T had got really enthusiastic. It was like the flush of the Meeting, and it lasted for about 2 weeks, and then life took over, distractions took over, and she didn't engage. It had been fascinating to read the quotes, which she hadn't done very often. She had written down her reactions and responses. It had been about remembering, and the remembering came with the breathing and the kettle, and the responses to that, and the experience of it. After reading Blaise Pascal's quote, Small minds are concerned with the extraordinary, great minds with the ordinary, she wrote:
Gurdjieff Work is humbling and ego busting. Gurdjieff Work sounded simple and doable, and then I expected to move on to other self-development work. The Work sounds deceptively simple, but it reaches to the core of the fragility of my life in nature and within the human world of human relationships, on the individual and world scale. Remembering is something I used to take for granted. It was something that I did, like eating or speaking or sleeping. Remembering was an undisputed natural and efficient way of being. My assessment now of then, and also of now, is I forgot in my past more than I remembered. In the past I forgot that I forgot, whereas now, through the Gurdjieff Work, I have at least started to accept that I forget, and with work I remember that I forget. Now I see that after a lifetime's habit of believing that I remember, I still forget that I remember less and forget more. This realisation is humbling as to the precariousness of my subjective understanding.
| Each morning, when you are about to switch on the kettle, take five deep breaths. Read the Quote of the Hour at gurdjieffmeetings.com (website top right), and consider how it relates to the Gurdjieff Work. When you eat, empathise, from the point of view of the food, its origin and route from nature to mouth. Be grateful. |
J said that an additional ingredient of the Buddha's teaching on eating, was that you should remember the effort of the people who prepared the food, and it was a way of being grateful for that which one was being given.
Taking the deep breaths had made L feel good. It made him stretch, and be aware of the qualities of the breath. His chest expanded and he stood erect. When it was sunny it was good to feel the sun. He felt energized and strong. It made him slow down, and got the metabolism going. Each successive breath was easier. He had realised how good the quotations were. For example, Blaise Pascal: Contradiction is not a sign of falsity, nor the lack of contradiction a sign of truth. So we had to be aware of our own ignorance, we were deeply submerged in Gurdjieff's merde. Gurdjieff was quoted talking about this in Women of the Rope, in English it is deep shit. We were struggling to get out of that mire. Thinking of the food, he was initially aghast when he looked at the ingredients of things he was eating, so it made him change and reconsider what he was going to eat. As regards gratitude, there was lots to be grateful for; farmers, and the habit of self-observing.
N said that taking the five deep breaths elevated the spirit, especially first thing in the morning. The quotes were very interesting. He looked particularly at the quote of Apollinaire about creativity:
There is a poet to whom the Muse dictates its chants, there is an artist whose hand is guided by an unknown being using him as an instrument. Their reason cannot impede them, they never struggle, and their work shows no signs of strain. They are not divine and can do without their selves. They are like prolongations of nature, and their works do not pass through the intellect.
He also liked Art is frozen Zen (Reginald Blyth), and The truth you believe and cling to, makes you unavailable to hear anything new (Pema Chödrön). For example there is an identification with the "truth". All these things got him thinking quite early in the morning about their relevance to the Work, and whether he thought they were accurate, and also whether he thought they were meaningful quotes and whether they taught him something. In terms of eating, going back to the source of what he had bought and eaten, made him much more discriminating in the course of the month. He would particularly go to shops where he thought food was much fresher or more organic. On some occasions he even went to a food market to get stuff straight off the farms rather than supermarkets, so it made him much more grateful. It made him think of the process, of what had been involved in the production, and of the people who were involved. There was one particular place in Hampstead which served coffee but also had all the machinery to make bread in a bakery in the place itself. One day he spoke to someone about it and had a very interesting conversation. He realised that this person had spent a fortune making sure he had got all the right equipment to make the right bread, and the bread seemed to taste much better as a result and was of quite a different quality.
Responding to N and L about food and how it got to the plate, T said that, being vegetarian, she had stopped eating animals, because she could not kill them herself, so she did not want to give someone else that responsibility for her. She was also struck by the fact that even as a vegetarian, she was eating what had already died. (This was more obvious in the case of people who ate meat.) So she was taking in deadness. Although it was revitalising her, it was paradoxical; it was life giving, but had died in order to be transformed, in the Gurdjieff sense of the human as a 'cosmic apparatus for the transformation of food'. However much she wanted to get good food in her, the process of deterioration of the thing that had been alive, had started in anything that she ate. This had made her question what she was eating.
Responding to T, J said it was interesting the way we considered the animal world and what we did eat and what we didn't eat. We downgraded hyenas and vultures as animals not to eat. These animals in fact didn't kill for food, like we did, they actually fed on cadavers. So he wondered if that was not a problem in the way we were conceiving of what we ate and the way we ate.
The reading then continued from Chapter 29 of Beelzebub's Tales.
... when the organ Kundabuffer with all its properties was removed from their presences, ... they also should then have existed without fail until their ‘second-being-body-Kesdjan’ had been completely coated in them and finally perfected by Reason up to the sacred ‘Ischmetch.’
But later, when they began existing in a manner more and more unbecoming for three-brained beings and entirely ceased actualizing in their presences their being-Partkdolg-duty, foreseen by Great Nature, by means of which alone it is possible for three-brained beings to acquire in their presences the data for coating their said higher-parts—and when, in consequence of all this, the quality of their radiations failed to respond to the demands of the Most Great common-cosmic Trogoautoegocratic process—then Great Nature was compelled, for the purpose of ‘equalizing-vibrations,’ gradually to actualize the duration of their existence according to the principle called Itoklanoz, that is the principle upon which in general is actualized the duration of existence of one-brained and two-brained beings who have not the same possibilities as the three-brained beings, and who are therefore unable to actualize in their presences, the said—foreseen by Nature—‘Partkdolg-duty.’
RM asked what people understood by Partkdolg-duty. N said it was development of our being on this planet; part of it was living in accordance with our essence. L had a recollection of it meaning what we do to earn our presence here. T thought it sounded as if unless we did this Partkdolg-duty, we became like any other creature on the planet, one or two brained and it was the third brain which needed to be worked for and did not come without work. L asked if Gurdjieff was also suggesting that under normal circumstances human beings could live longer, but because we hadn't developed in the right way, we lived according to the rules of other animals, which meant short lifetimes. N added, because we were not living according to our true natures, i.e. our essence natures, we were shortening our own lives by that very process.
And so, my boy, because these contemporary favorites of yours, these three-brained beings of the planet Earth, already arise only according to the principle Itoklanoz, therefore from the moment of conception up to the age of responsible being there are crystallized in their brains these Bobbin-kandelnosts with very definite possibilities of actualizing the processes of association.
... I intend to take as an elucidating example just those ‘Djamtesternokhi’ such as your favorites also have and which they call ‘mechanical watches.’
As you already well know, although such Djamtesternokhi or mechanical watches are of different what are called ‘systems,’ yet they are all constructed on the same principle of ‘tension-or-pressure-of-the-unwinding-spring.’
One system of Djamtesternokhi or mechanical watch contains a spring exactly calculated and arranged so that the length of the duration of its tension from unwinding may be sufficient for twenty-four hours; another system has a spring for a week, a third for a month, and so on.
RM thought watches were being used as a metaphor for the way the body works. N said the bobbin would unwind. L said that went along with the watch spring. N said Gurdjieff was very knowledgeable about carpet weaving. He was talking about something which was finite, which was weaving away, and he goes on to talk about watch springs, saying that our centres are like this. L said that when we run out of steam, we have to apply more energy and wind up the watch.
T asked what was going to be made - thread had potential for many things. RM asked what were we going to make of ourselves. The bit about the durations of the watch springs reminded L of planning, which could be done on a daily, weekly or monthly basis, all of which had to be included in planning. In fact, if planning didn't happen, stuff didn't happen. RM said he found that if he didn't plan, it happened better, because you were observing exactly what needed to be done. N said he did to-do lists, and found his days were much more productive as a result. If he did not plan, he did not get all the things done and time got used up.
