N had been in a difficult professional situation, and during the last week had received a worrying letter. He went through the procedure of closing his eyes and then "looking" at the scene, and that brought him back to himself, as a reminder, and stopped his intellect and emotions going into fear. Then he looked at the letter again, using his analytical mind. The following day, he decided to put the letter aside and revisit it the next morning and write a reply, which was what he duly did, and he felt much better, because he realised that the arguments in the initial letter did not have any substance.
| Each day, when you hear something said with apparent authority, consider the nature of the authority. Does it come backed up with force, or by evidence, reason and truth? Observe your feelings, direct your eyes to look at the scene in front of you, "then suddenly shut (your) eyes and go on seeing (the scene) without any break." |
MT said that the way his life was structured, he did not have a great deal to do with external authority. So he could only read the Challenge with a sense of irony, because his experience of authority now was through the media and being told what was happening and what to do, and he had no respect for that authority. He listened to what he was told, and he found it hard to accept it as based authority. So there was always a lot of discomfort, both going in and going out, around authority, but ultimately he could not help but think that all of it, for himself and for others, was just the expression of views, and how advantageous it would be for these manifestations of authority to be seen simply as views. Some being useful, some not being useful, some being more based in truth, some less based on truth, but just views.
J had been faced only the previous week with someone speaking with enormous authority, and the other people involved had to work out with what authority she thought she was speaking, and it transpired that whereas she thought she was speaking with a legal authority, it was actually an authority which came from her own head, and probably was transplanted from another context in her life where she was entitled to speak with authority. In this particular case it had to be unpicked, disentangled and worked out whether the views expressed were entitled to be expressed in the way they were. It was a practical question, and the conclusion was that, like so many people, this particular person had got it wrong.
T thought it was about trust, and because there were so many different people deciding what was real about the virus and what wasn't real, and the consequences, and the predictions into the future. She had stopped listening to the media too much, and was just trying to listen to the government that were supposedly having all the information channelled to them of some kind of reality-tested science. She had shut her eyes at this point of confusion about authorities that she was listening to, and whether she trusted or didn't trust them. When she opened her eyes, she had an after-image of what she had been looking at, and it was the opposite colours. Dark was light, and light was dark, and that was her memory of what she had seen. So it was the opposite of what she had looked at, and it reinforced how subjective even our own experience was, as to what we remember.
NO had been able to listen to the news media and to share opinions with people about the current U.S. president and the election coming up, and to listen to him talking in the state of Iowa last week had been quite interesting. She had watched the news and listened to what he had to say, and then she closed her eyes, and after he had said what he had to say, her response was to burst out laughing. She was very quickly realising that for authority she had to look within herself for the answers, and she could not in this situation right now look to anyone or anything because their situation was being so manipulated.
F found that authority was usually associated with power, in his job or with regard to the government. There was an implicit threat that if you did not conform, there would be repercussions, and this created a conflict in him. To what extent did he rebel, or oppose? It was taxing, because he felt that his integrity was being breached, although sometime he recognised that he himself might not be reasonable.
J asked T if she had any thoughts as to what the reversal of colours, when she closed her eyes, might signifiy. Or was it just a fact, which we observe and leave where it is. N liked L's comment about spatial awareness going beyond vision, because our ability to perceive is a much more complicated process than we think it is. This gave us a feeling when we close our eyes, and then look again at a scene. What is that we are seeing with? What is that part of us which is having the perceptions. Do we see something different, as T had indeed when she opened her eyes again. In a sense, the evidence of the eyes can be very confusing. He had noticed, with witness statements, that the human memory is an incredibly fallible thing. If events took place three or four years ago, and you tried to recall them, you would often embellish those events in your own mind. So because of how much we misremember things, and how we misperceive things, and how parts of us embellish, we have to question a lot of our experience and our memories, and be much more critical and aware of that. L said that T's experience of seeing opposite colours after opening her eyes reminded him of how N had described her experience after hearing remarks from President Trump. You could hear something, and then, in a silence afterwards, you may find that your thoughts were exactly the opposite of what you had just heard. When the impressions were removed, you could get a different viewpoint, or an opposite viewpoint.
Responding to F's contribution about external authority, L thought that the current situation in the world and in our respective countries mirrored the Gurdjieff Work in ourselves, because as individuals we find it difficult to create a centre and have our own authority and and our own direction, and it was much more comfortable to move around in a kind of haze where things are laid out for us, and he thought that was what had happened to the world. There had been a conscious shock to the world, and in a way national identities had had to be a bit restructured. It was very uncomfortable for everybody involved, just as it is for an individual when we try to change ourselves, and sometimes that only happens when it is forced upon us.
The reading then continued from Chapter 29 of Beelzebub's Tales.
At the present time the beings of various parts of contemporary Italy actualize this property of giving-pleasure-to-others in the following way:
The existence of the quadruped beings called ‘sheep’ and ‘goats,’ whose planetary bodies they also use for their first food, they do not destroy all at once; but in order to give this ‘pleasure’ they do it ‘slowly’ and ‘gently’ over a period of many days; that is to say, one day they take off one leg, then a few days later, a second leg, and so on, for as long as the sheep or goat still breathes. And sheep and goats can breathe without the said parts of their common presence for a very long time because, in the main functions of the taking in of cosmic substances for the possibility of existing, these parts do not participate, though they do participate in the functions which actualize those impulses giving self-sensations.
After what I have already said, there seems no need to say any more about the descendants of those Romans who were once so ‘menacing’ and so ‘great’ for the other communities there.
L said it was very interesting that he cloaked the terrible practice of how sheep and goats were treated, using the words giving pleasure - he relates how people can do very dubious things with apparent good intention, and he treats it as a complete normality and then goes on to talk about something else. L remembered reading somewhere of similar tribal practices. N said it was the contradictions in the cultures that he was talking about here. On the one hand, the Italians did come across as great restauranteurs and they were very amiable people, but then they were also indulging in this practice which appeared to be very insensitive and very cruel, for the purposes of producing the quality of the food that people ate. T said it was such a horrifying act, which seemed to be commonplace, and Gurdjieff has no truck with it, or no respect, for that supposed high civilisation, that once was. J asked if Gurdjieff had deliberately loaded his descriptions in a way to evoke in the mind a certain cynicism about the practices. How was it justified, for instance, that when they took the leg of a goat, they did it gently? Was the word gently an indication of him slightly over-egging the pudding deliberately for effect? N said it was in inverted commas, so it was ironic. J asked why the word "gently" was there. RM said they justified themselves by using the word, as if it excused them for the terrible thing they were doing. Innately they knew the suffering they were creating, but the goats were suffering it in a nice way, which was an absolute contradiction of terms. M had always assumed that the reference to the removal of limbs was at one level metaphoric. and he had struggled for a long time to pick apart what the metaphor is.. T said he did specify that these parts do not participate in the main functions, but they do participate in the functions which actualize those impulses giving self-sensations. She said they were taking the parts away from the whole body of the sheep. She did think in those terms, and all that was left was the head, presumably.
Now let us talk about that particularly maleficent invention of the ancient Greeks, which is being actualized in practice at the present time by the beings of the contemporary community there, called England, and which invention they call ‘sport.’
Not only have the beings of the contemporary community, England, namely, those beings who chiefly actualize during the process of their ordinary existence this particularly maleficent invention of the ancient Greeks, added, thanks to its maleficent consequences, one more sure-fire factor for shortening the duration of their existence - already trifling enough without that - ... because they have made the actualizing of the invention in practice their ideal and its spreading their aim, they, at the present time, by every possible means, strongly infect the beings of all other large and small communities of that ill-fated planet with that invention of theirs.
J asked what Gurdjieff was talking about. N said it was that English sports, like football, cricket and tennis, had been exported around the world. T said this was linked in the text to the sport of the ancient Greeks. England had absorbed that part of the Greek civilisation. J said Gurdjieff was assuming that there was something maleficent about sport. Had he explained why this was so? What was wrong with it? N said it says that sport shortens people's life. He did not know what the evidence was for this, whether people who indulged in sport were more likely to die earlier than those who did not indulge in sport. L mentioned the footballer, Nobby Stiles, who had died recently, who may have been affected by concussion. MT said that the reference to the shortness of life could be to do with quality rather than quantity. T said it was about emphasis. If you emphasised sport as the key thing, you were not emphasising the other centres. Sport was about the body, primarily.
