The first thing for N was the trigger. It was not every day that he saw something beautiful, that arrested his attention, but he did notice in particular, when he walked down the road where he lived, there was a group of trees, and because of the extraordinary changing colours around this time of the year, they were a wonderful orangey, yellowy colour, and that stopped him. Gosh, Wow, isn't that beautiful? That created a sense of wonder in him, and registered at a deeper emotional level.
| Each day, if your attention is drawn in by something beautiful, consider how that makes you feel emotionally. Shake a leg, and allow yourself to be drawn in more. Write a one line poem, or a haiku, reflecting the experience. |
What T had noticed was that she was very attracted by light. So she had a few one liners:
• Twinkles of light in water on the pavement
• Glints of light in grey mineral tough flooring
• Sparkling water on leaves in sunlight
and over the month, she managed one haiku:
under the green tree
five pointed yellow red leaves
in shafts of sunlight
She noticed the yellow and red leaves scattered like confetti on the pavement. She noticed bright yellow leaves catching the sun fluttering against the shadowy dark background. She noticed the low sun's rays through the car windscreen in the morning creating an ethereal atmosphere. Noticing something beautiful, she felt connected to the wonder of nature and felt joy. Each time it seemed easy to remember the challenge and shake a leg whilst walking, and surprisingly, when driving. When she shook her leg it amused her because it was the gesture of a clown, or a dog after it has peed. The amusement took her attention away from the next part of the challenge, which was to draw herself in more. Looking back, she was naturally, automatically, but not consciously, drawn in more to something she experienced as beautiful. She either pointed it out to herself, or when she was with someone else. When she was receiving something enjoyable her attention was directed and held a lot longer than usual. Regarding the part about the haiku, she was aware of starting to put into words the sight she had seen, and each time she was struck by the inadequacy of language to recreate the experience. Putting the experience in words was for her a translation for herself, and for communicating to others.
It did not happen to L that often, but when it did he paused and let it draw him in, and he wrote a haiku, which was usually to do with the sun or the leaves. On the first occasion, 15 November, he was on the platform for the Overground, and it was to do with red leaves that had fallen on a path leading to the platform. So he wrote:
the path descending
deep red leaves of autumn hue
soon the train arrives
A couple of days later, he was at the Studio, and there was a really nice sunset outside. He put
round and round he goes
pink and noble is the dawn
sunset is the crown
And then, another red leaved tree in the street.
trees - so red the leaves!
sunlight permeates, the wind
makes them sway and fall
And then, a few days before, there was a fallen leaf with dew or rain on it. He had written:
water droplets lie
upon the fallen leaf
below the rising sun
By doing this, he had just felt more of a connection with nature, and therefore reality. It had been a good experience.
Responding to L, N said he had liked L's haikus very much, he thought they were very well put together. He also thought T's were nice as well, with the light, seeing the the shafts of sunlight. He had not actually read out his haiku, which said:
beautiful trees, so
compelling in your orange
and yellow colours
He said what the haiku did was interesting, it tried to encapsulate the experience poetically, but we all knew that we were going to fall short of that experience, however gifted we might be in trying to write haikus or anything else poetic. There was something so compelling and mysterious about the beauty that we were seeing and which was affecting us emotionally, it was hard to fully express it in a way which would satisfy a similar emotional experience.
Responding to N, T said it resonated with her experience of the season's red and yellow and orange leaves. In a sense, they felt like a distraction. It was autumn - maybe other countries were not as blessed with these changes - but how sensitive we were to it! We were sensitive to it when we saw nature, and it elevated us, but the desire to communicate the experience to ourselves again, or to others, through language - why would we want to do that? There was a tension between our own experience and wanting to convey it to someone else or to another human being - perhaps it was for some tribal reason, a kind of glue for community. When N was speaking it resonated with her own experience; the desire to express the beauty, to hold on to it or to experience it again, but always the inadequacy of language to enable that.
J said he thought N's point about looking for beauty was where a difficulty arose; either we felt it without looking for it, or the moment we actually looked for it, there was a danger that we were going to be in self-illusion. When we looked for beauty we would experience it, not because of its innate quality, but because of our desire for it. N replied he had been talking about the involuntary experience of beauty, where his attention was taken away, and he was pulled out of himself and experiencing something in that moment which was powerful. He knew this from listening to music, because music was a flow, a continuum. If he got caught in the moments of a beautiful leitmotif, or whatever it was he was listening to, he would miss the next bit. T said that whilst N had been talking, she was thinking about natural sounds, like birds singing or the river flowing, and those could not be stopped and re-wound, not like artificial human creations. Although creations were from us and in that way they were natural, we could manipulate them more - we could listen to something six times over, because we loved it so much.
The reading then continued from Chapter 30 of Beelzebub's Tales.
It is necessary to say, first of all, that according to the completed result of the fundamental cosmic law of the holy Heptaparaparshinokh, that is, that cosmic law which was called by the three-brained beings of the planet Earth of the mentioned Babylonian period the Law of Sevenfoldness, the ‘common-integral-vibration’ like all the already ‘definitized’ cosmic formations is formed and consists of seven what are called ‘complexes-of-results’ or, as it is also sometimes said, of ‘seven-classes-of-vibrations’ of those cosmic sources, the arising and further action of each of which also arise and depend on seven others, which in their turn arise and depend on seven further ones, and so on right up to the first most holy ‘unique-seven-propertied-vibration’ issuing from the Most Holy Prime Source; and all together they compose the common-integral-vibration of all the sources of the actualizing of everything existing in the whole of the Universe, and thanks to the transformations of these latter they afterwards actualize in the presences of the cosmic ‘Insapalnian-concentrations’ the said number of the various ‘tonalities-of-color.’
J said that, funnily enough, Gurdjieff was very modern. He was saying that everything was vibration and interdependent on everything else, but why was it necessary to interpose a very human concept - seven? If everything was together, all vibration and energy, splitting it up in the way described might help a flowchart diagram, but J felt it was not the source of universal energy that animated everything, including us. So there was a problem immediately with the framework, as opposed to the perception of what it was that was happening. N said that if you looked at Chinese culture, they did not have this concept of seven in the same way, but had much more the concept of eight, for example, in their culture 64 was the number of hexagrams in the I Ching. He was wondering how much was culturally determined in these criteria, these frameworks, and how much was actually inherent in reality. RM said he found it intriguing that the Chinese universities would still talk about the fundamental seven crystalline forms.
... During such transformations, this said ‘common-integral-vibration,’ that is the white ray, acts with its gravity-center-vibrations upon other ordinary processes proceeding nearby in intraplanetary and surplanetary arisings and decompositions, and, owing to ‘kindred-vibrations,’ its gravity-center-vibrations dependently upon and in accordance with the surrounding conditions blend and become a part of the whole common presence of these definite intraplanetary or surplanetary formations, in which the said processes proceed.
J thought Gurdjieff was giving an entire new vocabulary to a set of concepts that relate to the way we were going about the world, but we did not see it. For instance, he was talking about the white ray. Now we can imagine various sorts of spiritualists or healers, saying there is a white ray coming down, and that this somehow transforms the mosaic of our normal experience into an holistic way of seeing the world and the interpermeation of all vibrations, and Gurdjieff is trying to put a framework in, which is quite instructive, but there is an outside non-human framework intercession with all this. Even when we say two and two is four, right across the universe, it is still, in a way, a human tautology. It is something outside, that is beyond language. He is trying to give it a language, which is actually, J thought, probably a modern truth in a way. It is impressive, but difficult to grasp in the detail.
... Deteriorating century by century, the ‘sensibility-of-perception’ of that organ also—namely, the organ by means of which there chiefly proceeds for the presences of the three-brained beings what is called the ‘automatic-satiation-of-externals’ which is the basis for the possibility of natural self-perfecting—had reached such a point that at the time of our fifth stay there during the period called by the contemporary beings there the period of the ‘Greatness-of-Babylon,’ that organ of theirs could perceive and distinguish the blending of the gravity-center-vibrations of the white ray at most up to the third degree only of what are called its ‘sevenfold-strata,’ that is up to only 343 different ‘tonalities-of-color.’
Here it is interesting to note that quite a number of the three-brained beings of the Babylonian epoch themselves already suspected the gradual deterioration of the sensibility of that organ of theirs, and certain of them even founded a new society in Babylon that started a peculiar ‘movement’ among the painters of that time.
This peculiar movement of the painters of that time had the following program: ‘To-find-out-and-elucidate-the-Truth-only-through-the-tonalities-existing-between-white-and-black.’
L said that was interesting, because they became aware that their sensitivity and perception were in a process of decline, so they tried to reverse the process and accentuate their senses by focusing in on just a narrow band of spectrum, and to try and raise awareness of it. J asked if we could not hang on to a point or a peak of perception. L said it was definitely a motif in Beelzebub's Tales that the ability of human beings to perceive and be aware was gradually reducing and in decline over the ages.
