N had found himself talking to a client, and realised it was in an area which was outside his knowledge of expertise, and he suddenly pulled back and did the action to himself regarding the jug.
RM had attended a meeting about Ficino. They had a long debate and discussion reading Ficino's words with people trying to interpret what Ficino actually said. RM's ego said, Oh, I know what he said, and while he was talking, he realised he was speaking way above his paygrade. He didn't want to stop, because he didn't want to show that he was an idiot. He carried on a bit, realised what he was doing, and then he stopped and just let it drop, and he emptied the imaginary jug. It had been an interesting experience but it also reminded him of the number of times he did speak above his paygrade, often wiseacring about what he thought he was clever at. It had been a great opportunity for him to realise something about himself. He kind of knew it, but it was more obvious to him after this.
J said he was very aware that this was a potential problem of people generally, and himself, speaking out of turn and with rather too much authority. The only instance he had seen during this period was when a friend of his from Afghanistan sent him cartoons of the current political situation, showing drug fuelled Afghanis obviously incapable of forming a government. He told his friend that when he had been in Kabul, he remembered getting almost transcendentally high simply walking down a street, because of the fumes of drugs billowing out of the front doors of houses on either side. Then he remembered the CHALLENGE, and asked himself if he sounded as if he knew all about Afghanistan and the drug situation there, which he did not. However, going through the instance in his mind, he realised that what he had been saying was nothing but the truth. In fact it was the whole truth as he saw it, and he was clear. So it might have been a temptation to wiseacre, but he thought that because of his long awareness of this potential danger in normal conversation, he thought he had avoided it. But the other attendees had heard him now, and could probably tell him that he was actually unaware that he was wiseacreing.
| Once a day, if you notice yourself speaking from a presumption of greater knowledge than you have, evaluate what you were saying and consider how you can make it more congruent with reality. Pause, grab an invisible jug by the handle, and turn it as if to pour out its contents. |
T had waxed very lyrical at home, and in that space she had been able to raise her hand far too often to pour water over herself. She had realised that this was talking about things she had heard or read about, and taken in the arguments, without any experiential knowledge, and everything had came flooding out, having an argument about something in real time with someone else. It felt very satisfying to beat that drum of intellectual knowledge gained from what other people had written or said. There were so many instances of going off on one that she could not think of one in particular, it had been shocking.
L said that nobody had yet talked about the part of the Challenge related to rephrasing statements in a form more congruent with reality. When he had tried to do that he found that what he actually tried to do was rephrase things in a more positive light, because when he talked about things he did not know about, it could lead to negative expression. The truth was, if he didn't know what he was talking about, the most positive slant was equally likely, perhaps, not to be correct, it might just make him feel better. He had done the pouring of water gesture, but because he was not talking to people very much, it happened equally or more often with his thoughts, thinking to himself. He was daydreaming from a vantage point of assumed knowledge which he did not have. It was really a waste of time and energy, and being aware of this he would then try to stop.
Responding to J, T said he had brought up an interesting point about historic experience and current experience. Things might have changed a lot, and we were left with the stereotype of what we remember, which was so tactile and so clear. It was like remembering somebody who was a juvenile delinquent - they might be reformed ten years later, but they were still tarred with the brush of their delinquincy. Even with these vivid experiences, it was possible to acknowledge that this was historic and might not be accurate now. N said it was more acceptable to preface such remarks by making it clear it was a personal opinion and not based on experiential knowledge.
The reading then continued from Chapter 29 of Beelzebub's Tales.
... the result of the frequent contact of the beings of those two communities was that the Greek beings, borrowing from the Roman beings all the finesses of sexual ‘turns,’ began arranging their what are called ‘Athenian nights,’ while the Roman beings, having learned from the Greek beings how to cook up ‘sciences,’ composed their later very famous what is called ‘Roman law.’
The reading then continued from Chapter 29 of Beelzebub's Tales.
D said that the Greek and the Roman civilisation were both very knowledgeable and advanced, and it had progressed to when Gurdjieff was writing, to another civilisation. Even fifty or sixty years ago, it was a different civilisation from what we had now. It was progress possibly, to what eventually? Possibly enlightenment?
J said there were several ways in which things could change, but he thought the interesting point that D was making was of human nature changing. There had been an interesting study of cats not long ago, which had shown that from their original independence of mind, from when they were out in the wild, they gradually became domesticated, but were never as affectionate as dogs. But now the modern breeds of cat were on average just as affectionate as some dogs. He did not know if this meant that the actual character of the cat was changing, but if you could assume that it might, then maybe our character and our attitudes were fundamentally changing.
... This advance of theirs into the interior of the continent Asia proceeded very successfully, and their ranks were constantly being increased, chiefly because the learned beings who had been in Babylon then continued everywhere on the continent Asia to infect the Reasons of beings with their Hasnamussian political ideas.
This reminded L of colonial history and well-meaning expeditions, including missionaries, going to foreign lands in Africa and America, and imposing a world-view on sometimes very peaceful people, and certainly people who couldn't resist. He did not know if there was any metaphorical depth to that section. T wondered about the moving into the interior, whether it meant self-exploration. J said that one of the chief commandments of Ashiata Shiemash declared: "Do not kill another even when your own life is in danger", and then in the following paragraph there they are destroying on their way all those who decline to worship their own gods. Was that slightly contradictory? L said it meant that the cultures who practiced that benevolant philosophy got quickly overrun, so the invaders were helped by the fact that those earlier cultures practiced some form of non-violent polytheism. They did not want to resist if resisting did harm. J said we were obviously saying that the mere fact that you want to be peaceful puts you at a disadvantage. N said that the use of the word hasnamuss is refering to evil, a bad person misusing their power to a great extent, and this is what he was saying about Alexander the Great.
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