In May, there had been a lot of rain, but when the sun did come out N made the circle with his thumb and finger. During the month, he had joined two networking organisations, in which he had been trying to help people. There was definitely an element of self-interest, but he did not think that was the predominant motive. Sometimes in helping other people, you were also helping yourself. He thought that the things went hand in hand, there was very little that was purely altruistic. The thoughts he had, when he was doing things, was that if this helped people, this gave them information, he was very happy to assist.
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T had remembered to make the sign when looking at the sun. Acknowledging the sun in this way was bringing a different experience to her relationship with the sun. It seemed such a trivial action to make in relationship to the magnitude of the sun. It highlighted how many hours she took the sun for granted, and yet it was the key to life - without it she would die. It sustained her day after day, whether or not she noticed it. The second part was to think of a club she belonged to, and plan to do a selfless deed for it. She thought about what she was involved with apart from work, and the closest to being in a club was coordinating a group of her professional association, and in her involvement with a life drawing group from which she had been absent since the lockdowns. Anything she thought of to do for the professional association group did not meet the criteria for selflessness. Any action she took for the benefit of the group also benefited her as a member of the group. There were different levels of benefit. The deed itself would affect her too. There was even the emotional consequence for her, even if it was just fantasy, of other people's emotional or intellectual reactions to the deed. This made her question if altruism was an impossible state. The closest she could think of was donating anonymously to a charity, but even then there would be the emotional satisfaction, and even a sense of superiority, over those she was helping anonymously. By donating anonymously she would prevent the ability for others to be able to express gratitude towards the donor. The very act of doing something for someone else, ipso facto, generates a feeling of expansion and satisfaction. The old saying: It is in giving, we receive.
O said she had been doing the exercise every day, without the bodily part, and not consciously in the framework of the exercise. She was doing a lot of things for people, and all the time thinking about whether she was serving herself. So it was a conflict for her every day. So the question was whether, because it was not in the framework of the exercise, she had forgotten about the exercise itself, as if it had become like an everyday thing. It was not something that she had got an instruction here to do.
L had done this a few times during the month. As N had said, it had not been a very warm May, so he did this sign when the sun came out, and then he consciously tried to think of some way to benefit selflessly groups he was in, and he was in some professional associations, and other groups of similar interests, and there was this one too, but he was not in any group that was based about people helping each other as N had described. So no quid pro quo types of organisations. So what he came up with was contacting people and saying he liked this and he liked that. He like such and such a performance or event. It may have made people feel good, but it felt to him a kind of hollow altruism, because he did not necessarily fully believe in what he was saying, and he thought that if people do good things they don't need external praise. So it made him question altruism generally.
Responding to O, N said though she did this every day, he thought the whole part of these exercises was that there was another part of us, where we were asserting our will, and trying to be present and trying to wake up. He was sure there were a lot of things we did which were very beneficial to other people, and also very beneficial to ourselves, in the course of our everyday lives, but if we were doing them unconsciously, and were not actually "there" when we did these things, in terms of self-remembering, then he thought it was a very different process to the process that Gurdjieff was trying to teach us. Sometimes, when people joined his groups, he would try and get them to change their behaviour. For example, if they had a particular role in life, he would get them to act their role. He was trying to create a distinction between their higher self, that was doing the acting, as opposed to their lower self, which was just living life automatically. So N was trying to live his own role more consciously and accept it as being a role. He thought it was an important part of the Gurdjieff Work, that we look at our various roles, and then try and live those roles more consciously, and separate in the process of living those roles, rather than doing them at a subconscious level.
Responding to O and N, T said it was so complex, because whatever we were doing was originally our passion, but the more you do it, the more you go to sleep whilst you are doing it. It becomes entrenched. The whole life is surrounded by the consequence of doing, which means you can live where you live, and eat your food, because you get your living from it as well. T liked that distinction N was making between being in the role passionately, but maybe to step away from the passion, not losing the meaning for yourself of why you are doing it, but coming from a different place somehow, and the Challenges were trying to get you to be an observer of what you were doing, and that is the hardest part because we are so involved.
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| Source: hebrew4christians.com |
O said that it was very difficult for people who pray every day not to be mechanical. L said that over the years and centuries prayers get longer and longer, so people say them faster and faster, and obviously mechanically. He thought that applied in every religion. J said that if you did not know the commandment, but you did it because it was a natural and meaningful thing to do, you were almost doing better, because you did not have the tenets of your religion in your mind - but the question really was, if you were bringing your considerations into your conscious, and being aware of what exactly you were thinking, because you were in the context of the real world, not your own mind, did that improve your decision making if you were more alert and alive to it, rather than because it had come from within you in a meaningful rather than a purposive way? L thought it was better to stand back and think, as well as do things naturally, because we can easily deceive ourselves and do things naturally and might think, at a later time, maybe that wasn't quite right. In the Gurdjieff Work, we can focus and develop values and understanding, and we can use the human quality of reason, which other creatures do not not have. and that makes something that was purposeful, become meaningful. O said this was where the Gurdjieff Work came into it, which was about the centres. There were things you should be doing automatically, like driving. If you stopped and thought about driving, you were not going to do it very well. O said there were thing that you had to do mechanically. When she played music, if she thought about all the chords, she slowed down. L said that before that point you learn what the chords are, and decide what you are going to practice, and when you have practiced for hours a day, you will play those sequences without thinking about it. O thought that this work about which centre you employ is very important, and that was something which was difficult. T said it was whether or not the three centres were all working together, plus the "will", which N had mentioned earlier on. You consciously willed something, and the plan was the proof, the plan brought it into manifestation, that was the hardest thing.
The reading then continued from Chapter 30 of Beelzebub's Tales.
... they clearly constated that in the course of the change of generations of beings on the Earth a very undesirable and distressing phenomenon occurs, namely, that, during the processes of reciprocal destruction, that is during what are called ‘wars’ and ‘popular risings,’ a great number of initiated beings of all degrees are for some reason or other invariably destroyed, and, together with them, there are also destroyed forever very many Legominisms through which alone various information about former real events on the Earth is transmitted and continues to be transmitted from generation to generation.
... they decided to take advantage of the exceptional circumstance that so many learned beings were together in one city to confer collectively for the purpose of finding some means for averting at least this distressing phenomenon ...
This reminded La that in the present time there were concerted efforts by some organisations to stop us using certain words, or to suppress books. So we can see difficulty in the preservation of knowledge and ideas at work at the moment. Gurdjieff was describing a long-term phenomenon that recurs in history, and suggesting that a great deal has been lost in the past, T said she had always thought of reciprocal destruction as about literal wars, but it could also mean generations destroying previous generations' wisdom deliberately, for whatever reasons. O said it was happening a lot in this century. The psychological knowledge that existed so far is being lost. There were only a few mental health professionals who fight against this trend, and even take it to court sometimes. T said it seemed to be an attack on relationship, and one of the things she was coming across was that everything was time limited, but you can't predict how long something is going to take between two humans, one trying to help the other. L said that in terms of theories of psychology being lost, and the system of legominism - symbols to preserve knowledge - you could see that very clearly with the complex system of astrological signs, representing different aspects of personality, and how they may mesh, and that has continued despite, no doubt, many attempts to suppress it. N said that astrology had been all round the world, it was obviously been a universal system of knowledge at one stage. It got trivialised, if you thought about astrology as it appeared in the Evening Standard every day, at a very simplistic level. There was knowledge about characterology, but a lot of that knowledge was not known to most people. L said there was also the ingenuity of connecting that to a comprehensive knowledge of astronomy, and the orbits of the moon, sun and planets. There was the Antikythera Mechanism which had been found in a shipwreck. It was over two thousand years old, but it showed a clear and precise knowledge of the orbits. T said it also showed knowledge of engineering.
...And on the day when new members ceased to be admitted, the number of those enrolled amounted to a hundred and thirty-nine learned beings; and it was with this number of members that the club existed until the said Persian king abandoned his former caprice connected with those terrestrial learned beings.
As I learned after my enrollment as a member of that club, all the learned beings had arranged on the very first day of its opening a general meeting at which it was unanimously resolved to hold daily general meetings, when reports and discussions on the two following questions were to be made: namely, the measures to be taken by the members of the club on their return home for the collection of all the Legominisms existing in their native lands, and for placing them at the disposal of the learned members of this club which they had founded; and secondly, what was to be done in order that the Legominisms might be transmitted to remote generations by some other means than only through initiates.
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| Source: Crop Circle Connector |
