Monkey Business

L had tried the exercise, one day, sitting in a restaurant. There was an elderly woman sitting there. She didn't look entirely happy, so he thought he would send some good feelings towards her to see what happened. She was still there when he left. Maybe she was looking slightly happier, he did not know. He would not say it was a successful use of the exercise. Maybe he felt a bit happier about it, but he didn't do the exercise much more, and it didn't do much for him.

EXERCISE “ Once a day, to send out good thoughts or feelings thinking of somebody, and observe if anything happens.” • NEXT EXERCISE • NEXT READING • NEXT MEETING

As a mother and a grandmother, "R" had her family, particularly her descendants, in mind every day. Over the Christmas period was a day when she visited relatives. A nephew was there who was severely disabled in a wheelchair. He was full of energy, and furious about the fact that he could not do huge amounts of things. What was there that might be emanated in his direction that would solve that? She realised that we were trying to solve these things all the time, and she had no way of knowing whether her presence was helpful, or even whether one should be trying to calm that anger down, or encouraging it, because in him it was a big factor in his life-force. It revealed how limited one's own sense was of what was appropriate and right, even when those rare moments existed when she was really in touch with her own conscience, and not just with considering what ought to happen, what one ought to do.

J said he would make a comment without having specifically once a day attempted this, because the experience of attempting to send out good vibration was something which we probably all attempted, and he posed two very different questions. One was the effect on oneself, and the other was the effect on the outside world, or other people. When it comes to the effect on oneself, there was a large body of opinion that in a trite example you could summarise by citing the salesman who is adjured to wear on his face, when he speaks on the telephone, a smile, because that somehow induces in him a feeling of well-being which, the presumption is, is transmitted in some form to his interlocutor. J thought having good feelings about the outside world was something that was good for oneself, and the moment you started to look at whether there was going to be an impact or reaction on your target person, you were in the realm of the same sort of unknowable as the afterlife. In other words it may have a direct effect, and people who did faith healing, for instance, certainly said that it does, but you could not be given, by its nature, proof of this, otherwise our whole beings would be directed towards extra-sensory perception. It was like good and ill - if you knew what you were going to do was going to benefit you, then the purpose of your doing it was diluted, so maybe it was the realm of the unknowable.

Sleepers Wake by J S Bach

2010 Prom concert

Responding to "R", J said that the logical, quasi-philosophical question was how far your belief that something was going to work actually affects the effect, and if the nephew did not know that this was being done, did that dilute it? Did we or did we not transmit our thoughts, our feelings, or were we "islands entire"? "R" said that it was great to ask that question, but at the same time we were trying to experience something, because whatever came up, unless it was put to the test, we could not really know whether we were going up a blind alley or not. L said that we did know that, through music, it was possible to have an effect on people tangibly, and a repeated effect, of course different in each individual, but most people who listened to a piece of Bach's spiritual music would be affected.

The Meeting moved to reading from Chapter 23 of Beelzebub's Tales.

 

With acknowledgments to Harold Good
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Beelzebub continued thus:

I descended for the fourth time to that planet Earth owing to the request of my essence-friend Gornahoor Harharkh.

I have already told you that after my third personal descent to your planet, I occasionally for a rest ascended to the planet Saturn to this friend of mine.

... the idea once arose in me to invite him to descend on our ship Occasion to the planet Mars, in order there, on the spot, to help me personally with his knowledge in the details of arranging my observatory which was just then being completed.

J was not sure why Gurdjieff had changed the word for telescope, and found his choice of words interesting, for example why was the spaceship called Occasion?

...The problem was that our route from the planet Saturn to the planet Mars would cross such cosmic spheres as did not correspond to the presence of Gornahoor Harharkh, a being who had as yet the possibilities only for an ordinary planetary existence.

The result of our deliberations, then, was ... to arrange a special compartment in our ship Occasion itself, and to furnish it with every kind of adaptation and apparatus for elaborating those substances of which the atmosphere of the planet Saturn consists, and to which Gornahoor Harharkh was adapted by Nature for existence.

...And there, on the planet Mars, which had almost the same atmosphere as the planet Saturn, my essence-friend Gornahoor Harharkh very soon became acclimatized and began to exist almost freely.

It struck L that Gurdjieff talked about the difficulty of going from Saturn to Mars, because that would be crossing a point in the octave which ordinarily would be extremely difficult. "R" said that sometimes he speaks about flights, and sometimes he speaks about descents, as if he is reminding us of levels of consciousness as well. H thought the reference to planets was related to essence. Normally, maybe there wasn't all that much relation to essence. This was a step up from the norm. Normally, according to what he had read and believed, operation was through sensation, mostly, and false personality, not essence. If you started operating from essence, you were in a different world. J said that Gurdjieff was homing in on another element besides essence here. The main differentiation between Mars and Saturn, which you had to analyse, was wherein lay the difference in the atmospherics. He was putting at the centre exactly that which you did not normally spend your time in trying to analyse, but which actually, without your being conscious of it, permeated everything you were doing.
 
It was just during his stay on Mars that he devised that Teskooano, or, as your favorites call it, a ‘telescope,’ ...

The Teskooano he constructed is indeed a marvel of being-Reason ...

Thanks to this Teskooano I was sometimes fully able, while seated in my house on Mars, to observe almost everything that proceeded on those parts of the surface of other planets of this solar system ...

... a certain fact which we happened to notice was the cause of a very serious exchange of opinions between us concerning the three-centered beings of that peculiar planet of yours.

... I undertook to descend onto the surface of that planet and to bring back to the planet Saturn a certain number of the beings called there ‘apes,’ in order to carry out certain elucidating experiments with them concerning the fact we had noticed and which had then surprised us.

J said that Gurdjieff was operating under his own prejudices there, elevating being-reason, which you might argue was consciousness and the whole surround of human being, above the ape, and that was a humanocentric way of looking at life, to think that human beings, being-reason, were better receptors of atmosphere. He wondered why Gurdjieff was bringing apes into the narrative. L said the description suggests he was able to observe what happens on other planets to some extent, but not completely. Maybe that was like a partial change of consciousness. "R" said that one association about apes is that they copy. The verb "to ape" is to copy. Perhaps it meant that he wanted to study the things that had become automatic, that were not the result of reason.

... the three-centered beings of the planet Earth have again begun to revive what is called the ‘Ape question.’

... they wish at all costs to find out whether they have descended from these apes or whether these apes have descended from them.

... this question is this time agitating chiefly those biped beings who breed there on the continent called America.

Although this question always agitates them from time to time, yet every once in a while it becomes there for a long time, as they express it, ‘the burning question of the day.’

President-elect Donald Trump

J said this suggested Gurdjieff did not like America. "R" said that he loved America. In this book he was taking them to task. L thought it was topical, because Donald Trump had just been elected to the presidency, and many of the people who voted for him would believe that the planet was only 6000 years old, and that there had been no evolution between the ape and human species. "R" added that they might also believe in the right to carry guns. J wondered if L was equating the voting populace of America, after their election of Trump, with the ape family. L said this had not crossed his mind.