N had had one particular experience in the course of the month, which was like this It was a meeting with someone which had gone very badly, and that, and some of the things that were said subsequently, had thrown him off his equilibrium. He thought there was a part of him that was quite outraged for a few days afterwards, and he noticed that I thought, and asked himself, Well, what's behind this and what have I learned from it? Usually, it was something to do with his ego or some form of injustice or not being treated or accepted in the way he wanted. So it tended to be egotistic things, when he analysed it.
| Each day, observe any shocks that happen. If a particular one throws you off your stride and takes you away from where you thought you were going, raise your palm to your head, and consider what the shock means to you and what you can learn from it. |
On one occasion, T had got geared up the flu jab appointment at her local pharmacy, before she had another appointment. But the pharmacist was not ready. it wasn't ready. This was a shock, and she was left wondering why. So she left the pharmacy, and that was when she put the palm of the hand to her head. She experienced anxiety and a sense of lack of trust, but delayed her other appointment and braved returning to trust the doctor a second time. The second one was having no petrol after driving around for an hour finding and avoiding long impossible queues, and she slapped her forehead. The consequences for her were alarming. She faced the uncomfortable reality of a long cycle ride the next morning. She faced this and managed the ride.
For L it was more a question of being literally taken off his stride. He would walk into something, knock a toe, or hit something with his arm, and it would be a moment of pain. That would be a shock. And then he might slap his head. then I might, I might do that. Then it was the question of how he felt and what he could learn from it, and that was quite useful. It was usually a matter of walking more slowly, stopping thinking about distracting things. Generally, he thought he was quite level-headed, and usually did not get as upset or affected emotionally by things other people did. So for him it was mainly physical things, which is very literally what was in the challenge.
Responding to N, J said there seemed to be, in that approach, the presumption that there must have been some sort of mistake, and it might have been to do with a missappraisal of N's own ego. We do find, even with shocks and the unexpected, that we have an expected way of dealing with the unexpected. J had found, generally, with so many of the things that apparently had gone wrong in his life, that they had actually gone wrong for what was ultimately a good purpose, and it was not necessarily that he had mis-reacted. There were these people who will say that for everybody you meet, there is a purpose to it as if there were some sort of divine or providential orchestration to our every encounter, which he thought was trying to second guess God a little bit too far. So he just wondered if, looking at what were the basic building blocks of one's own prejudice, whether it might be a useful alternative to consider what goes wrong in people's strange behaviour, as useful, rather as the Chinese see opportunity in crisis. The fact that one was disproportionately angry, may mean that there was some good reason for staying away from or reworking one's attitude towards situations like that. It may be better to know that one had got a warning from within one's own body, that this was something to steer clear of, as opposed to it being something wrong that had done by oneself.
The reading then continued from Chapter 30 of Beelzebub's Tales.
This posture of his infallibly demands, in accordance with the Law of Sevenfoldness, that his feet should normally be placed in a certain position; but these Babylonian learned beings intentionally put the feet of the said leader of the ceremony not as they should be placed in accordance with this Law, but otherwise.
... On Tuesdays, namely, on the ‘day-of-architecture,’ the learned beings belonging to the second group brought various models for such proposed buildings and constructions as could endure a very long time.
And in this case, they set up these buildings not exactly in accordance with the stability ensuing from the Law of Sevenfoldness, or as the beings there were mechanically already accustomed to do, but otherwise.
For instance, the cupola of a certain construction had, according to all the data, to rest on four columns of a certain thickness and definite strength.
But they placed this said cupola on only three columns; and the reciprocal thrust, or, as it is also expressed, the ‘reciprocal resistance,’ ensuing from the Law of Sevenfoldness for supporting the surplanetary weight, they took not from the columns alone, but also from other unusual combinations ensuing from the same Law of Sevenfoldness with which the mass of the ordinary beings of that time were also already acquainted; that is to say, they took the required degree of resistance of the columns chiefly from the force of the weight of the cupola itself.
T thought this had to be a metaphor for, in terms of the human being, that the usual way of doing things - which is exact - is being taken to to another point where it is inexact, but still works. J thought it was to do with the sort of degree to which we ought to re examine preset patterns in our lives for doing things. In this case, a particular outcome was needed, which was that the cupola did not crash to the ground, and there was not just one, but other ways other than the norm, for ensuring that that did not happen. N said they knew what perfection could be, in terms of the law of Sevenfoldness, but they were choosing to make these changes and do things in a different way. Suddenly some of the mysteries about the Sevenfoldness were hidden away from people. Conscious mistakes were being made in the way buildings were being created, and conscious changes in the way that dances would be. Gurdjieff had studied dancing, and Gothic architecture. So it was partly some of the coding that Gurdjieff was talking about here, whereby some of this knowledge was kept esoteric purposely, because people did not want all this knowledge to be out there in the world. L said that Gurdjieff had talked about deliberate exactitude earlier, in connection with doing some of these constructions slightly wrong. And that would stand out to future historians. But he might be also be saying that the sevenfoldness law was not really true, that it was a dogma that was legitimate to change. L thought that when Gurdjieff talked about it initially, it was presented as something dogmatic.
... This group of learned members of the club of the Adherents-of-Legominism further indicated what they wished in their minia-images or models of proposed constructions, by utilizing the law called ‘Daivibrizkar,’ that is, the law of the action of the vibrations arising in the atmosphere of enclosed spaces.
This brought to T's mind walking into a cathedral. It is very inspiring and enhancing of your sense of yourself. L said the big cathedrals might be legominisms because we had lost the art of building them.
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| The interior of the Dominican church in Antwerp Pieter Neefs the Elder c. 1636 |
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