N had realised how much he was in his intellectual centre as he was sitting at his desk doing his work. So doing the Challenge got him to move around a bit, trying to get back into his physical centre, trying to get back into his emotional centre, just for a few minutes, like going off to read a poem, or listening to a piece of music, or doing something which would get him out of his intellectual centre which he was just very focused in, and to move himself towards a different centre and bring himself back.
| Set an alarm to go off at the same time every day. When it goes off, stop what you are doing. Consider what is happening with the moving, feeling and thinking centres. Is there crystalization, or over/under use of a centre? Consider if the centres can be re-balanced. If one of the centres is running down, try to think of something that might wind it up. Note down your experience each day. |
T had set an alarm at the time of her choosing, and the first time was really inconvenient, so she changed it to another time. She wrote an entry into an email, and kept replying it to herself each time she remembered. Out of the month she wrote nine emails, and had chosen one to read out.
The alarm went off at three. I was sitting at the table reading about safeguarding which was heavy duty and disturbing reading. I had got to a very lengthy statutory act. I stopped and assessed my physical state. My eyes felt swollen and my stomach felt in turmoil. I didn't like what I was experiencing. I decided to stop reading the legislation and go back to the main training, and I had gone down an unnecessary rabbit hole that was not required for my pay grade, but maybe it was easier reading than the gruesome examples given in the training. The thinking centre is this stopping, but also the reflection which is the writing. The feeling, or sense-centred, brain was yelling at me to stop what I was doing before the alarm went off, but my head was ploughing on through the flood of words, driving deeper and deeper into a dead end, so I just wasn't listening to myself. The alarm just went off at 3:19 to stop the Challenge, and I couldn't recall what the third brain was, and that was of course the moving centre, and the only action that I could think was taking place was me typing the reflection, and the action of typing my own thoughts felt more life-enhancing than reading what others had written.
When the alarm went off during the week to remind him of the Challenge, when he might be in a meeting, RM realised so much he was in the state of common knowledge, stuff that people had told him rather than what he actually knew, which was the moving centre. So he was really wiseacring a lot of the time, and not working with what he actually knew from a sensory point of view.
T said she had been very taken with what N had been saying about getting completely absorbed by the requirement to pay attention to what he was doing, but to the consequent neglect of the body. But how did you reconcile those two when you had got a job to do? It was almost as though the requirement of other people, and a desire to do a job, was so strong. This was all very laudable, and what made the wheels go round in our culture. She wondered if it was a cultural pathology that we were in. That was just a question that she was asking herself. N said he thought a lot of occupations had a tendency to push you in one direction. Where he could, he tried to feel his feet, somewhere in his mind, to get some connection with the moving centre, but he agreed, it was very easy to lose it. Once an hour, he would get up and walk around for five minutes, just to get out of the thinking centre, and enable him not to be entirely an intellectual machine as he went through the process of doing what he had to do. J wondered whether the observer part of one, and the actual actor in the world, had to be dovetailed at the same time. Were there not legitimately two states of thinking? You could stand back at one point, and when you were involved in your occupation, you should be fully integrated in that. Was there any thinking about why they both had to happen at the same time? RM said there were two schools of training for being an actor. Method acting was where you were in the part, and you took it as you. Most actors will try and be both at the same time, both the actor and the act they were playing. The trouble was you might get locked into one and not find your way out to be who you really were. L said that for consistent work in art of high quality, it was best to have the passion in the art, but not in the artist.
The reading then continued from Chapter 29 of Beelzebub's Tales.
And a one-third death through the premature using up of the Bobbin-kandelnost of the feeling-center occurs for the most part among those terrestrial beings who become by profession what are called ‘representatives-of-Art.’
Most of these terrestrial professionals, especially the contemporary ones, first fall ill with one or another form of what is called ‘psychopathy,’ and thanks to this, they later in their psychopathy intentionally learn, as they say, to ‘feel’; and thereafter repeatedly feeling these abnormal being-impulses, they gradually use up the contents of the Bobbin-kandelnost of their feeling-center, and thus disharmonizing the tempo of their own common presences bring themselves to that peculiar end which is not often met with even among them there.
M asked how this sat against what was being said about passion in the responses to contributions, because it seems an invitation to pull back on passion, because passion is expensive in terms of the running down of that centre. L said it seemed to him like a warning to artists of the dangers of becoming too passionately involved. O said that Freud said about artists, that they were all neurotic. Art did not always come from the right place. Sometimes it was a form of identification, and no more than that. M asked O if she thought there can be passion without identification. O said that not all artists are alike. Some of them sit on a particular pathology and need for stability and orientation, and some of them are really passionate about what they are doing, and are really interested to discover something else.
... This kind of death through the thinking-center occurs there chiefly among those favorites of yours who try to become or have already become scientists of new formation, and also among those who during the period of their existence fall ill with the craze for reading what are called ‘books’ and ‘newspapers.’
“The result among those three-brained beings there of reading superfluously and associating only by thoughts, is that the contents of the Bobbin-kandelnost of their thinking-center are exhausted before the contents of the Bobbin-kandelnosts of their other being-centers.
L said he recognised himself there, because he loved reading sci-fi, so there was definitely an imbalance of the thinking centre bobbin-kandelnost for him. T said that Gurdjieff had chosen sport, art and reading. These were like the tenets of our civilisation. L said these were all things that we could lose ourselves in, literally. M said we could lose ourselves in anything. O said that maybe there was no connection between the psychological being of a person, and their activity. Some artists, for example, came to therapy thinking that if they improved psychologically, their work would improve. There were some very talented people in art that psychologically speaking were very infantile.
... I admit that somebody would be certain to understand this ‘secret’ because, in the first place it is simple and obvious, and secondly because they discovered it long ago and they even often employed it in what they call ‘practical use.’
They even use this simple secret, to which I referred, for those mechanical-watches which we took for comparison as an elucidating example concerning the duration of their existence.
In all the mechanical watches of various systems they use this said simple secret for regulating what is called the ‘tension’ of the said spring or the corresponding part of the general mechanism of the watch; and it is called, it seems, the ‘regulator.’
By means of this regulator it is possible to make the mechanism of a watch, wound for instance for twenty-four hours, go a whole month, and on the contrary, thanks to this regulator, it is possible to make the same winding for twenty-four hours finish in five minutes.
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| Source: angelhomebrew.co.uk |
RM asked if anyone could tell him what the secret was, which Gurdjieff was just trying to tell us. M asked if it was not to intentionally bring all our centres into every activity, and live harmoniously. L said he thought there were two related ideas that he was getting here. One was not to get too involved just in one of the three centres, and the other was to pace ourselves, just to do a bit at a time. That was the regulator idea. So it was going, on a ratchet, slowly round a circle, in a watch, tick tick tick, a bit of painting, then a bit more of painting, a bit of walking in nature. M said that the regulator is a metaphor, and the metaphor is the balancing of all the centres in any activity. RM said governance was not control. It was about regulating. So a good governor regulates all the centres of a business. In political governance, like governance of a nation, the concentration should be about regulating. not controlling. N said that laws were our way of regulating society, and keeping balances between interests, and making positions clear. It was meant to be objective, and objectively upheld by the courts. That was the basic idea of the legal system.
