Masquerade

On occasions when N wore the mask, he did not see so many flowers, but there were trees, and he looked at them and tried to integrate this with the wearing of the mask. Putting on the mask, he had different experiences; sometimes he found it unpleasant, sometimes he found it pleasant, if he wore the same mask too often, there could be a horrible smell coming back from it, which made it a bit unpleasant, and so he then concentrated on either trying to forget the smell, or trying to integrate it with his own feeling, in other words trying to make it pleasurable towards himself. He found that quite hard at times, so then spent the next day or two washing the masks and putting a perfume on them to make them more acceptable and pleasant to wear. This helped a bit with the pleasant smell coming back at him, and made it more pleasant to wear.

When you put your protective mask on to go out, clear the mind and enjoy looking at a flower or something beautiful in nature. Accentuate the feeling of wearing the mask and make it pleasurable.

L said that putting on a mask was not generally that pleasant because you had to pinch a bit of metal over the top of the nose to secure it, but it did make him aware of his skin and his face, as he pressed it round the contours. Of course, looking at a flower on going out, was always nice, and it enhanced his sense of nature. Wearing a mask, or not wearing a mask, was symbolic of change, and he thought over the month he might have sensed a change creeping over him.

When RM first put on the mask, he found it uncomfortable; he had to pinch around the nose to make sure it sealed properly. Then he looked at things around him, which was pleasant. He then started enjoying wearing the mask because he associated looking at nice things. This was a change of attitude, which seemed a permanent change. He also realised that if he put the mask on first and then his glasses on top, it sealed the mask more, and he thought that was quite cool.

J said that if you try to look at a flower through a perspex screen, you can't actually see it properly, so part of the challenge was negated for him before he got going. He was able to be aware of the mask, but not necessarily make it more comfortable. It did not induce a different spread of reactions according to how he placed it. The only difference was that he would be thinking, "what pleasure do I get from wearing it?" The more he thought about it, and he did not think very much about it, the more the process of thinking about it in this way was taking him away from the purpose of the Challenge, which was to be mindful and to be conscious and to be aware. He realised he was setting himself a set of intellectual problems - What is the purpose of it? How can I feel better about it? - rather than actually feeling better.

T's challenge, every time, was, "Can I remember the challenge and all the parts of it, and the joining up of those parts when I am doing it?" Her experience of the mask when she was out on the street, was that it was warm and she could hear and feel her breath which she could not normally do. She was reminded of women in the Muslim burqa, though hers was white with a red ventilator. For her it was always easy to notice the beauty in flowers that she came across. Generally she is easily distracted by sights as she walks along but during the challenge of remembering the mask, she did not manage to connect up the two aspects, wearing the mask and looking round at nature. In the last two weeks she managed to remember the challenge with notes to herself - Remember the Gurdjieff Challenge! - and even made alarms. She had a sense of cheating, but also wanted help for  remembering, and used strategies for that but even then only had few occasions where the two aspects happened at the same time.

Responding to J, RM said said that knowing the difference between thinking about it and experiencing it, was a huge shift in perception. When he was just thinking about it, it took him away from doing it and being present to it. Most of the people he talked to were so much more in thinking about their life, rather than living and being in it. There was a huge difference between the two. L said he thought it was probably a good sign if J had found it quite awkward and uncomfortable. When that happens during a Gurdjieff Challenge, to L it means that it is working. It is when life is too comfortable and everything seems OK, that our growth stops, so the cat has to have something to sharpen its claws against. J clarified that the inconvenience, not quite amounting to discomfort, wasn't so much in the actual wearing of it; it was in perceiving, as you would wish, the sensory perception of the flower. By wearing a mask, one of the things you could normally get from enjoying a flower, was to be able to smell it, and of course you couldn't do that either. So maybe the inconvenience aspect of it, made you appreciate the flower, but not because you were smelling it, but because you couldn't smell it. Therefore it brought to mind more clearly the experience that you weren't able to have, and thereby, by thinking about it in that way, you became more appreciative of the flower. It was a sort of odd roundabout.

The reading then continued from Chapter 29 of Beelzebub's Tales.

     

With acknowledgements to Harold Good
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In the early period of that Greco-Roman civilization, the said maleficent impulses, which have now become being-impulses, namely, the ‘passion-for-inventing-fantastic-sciences’ and the ‘passion-for-depravity,’ were inherent in the Greek and Roman beings alone; and later, when, as I have already said, the beings of both these communities chanced to acquire the said strength and began coming into contact with and influencing the beings of other communities, the beings of many other communities of your unfortunate favorites gradually began to be infected by these peculiar and unnatural being-impulses.

J said Gurdjieff was really chancing his arm by disposing of Greco-Roman civilisation in one sweeping and rather derogatory way; that all maleficent impulses that arise are as a result of them. Each generation proceeds along certain lines of development, some good, some bad, for the future. You have got to take account of what there would have been without this. T said it was the character that Gurdjieff was writing about who was saying all this. Beelzebub is the devil, isn't he? So he was really getting J going. We always thought to admire those fantastic civilisations, but maybe he is trying to shake things up, to question what were they doing; but it is also what we are doing with the knowledge that has come from those civilisations. Do we sit on our laurels, because they have done all the thinking, or do we use our own experiences to have some discrimination.

And thus, little by little, these ‘inventions’ of those two ancient communities have brought it about that already, at the present time, the psyche of your favorites—shaky enough already before then—has now become so unhinged in all of them, without exception, that both their ‘world outlook’ and the whole ordering of their daily existence rest and proceed exclusively on the basis of those two said inventions of the beings of that Greco-Roman civilization, namely, on the basis of fantasying, and of ‘striving-for-sexual-gratification.

Here it is very interesting to notice that although, as I have already told you, thanks to the inheritance from the ancient Romans, ‘organic-self-shame’—proper to the three-brained beings—has gradually and entirely disappeared from the presences of your favorites, nevertheless there has arisen in them in its place something rather like it. In the presences of your contemporary favorites there is as much as you like of this pseudo being-impulse which they also call ‘shame,’ but the data for engendering it, just as of all others, are quite singular.

This being-impulse arises in their presences only when they do something which under their abnormally established conditions of ordinary being-existence is not acceptable to be done before others.

N said that, on the one hand, the author is complaining about the Greeks, that they were responsible for having created this thing whereby we came up with all these fantastic sciences, which you would have thought would have been beneficial to civilisation. On the other, he was complaining about the Romans, that sexual gratification was the only thing that they were about, or that they gave to civilisation. That all this was somehow imbibed into our psyches, either we are fantastically turned on by technology or by sex. If we look around at our civilisation there is a fair bit of truth in that, thinking about how extensive technology and science is within our civilisation, how much it controls things, and at the same time how much there was in terms of pornography out there in the world, which Gurdjieff would say was presumably a corruption of the sexual centre, in his understanding of the way it works. He is also saying that shame is part of this, in other words, that is it is not very authentic, only when we have done something and we have been found out about it. Therefore we feel shame, not because we have any conscience about it from a more conscious place, but simply because of what other people think about us.

Thanks to the sciences invented by the ancient Greeks, only the being-mentation of other beings was spoiled and still continues to be spoiled.

... the said specific disease there of wiseacring has been very widely spread among other of your favorites;  their total effect has now already become, what is called, the ‘resultant-decomposing-force,’ in contradistinction to what is called the ‘resultant-creative-force’ of Nature.

L did not think he was talking about science, but more about wiseacring from social sciences and maybe politics. RM said the decomposing force is natural entropy, where things slide back if you let them. We have a natural tendency to undo things if we get lazy. The creative force is where we want to drive forward. Gurdjieff was talking about a balance here. We have to watch out for natural entropy entering into our lives, just being slovenly and slow, or when we are wiseacring.