N said that when he shifted his attention,
he found that he was still aware of what was going on in the street,
but he was also aware of these other things happening as well.
It increased the level of his consciousness,
and the more he did it
the more he found it added to
a state of awareness in the course of the day.
It was quite a pleasant
CHALLENGE to do as well,
just to remind himself,
and bring himself back
into separate reality and not be absorbed totally by things in front of him.
D said that on his way, he became very aware of a weeping willow, with a huge canopy, and he stood under it. He had walked up that road many times, and never noticed it. A bit further on, he saw a huge white mansion, that he had never really noticed. He thought this challenge had calmed him down, and he had not been lost in conditioned thoughts. The colours suddenly bounced into his consciousness. He had suggested this challenge but did not know where he had read it.
When T started it, she thought to herself that it was no different from what she was doing all the time, in a visual sense, being aware, through painting, so she thought that this was not going to impinge on her that much. She had been attempting to do it more consciously, and she found that on two occasions she fell over, because she was more absorbed in the peripheral visions, than she would otherwise be, which had really surprised her. She thought what happened was that she directed attention to the peripherals and then forgot where she was. She had not been looking consciously at the pavement in front of her. The challenge had tripped her up.
"R" said she had been doing a lot of travelling over the previous month, and she found how little attention she usually gave to the scenery that was going past. She tried to use this as a reminder to sense herself, because she had got an opportunity to sense where she was, otherwise it was just another distraction.
L had been prejudiced about this challenge because it was a Gurdjieff Meeting, and he thought everything we did should be about Gurdjieff, but he did try it a few times. He was a person who tried to develop a centre, and look where he was going, but to look for something else, a distraction, was taking him away from his focus and his direction. It was lovely to walk along the street, and then if he was looking too much at one thing, to look at something else, but it was also like one distracting thought succeeding another. It was the opposite of how he saw the Gurdjieff Work, which helps take us away from the state of mind where we are constantly distracted.
O had tried to divert her attention to something insignificant, and noticed that it drew her attention to the miraculous nature of the insignificant. In a way, it was a different kind of fascination, rather than divided attention, a higher awareness rather than just treating the insignificant as triviality.
When GC realised that he had been getting involved with thinking that was like a soap opera, he would say to himself. for example, Tree!, and his attention would be diverted outwards to the trees, and the thinking would stop. When you actually had to think about something, then obviously you did not need to divert your attention, but the amount of time during the day that we thought about things that needed thinking about was very small, and at other times we were just dreaming.
GC said he could not understand how L could say that that challenge had nothing to do with Gurdjieff. L said that normally we could do a direct link to something Gurdjieff had written in Beelzebub's Tales, or something we had been discussing during that Meeting about Gurdjieff, but in this case by the last minute of the 10 minutes allocated to deciding a challenge, we had still not come up with one. Then D remembered this thing he had read somewhere, but did not remember where. From that point of view, L was not sure there was a direct link with Gurdjieff. N said he thought it was very much to do with self-remembering and the Gurdjieff Work.
Responding to GC, L said that rather than being aware of having a set of thoughts, and then looking at something else and having a different set of thoughts, GC's idea was to put a stop to those thoughts, which was different from what D had suggested. GC said that everybody had personalised the challenge.
Following the responses to the contributions, the reading continued from Chapter 25 of Beelzebub's Tales.
“As for the information which passed from generation to generation through the ordinary mass of beings of that planet, it has either completely disappeared, having been soon forgotten, or there remains of it, as our dear Mullah Nassr Eddin expresses it, only the ‘tail-and-mane-and-food-for-Scheherazade.’
...How the contemporary learned beings of the planet Earth concoct their hotchpotch ... is very well defined in one of the wise sentences of our dear Mullah Nassr Eddin, which consists of the following words: "A flea exists in the World just for one thing— that when it sneezes, that deluge should occur with the description of which our learned beings love so much to busy themselves."
L said that if you had a body of knowledge which you wanted to transmit for, maybe, hundreds of thousands of years in the future, it was almost impossible, because as soon as you started talking about it, it started to diverge. L said that the bit about the flea sneezing was similar to the question of how many angels can dance on the end of a needle. T said that the flea was the tiniest thing, yet the sneeze was a deluge. L said that something inconsequential might lead to a whole science. O said that James Joyce was a case in point - he wrote his book, and he said that all the academics read his book over and over to interpret it.
'To me, a trifling particle of the whole of the GREAT WHOLE, it was commanded from Above to be coated with the planetary body of a three-centered being of this planet and to assist all other such beings arising and existing upon it to free themselves from the consequences of the properties of that organ which, for great and important reasons, was actualized in the presences of their ancestors.
'All the sacred Individuals here before me ... have always endeavored while striving for the same aim to accomplish the task laid upon them through one or other of those three sacred ways for self-perfecting, foreordained by OUR ENDLESS CREATOR HIMSELF , namely, through the sacred ways based on the being-impulses called “Faith,” “Hope,” and “Love.”'
O asked why it was so important to assist all other beings. "R" said it was because the world was in a perilous state. L said that this assertion was in quotation marks, so it was one of the characters saying it. O asked why Gurdjieff was implying that there was a Creator in the first place. L said he thought Gurdjieff was playing off those who set themselves up as teachers against those who follow teachers too blindly.
|
Once a day, when you walk down the street,
shift your consciousness to something different
that you feel is unimportant, that hasn't grabbed your attention.
|
D said that on his way, he became very aware of a weeping willow, with a huge canopy, and he stood under it. He had walked up that road many times, and never noticed it. A bit further on, he saw a huge white mansion, that he had never really noticed. He thought this challenge had calmed him down, and he had not been lost in conditioned thoughts. The colours suddenly bounced into his consciousness. He had suggested this challenge but did not know where he had read it.
When T started it, she thought to herself that it was no different from what she was doing all the time, in a visual sense, being aware, through painting, so she thought that this was not going to impinge on her that much. She had been attempting to do it more consciously, and she found that on two occasions she fell over, because she was more absorbed in the peripheral visions, than she would otherwise be, which had really surprised her. She thought what happened was that she directed attention to the peripherals and then forgot where she was. She had not been looking consciously at the pavement in front of her. The challenge had tripped her up.
"R" said she had been doing a lot of travelling over the previous month, and she found how little attention she usually gave to the scenery that was going past. She tried to use this as a reminder to sense herself, because she had got an opportunity to sense where she was, otherwise it was just another distraction.
L had been prejudiced about this challenge because it was a Gurdjieff Meeting, and he thought everything we did should be about Gurdjieff, but he did try it a few times. He was a person who tried to develop a centre, and look where he was going, but to look for something else, a distraction, was taking him away from his focus and his direction. It was lovely to walk along the street, and then if he was looking too much at one thing, to look at something else, but it was also like one distracting thought succeeding another. It was the opposite of how he saw the Gurdjieff Work, which helps take us away from the state of mind where we are constantly distracted.
O had tried to divert her attention to something insignificant, and noticed that it drew her attention to the miraculous nature of the insignificant. In a way, it was a different kind of fascination, rather than divided attention, a higher awareness rather than just treating the insignificant as triviality.
When GC realised that he had been getting involved with thinking that was like a soap opera, he would say to himself. for example, Tree!, and his attention would be diverted outwards to the trees, and the thinking would stop. When you actually had to think about something, then obviously you did not need to divert your attention, but the amount of time during the day that we thought about things that needed thinking about was very small, and at other times we were just dreaming.
GC said he could not understand how L could say that that challenge had nothing to do with Gurdjieff. L said that normally we could do a direct link to something Gurdjieff had written in Beelzebub's Tales, or something we had been discussing during that Meeting about Gurdjieff, but in this case by the last minute of the 10 minutes allocated to deciding a challenge, we had still not come up with one. Then D remembered this thing he had read somewhere, but did not remember where. From that point of view, L was not sure there was a direct link with Gurdjieff. N said he thought it was very much to do with self-remembering and the Gurdjieff Work.
Responding to GC, L said that rather than being aware of having a set of thoughts, and then looking at something else and having a different set of thoughts, GC's idea was to put a stop to those thoughts, which was different from what D had suggested. GC said that everybody had personalised the challenge.
Following the responses to the contributions, the reading continued from Chapter 25 of Beelzebub's Tales.
“As for the information which passed from generation to generation through the ordinary mass of beings of that planet, it has either completely disappeared, having been soon forgotten, or there remains of it, as our dear Mullah Nassr Eddin expresses it, only the ‘tail-and-mane-and-food-for-Scheherazade.’
...How the contemporary learned beings of the planet Earth concoct their hotchpotch ... is very well defined in one of the wise sentences of our dear Mullah Nassr Eddin, which consists of the following words: "A flea exists in the World just for one thing— that when it sneezes, that deluge should occur with the description of which our learned beings love so much to busy themselves."
L said that if you had a body of knowledge which you wanted to transmit for, maybe, hundreds of thousands of years in the future, it was almost impossible, because as soon as you started talking about it, it started to diverge. L said that the bit about the flea sneezing was similar to the question of how many angels can dance on the end of a needle. T said that the flea was the tiniest thing, yet the sneeze was a deluge. L said that something inconsequential might lead to a whole science. O said that James Joyce was a case in point - he wrote his book, and he said that all the academics read his book over and over to interpret it.
'All the sacred Individuals here before me ... have always endeavored while striving for the same aim to accomplish the task laid upon them through one or other of those three sacred ways for self-perfecting, foreordained by OUR ENDLESS CREATOR HIMSELF , namely, through the sacred ways based on the being-impulses called “Faith,” “Hope,” and “Love.”'
O asked why it was so important to assist all other beings. "R" said it was because the world was in a perilous state. L said that this assertion was in quotation marks, so it was one of the characters saying it. O asked why Gurdjieff was implying that there was a Creator in the first place. L said he thought Gurdjieff was playing off those who set themselves up as teachers against those who follow teachers too blindly.
