Look Before You Leap!

	EXERCISE “ If you receive a stimulus and feel the need to react immediately, pause and delay the reaction.”
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RG said we were prone to react to stimuli very quickly, and lose ourselves and our composure. This was very important, because once you stop, you calm down and react in a better way. It was also a way to remember yourself.

J said there were occasions during the month in which he did not react immediately to a stimulus, but thought about it. He thought that was a good watchword for how one should normally behave. For example, if you studied for an exam, you could study in your room or outside, and the different atmospheres in which your thought process was coming about, confirmed you in remembering, somehow changed your thinking so that you took account of factors that were not factors of the moment when you got yourself a shock or stimulus or idea. So it was as well to sleep on something before you acted. For anything but an obvious decision, it was as well to pause before taking it. He thought there was no need to unpack the different emotions that could come into the moment, the different reactions, that did not necessarily give you the sensible conclusion.

L had suggested the exercise because he had it in his memory as an exercise from Gurdjieff. He could not remember where, so he had said he would check it out and look into it. He had discovered eventually it wasn't from Gurdjieff, it was from Osho. It was all over the Internet. It was Osho's story of what advice Gurdjieff's father gave to Gurdjieff, as Gurdjieff's father was dying, and it appeared to be completely made up, because in Meetings With Remarkable Men, Gurdjieff describes how when he met his father for the last time, his father was very well. Going back to the exercise, L thought it was a good one. It was a pause when you feel an itch, and you can then decide not to scratch. Or you receive a letter and you don't reply in the moment, or impetuously. It was a good exercise, even if it wasn't suggested by Gurdjieff.

Where T had been most aware of pausing was with emails and texts, and particularly over the last month there had been high emotion stuff going on, so it was an extraordinary exercise in that sense, because if she got an emotionally charged text or email, she felt the necessity to grab it and say her piece, so it was a learning curve to leave it for a day, especially a text. The contemporary stresses were often to do with feeling the need to react immediately to others - all the technology was asking you to do that, and it could be very exhausting to be in this continual conversation with somebody who was not in the immediate vicinity. That was her experience with that exercise. She felt it was tortuous to do it, but it was helpful because it gave that space to think, and the world didn't collapse if she didn't respond. It was also about whether you felt the person you were responding to had got the patience, and the tolerance, to wait for the response. And it was also about daring not to. It gave her some courage not to.

N had had a stimulus/response experience the previous week, which he thought was very important in terms of communication. He had received an aggressive letter at work demanding information be sent within a short time frame on a matter the sender had not corresponded about for two years. N looked at this letter and on consideration realised why it had been sent at this time. He spoke to a colleague, and instead of sending the information requested, wrote a letter back the following day, asking why, after two years, there was a rush now. If he had gone with his first stimulus, he would have acted differently, but by thinking about the strategy, a much cleverer response was found.

D said it was so difficult if the stimulus was unexpected, as you were in automatic mode and it was natural to respond right away. He had asked a friend not to text him for a while. She immediately texted him back. He tried to keep calm, but after a while responded. Gurdjieff work was about forgetting and then reminding yourself. He, in his turn, did not wait and replied to her text.

Following the contributions, RG said she wanted to work on how the stimulus affects our three centres, and how we can balance that. CG asked what were the three centres. RG said they were the intellectual, the emotional and the physical. D asked if she thought it was an emotional response or a thought response. RG said we had to find out and see which one to balance. It could also be a physical response, because you could punch someone.

Responding to L, D said it was not important whether Osho's statement about advice from Gurdjieff's father was true or false. The main thing was whether it worked. L replied that it was important, as these were Gurdjieff Meetings, not Osho Meetings. There had been another occasion, a year before, where the Meeting had discussed another widely quoted statement from Osho about Gurfjieff which was without corroboration, and might have been misleading people to believe Gurdjieff insisted his vegetarian students eat meat.

N said that according to an acupuncturist he knew in Greece, who was a very good healer, some people needed to eat meat. D said that human beings could not say what was right or wrong. It was a choice. S said she came from India, and was of the Brahman caste which is the caste of the priests. The majority of Hindus did not eat meat, and were purely vegetarian. She did not think there was anything lacking in their brain power. D asked if it was to do with the climate. S said she thought not. It was to do with the religion, Buddhists don't eat meat, they don't kill. D said that he did, and different Buddhists, Tibetan Buddhists, ate meat.

J said the point comes when reacting to a letter that appears to demand an instantaneous reaction, what you were doing wasn't so much centring yourself; you were giving a balanced response that was typically you, not a typification of the mood you were in just at the moment of anger. What you were actually trying to do was to think out a fresh response altogether, so you wouldn't be giving someone the typical view. You were trying to change the place you were at.

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

 

With acknowledgments to Harold Good
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I very well remember that this ‘agitation of mind’ concerning the origin of these apes occurred there among them for the first time when, as they also like to express it, their ‘center of culture’ was Tikliamish.

This Menitkel ... out of boredom compiled a massive and erudite work in which he ‘spun out,’ concerning the origin of these apes, an elaborate theory with every kind of ‘logical proof,’ ... that these ‘fellow apes’ of theirs had descended neither more nor less than from what are called ‘people who became wild.’

... from that time on, this question ... became a subject of discussion and fantasying ...

N said there was this debate between Darwinian and Mendelian theories of evolution, and the name Menitkel was a little bit like Mendel. T asked if Mendel came after Darwin. N said he did, and that his theories were very much around in the 1920's and 1930's, when Gurdjieff would have been writing this.

But when what is called their ‘cultured existence’ was concentrated on the continent named Europe, and when the time of the maximum intense manifestation of the peculiar illness there named ‘to-wiseacre,’ had again come round ... then, to the grief of three-brained beings of the whole of the universe, that Ape question, namely, the question who is descended from whom, again arose...

The stimulus for the revival there of this Ape question was this time also a ‘learned’ being ... named Darwin.

And this ‘great’ learned being, basing his theory on that same logic of theirs, began to ‘prove’ exactly the opposite of what Menitkel had said, namely, that it was they themselves who were descended from these Mister Apes.

Jessica Lange in King Kong

T said it was suggesting that Darwin came after Mendel. Perhaps Gurdjieff was topsy-turvying that as well. L said that here the allusion might be to Lamarck. N said it might have been Lamarck, who was two centuries earlier. T said whichever way round it was, it means that there was the danger of people becoming apes, or that we came from apes, so there was no escape from the animal nature. N said that by putting the words great and prove in quotation marks, Gurdjieff was obviously being ironic about it. No science was proved definitely for all time. Different theories or hypotheses come along, and then subsequently another theory comes along which replaces them. J said that Gurdjieff was criticising the whole process by lumping it all together as a sort of wiseacring, and asked if we were saying that we went with Gurdjieff to that extent. There followed a prolonged discussion on wiseacring in science.

And as for the objective reality of the theories of both these ‘great’ terrestrial ‘learned beings,’ I am reminded of one of the wise sayings of our esteemed Mullah Nassr Eddin, namely:

‘They were both very successful, though of course not without luck, in finding the authentic godmother of the incomparable Scheherazade on an old dunghill.’

... this question of the genealogy of these apes there is indeed exceedingly abstruse ...

In fact, neither have they descended from apes nor have apes descended from them ...

 

J thought Gurdjieff had contributed here to the debate on evolution. it was the first time he had read the theory that humans were progenitors of apes. L said that the idea was, however, part of modern culture as it was the theme of Planet of the Apes by Pierre Boulle.