L tended to be a little thick-skinned and did not react too much, but he did find himself reacting on several occasions. On one occasion he had arranged to meet with somebody at a particular location, and it was a cold night, and the friend decided at the last minute to meet somewhere else, which was warmer for him, so L had ended up walking a long way in the cold.
L felt that if you made an arrangement to meet somebody, at a time and place, you would go to that place, so he felt himself reacting in annoyance, and he realised and then he consciously blinked. So that was an example, and this happened several times during the month, he observed himself having reactions, and he blinked. He liked blinking as the physical action, which is symbolic of waking up, and one of the first things we do when we wake.
O spoke of someone who was a very kind and generous person, but she always spoke in a way that made you feel she was telling you off, and O's automatic reaction was to argue back. At a certain point O realised that this was just the person's style. The person was not really telling her off. She had had to accommodate the complexity of the situation and the person, and just let it be, and it was a lot better. She thought this was an interesting observation, which can be generalised to apply with any person. People come with different styles and we interpret all the time, and we react automatically. The point is, how do you catch yourself doing it?
J said that one of his guests at Christmas, when he was slightly under pressure for getting the lunch ready on time, said "Let's do without the Queen's Speech," and to J, this was such an outrage, that his reaction was not as it might have been to someone who had come along for a nice Christmas day. Your reaction in a case like that did not permit, unless you really trained yourself to have the space or the time, of being able to check your reaction; it was too spontaneous. J distinguished between the reaction in the outside world to other people, and the reaction you observe in yourself. There was this difficulty in terms of reactions in the outside world, to other people, of restraint. What was said to him, to incur that reaction, was so shocking, so contrary to what one would normally believe, that it was an infringement.
During the month T had been remembering the CHALLENGE, and wondering what the automatic behaviour was. It had happened quite a lot, particularly over the Christmas period, being with people who were related. But it was after the event, when she felt rising anger, the solar plexus in absolute torment and anguish, remembering what had happened. At the time she hadn't remembered the Challenge, but it was after the events that repercussions and re-triggering happened, and there she was, sitting, elbows on the kitchen table, feeling this rage, and only then remembering to blink. She had come to the conclusion that emotional triggering, usually anger - suppressed anger - happened when other people's actions were completely unthinkable to her.
D said that what T had said was very important, because you could not escape - full stop - because it was going to come up, whatever you did. So there was no problem with reacting at the time, when you thought about it logically and rationally, because you were going to be affected, maybe hours later, a day later. So all these so called esoteric teachings might not be suitable or appropriate. So react, maybe you won't feel this terrible feeling later on. There was no right or wrong, it was how you react or how you feel about yourself, and how you deal with things. You will take the consequences whatever happens.
Responding to J and O, T wanted to hear if they blinked or not, because it was the body part of the Challenge, connecting the body with the brain and the heart. J replied that the reaction preempted blinking, it was so quick. By the time the moment had passed he was in a position to check what he was saying, engage the brain before the mouth. When the emotion of the moment had passed, and it had been almost too late the moment he realised, myes, he had blinked when he thought of it.
O thought we were making a very artificial distinction with the mind and the body. T had been very angry, and had felt it all over her body. The body had reacted anyway, so what was the point of blinking? Maybe the blinking was raising your awareness for something, but automatically your body is involved in the reaction. T said that what the Challenge did was take it out of the sea of it happening all the time, and not being aware of it happening and riding the waves of daily life - it had made it into something which was less of the sea and more of a thing which you could get hold of. RM said that the blinking, for him, was acknowledging that he had noticed what had happened. If he did not blink (or did not have some physical thing to do), the whole event passed him, he did not even notice that anything had happened, so the blinking was really important because it was an acknowledgement, like Know Thyself. It was telling him that this was what he had done.
The reading then continued from Chapter 28 of Beelzebub's Tales.
... "hordes" with the arch-vainglorious Greek called "Alexander-of-Macedonia" at their head, were dispatched thence and passed almost everywhere over the continent of Asia, they made, as it is said, a "clean sweep" from the surface of that ill-fated planet of everything that had been established and had still been preserved and carried out; so clean a sweep, that it left not even the trace of the memory that there could once have existed on the surface of their planet such a "bliss" ...
O said this sense about the generation of knowledge was interesting. There had been a few people who wrote in a way that people could not easily understand. One of them was Jacques Lacan, a French psychoanalyst. There had been other people in the past who wrote esoterically in such a way, that people would not use it in a simplistic, twisted way, so that it would only be accessible to people who wanted to know something like that and investigate properly. RM said that one thing he had noticed through all the great teachings was that the most effective teachings were done by telling a story, not instruction.
L said that people like Gurdjieff and Lacan incorporated what they were saying into geometrical structures. You could not explain a shape, but by associating psychological concepts and feelings around different parts of the topology, there could be a basis for discussion between people and self-considering of emotional relevance.
If these separate aspects of the entire ‘spectrum’ of Naloo-osnian-impulses are described according to the notions of your favourites and expressed in their language, they might then be defined as follows:
(1) Every kind of depravity, conscious as well as unconscious
(2)The feeling of self-satisfaction from leading others astray
(3) The irresistible inclination to destroy the existence of other breathing creatures
(4) The urge to become free from the necessity of actualizing the being-efforts demanded by Nature
(5) The attempt by every kind of artificiality to conceal from others what in their opinion are one's physical defects
(6) The calm self-contentment in the use of what is not personally deserved
(7) The striving to be not what one is.
RM said he was one of those people, to one degree or another, he could see them all in himself. He thought this was where compassion comes from. It was only because he saw it in himself, that he could understand it in other people. N said it was the evil inclination. T asked about the fourth in the list: The urge to become free from the necessity of actualizing the being-efforts demanded by Nature. O said that people have short-cuts to achieve - if you like me you will give me this - but they might give it to you and you would not value it, unless you made the effort to get it. L said he had come across people who embody the sixth one - a calm self-contentment in the use of what is not personally deserved. J said it was interesting that each person seemed to have alighted on one particular defect.
| Once a day, when you become aware that you have reacted to something automatically, observe yourself, consider how compulsively you reacted, and blink once consciously. |
O spoke of someone who was a very kind and generous person, but she always spoke in a way that made you feel she was telling you off, and O's automatic reaction was to argue back. At a certain point O realised that this was just the person's style. The person was not really telling her off. She had had to accommodate the complexity of the situation and the person, and just let it be, and it was a lot better. She thought this was an interesting observation, which can be generalised to apply with any person. People come with different styles and we interpret all the time, and we react automatically. The point is, how do you catch yourself doing it?
During the month T had been remembering the CHALLENGE, and wondering what the automatic behaviour was. It had happened quite a lot, particularly over the Christmas period, being with people who were related. But it was after the event, when she felt rising anger, the solar plexus in absolute torment and anguish, remembering what had happened. At the time she hadn't remembered the Challenge, but it was after the events that repercussions and re-triggering happened, and there she was, sitting, elbows on the kitchen table, feeling this rage, and only then remembering to blink. She had come to the conclusion that emotional triggering, usually anger - suppressed anger - happened when other people's actions were completely unthinkable to her.
D said that what T had said was very important, because you could not escape - full stop - because it was going to come up, whatever you did. So there was no problem with reacting at the time, when you thought about it logically and rationally, because you were going to be affected, maybe hours later, a day later. So all these so called esoteric teachings might not be suitable or appropriate. So react, maybe you won't feel this terrible feeling later on. There was no right or wrong, it was how you react or how you feel about yourself, and how you deal with things. You will take the consequences whatever happens.
Responding to J and O, T wanted to hear if they blinked or not, because it was the body part of the Challenge, connecting the body with the brain and the heart. J replied that the reaction preempted blinking, it was so quick. By the time the moment had passed he was in a position to check what he was saying, engage the brain before the mouth. When the emotion of the moment had passed, and it had been almost too late the moment he realised, myes, he had blinked when he thought of it.
O thought we were making a very artificial distinction with the mind and the body. T had been very angry, and had felt it all over her body. The body had reacted anyway, so what was the point of blinking? Maybe the blinking was raising your awareness for something, but automatically your body is involved in the reaction. T said that what the Challenge did was take it out of the sea of it happening all the time, and not being aware of it happening and riding the waves of daily life - it had made it into something which was less of the sea and more of a thing which you could get hold of. RM said that the blinking, for him, was acknowledging that he had noticed what had happened. If he did not blink (or did not have some physical thing to do), the whole event passed him, he did not even notice that anything had happened, so the blinking was really important because it was an acknowledgement, like Know Thyself. It was telling him that this was what he had done.
The reading then continued from Chapter 28 of Beelzebub's Tales.
Jacques Lacan, psychoanalyst Source: Wikipedia |
Borromean Knot as used by Lacan Source: NO SUBJECT |
L said that people like Gurdjieff and Lacan incorporated what they were saying into geometrical structures. You could not explain a shape, but by associating psychological concepts and feelings around different parts of the topology, there could be a basis for discussion between people and self-considering of emotional relevance.
If these separate aspects of the entire ‘spectrum’ of Naloo-osnian-impulses are described according to the notions of your favourites and expressed in their language, they might then be defined as follows:
(1) Every kind of depravity, conscious as well as unconscious
(2)The feeling of self-satisfaction from leading others astray
(3) The irresistible inclination to destroy the existence of other breathing creatures
(4) The urge to become free from the necessity of actualizing the being-efforts demanded by Nature
(5) The attempt by every kind of artificiality to conceal from others what in their opinion are one's physical defects
(6) The calm self-contentment in the use of what is not personally deserved
(7) The striving to be not what one is.
RM said he was one of those people, to one degree or another, he could see them all in himself. He thought this was where compassion comes from. It was only because he saw it in himself, that he could understand it in other people. N said it was the evil inclination. T asked about the fourth in the list: The urge to become free from the necessity of actualizing the being-efforts demanded by Nature. O said that people have short-cuts to achieve - if you like me you will give me this - but they might give it to you and you would not value it, unless you made the effort to get it. L said he had come across people who embody the sixth one - a calm self-contentment in the use of what is not personally deserved. J said it was interesting that each person seemed to have alighted on one particular defect.
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