N had come across an interesting book called How Spies Think: Ten Lessons in Intelligence. He thought it was very easy to get into a mindset, to get pulled in by stuff on social media, and so much was out there, trying to persuade people into a particular way of thinking. He had found the book quite reassuring, that people were aware of it, and saw it happening all the time, and how social media, which was a great thing, had now been perverted in so many ways. He felt that this book was trying to preserve knowledge or at least objectivity at some level, and it gave him quite a boost to come across a copy of a book like this, and a feeling for optimism in the future.
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J had written a history of the job he was doing. There was now a new director, who agreed that the history was important, in contrast to a previous director, who had thought it didn't matter. When J saw that what the group had been about for fifty years, was not being junked in favour of going down an entirely different branch, it induced a feeling of satisfaction.
L said there had been one occasion during the month when former President Trump had announced a lawsuit against Facebook, Twitter and Google calling for an end to un-American cancel culture, because he was being blocked by, in particular, Twitter. So he was an example of somebody who was trying to preserve knowledge, not only in the context of himself, but also for other people who were being silenced every day. So then L did look upwards, which was part of the Challenge, and engendered that feeling of optimism, because one can change the way one feels. Feeling negative is not necessarily a state, it can be a decision and feeling positive can likewise be a choice. Another occasion was a comment made by the departing chief conductor of the Liverpool Philharmonic, Vasily Petrenko, who said “I have all my belief in the future of music, the future of the orchestra and in the future of humanity.” L thought that was an example of somebody trying to preserve knowledge.
Responding to L, T said that preserving knowledge required such a lot of effort, attention, inquiry, and keeping to the course, and destroying knowledge might require less effort. It was easier to cut down a tree than to grow one. She thought the main thing was that the effort required, to preserve knowledge and to keep truthful, was phenomenal. B said that there are plenty of people who used a lot of energy to go to court to falsify knowledge.
The reading then continued from Chapter 30 of Beelzebub's Tales.
In regard to the human Soldjinoha, as for instance various “mysteries,” “religious ceremonies,” “family-and-social-customs,” “religious-and-popular-dances,” and so on, then although they often change in their external form with the flow of time, yet the impulses engendered in man through them and the manifestations of man derived from them always remain the same; and thus by placing the various useful information and true knowledge we have already attained within the inner factors which engender these impulses and these useful manifestations, we can fully count on their reaching our very remote descendants, some of whom will decipher them and thereby enable all the rest to utilize them for their good.
The question now is only this, by what means can such a transmission through the various human Afalkalna and Soldjinoha as I have described be actualized?
I personally suggest that this be done through the Universal Law called the “Law of Sevenfoldness.”
The Law of Sevenfoldness exists on the Earth and will exist forever and in everything.
For instance, in accordance with this Law, there are in the white ray seven independent colors; in every definite sound there are seven different independent tones; in every state of man, seven different independent sensations; further, every definite form can be made up of only seven different dimensions; every weight remains at rest on the Earth only thanks to seven “reciprocal thrusts,” and so on.
T wondered if this was tongue in cheek, because it was so simple, the law of seven, and she was not quite sure that the white ray did go into seven independent colours. L said that in this extract, Gurdjieff might be demonstrating the tendency to suppress information, because he was now enveloping it in mysticism, and it may be very seductive to many people to think there are seven colours in the rainbow, seven notes in the octave. B said that was quite right, because people will try to simplify knowledge, which can destroy it. J thought Gurdjieff was saying that knowledge can go forward in time only up to a certain level. The general truth is something that through all these different manifestations - dance, ritual and the rest - can be projected, but the particular truths that particular societies were putting forward, may be more questionable. So the truth lies in the generality. When it comes to his perception of the different categorizations, which supposedly permeate all schemes and frameworks, he states clearly that this is a personal view of his.
... And as regards the method itself, that is to say, the mode of transmission through this Law, in my opinion, it can be actualized in the following way:
In all the productions which we shall intentionally create on the basis of this Law for the purpose of transmitting to remote generations, we shall intentionally introduce certain also lawful inexactitudes, and in these lawful inexactitudes we shall place, by means available to us, the contents of some true knowledge or other which is already in the possession of men of the present time.
In any case, for the interpretation itself, or, as may be said, for the “key” to those inexactitudes in that great Law, we shall further make in our productions something like a Legominism, and we shall secure its transmission from generation to generation through initiates of a special kind, whom we shall call initiates of art.
And we shall call them so because the whole process of such a transmission of knowledge to remote generations through the Law of Sevenfoldness will not be natural but artificial.
L found this final phrase very interesting, because he explains his use of the word art, which was the title of this chapter, as alluding to an artificial process. He had never thought of the connection between art and artificial, but it meant something that was made by people. T said that if you made something, it was a manifestation of your understanding and your psychological motivation, it was coming from human nature in addition to what we normally call nature. N gave the example of a flower - it could be a process of nature, but could also be artificially produced as a blend.
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