exercise for the coming month: once a day to compel yourself once a day to be able to endure the "displeasing-manifestations-of-others-towards-yourselves".