Next Meeting
7 May 2017 at 9am
EXERCISE
READING
Disclaimer & Notes
N had found his response to the EXERCISE was usually an emotional one, rather than a solidly intellectual one, and occasionally a physical response. He found the intellectual element came later, when he was in the process of observing it. He would try and analyse the experience, or why it had the stimulus that created this particular response. He understood that the emotional centre worked very, very fast, faster than the other ones, so in a sense we were probably humanly based to experience things emotionally, and then rationalise them afterwards, or bring in the intellectual centre later, to try and understand the emotional response.
| EXERCISE
To observe, once a day, in the moment, how we respond to a positive or negative stimulus, and whether the response is physical, mental or emotional. |
Over the last two months, T had been sick more than she had been well. She had not really been able to locate the three centres. When she was sick, it was as if everything else disappeared, and she was left with a body out of equilibrium. She had been thinking about where these ideas come from, about the centres. Did they emanate from experience of the body?
She felt the strongest emotion in the middle of the chest, which she believed was the solar plexus. She did not know how that equated with the centres in the Gurdjieff Work. She thought that the heart chakra was somewhere there in the Hindu system. When she was sick, everything else stopped, it was a non-thinking state. Days went by and nothing happened. It was like being in a state of suspended animation.
For L the response was sometimes emotional, sometimes physical. On one occasion he had received a rather aggressive message complaining about something he had written about the theory of music. Sometimes, with something like that, he felt it physically or emotionally. Some things did not seem to fit into the three categories, the three centres.
If a musical tune came into his mind, he did not know if that was striking an emotional or an intellectual, or a physical sense. Maybe it was something different, or maybe he was just tuning in to something, and then he would write it down, and then respond, and that response was intellectual - where it fitted in terms of harmony and counterpoint, and it was emotional - how to bring out as much as possible the beauty, whatever there was there in the source, like a painter.
RG thought it was very difficult to be passive, to be still. She tended to react more emotionally. In the exercise, although it was really difficult not to react with emotion, she tried to balance it. What she did, that worked for her, was to sit down and try to look at herself, remember herself, and be quiet. She observed the way she reacted to a stimulus. She thought that she should not let the stimulus have so much influence on her. The difficult thing was to break the habit, and she asked how she could do that, so the stimulus would have less influence on her response?
Responding to RG, C said that we try and find the silence in the crowd. If you were in a pub or a restaurant where there was a lot of noise going on, you could detach yourself from it. That was a good experience, it was a good thing to be able to do, because the noise was so great around you, people all chattering. RG asked C how he did this. C said there were two responses. Either to join it and be one with it, or to move away from it, move above it, move outside of it. Most people sought solitude in distant places, apparently you were running away from yourself if you did that.
Source
giphy.com
C responded also to what L had said about classical music. It was so much easier to listen to pop and stamp your feet, whereas if you allowed classical music into you, to become part of you, the whole person changed, and you didn't really want to listen to pop, pop was just a noise. He said there was an old saying from the East that if you chased butterflies, they would always elude you, but if you sat still, one would come and gently stay on your shoulder.
D said it was the thoughts about the thoughts that stop it. He thought the other day that he was not thinking, but he was! He was thinking about not thinking.
GC said that once you found yourself dancing with a thought, there was no obligation to carry on dancing if you realised that you were dancing with that thought.
You could change partners, or you could be with no partner, it was up to you, but you had to realise that you were dancing with a thought. It had crept up, it had asked you to dance, you didn't know anything about it.
RG wondered why Gurdjieff had asked de Hartmann, the musician, to translate his melodies into music, and she wanted to know which message he was trying to give us through that music. "R" said that Olga de Hartmann's book would lead towards answering that question. If it could be explained, we would not need to have the music.
The Meeting continued with the Reading from Beelzebub's Tales, Chapter 23.
She felt the strongest emotion in the middle of the chest, which she believed was the solar plexus. She did not know how that equated with the centres in the Gurdjieff Work. She thought that the heart chakra was somewhere there in the Hindu system. When she was sick, everything else stopped, it was a non-thinking state. Days went by and nothing happened. It was like being in a state of suspended animation.
For L the response was sometimes emotional, sometimes physical. On one occasion he had received a rather aggressive message complaining about something he had written about the theory of music. Sometimes, with something like that, he felt it physically or emotionally. Some things did not seem to fit into the three categories, the three centres.
If a musical tune came into his mind, he did not know if that was striking an emotional or an intellectual, or a physical sense. Maybe it was something different, or maybe he was just tuning in to something, and then he would write it down, and then respond, and that response was intellectual - where it fitted in terms of harmony and counterpoint, and it was emotional - how to bring out as much as possible the beauty, whatever there was there in the source, like a painter.
RG thought it was very difficult to be passive, to be still. She tended to react more emotionally. In the exercise, although it was really difficult not to react with emotion, she tried to balance it. What she did, that worked for her, was to sit down and try to look at herself, remember herself, and be quiet. She observed the way she reacted to a stimulus. She thought that she should not let the stimulus have so much influence on her. The difficult thing was to break the habit, and she asked how she could do that, so the stimulus would have less influence on her response?
Responding to RG, C said that we try and find the silence in the crowd. If you were in a pub or a restaurant where there was a lot of noise going on, you could detach yourself from it. That was a good experience, it was a good thing to be able to do, because the noise was so great around you, people all chattering. RG asked C how he did this. C said there were two responses. Either to join it and be one with it, or to move away from it, move above it, move outside of it. Most people sought solitude in distant places, apparently you were running away from yourself if you did that.
Source
giphy.com
D said it was the thoughts about the thoughts that stop it. He thought the other day that he was not thinking, but he was! He was thinking about not thinking.
GC said that once you found yourself dancing with a thought, there was no obligation to carry on dancing if you realised that you were dancing with that thought.
You could change partners, or you could be with no partner, it was up to you, but you had to realise that you were dancing with a thought. It had crept up, it had asked you to dance, you didn't know anything about it.
RG wondered why Gurdjieff had asked de Hartmann, the musician, to translate his melodies into music, and she wanted to know which message he was trying to give us through that music. "R" said that Olga de Hartmann's book would lead towards answering that question. If it could be explained, we would not need to have the music.
I must tell you first of all that the species of terrestrial ape-beings now arising there under several different exterior forms, never existed at all before the second 'Transapalnian perturbation'; only afterwards did the genealogy of their species begin.
The causes of the arising of this ‘misconceived’ being as well as the cause of all the other events more or less serious in an objective sense, which occur on the surface of that ill-fated planet, ensue from two sources, totally independent of each other.
The first of them, as always, was the same lack of foresight on the part of certain Most High, Most Very Saintly Cosmic Individuals, and the second was, in the given case, also the same abnormal conditions of ordinary being-existence established by them themselves.
The causes of the arising of this ‘misconceived’ being as well as the cause of all the other events more or less serious in an objective sense, which occur on the surface of that ill-fated planet, ensue from two sources, totally independent of each other.
The first of them, as always, was the same lack of foresight on the part of certain Most High, Most Very Saintly Cosmic Individuals, and the second was, in the given case, also the same abnormal conditions of ordinary being-existence established by them themselves.
T said he was very negative about the human being, it was misconceived.
L wondered if Gurdjieff, when talking about various calamities - Transapalnian perturbations - in the history of the planet very early on, was relating that to what happens in the development of the human being, and the various terrors and crises in childhood, syndromes and affectations and behaviour which affect us throughout our lives further on. Maybe he was saying that some things begin in childhood, which we knew, from psychology, was true.
L wondered if Gurdjieff, when talking about various calamities - Transapalnian perturbations - in the history of the planet very early on, was relating that to what happens in the development of the human being, and the various terrors and crises in childhood, syndromes and affectations and behaviour which affect us throughout our lives further on. Maybe he was saying that some things begin in childhood, which we knew, from psychology, was true.
This sacred substance which arises in the presences of beings of every kind is almost everywhere called ‘Exioëhary’; but your favorites on the planet Earth call it ‘sperm.’
...in the presences of three-brained beings it arises also in order that it might be consciously transformed in their common presences for coating their highest being-bodies for their own Being.
Before the second Transapalnian perturbation there, ... a being impulse began to be formed in them which later became predominant.
This impulse is now called 'pleasure'; and in order to satisfy it they had already begun to exist in a way unbecoming to three-centered beings, namely, most of them gradually began to remove this same sacred being-substance from themselves only for the satisfaction of the said impulse.
... owing to the fact that most of them ceased to utilize this sacred substance consciously for coating their higher being-bodies, the result was ... invariably accompanied by what is called ‘mechanical suffering.’
...in the presences of three-brained beings it arises also in order that it might be consciously transformed in their common presences for coating their highest being-bodies for their own Being.
Before the second Transapalnian perturbation there, ... a being impulse began to be formed in them which later became predominant.
This impulse is now called 'pleasure'; and in order to satisfy it they had already begun to exist in a way unbecoming to three-centered beings, namely, most of them gradually began to remove this same sacred being-substance from themselves only for the satisfaction of the said impulse.
... owing to the fact that most of them ceased to utilize this sacred substance consciously for coating their higher being-bodies, the result was ... invariably accompanied by what is called ‘mechanical suffering.’
C said this passage had condemned pleasure. N said Taoist thought includes a theory that retention of semen could be used for spiritual development. GC said he believed Gurdjieff did not hold his in check.
... the poor ‘women orphans’ of that time, being already then more cunning and inventive than the men there, began to seek out and accustom beings of other forms of the given place to be their ‘partners.’
Well then, it was after these ‘partnerships’ that those kinds of beings also began to appear in our Great Universe who in themselves are, as our dear Mullah Nassr Eddin would say, ‘neither one thing nor the other.’
C said Gurdjieff was getting to the crux of the matter. He was talking about men or women, cohabiting with other creatures, and that this is how these different species evolved, because somehow or other we needed to mix with the animal kingdom. "R" said this could be understood in several different ways as well, for example to do with being more in one's animal nature. L thought we needed to take this as a shocking way of expressing a psychological idea about our being affected by mechanical influences.
... in certain surrounding conditions and with the participation of the third separately localized holy force of the sacred Triamazikamno, namely, the holy force called ‘Reconciling,’ the blending of these two Exioëharies arising in two distinct independent different beings just gives, owing to the process called ‘the process of the sacred Elmooarno’ which proceeds between those beings of opposite sex, the beginning for the arising of a new being.
D said this referred to the arising of modern man.
C asked what Triamazikamno meant. "R" said it was the Law of Three. C asked if this was the negative and positive force reconciling. "R" said it was. GC asked if there was also a Law of Three, The Father, The Son, and the Holy Ghost. "R" said that was another expression of something similar that belonged in its era. Many traditions had three forces.
C asked what Triamazikamno meant. "R" said it was the Law of Three. C asked if this was the negative and positive force reconciling. "R" said it was. GC asked if there was also a Law of Three, The Father, The Son, and the Holy Ghost. "R" said that was another expression of something similar that belonged in its era. Many traditions had three forces.
