N had had a month of quite strong feelings, sudden waves of emotion coming over him. His normal thing would be to do music, or write, but this time he started drawing. He drew faces or shapes, maybe symbolically of what he was thinking. He had found it was a good way of transforming the emotion and changing it, working with it, and seeing possible new dimensions in it. The main thing he was doing was trying to observe the emotions that came in, and see where they came from and what they gave him. He did not always have a book to hand to sketch things in, but he did find that when he was drawing it took his mind in to a different place in a different mode, and he thought it was beneficial. So it was an interesting exercise and a useful one.
J spoke of a previous experience, as he had not had any particular pain this month. He had gone through a difficult phase, and without having the conscious intention he did something in an artistic way.
It was utterly different from anything he had done previously. He had found that the mere fact of it being something completely different, not just a work of creativity, completely took his mind off what was the problem at the time. So it was a very cathartic thing to do, and he could not help thinking that it was also a natural thing for him to do. In a sense the difficulty, rather like the dung hill, produced the lilly, so as an exercise he thought it was a very good one.
T thought the exercise, as ever, was extremely difficult to remember to do, and think about, particularly this month. She usually painted, so thought about composing music, but there was too much in the way - she was too unskilled and she thought that helped the resistance. She did try it, but found it very difficult to relate to, because it was something new that she needed to learn and everything else got in the way. That was her self-observation - these exercises pulled you up short, because the fantasy was that you would do that exercise, no problem, every day, or at least once a week. She thought she did it once.
L's usual art was composing music, so he thought he would do some drawing, but managed to sabotage this quite successfully. He thought he would do it on his phone. He had a new phone.
The old one, which he had broken, had contained a stylus, but the new one did not, so first of all he had to find a stylus which worked with it, which took him quite some time. Eventually he found one, though the tip was too thick. He then had to regain familiarity with the drawing app on his phone, which was quite difficult. Although he had pain a few times, emotional or physical, he had made so many obstacles that he didn't do very much drawing. Of course, he should have got a little notepad, made of paper, and had a pencil with him. So that had not gone very well. It was a difficult exercise, and kudos to whoever managed to do it, because if you were used to working in one art, it took grit and determination to start doing something in a different art and keep going.
H said that although he had not been for a while, he had read about the exercise on the website, and found it very puzzling. He could get to understand it, but at the same time he had to write a poem for a class he went to, on Shakespeare sonnets and related things. He had found it very, very difficult. It was just a seven line stanza, but he had got the whole thing mixed up, and thought the "ABAB..." structure applied to a line rather than the stanza itself. He had eventually broken through that, and had brought the poem with him:
The Sparrow and the Ant
I thought I saw a sparrow in the sky
Swoop on an ant too small my sight to see.
Ant gone in an instant, wingless, not to fly.
Unlike the mating mother soon to be
Laying eggs in the earth in marvellous quantity.
More life for the sparrow's chirping progeny.
For ant, perhaps, a new eternity.
A had just discovered about Gurdjieff a week before. A lot of coincidences were happening, and he kept coming across the name Gurdjieff in a lot of different places. A lot of it was coming through music and dance. He was very interested in the Gurdjieff Movements and the idea of separating your body into sections and being able to follow different rhythms, but then he also realised that the dance goes along with the teaching. Then he discovered the blog and decided to come.
Following on A's description of recent coincidences, L quoted Jung: The psychological rule says that when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside, as fate. So coincidences may reflect things that were happening within us, but which we were not expressing or conscious of. T said that synchronistic experiences might feel amazing and unusual, but actually they were happening all the time, and it was about being aware of that, observing and noticing. There had to be a lot of external work, because the universe was giving us all these clues that we were missing.
The reading continued from Beelzebub's Tales, Chapter 23.
...Analyzing himself in this manner, he began to recall just which impulses evoked which reactions ... in his feelings and in his thoughts, and the state of his essence when he reacted to anything more or less attentively, and how and when, in consequence of such reactions of his, he had manifested consciously with his ‘I’ or had acted automatically under the direction of his instinct alone.
RG thought this paragraph was amazing, and in fact she was underlining it. This was exactly, to her, how she interpreted the way Gurdjieff said we have to meditate - that the real observation was to look at the impulses. She did not think he meant to meditate at one hole on the wall - that was more like a relaxation. This was one of the best pages she had read in this book so far. The last paragraph spoke of observing, when we had done something, whether we had done this automatically or consciously.
C asked if the act of self-remembering might in itself be distracting? L said that once you started to congratulate yourself over your success in self-remembering, the ego was already coming in, so Gurdjieff was suggesting there was hardly any "I". L paraphrased the title of one of Gurdjieff's books to say, I am only real, then, when when I create.. Many of the people who came to the Meetings were artists of one kind or another. C said, that when you were creating, you were outside of yourself. L said that when doing art, it was coming out of the inside. L thought that H had been real when he was doing the sonnet. H did not remember this.
H thought that a good way of self-remembering was to become aware of your sense of self, and you were not going to do that easily unless you initially became aware of the presence of your body in space, and a separation of what you were, and not being absorbed in everything. If you became aware of your own sense of self, you were, to some extent, self-remembering. Otherwise what self were you remembering? You were just sensing, generally speaking.
These exhaustive conscious observations and impartial constatations finally convinced Belcultassi that something proceeded in his own common presence not as it should have proceeded according to sane being-logic.
H thought the very last line was really good, it said - not as it should have proceeded according to sane being-logic - and that was something he had been aware of more and more, that he did not always proceed according to reason. Mostly it was just automatic, being absorbed, but even if you were more aware, sometimes the mechanical parts of you proceeded not according to reason, and that was what he seemed to be saying, that reason was not the way we normally always worked. It was usually mechanical in some way or another, like some other world you were working against, as it were.
RM said that the trouble was that our desire for something overruled reason. You want things to be like this but reason tells you they are not. I want to eat more but reason says I am going to get fat. We get overruled by that and get totally into a world of nonsense.
...With that aim he began inquiring among his friends and acquaintances to try to find out from them how they sensed it all and how they cognized their past and present perceptions and manifestations, doing this, of course, very discreetly, so as not to touch the aforementioned impulses inherent in them, namely, ‘self-love,’ ‘pride,’ and so on, which are unbecoming to three-brained beings.
Thanks to these inquiries, Belcultassi gradually succeeded in evoking sincerity in his friends and acquaintances, and as a result it turned out that all of them sensed and saw in themselves everything just the same as he did.
...Soon after, on the initiative of the same Belcultassi, they began to meet together from time to time, and to share their observations and new constatations.
After prolonged verifications, observations, and impartial constatations, this entire group of terrestrial beings also became categorically convinced, just like Belcultassi himself, that they were not as they ought to be.
RM said it was like the reason for playing chess. It was reasonable to make a move, but as soon as you made a good move, your ego goes "Hey, I've done a good job", and suddenly you got caught by that somewhere else, so you had to watch that you did not get caught by these things while you were reasoning things through. L said chess was a very good example, because we used reason to play it, but it was not computable, so reason was not enough, even for a computer.
T said it was highly emotional - if you listened to people describing the chess moves in the game, there were all sorts of emotive words used, which was a real surprise. L said the passage also implied that it needed a team of people to overcome this problem, because left by ourselves we slipped very quickly into automatic behaviour. So long as a few people were awake at any time, things could keep going.
...later they founded that society which they named the ‘Society of Akhaldans.’
...From the very beginning of the foundation of this society, Belcultassi himself stood at its head, and the subsequent actions of the beings of this society proceeded under his general guidance.
...But as it proved impossible for each and every one of them to acquire the necessary special knowledge, they divided themselves for convenience into a number of groups so that each group might separately study one of these special branches of knowledge required for their common aim.
RM got the sense he was describing here what should happen. There was a need to specialise in various aspects of what was going on without losing touch with what their main purpose was. He thought this alluded to Gurdjieff's own experience. In reality a lot of the groups that left Gurdjieff went off and did their own thing and lost touch with the core principle of self-observation. H said it was also a kind of description of what group he belonged to - The Seekers after Truth - their system was more or less what he had described. RM found the whole book was separated into two larger views. What we had read up to now about what humanity was like now, and now he was getting into the nuts and bolts of what we should be doing and how we should be observing.
J spoke of a previous experience, as he had not had any particular pain this month. He had gone through a difficult phase, and without having the conscious intention he did something in an artistic way.
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EXERCISE When you feel physical or emotional pain, do something creative in an art you do not normally do. |
T thought the exercise, as ever, was extremely difficult to remember to do, and think about, particularly this month. She usually painted, so thought about composing music, but there was too much in the way - she was too unskilled and she thought that helped the resistance. She did try it, but found it very difficult to relate to, because it was something new that she needed to learn and everything else got in the way. That was her self-observation - these exercises pulled you up short, because the fantasy was that you would do that exercise, no problem, every day, or at least once a week. She thought she did it once.
L's usual art was composing music, so he thought he would do some drawing, but managed to sabotage this quite successfully. He thought he would do it on his phone. He had a new phone.
Source: giphy.com |
H said that although he had not been for a while, he had read about the exercise on the website, and found it very puzzling. He could get to understand it, but at the same time he had to write a poem for a class he went to, on Shakespeare sonnets and related things. He had found it very, very difficult. It was just a seven line stanza, but he had got the whole thing mixed up, and thought the "ABAB..." structure applied to a line rather than the stanza itself. He had eventually broken through that, and had brought the poem with him:
I thought I saw a sparrow in the sky
Swoop on an ant too small my sight to see.
Ant gone in an instant, wingless, not to fly.
Unlike the mating mother soon to be
Laying eggs in the earth in marvellous quantity.
More life for the sparrow's chirping progeny.
For ant, perhaps, a new eternity.
A had just discovered about Gurdjieff a week before. A lot of coincidences were happening, and he kept coming across the name Gurdjieff in a lot of different places. A lot of it was coming through music and dance. He was very interested in the Gurdjieff Movements and the idea of separating your body into sections and being able to follow different rhythms, but then he also realised that the dance goes along with the teaching. Then he discovered the blog and decided to come.
Following on A's description of recent coincidences, L quoted Jung: The psychological rule says that when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside, as fate. So coincidences may reflect things that were happening within us, but which we were not expressing or conscious of. T said that synchronistic experiences might feel amazing and unusual, but actually they were happening all the time, and it was about being aware of that, observing and noticing. There had to be a lot of external work, because the universe was giving us all these clues that we were missing.
The reading continued from Beelzebub's Tales, Chapter 23.
...Analyzing himself in this manner, he began to recall just which impulses evoked which reactions ... in his feelings and in his thoughts, and the state of his essence when he reacted to anything more or less attentively, and how and when, in consequence of such reactions of his, he had manifested consciously with his ‘I’ or had acted automatically under the direction of his instinct alone.
RG thought this paragraph was amazing, and in fact she was underlining it. This was exactly, to her, how she interpreted the way Gurdjieff said we have to meditate - that the real observation was to look at the impulses. She did not think he meant to meditate at one hole on the wall - that was more like a relaxation. This was one of the best pages she had read in this book so far. The last paragraph spoke of observing, when we had done something, whether we had done this automatically or consciously.
C asked if the act of self-remembering might in itself be distracting? L said that once you started to congratulate yourself over your success in self-remembering, the ego was already coming in, so Gurdjieff was suggesting there was hardly any "I". L paraphrased the title of one of Gurdjieff's books to say, I am only real, then, when when I create.. Many of the people who came to the Meetings were artists of one kind or another. C said, that when you were creating, you were outside of yourself. L said that when doing art, it was coming out of the inside. L thought that H had been real when he was doing the sonnet. H did not remember this.
H thought that a good way of self-remembering was to become aware of your sense of self, and you were not going to do that easily unless you initially became aware of the presence of your body in space, and a separation of what you were, and not being absorbed in everything. If you became aware of your own sense of self, you were, to some extent, self-remembering. Otherwise what self were you remembering? You were just sensing, generally speaking.
These exhaustive conscious observations and impartial constatations finally convinced Belcultassi that something proceeded in his own common presence not as it should have proceeded according to sane being-logic.
H thought the very last line was really good, it said - not as it should have proceeded according to sane being-logic - and that was something he had been aware of more and more, that he did not always proceed according to reason. Mostly it was just automatic, being absorbed, but even if you were more aware, sometimes the mechanical parts of you proceeded not according to reason, and that was what he seemed to be saying, that reason was not the way we normally always worked. It was usually mechanical in some way or another, like some other world you were working against, as it were.
RM said that the trouble was that our desire for something overruled reason. You want things to be like this but reason tells you they are not. I want to eat more but reason says I am going to get fat. We get overruled by that and get totally into a world of nonsense.
...With that aim he began inquiring among his friends and acquaintances to try to find out from them how they sensed it all and how they cognized their past and present perceptions and manifestations, doing this, of course, very discreetly, so as not to touch the aforementioned impulses inherent in them, namely, ‘self-love,’ ‘pride,’ and so on, which are unbecoming to three-brained beings.
Thanks to these inquiries, Belcultassi gradually succeeded in evoking sincerity in his friends and acquaintances, and as a result it turned out that all of them sensed and saw in themselves everything just the same as he did.
...Soon after, on the initiative of the same Belcultassi, they began to meet together from time to time, and to share their observations and new constatations.
After prolonged verifications, observations, and impartial constatations, this entire group of terrestrial beings also became categorically convinced, just like Belcultassi himself, that they were not as they ought to be.
RM said it was like the reason for playing chess. It was reasonable to make a move, but as soon as you made a good move, your ego goes "Hey, I've done a good job", and suddenly you got caught by that somewhere else, so you had to watch that you did not get caught by these things while you were reasoning things through. L said chess was a very good example, because we used reason to play it, but it was not computable, so reason was not enough, even for a computer.
T said it was highly emotional - if you listened to people describing the chess moves in the game, there were all sorts of emotive words used, which was a real surprise. L said the passage also implied that it needed a team of people to overcome this problem, because left by ourselves we slipped very quickly into automatic behaviour. So long as a few people were awake at any time, things could keep going.
...later they founded that society which they named the ‘Society of Akhaldans.’
...From the very beginning of the foundation of this society, Belcultassi himself stood at its head, and the subsequent actions of the beings of this society proceeded under his general guidance.
...But as it proved impossible for each and every one of them to acquire the necessary special knowledge, they divided themselves for convenience into a number of groups so that each group might separately study one of these special branches of knowledge required for their common aim.
RM got the sense he was describing here what should happen. There was a need to specialise in various aspects of what was going on without losing touch with what their main purpose was. He thought this alluded to Gurdjieff's own experience. In reality a lot of the groups that left Gurdjieff went off and did their own thing and lost touch with the core principle of self-observation. H said it was also a kind of description of what group he belonged to - The Seekers after Truth - their system was more or less what he had described. RM found the whole book was separated into two larger views. What we had read up to now about what humanity was like now, and now he was getting into the nuts and bolts of what we should be doing and how we should be observing.
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