L found this challenge harder to do and to log, because there was no external trigger. On one occasion, he observed he was focused working at his desk, and he was too identified with the thinking centre. He did feel a bit of guilt, and he did consider it as a regulator. He did clap. He then had the thought, that although in the Challenge the idea was to balance the activity with the other two centres, but also pushing on was also a regulator action. It was an alternative. You did not always have to have the balance. Some things do require that extra push, and he thought that was a Gurdjieff third force idea. On how to balance it, he thought to go for a walk, and did so later. Five days later, there was a computer problem, synchronising phone and laptop, and he realised he was spending too long trying to fix it, and he was over-using the thinking centre again. He did feel guilt, and considered it as a regulator, and clapped, and he identified the guilt may be coming from childhood, that he wasn't doing enough to help people.
| Every day, if I "lose it" and find myself identified with the activity of a particular centre - thinking, feeling or moving - I will observe any regret, guilt, conscience and consider the feeling as a mechanical regulator in action and clap hands as if applauding the feeling, and think about other feelings that are possible. I will make an intentional effort, a regulating adjustment, to bring the other centres into my experience. I will make a note when and how it happened and over time, look for a pattern in my notes and if one centre usually predominates come up with a strategy for changing behaviour to reduce the predominance. |
T read out two notes following doing the Challenge:
- The first time I found myself raising my voice in an argument, and getting very stressed trying to say my point, and when I realised in the heat of the moment, I suddenly remembered the Challenge, and started clapping. The clapping was as furious as the fury, I couldn't stop. Then the noise and experience of the hands slapping each other got my attention, which then altered the direction of energy and brought me back into myself away from the angry feelings. I became more self-centred and had withdrawn from this verbal fencing.
- I remembered I hadn't done the Challenge, and I felt guilty at not having done it, so then I started clapping. So it was self-referential. The sudden slapping of my hands together put a different backdrop to the scene and brought it centre-stage, where I was more able to locate it in my body around the solar plexus, and the heart area. With the clapping it began to disperse, but not really into another state, more like a reducing of the guilt state, and it was only then that I became aware of the self-referential nature of it, that not doing the Challenge had set off the practical part of the Challenge.
During the early part of February, N had been very much involved with completing a transaction, and he only had three days to get it done. He was the one who had to originate all the documents, which put a lot of pressure on him. He found at times that he was getting worked up with the anxiety about getting all this done, or letting the client down, so sometimes he would notice this anxiety rising in him as part of that, and then he would clap. He would get up and do some exercises in the same room, to bring himself back into his body, because he realised that his intellectual centre was predominating, and then he would come back to his work, hopefully more calm about the situation. He noticed in that a pattern and took it on board as a way to balance himself out, in terms of the centres which usually predominate in one's life. So before sitting down to do work, he did some physical exercise, and tried to make a conscious effort to get up every hour, from his seat, and wander round the room, or do some exercise, or do something physical to get him out of the predominance of his intellectual centre.
During the period allocated to responses to specific experiences of doing the Challenge, there were no such responses during the discussion that ensued.
The reading then continued from Chapter 29 of Beelzebub's Tales.
But in your favorites, specially in your contemporary favorites, who exist constantly passively under the direction of only one of the separate spiritualized parts of their common presence and thereby constantly manifest themselves entirely by their factors for negative properties also lawfully arisen in them, and hence, by negative manifestations, there proceeds in them that same disproportionate expenditure of the contents of their various Bobbin-kandelnosts, that is to say, the possibilities, placed in them by Nature according to law, of action by only one or only two of their brains, are always experienced, in consequence of which the contents of one or two of their Bobbin-kandelnosts are prematurely exhausted; whereupon, just like those mechanical watches in which the winding is run down or the force of their regulators is weakened, they cease to act.
Sometime later, I shall explain to you in detail not only why, when beings, existing only according to the principle Itoklanoz, exist by the direction of only one or two of their spiritualized sources, and not harmoniously, that is to say, with all three combined, and in agreement, that particular brain of theirs in which there were superfluous associations is prematurely used up in them and consequently dies during the period of its existence, but also why, owing to this, the other Bobbin-kandelnosts also are used up, even without their own action.
But here you must also know that even on your planet, one still occasionally finds one of your favorites whose duration of planetary existence extends to five of their centuries.
N said Gurdjieff seemed to be expressing the idea that there were limitations for the centres, that get used up, because if we don't use them harmoniously with the other centres, we are running some of these centres down, and if one didn't do this there was the possibility of extending one's life considerably, such that one's planetary existence could extend to five centuries, which was quite extraordinary because we were not aware particularly of any cases in history of people living for five centuries, though there are theories about the Count de St Germain. The Gershwins wrote a song about Methuselah. O thought Gurdjieff might not have meant duration of physical existence, but rather how long they existed in people's minds. Who would want to live 500 years? Life wouldn't have any meaning. You could postpone everthing. Simone de Beauvoir had written about this in her 1946 novel, All Men Are Mortal. L said that the very first paragraph, in terms of its structure, was extremely complex. It was a single sentence. He had tried to take it apart, and work out the structure. T said the same was true of the second paragraph.
. . . though there are more than two and a half millions of what are called ‘unemployed-beings’ in that community England, yet the power-possessing beings there take no measures concerning this, but endeavor to spread still more widely among them that same famous sport of theirs.
Just as in the large community Russia the contents of all what are called ‘newspapers’ and ‘magazines’ used to be always devoted to the question of Russian vodka, so now in that community England, more than half of the text of all their ‘evil-sowers’ is devoted to that famous sport.
N thought England had promoted sport more than any other country. We did not see it not see it so much now because the rest of the world had come on board and was equally mad on sports, and in some areas more than the UK was. There were great supporters of Manchester United that he used to meet in India. You would have thought that sport was quite good - it allowed people to become physically fit and healthier, but Gurdjieff was denigrating all of that, and saying that this was just part of the mass hypnosis that governments and others were trying to induce on us at some level.
