Essence and Sensibility

RM realised through the challenge that this was a long jounrey for him. First he needed to discover what his essence was, which was an opening door for him. Was he on his craft? Had he found his craft? Had he found what he was? All these questions, and so it would take him more than a month to find out what that was, and then to see whether he was consistent with it.

Once a day, consider whether or not your mantle, your outer personality, is consistent with your essence. Sense your solar plexus, and observe any stress there. Try to be totally aware of your presence, say I am, and twirl round like a whirling dervish trying to focus on the solar plexus of that movement.

N said he was aware he had different personalities for different things that he did. Part of his essence was music and writing music, but it was not his profession, which pushed him in a direction to behave a particular way with clients, especially in regard to colleagues. Part of his essence was helping people who had got into difficulties, and supporting them and giving them help. He had one particular case where he could not possibly charge the person the kind of money that was involved in the work, but he was nevertheless going ahead, even though the result was not going to be good financially, simply because there was a case deserving of help. So part of his essence was present when there was a pro bono element to his work, although he wouldn't say that was always the case.

T had done the Challenge several times during the month. It had been a busy month trying to get back to the workplace with all its problems. She had not managed to twirl in public, outdoors but had tried it indoors, and then she had to be very careful not to knock into things. She had experiences of the solar plexus being energised and also in turmoil, and once or twice she became aware of these states, but it was the turmoil of the solar plexus that reminded her of the Challenge, rather than the other way round. She had taken it literally about the mantle and had become very conscious of what she was wearing. Where was the mantle? Was it the clothes? And then she became aware of the skin, of the body, as the mantle and how in the northern hemisphere we were all about the manufactured clothes we were wearing, and what that does to how we think about and feel about ourselves. She was not so aware of the body, especially in the public arena.  And where was the essence? Where did it reside? And what was the relationship between the two? For the last part of the Challenge, she realised she was turning rather than twirling, and she felt so clunky it was even hard to turn without falling over.

Some years ago L had received some emotional and unpleasant messages from a family member, which had been difficult for him. More recently, he had received less unpleasant, but still quite unpleasant, messages from another member. He had perhaps been unduly deferential to his family in the past, maybe taking the role of victim or being overly understanding to the way people act, but he had realised that this was a false mantle. It was not the way he really was. He was really a strong person but also a nice person, but maybe too nice sometimes. So he had adopted his real mantle of not giving way to this sort of thing, and responded in a firm way. He had done the twirling as well. It had made him go a little dizzy, but made him aware of his body. He also had an AGM of a professional association coming up, where everybody has roles and then personalities get involved. He had decided he would stick to the rules and responsibilities that officers have in such a situation, with no emotion about it. He thought that was a real mantle.

RM said N was obviously identifying something of his essence, where there was a deviation from strict regulation and the kindness was trying to get through. L thought that N's kindness was a virtuous aspect of his character, but mantles are more like roles, and his song writing was more of a mantle. Maybe he could write songs and be kind at the same time. RM saw mantle as the role in life you had got to, and the issue was whether your mantle was consistent with your essence.

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

        

With acknowledgements to Harold Good
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... they have become expert in inventing and in distributing ... vast quantities of every kind of metalwares called there locks, razors, mousetraps, revolvers, scythes, machine guns, saucepans, hinges, guns, penknives, cartridges, pens, mines, needles, and many other things of the same kind.

“And ever since the beings of this contemporary community started inventing these practical objects, the ordinary existence of the three-brained beings of your planet has been ...‘not-life-but-free-jam.’

“The beings of that contemporary community have been the benefactors of the other contemporary beings of your planet, offering them, as they say there, ‘philanthropic aid,’ especially as regards their first being-duty, namely, the duty of carrying out from time to time the process of ‘reciprocal destruction.’

“Thanks to them, the discharge of that being-duty of theirs has gradually become for your contemporary favourites, the ‘merest trifle.’

T said that the mechanisation of making things had "made life easier" but almost robbed every human being of that experience of the craft that goes into making something, a process which they can learn so much from. When you make something you are interacting with the world and forming something which wasn't there before. L thought the emphasis was on the export from Britain of weapons. Guns (which were mentioned), and maybe tanks and warships, expediting the destructive manifestations of humanity.

Charles Chaplin - Modern Times

T said the mechanisation acts to amplify and magnify all that a human being can make, good and bad. MT asked if the three centres were involved in making something? Whereas in the use of a manufactured item, he did not know what was involved, certainly not the three centres. RM said certainly in the making of things the three centres are involved, because if you missed out one of these centres it would not produce very much. RM said that by having these labour-saving devices, at least one of the centres could go to sleep because of not being applied. So it was critical that we continue to be creative, and this is what art does for us, because we are not making something that is being used for something else, we are making it for its own sake. N said that his was almost a Marxist point, about the division of labour which took place under manufacturing. In the past if you were a craftsman or creator you created the whole item. With industrialisation there was a fracturing of that process such that you only saw a very little part of the process of production, which caused, in Marx's idea, the alienation of the individual involved in that manufacturing process. T said that when things are made and distributed, it is the consumer that has nothing to do with making it, so there is a disconnect between the making and the using. RM said the user can be fast asleep and just using it, but if they use it to be creative, that is another story, because they use it as part of the creation of something else, but society produces so much for the ease of use, it is tending to send society asleep. J said it struck him, when Gurdjieff was talking about "... machine guns, saucepans ... and things of the same kind", that of course those particular items were very different in kind. It seemed to J that Gurdjieff was saying that there were two different things that we do. We are giving people free jam, in other words pandering to their wish to have something for nothing, and also we have got a tendency to mutual destruction, or reciprocal destruction. It was like the earlier discussion about essence. There are two aspects of it. One is the benign and helpful, and that sometimes leads to sloth on behalf of those we are being kind to, and then there is the red in tooth and claw aspect of life which puts us all on our mettle, and he was making this distinction by somehow making a sort of mulch of all these different ingredients for two very different  purposes.

“The contemporary beings now scarcely need to make any effort whatsoever in order to destroy completely the existence of beings like themselves.

... sitting quietly in ... their ‘smoking rooms’ they can destroy, just as a pastime ...  tens and sometimes even hundreds of others like themselves.

The descendants of the beings of the once ‘great’ and ‘powerful’ community Greece there, still continue to exist ... but for the other independent communities there, they have at the present time scarcely any significance whatever.

They already no longer do as their ancestors did there, who were supreme specialists in cooking up all kinds of ‘fantastic sciences’; for if a contemporary Greek cooked up a new science, the beings of the other communities of the present time would not pay it the smallest attention.

And they would pay no attention to it, chiefly because that community has not at the present time enough of what are called ‘guns’ and ‘ships’ ...

... the descendants of the former great Greeks, ... have now perfectly adapted themselves there on almost all the continents and islands to keeping what are called ‘shops,’ where without any haste, slowly and gently, they trade in what are called ‘sponges,’ ‘halva,’ ‘Rahat-Lokoum,’ ‘Turkish delight,’ etc ...

N said that this was written not long after the first World War, and Greece was not on the political map at that stage. Gurdjieff was partly of Greek descent, so he most probably felt this particularly that his once great nation of philosophers and scientists was now no longer considered to have any authority in the world. J said that at first it seemed to be a dig at the British Empire again; sitting in our smoking rooms in the typical English club setting, chattering away, and by so doing not having much heed of the fact that we were destroying the lives of hundreds and thousands of people like ourselves elsewhere. It was a lack of understanding of what we were doing. That was on one side of it, and then he moves over to the great results of a different part of the globe, the nice foodstuffs from the Middle East. It seemed that Gurdjieff was taking sides here, but it was the first bit that interested J. T said that the people who get into the clubs J described are politicians, ruling class, and at the press of a button, or a decision in parliament, we go to war, and if  we have the military strength, the bully rules. Any natural authority can no longer exist if there is a military authority. MT asked what would natural authority be based on? T said that was a good question and suggested ethical principles.