L had found this EXERCISE difficult in that the original idea was just to let the thought go, and the additional requirement to focus on the body changed its nature.
Information for
Next Meeting
4 June 2017 at 9am
EXERCISE
READING
Disclaimer and Notes However he attempted it, and it reminded him of his one-minute meditations in which attention moves variously between what is seen, what is heard, and what is physically felt. As for the benefits of the exercise, we were all prone to thoughts straying, and it did seem to be quite an effective way of bringing us back to earth, and maybe we were not conscious enough of the body; we did not talk about the body very much in these Meetings. He had also discovered, which he thought was of interest, was that the concept of the Gurdjieff Group didn't start with Gurdjieff, it was an idea of Ouspensky.
What N found difficult was that he was not aware all the time when he was involved in a thinking process, so it was tricky to know when it started and ended. There were certain days when he had more clarity on that issue, especially if he had been working on a professional problem, or writing a document, there was a more definitive process, and he could do that. Going around his everyday life, he liked the idea of thinking, or the thinking process, as a tool which you might put away after you had done it, and then be more aware of your body in daily life, so he thought it was a nice concept to work with and it was an interesting thing. We kept on thinking even when we didn't need to think. One day he went on the tube, and there was a quite an interesting quote on display in the station which he wrote down that day: Feelings are like waves. We can't stop them from coming but we can choose which one to surf. He thought it was quite a playful one, you didn't have to go with every emotion that came in, but when you became aware of what emotions were going through your body, you could then enjoy them at some level.
For RG meditation was more like observing herself and having this quiet time when she thought of her body, what it was doing, and her breathing. She thought it was impossible to stop the thoughts, but she normally let them pass by, without putting too much emphasis on the thoughts, and all the time trying to reconnect with herself, within herself. The emotions were also part of the influences that we absorbed. Why were we happy? Why were we sad? Were these really inside her or were they because of something else. It was difficult to remember yourself every day because we were so much engaged with everything else, and we had to do everything in a rush, and we forgot. But when she remembered herself and looked inside herself, she breathed better, was more grounded, and also felt more stable.
T had found the meaning of the exercise very difficult to absorb. The awareness she had was how thoughts were there all the time, in varying degrees of decibels.
She thought she was permanently distracted when she walked down the street. The main thing she experienced was how divorced the thinking was from the body, which was awful. That was judgemental, but that was how it was. The thoughts were buzzing around, and the body was doing its thing, very obediently.
Responding to what RG had said about feelings and emotions we have, L wondered if the practice of art was related to this. If you were painting a portrait of somebody in a passionate or emotional state, you would not be passionate or emotional. You would be trying to mix the right colour and shade for the skin of that part of the profile. L was writing a piece of music at the moment, and was in a section which was very emotional, and full of passion, but he was quite rationally trying to work out harmonies. So what was this emotion and what was this passion? And what was this state of standing back? It must be the same for a novelist who was writing about people engaged in a drama and the turmoil they were in, but was the writer in that turmoil? No, he wasn't, he was thinking about out how long that chapter should be, at what proportion in the novel to put the climax, when was the turning point. T asked if L was saying that the author, or the painter, or the composer was the witness. L said yes, the state of being an artist was like the state of being a witness. Engaging in the practice of art of any kind, if you were doing it well you had to become a witness. The emotional process and passion could get in the way. C said that the writer only really knew the emotion he was writing about if he had experienced something similar himself. N said that Wordsworth talked about art and poetry being emotion recollected in tranquillity. In a sense we were talking about being artists of our own life, we were witnessing without becoming identified. C said that these emotions attached themselves to us. They were not real in themselves. We were placid really, deep down inside, the essence was just watching these things. L quoted Erich Fromm: Most people die before they are fully born. Creativeness means to be born before one dies. L said that maybe these emotions we could stand back from and observe were the shell that had formed through which we were going to break.
Following on from N's contribution, J said you could probably choose what thoughts you wanted to accentuate or emphasise, just as you could choose which emotions you could surf in on. The problem he saw was wanting to be an observer of yourself all the time, as opposed to the times when you were recollecting emotion in tranquillity. What were we designed for? We weren't, aeons ago, put on this Earth to sit and contemplate lotus flowers. We were put on this Earth to accomplish things. We were purposive beings. If you had a purpose, whether it was a composition, or a work of art, or thinking about yourself, or accentuating your thoughts or feelings, you had to realise that the biological programming, the hard-wiring, is going to get in the way of the sort of exercise we were talking about. So if you assume the mind needs a purpose, then, you give it a bluff purpose, perhaps. If you are on a train, you see around you movement. Then the mind thinks it is accomplishing something, and that is what will enable you to focus on the emotion or the thinking about yourself. The other problem about thinking too much about yourself, at all times, as opposed to when that is the exercise, is that it gets in the way of what it is one is trying to accomplish. If you were trying to write a poem, part of that could be thinking about how many lines, how many words, quavers.
Thinking about that was part of the process, but if you were thinking about thinking about it, you were reducing your hundred percent concentration on that object. So there was a time and a place for all these things, and the time and the place was not all the time, everywhere. The thoughts and the body are two different things, but they well out like a candle flame out of the wax. There was a connection, but it was not coextensive. D said he thought thinking about thinking meant you were observing, and more efficient. If you were lost in something, you could not see the rest of it. You had to step back from it to see the clarity of it, to choose what you want to put in. L said that in the case of autobiographical work, the writer is observing his own thinking, but in writing about other people, it might, in a sense, be truer, as the writer is able to step back.
RG said that when we write a piece of music or something where we have to put a structure, at that moment it is the intellectual centre that is working. How is the emotion in that moment? Am I aware of my body? What is my body doing? She thought that Gurdjieff said that when we did something, we had to be aware of all three at the same time, and that was the difficulty, because normally if you started to write, for example, a poem, it seemed to her to need just the intellectual side.
The Meeting continued reading from Beelzebub's Tales, Chapter 23.
“Concerning this cosmic law just mentioned, it is now absolutely necessary to tell you that it arose and began to exist in the Universe after the fundamental sacred law of Triamazikamno was changed by OUR CREATOR for the purpose of rendering the Heropass harmless, and after its previously totally independent holy parts had begun to be dependent upon forces coming from outside.
...“Meanwhile know, concerning this question, that in general everywhere on normally existing planets of our Great Universe the Exioëhary formed in the presence of a three-brained being who has perceptive and transformative organs for localizing the holy affirming part of the sacred Triamazikamno, that is to say, a Keschapmartnian being of the male sex, can, owing to the just-mentioned cosmic law, never be blended with the Exioëhary formed in the presence of a Keschapmartnian two-brained being of the opposite sex.
“At the same time, the Exioëhary formed in the three-brained Keschapmartnian being of the female sex can sometimes—in those cases when a special combination of the blending of cosmic forces is obtained and the mentioned law comes into effect—be completely blended under certain surrounding conditions with the Exioëhary formed in two-brained Keschapmartnian beings of the male sex, but only as the active factor in such an actualizing process of the fundamental sacred Triamazikamno.
C said that Gurdjieff is saying that there is only one way to recreate a new human being, and we shouldn't use our sperm for discredited means. GC said that Gurdjieff did, was he now telling us not to? T said that the males were separated from the females, so the males did pederasty and the females did bestiality. J asked if he had missed something when he had not attended last time. T said it could be too that women were considered over these generations and millennia, the second sex, somehow lower than the male, and this section was saying that both were required and equal.
L said he was talking about where life in general came from. What made the universe animate? Was it everywhere? We did not know yet, but were trying to find traces of it on Mars.
“In short, during the said terrible years on this planet of yours, a result very rare in the Universe was obtained, that is to say, there was obtained the blending of the Exioëharies of two Keschapmartnian beings of different brain systems of opposite sexes; and as a result, there arose the ancestors of these terrestrial ‘misconceived’ beings now called apes, who give your favourites no peace and who from time to time agitate their strange Reason.
T wondered if he was talking about other human beings who were animalistic, violent or excessively emotional. J said he seemed to be implying that in the beginning there was something like homo sapiens, and the animal kingdom came thereafter, which was quite an interesting way round. L said he thought he was talking about the personal development of human beings. C asked if we understood apes as bipeds or quadrupeds. T said they used their hands when walking. C said he did not think he was taking evolution into account. He had heard in a programme that there were up to 270 primates. Elephants had similar sized brains to us, and so had other creatures, but they did not have the same capacity as us, and scientists were trying to find out why.
The programme said that diet was a more important factor than sociability, and going from eating leaves and branches to fruit made a tremendous difference. L said that elephants eat both leaves and fruit. C said that sometimes fruit is very difficult to get at, for example pineapples. Would any creature other than us look at a pineapple and eat it? GC said that if you gave a monkey a pineapple, who had never seen one before, he would know what to do with it.
“... but on the other hand that what are called the ‘psychic features’ of all the separate species of these apes there are absolutely identical, even down to details, with those of the psyche of the three-brained beings there of the ‘female sex.’”
At this point of his tales, Beelzebub made a long pause and looking at his favourite Hassein with a smile which very clearly expressed a double meaning ...
D asked why he brought the word psychic in here. L said he was relating this to human women, and asked why men were not included to. T said he was separating out the sexes, and whether it was complimentary or derogatory was unsure. N repeated Gurdjieff's description of Beelzebub smiling expressing a double meaning; so it was very hard to know what Gurdjieff was really saying about all this.
“In the text of the etherogram which I have just received, it is further said that in order this time finally to settle who has descended from whom — whether they from the apes or the apes from them — these freaks, your favourites, have even decided to carry out ‘scientific experiments,’ and furthermore that several of them have already left for the continent of Africa where many of these apes breed, with the object of bringing back from there the number required for these ‘scientific investigations’ of theirs.
C said Gurdjieff was leaving it open we came from the apes or the apes from us. L said he was also saying that our free thinking, our individuality, evolves from a state of automatic behaviour.
Next Meeting
4 June 2017 at 9am
EXERCISE
READING
Disclaimer and Notes However he attempted it, and it reminded him of his one-minute meditations in which attention moves variously between what is seen, what is heard, and what is physically felt. As for the benefits of the exercise, we were all prone to thoughts straying, and it did seem to be quite an effective way of bringing us back to earth, and maybe we were not conscious enough of the body; we did not talk about the body very much in these Meetings. He had also discovered, which he thought was of interest, was that the concept of the Gurdjieff Group didn't start with Gurdjieff, it was an idea of Ouspensky.
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EXERCISE
Once a day, after a thinking process has finished, put the mind away as you would a tool, and put your attention on your body for a minute. |
For RG meditation was more like observing herself and having this quiet time when she thought of her body, what it was doing, and her breathing. She thought it was impossible to stop the thoughts, but she normally let them pass by, without putting too much emphasis on the thoughts, and all the time trying to reconnect with herself, within herself. The emotions were also part of the influences that we absorbed. Why were we happy? Why were we sad? Were these really inside her or were they because of something else. It was difficult to remember yourself every day because we were so much engaged with everything else, and we had to do everything in a rush, and we forgot. But when she remembered herself and looked inside herself, she breathed better, was more grounded, and also felt more stable.
T had found the meaning of the exercise very difficult to absorb. The awareness she had was how thoughts were there all the time, in varying degrees of decibels.
She thought she was permanently distracted when she walked down the street. The main thing she experienced was how divorced the thinking was from the body, which was awful. That was judgemental, but that was how it was. The thoughts were buzzing around, and the body was doing its thing, very obediently.
Responding to what RG had said about feelings and emotions we have, L wondered if the practice of art was related to this. If you were painting a portrait of somebody in a passionate or emotional state, you would not be passionate or emotional. You would be trying to mix the right colour and shade for the skin of that part of the profile. L was writing a piece of music at the moment, and was in a section which was very emotional, and full of passion, but he was quite rationally trying to work out harmonies. So what was this emotion and what was this passion? And what was this state of standing back? It must be the same for a novelist who was writing about people engaged in a drama and the turmoil they were in, but was the writer in that turmoil? No, he wasn't, he was thinking about out how long that chapter should be, at what proportion in the novel to put the climax, when was the turning point. T asked if L was saying that the author, or the painter, or the composer was the witness. L said yes, the state of being an artist was like the state of being a witness. Engaging in the practice of art of any kind, if you were doing it well you had to become a witness. The emotional process and passion could get in the way. C said that the writer only really knew the emotion he was writing about if he had experienced something similar himself. N said that Wordsworth talked about art and poetry being emotion recollected in tranquillity. In a sense we were talking about being artists of our own life, we were witnessing without becoming identified. C said that these emotions attached themselves to us. They were not real in themselves. We were placid really, deep down inside, the essence was just watching these things. L quoted Erich Fromm: Most people die before they are fully born. Creativeness means to be born before one dies. L said that maybe these emotions we could stand back from and observe were the shell that had formed through which we were going to break.
Following on from N's contribution, J said you could probably choose what thoughts you wanted to accentuate or emphasise, just as you could choose which emotions you could surf in on. The problem he saw was wanting to be an observer of yourself all the time, as opposed to the times when you were recollecting emotion in tranquillity. What were we designed for? We weren't, aeons ago, put on this Earth to sit and contemplate lotus flowers. We were put on this Earth to accomplish things. We were purposive beings. If you had a purpose, whether it was a composition, or a work of art, or thinking about yourself, or accentuating your thoughts or feelings, you had to realise that the biological programming, the hard-wiring, is going to get in the way of the sort of exercise we were talking about. So if you assume the mind needs a purpose, then, you give it a bluff purpose, perhaps. If you are on a train, you see around you movement. Then the mind thinks it is accomplishing something, and that is what will enable you to focus on the emotion or the thinking about yourself. The other problem about thinking too much about yourself, at all times, as opposed to when that is the exercise, is that it gets in the way of what it is one is trying to accomplish. If you were trying to write a poem, part of that could be thinking about how many lines, how many words, quavers.
Thinking about that was part of the process, but if you were thinking about thinking about it, you were reducing your hundred percent concentration on that object. So there was a time and a place for all these things, and the time and the place was not all the time, everywhere. The thoughts and the body are two different things, but they well out like a candle flame out of the wax. There was a connection, but it was not coextensive. D said he thought thinking about thinking meant you were observing, and more efficient. If you were lost in something, you could not see the rest of it. You had to step back from it to see the clarity of it, to choose what you want to put in. L said that in the case of autobiographical work, the writer is observing his own thinking, but in writing about other people, it might, in a sense, be truer, as the writer is able to step back.
RG said that when we write a piece of music or something where we have to put a structure, at that moment it is the intellectual centre that is working. How is the emotion in that moment? Am I aware of my body? What is my body doing? She thought that Gurdjieff said that when we did something, we had to be aware of all three at the same time, and that was the difficulty, because normally if you started to write, for example, a poem, it seemed to her to need just the intellectual side.
The Meeting continued reading from Beelzebub's Tales, Chapter 23.
“Concerning this cosmic law just mentioned, it is now absolutely necessary to tell you that it arose and began to exist in the Universe after the fundamental sacred law of Triamazikamno was changed by OUR CREATOR for the purpose of rendering the Heropass harmless, and after its previously totally independent holy parts had begun to be dependent upon forces coming from outside.
...“Meanwhile know, concerning this question, that in general everywhere on normally existing planets of our Great Universe the Exioëhary formed in the presence of a three-brained being who has perceptive and transformative organs for localizing the holy affirming part of the sacred Triamazikamno, that is to say, a Keschapmartnian being of the male sex, can, owing to the just-mentioned cosmic law, never be blended with the Exioëhary formed in the presence of a Keschapmartnian two-brained being of the opposite sex.
“At the same time, the Exioëhary formed in the three-brained Keschapmartnian being of the female sex can sometimes—in those cases when a special combination of the blending of cosmic forces is obtained and the mentioned law comes into effect—be completely blended under certain surrounding conditions with the Exioëhary formed in two-brained Keschapmartnian beings of the male sex, but only as the active factor in such an actualizing process of the fundamental sacred Triamazikamno.
C said that Gurdjieff is saying that there is only one way to recreate a new human being, and we shouldn't use our sperm for discredited means. GC said that Gurdjieff did, was he now telling us not to? T said that the males were separated from the females, so the males did pederasty and the females did bestiality. J asked if he had missed something when he had not attended last time. T said it could be too that women were considered over these generations and millennia, the second sex, somehow lower than the male, and this section was saying that both were required and equal.
“In short, during the said terrible years on this planet of yours, a result very rare in the Universe was obtained, that is to say, there was obtained the blending of the Exioëharies of two Keschapmartnian beings of different brain systems of opposite sexes; and as a result, there arose the ancestors of these terrestrial ‘misconceived’ beings now called apes, who give your favourites no peace and who from time to time agitate their strange Reason.
T wondered if he was talking about other human beings who were animalistic, violent or excessively emotional. J said he seemed to be implying that in the beginning there was something like homo sapiens, and the animal kingdom came thereafter, which was quite an interesting way round. L said he thought he was talking about the personal development of human beings. C asked if we understood apes as bipeds or quadrupeds. T said they used their hands when walking. C said he did not think he was taking evolution into account. He had heard in a programme that there were up to 270 primates. Elephants had similar sized brains to us, and so had other creatures, but they did not have the same capacity as us, and scientists were trying to find out why.
“... but on the other hand that what are called the ‘psychic features’ of all the separate species of these apes there are absolutely identical, even down to details, with those of the psyche of the three-brained beings there of the ‘female sex.’”
At this point of his tales, Beelzebub made a long pause and looking at his favourite Hassein with a smile which very clearly expressed a double meaning ...
D asked why he brought the word psychic in here. L said he was relating this to human women, and asked why men were not included to. T said he was separating out the sexes, and whether it was complimentary or derogatory was unsure. N repeated Gurdjieff's description of Beelzebub smiling expressing a double meaning; so it was very hard to know what Gurdjieff was really saying about all this.
“In the text of the etherogram which I have just received, it is further said that in order this time finally to settle who has descended from whom — whether they from the apes or the apes from them — these freaks, your favourites, have even decided to carry out ‘scientific experiments,’ and furthermore that several of them have already left for the continent of Africa where many of these apes breed, with the object of bringing back from there the number required for these ‘scientific investigations’ of theirs.
C said Gurdjieff was leaving it open we came from the apes or the apes from us. L said he was also saying that our free thinking, our individuality, evolves from a state of automatic behaviour.
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