L had found the tensing of the fist symbolic of strength. One thing he had been doing was clearing and throwing old stuff away, some of which he could be very attached to, and he would say You're going, and tense his fist. Also there were things he was attached to doing, like reading or watching a film, and he did the same action and refrained.
N had been involved in a relationship with someone, and his desire had been to contact them back. He had realised also that that was because it was his attachment which was pushing him forward to want to immediately contact them back, so he then stopped that and clenched his fist, which was a good reminding and waking up factor. Sometimes he had found that these things were largely ego-driven, and the CHALLENGE had made him stop and look at the process again, and then he could see his ego in operation.
For T the Challenge had been usually to do with attachment to things, being full of historic, emotional content, but the thing itself was just a thing, and not what she associated with it. After deciding to let it go she felt all sorts of anguish, but the action of doing the fist afterwards, felt victorious.
Responding to T, N said that when you clench your fist it changes your body dynamic powerfully, mainly because it can be aggressive, but there was a positivity in it which gave her more strength to stay with her resolve about not going with her attachment. T said that as well as aggression, it was a sign of solidarity. Black Power has used it - strength in numbers. Somehow the hand clenched like that has a direct link with the brain and the heart. The importance for her was to allow experiencing the physical, like touch, to inform perception, conception, understanding, and then the understanding to go back to and inform feeling.
The reading then continued from Chapter 28 of Beelzebub's Tales.
... from among all the ‘highest being-bodies’ which have been coated and perfected in every kind of exterior form of three-brained being there have, so far, reached the planet ‘Retribution’ from the whole Universe, only three hundred and thirteen, two of whom had their arising on your planet and one of these is the ‘highest being-body’ of this Lentrohamsanin
LR wondered about the three hundred and thirteen. T said it was very specific, and moreover only two came from the whole planet. L said that there must be a significance to that number, because everything he wrote was carefully measured. T said it was like the unpronounceable names, which stop us in our tracks and force us to acknowledge that we don't understand something, and to perhaps ask, "do those two in the planet include me?" Maybe it speaks to the ego when he says something very specific like three hundred and thirteen. L asked, if you were one of those two righteous people, and had been very good all your life, would you want to go to a planet called Retribution? You might prefer to go to one called Reward.
... Among the number of those independent communities, there were during those periods, owing to those cosmic laws which I have once mentioned to you, those two large and, as they say there, ‘most-powerful’ communities, that is to say, well organised and possessing more means for the processes of reciprocal destruction, the Greeks and Romans.
And about these, from the point of view of your contemporary favourites, ‘very-ancient’ communities, I must furthermore not fail to explain to you and possibly in detail, because not only did they then, as I have already said, make a clean sweep from the face of that unfortunate planet of the last results beneficial for all the three-brained beings of all subsequent epochs, and even of all traces of the memory of the Very Saintly Labours of the Essence-loving Ashiata Shiemash, but they were also the cause that real ‘nonsense’ already proceeds in the Reasons of the contemporary favourites of yours, and that there is completely atrophied in them that ‘fundamental-being-impulse’ which is the main lever of objective morality, and which is called ‘organic shame'.
L said that we normally think of the ancient Romans and Greeks as the ones who created civilisation, and we as the heirs to it - we even talk about the Dark Ages after the Romans left Britain - but what Gurdjieff is implying here is that there had been progress in psychology, in self development, before that time.
J found it strange that Gurdjieff seemed to be saying up until then that everything was on the slide downhill, and everything was going wrong, and from the great Ashiata Shiemash beginnings, there had been a constant descent - and now he was saying that when the Greeks and the Romans came in, all that had been gained from before was lost.
LN said she believed Greece and Rome touched something very high in terms of knowledge and wisdom, but as with most humans it degenerated.
| If you realise you are about to do something because of attachment to a desire, let the attachment go and deliberately tense your fist. |
For T the Challenge had been usually to do with attachment to things, being full of historic, emotional content, but the thing itself was just a thing, and not what she associated with it. After deciding to let it go she felt all sorts of anguish, but the action of doing the fist afterwards, felt victorious.
Responding to T, N said that when you clench your fist it changes your body dynamic powerfully, mainly because it can be aggressive, but there was a positivity in it which gave her more strength to stay with her resolve about not going with her attachment. T said that as well as aggression, it was a sign of solidarity. Black Power has used it - strength in numbers. Somehow the hand clenched like that has a direct link with the brain and the heart. The importance for her was to allow experiencing the physical, like touch, to inform perception, conception, understanding, and then the understanding to go back to and inform feeling.
The reading then continued from Chapter 28 of Beelzebub's Tales.
LR wondered about the three hundred and thirteen. T said it was very specific, and moreover only two came from the whole planet. L said that there must be a significance to that number, because everything he wrote was carefully measured. T said it was like the unpronounceable names, which stop us in our tracks and force us to acknowledge that we don't understand something, and to perhaps ask, "do those two in the planet include me?" Maybe it speaks to the ego when he says something very specific like three hundred and thirteen. L asked, if you were one of those two righteous people, and had been very good all your life, would you want to go to a planet called Retribution? You might prefer to go to one called Reward.
... Among the number of those independent communities, there were during those periods, owing to those cosmic laws which I have once mentioned to you, those two large and, as they say there, ‘most-powerful’ communities, that is to say, well organised and possessing more means for the processes of reciprocal destruction, the Greeks and Romans.
And about these, from the point of view of your contemporary favourites, ‘very-ancient’ communities, I must furthermore not fail to explain to you and possibly in detail, because not only did they then, as I have already said, make a clean sweep from the face of that unfortunate planet of the last results beneficial for all the three-brained beings of all subsequent epochs, and even of all traces of the memory of the Very Saintly Labours of the Essence-loving Ashiata Shiemash, but they were also the cause that real ‘nonsense’ already proceeds in the Reasons of the contemporary favourites of yours, and that there is completely atrophied in them that ‘fundamental-being-impulse’ which is the main lever of objective morality, and which is called ‘organic shame'.
L said that we normally think of the ancient Romans and Greeks as the ones who created civilisation, and we as the heirs to it - we even talk about the Dark Ages after the Romans left Britain - but what Gurdjieff is implying here is that there had been progress in psychology, in self development, before that time.
J found it strange that Gurdjieff seemed to be saying up until then that everything was on the slide downhill, and everything was going wrong, and from the great Ashiata Shiemash beginnings, there had been a constant descent - and now he was saying that when the Greeks and the Romans came in, all that had been gained from before was lost.
LN said she believed Greece and Rome touched something very high in terms of knowledge and wisdom, but as with most humans it degenerated.
