Virtuoso-Caperings

T listened to the radio for news, and on some channels, not all, sports news came at the end. She habitually turned it off at this point. This time the switching off offered an opportunity for the Challenge. She was usually doing something intentional in the kitchen, to do with preparation, cooking or clearing, and cleaning eating implements. She had not thought before that these activities were intentional. She continued with the task with the idea that the otherwise ordinary task was intentional, literally for sustenance, and then essential for sustaining survival of the body, without which nothing else can survive, let alone thrive. So she thought that what had happened to her was experiencing something which you did automatically or took for granted. It was something that you did but did not think very much about, and it opened that area up to be more reflectful at the time of a habitual task. That was the main thing.

When you are checking the news media, and the subject of sport arises, become aware of what you are doing, and ask yourself if it is intentional or out of habit. Click your fingers. Do something different intentionally, and consider to what extent it is purposeful or meaningful.

When L listened to the news, it was usually while he was doing something else, because he generally did not think it was important enough for him to stop and give it full attention. At the beginning of the month he did remember this Challenge. On one occasion he was making toast and the news turned to sport so he clicked his fingers and did something else. He asked the questions stipulated in the Challenge. Was he doing something purposeful? Yes. Making toast is purposeful, because he wanted to prepare something and eat it. Was it meaningful? No. Because it wasn't going to change his life, or follow a goal or personal project. On another occasion he was doing a list of things, and the news switched to sport, so he clicked his fingers and started doing something else - some cooking. Again it was purposeful but not meaningful, he wasn't doing anything life-changing. He noticed during the month how prevalent the subject of sport was. So in one of the regular press briefings from Downing Street about the coronavirus situation, the prime minister started by talking about sport, and how we were all looking forward to the resumption of sport events as soon as possible.

A had not done the Challenge as described, because she did not have a television, she did not watch TV, She did not watch news She read some, and she was not interested in sport. She had understood the Challenge to be focused on stop, pause, and look at what you are doing. Was it doing something purposeful or meaningful? (And not so much about sport.) So she was watching herself a lot of times, without this particular trigger, and what she did was only purposeful, but none of it was what she would describe as meaningful. She had been looking forward to the Meeting to listening, and she wondered what people would consider was meaningful. She realised that she hadn't been doing anything, since she got the Challenge, which she would really consider to be meaningful to her life. She thought that was what would make us thrive and be happy.

Using Todoist to review meaningful vs purposeful
 vs routine activity

Responding to A, T said that if we did not do the household activities, the eating and the cleaning, then our lives would deteriorate, so it was maintenance. She was very questioning of purposeful and meaningful, because cooking and eating sustained the body. Without the body, nothing happened. If you didn't sustain the body, there was deterioration and death. So the body was the vessel of everything. For her there was enormous meaning in doing the purposeful tasks. L had been using the app Todoist which presents a colour-coded chart at the end of the day or week. He had set it up to separate the the routine things he had been doing from the others.  Routine tasks can be meaningful - if you don't eat, you die. But they are not meaningful in the sense of changing your life. There are other things which are purposeful, but it is not our purpose. So we may be doing something for a job - preparing a spreadsheet or a presentation - it is for the boss's purpose, not ours, but we do it in a purposeful way because we want to fulfill a responsibility. Meaningful action follows our own goals, our own purposes, which may reflect our values or dreams, or wanting to change a habit. These he would colour code differently, So his charts did show, in colour, the proportions, and it was mostly routine tasks, with a number of purposeful ones and a smaller number of meaningful ones. This reminded J a bit of Bronowsky who said "... there are people who have led

happy and complete lives, who feel that they can speak out of a full heart and a full mind all in the same breath". J wondered if this also applied to a person whose purposefulness, and whose meaningfulness, in there lives, were correctly aligned. So if you could do both what was purposeful and meaningful at the same time, you were being to some extent happier and being fulfilled. The meaningful and the purposeful were definitely distinct, but you could marry them together and do what was meaningful because it was purposeful. He tried to do that. L said it seemed to him that there was a kind of pyramid here. There was a level of routines, things we had to do just to keep going every day. The second level of the pyramid might be purposeful actions, and out of those a few would be meaningful. And maybe the name of the game was to make the meaningful level bigger, or coinciding with the purposeful. This reminded RM of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs.

The reading then continued from Chapter 30 of Beelzebub's Tales.

        

With acknowledgements to Harold Good
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At this place of his tales, Beelzebub became silent and turning suddenly to his old servant Ahoon, who was also sitting there listening to him with the same attention as his grandson Hassein, he said:

And you, old man, are you also listening to me with the same interest as our Hassein? Weren’t you yourself personally with me everywhere on that planet Earth and didn’t you see with your own eyes and sense for yourself everything about what I am relating to Hassein?

Instead of just sitting there openmouthed at my tales, you also tell our favorite something…. There is no getting out of it. We have got to tell him all we can about those strange three-brained beings, seeing that they have so intensely interested him.

Surely you must have been interested in one aspect or another of these queer ducks; well, tell us something just about that aspect.”

When Beelzebub had finished speaking, Ahoon, having thought a while, replied:

“After your subtly psychological tales about all these ‘unintelligibles,’ how can I intrude with my tales?”

And then, with an unusual seriousness and preserving the style and even entire expressions of Beelzebub himself, he continued:

“It is, of course…. How shall I put it? My essence even was often thrown out of balance by those strange three-brained beings, who with their ‘virtuoso-caperings’ nearly always used to supply an impetus for evoking the being-impulse of amazement in one or in another of my spiritualized parts.”

T was curious about the symbolic role of Ahoon, whose name was an anagram of a biblical character. L said that Beelzebub, like Noah, was on a ship. Ahoon might be like an aspect of Beelzebub that was observing. Beelzebub might have been caught up in events emotionally, and was asking what the observer observed, for a more abstracted version of what had been going on. T said that the Ahoon character was also someone who did not speak most of the time, and he had been given this chance to speak.

... “I intend to speak about that factor which has already become definitely maleficent for the contemporary beings and at the arising of the cause of which, you yourself were present, as I very well remember during our stay then in Babylon; I mean the factor they themselves call ‘art.’

“If you should consent in your wisdom to take up that question in detail, then, according to my understanding, our dear Hassein will have perhaps the choicest material for his better elucidation of all the abnormal strangenesses of the psyche of the three-brained beings, who in most recent times arise on that planet Earth which has interested him.”

Having said this and having with the tip of his tail wiped off the drops of sweat which had formed on his forehead, Ahoon became silent and adopted his usual attentive posture.

L asked if this meant that Gurdjieff was not that keen on art? Or maybe he was not that keen on organised art, or subsidised art. N said we knew that he was quite interested in objective art. Gurdjieff made a distinction between objective art and other art. He was not condemning all art. L said that artists were very present in his groups, in the Prieurié. T said that the text described bringing the base of the body to the top - Ahoon wiped the sweat off his forehead with his tail. RM said this meant a lot to him. He had been studying the evolution of consciousness. Consciousness and the possibility of evolving arises in creatures when they become self-conscious.