Choice Noise

D had become ill during the previous month. After a week he went to the doctor, who prescribed medications which had affected his immune system adversely in the past. After weighing things up, he went on the internet, ordered some different remedies online and three weeks later was better.

EXERCISE “ When you are in the company of someone who is, in your judgement, talking a load of rubbish, observe your own thoughts and then annihilate the thoughts. Then respond naturally.”

T had found the annihilation of thoughts extremely difficult to stay in the present with, and even to be aware it was happening. She had a conscious shock when neighbours called in a gardener. The front garden had been a haven of wildlife, and she came back from work to find the gardeners had razed it to the ground and put wood chip down to prevent it growing again. There was nothing left. It was as if a tropical rain forest had disappeared, and she had hateful thoughts towards the neighbours, who had brought in the gardeners but not passed on her messages to save the blackberries and the thistles.

J said one was constantly in the company of people talking rubbish (present company excepted) but normally factored in somebody else's misappraisal of a situation, and it passed over. It struck him that this compartmentalizing idea of emotional intelligence was now a fashionable way of perceiving the world, as opposed to intelligence, and these were quite wrongly bifurcated, and emotional intelligence was factored into a lot of the thinking we do.  He once had to spend time filing letters from a person who had consistently lied, and though not in the person's physical company, he had been in their mental vicinity, and what he found was that the access to hatred almost overwhelmed the actual analysis of the illogic, such that it wasn't so much the illogic that caused the reaction, it was the emotional response. Though in the exercise it was the thoughts that were to be annihilated, and not the person.

H had missed some Meetings but had been reading the blog, and what had struck him was the word endure in the July exercise on intentional suffering, which was once a day to compel yourselves to be able to endure the "displeasing-manifestations-of-others-towards-yourselves". He hadn't thought about that at all, although he had read a lot of stuff, but he had been interested in dealing with the expression of negative emotion and he had tried to relate the two. You just needed to go into the Tube for two minutes and somebody would do something annoying, and it struck him that this was happening all the time, and this was why Gurdjieff had pressed this point about controlling negative emotion - it hinged on enduring, you had to take it. He had done this at a meeting where somebody had been going on and on, not to the point, and he had found it terribly difficult, but was handling it in relation to not expressing negative emotion, which came to the same thing as enduring, and somehow he reached a point where it clicked. By enduring so much he overcame the thing, not forever, but just on that one occasion, and it changed his being-nature.

Newton's Third Law
Action and Reaction are equal and opposite

L had found the incident T had described interesting - it was like a spiritual law that when people try to do something in an area where they are meant to be experts, they in particular fail. So in this case people who say they are gardeners go to a garden, and destroy it, wipe it out completely. In terms of this exercise, he had again been making phone calls to telephone help lines, which was always very good for Gurdjieff work, trying to get an internet service fixed with BT, and BT, a communications company, cannot return calls. Insight Timer was a very good app and organisation to help people do meditation. In meditation we try to still the mind and get away from the ten thousand thoughts which distract us all the time. Insight Timer had been changing their app to do so many things it did't work as easily as it used to, so it had actually been impeding his use of it for meditation.

Extract from a help screen of the Android app Awoken

L had also been looking into an app for lucid dreaming called Awoken, which he thought fitted very well with the Gurdjieff work, which was about waking up. Were we awake now? How do we know we're awake now? Also when we're asleep, can we become aware that we're asleep?

RM said that conscious suffering had been to him a big theme. He had read a lot of a book by Ramana Harshi who uses the phrase conscious awareness, which RM tries to practice by taking on conscious suffering. Ramana Harshi advocated making no choice, good or bad, about anything - this was the state of absolute calmness. Accepting the suffering for what it was and then seeing the root of why he was suffering. RM found by doing this that he was seeing that it was his own judgements. This had helped him to be absolutely calm under whatever conditions - somebody was talking nonsense, somebody talking lies, it was irrelevant, they were telling a story. He was getting a sense that everything we did was just a story. It was not a lie, it was not true, it was just a story. If he saw it like that, he felt completely calm, he made no choices, he was just seeing as if he was reading a good novel or seeing a good movie. Whether the person was lying didn't matter - it gave it substance, interesting substance.

Following the contributions, the Meeting moved on to responses.

H said that in addition to the contributions about enduring and waking up, he said that not expressing negative emotion was something Gurdjieff kept on pressing people about, by using self-observation. which H thought went well with enduring. You needed both. He thought this might help in the process of waking up. T agreed that it was to do with the switch to observing. Her initial reaction was very visceral. She had been shocked and stunned. She couldn't speak for a long time, was thinking hatefully of the neighbours, and then was in floods of tears, because it wasn't just blackberries, but was also roses and a quince bush. It wasn't until she heard her thoughts about the neighbours that it clicked in about the exercise, so that did help her stay with the suffering of her reaction. Her neighbours saw some of the plants as weeds, but T had been really enjoying them and taking loads of photographs. She thought it was key to notice in the first place. She found it very difficult to be observing at the same time as somebody was talking to her.

Following on from H, L said that it was all very well if we can wake up, or think we have woken up, and become aware of our automatic behaviour, but the next question was can we change that automatic behaviour? Or were we still following the narrative of the dream.

Responding to T's account of what had happened to the garden, GC thought there was nothing she could have done afterwards, but when this situation arose again, and it would, she would have to impose her will on it to define what she wanted. It was no good sitting back and letting other people decide for you, and then saying you didn't like it, because you then become part of the problem. You had to curtail it beforehand.

H had a different perspective, that the whole point was to endure something you didn't like. This concept was symbolised by the suffering of Christ. Theory was all very well, but practice led somewhere.

D saw it as not reacting, rather than enduring. J recalled how Shakespeare famously phrased this dilemma in Hamlet:

To be or not to be - that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And, by opposing, end them.

RM advocated not having opinions about things. The problem was that if you had ten people in a room you might get ten different opinions about the garden. One might not want any flowers because they had work to do and it would look very nice if there was gravel and stones there. Another might want a tree, and another one love the weeds. If we could just see it as a multiple of stories but have none oneself. We tend to get attached to what we think is the real story.

GC said there was a simple point here but it was very difficult to understand. Thoughts are real, but the thinker is not. We think the thinker is real and the thoughts are just nonsense, but the thoughts are real, it's us that is nonsense, it's us that is not real.

Following the responses, the Meeting continued reading from Beelzebub's Tales, Chapter 21.

... And there in Pearl-land, owing simply to my invention, your favorites so greatly changed their essence-relations towards the beings of other forms, that they not only ceased to destroy the existence of these beings for their famous Sacrificial-Offerings, but even began very sincerely with the whole of their being to regard these beings of other forms as beings like themselves.

With acknowledgments to Harold Good Watch on YouTube

... you could see when strolling down the street of the city Kaimon, almost at every step, beings there walking on what are called 'stilts.'

And they walked on stilts in order not to risk crushing some insect or other, a 'little being,' as they thought, just like themselves.

Jains

RM said that this just described the absurdity of going as far as being vegan. Extreme vegans might worry about treading on insects and would wear stilts, and the end of the stilts would have to be so small in case they landed on an insect. T said they would be very sensitive people to do that and maybe we all should be. L thought a more practical way was what the Jains do in India. They sweep the ground in front of them as they walk, to move insects out of the way.

Many of them took the precaution to wear what are called Veils,' lest poor-little-beings-like-themselves in the air might chance to enter mouths or noses, and so on and so forth.

... It is needless to say that from the truths indicated by Saint Buddha Himself absolutely nothing has survived and reached the beings of the present time.

RM, H and J said the examples given by Gurdjieff in the text were to show extreme beliefs lead to absurd action. L said the mayor of Turin, Chiara Appendino, had pledged the previous month to promote vegetarian and vegan diets in the city, and the city of Palitana in India had recently banned animal slaughter. L said he thought Gurdjieff repeatedly brought up the issue of animal welfare because it provoked a reaction in people and is part of the contemporary world. D said that Gurdjieff was not a vegetarian, and GC said far from it. L said he had seen a Paul McCartney quote the previous day: If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be a vegetarian. RM said he had worked in one and had never become a vegetarian. GC said he did not think Paul McCartney should be quoted at a Gurdjieff Meeting.

Slaughterhouse 1,100: The Emotional Impact of Killing Animals

RM said he was writing a book at the moment, and one of the chapters was on whether we had free will, and his conclusion at the end of the chapter was that we did not. He had spoken to a neuroscientist who said this was the case, and said that N, who had read all the books on the subject, said we did not have free will. L asked if this was not too easy, for if there was no free will there was no obligation to use it. He asked RM what made him decide to write the book. RM said it was because he needed to find the truth. L asked RM if he had chosen to do it. RM said he hadn't. GC said that the science RM was quoting may or may not be true. J said that one of the things about Gurdjieff was that you do not accept these totems that are made for us by outside authorities. L said that what contemporary science tells us through quantum mechanics is that life is unpredictable, and that there is room for free choice.

Following the Reading, there was a discussion on what exercise to adopt for the coming month. A suggestion by L based on an idea from H was adopted: Every day to note one thing that you do to go to waking sleep.