Echoes of the Past

T said there were different cultures living in the same community and talking to each other using a common language, but the same words meant different things leading to miscommunication and discord. Her thoughts were that free speech was a legal term and possible if everyone was singing from the same song sheet. Free meant that there were no legal consequences, but now there were social consequences and loss of livelihood through forced resignations or cancellations of events. Her emotions were horror at the changes, every time she heard the instances in the media. Even dictionary definitions were being changed.

When you come across words in conversation or the media, that have changed their meaning from a time earlier in your life, make a note of them. Open and close your mouth. Consider what the original and new meanings represent and how that affects you emotionally. Choose which one you prefer.

J spoke of the words perfect and awesome. which used to be used in a rather reserved sense. When you said perfect, you really meant something that was, in every way, perfect. Now perfect was almost a way of saying yes, I agree with that. If somebody said, Yes, I'm good, it would normally have implied something to do with their moral stance, but it did not mean that any more. It was draining the words of their previous full blooded meaning. As to his emotional reaction to them, he thought it was good. It demonstrated a level of youthful enthusiasm. The word meditation had changed its meaning and become very specialised and connected with all manner of usually Eastern-orientated cults. He thought that was a change that needed unpacking. It did not have much of an emotional charge with him. Generally speaking, he thought the changes of the meanings of the words were in line with the changes in society.

The first instance that occurred to L was the use of the word coffee to refer to decaffeinated coffee, which was not coffee, as there was only a minute amount of caffeine in it. He decided to stop buying decaffeinated coffee. Then he recalled the word policeman, who used to be somebody who walked the streets, looking for disturbances, creating a secure environment. Policemen now no longer walked the streets. Another time, he heard a very noisy car. That used to denote a powerful engine, but now it was often an artificial noise put in by the manufacturer to add some panache to the vehicle. So again, that was a kind of fakery. Then he saw a quote from Robert Conquest. The simplest way to explain the behaviour of any bureaucratic organisation is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of his enemies. One way to attack an organisation was to change the meaning of words.

During the period allocated to responses, nothing was said about specific instances of doing the challenge.

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

        

With acknowledgements to Harold Good
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From the very beginning of the arising of those theaters of theirs, they assembled and now assemble in them for the purpose of watching and studying the reproductions of their contemporary ‘actors’; no… they assemble only for the satisfaction of one of the consequences of the properties of the organ Kundabuffer, a consequence which had been readily crystallized in the common presences of the majority of them, and called ‘Oornel,’ which the contemporary beings now call ‘swaggering.’

You must know that thanks to the mentioned consequences of the properties of the organ Kundabuffer most of the contemporary beings acquire in their presence a very strange need to evoke the expression in others of the being-impulse called ‘astonishment’ regarding themselves, or even simply to notice it on the faces of those around.

The strangeness of this need of theirs is that they get satisfaction from the manifestation of astonishment on the part of others regarding their appearance, which exactly conforms with the demands of what are called ‘fashions,’ that is to say with just that maleficent custom of theirs, which began there since the Tikliamishian civilization and which has now become one of those being-factors which automatically gives them neither the time nor the possibility to see or sense reality.

This maleficent custom for them is that they periodically change the external form of what is called ‘the-covering-of-their-nullity.’

N said that he had met a few actors in his time, and some of them did adopt this kind of swagger because, as the text says, it creates astonishment in other people. Then Gurdjieff builds on this by talking about fashion, and how people wanted to look great and resplendent on the outside and be appreciated as something extraordinary, but they were just covering up their nullity. L said that actors were like clowns, but their productions were dressed up with background stories, in which they would  fall over, swagger, shout and sing. N said some were carried to this extreme, of becoming hellraisers, like Richard Harris, Richard Burton, Peter O'Toole, and Oliver Reed, they wanted to go to extremes to show off in front of people. T said the paragraph was alluding to the actors, not in their roles, but outside of acting, almost to make up for the fact that they weren't being themselves in the characters that they were portraying. They were being other people all the time. It was about that difference between being in the play and out of the play. N said they kept on acting, even when it was not required by the circumstances of their lives. L thought the word for what N was describing was overdramatisation. Dramatisation in itself was like making an illusion, but overdramatisation was typified by the actors N had mentioned, or when violence was enacted in a movie.

Fubar

L had received an email asking if he knew somebody of a particular name who had been at Cambridge at the same time, and was a musician and also a creator of cryptic crosswords. L had not known him, but used to know someone of the same surname who had a friend while at Oxford who was also a musician and an authority on creating puzzles. So there was a connection with the surname. A few days later, L had come across a saying from Malaysia: Where there are no eagles, the grasshopper will say "I am an eagle." The next day, a Facebook friend put up a big picture of an eagle. So there was a connection with the eagle, and there was also a link with the previous synchronicity, since the first name of the Facebook friend was also the name of L's friend who had been at Oxford. More recently, he had been talking about a visual metaphor. The next day, he looked up the name of an artist whom he knew 15 years before. She had done a painting of precisely that metaphor.

Each day, look out for coincidences or synchronicities. Try to work out and write down what they might mean and what the connections are, as if it had happened in a sleeping dream. Even if you don't see a connection, if something happens to you, think about what it symbolises. When you see a connection, touch your head with your hand, as if to say, I got it!

N had a friend who was studying literature, who told him about an essay she had to write on the Chartists and Thomas Carlyle, about which she unfortunately knew very little. N replied that he knew even less. About an hour later, he went into a secondhand bookshop in St John's Wood, and they had a book by Thomas Carlyle on the history of the Chartists, which he bought. It was such a rare book, you did not come across many books by Thomas Carlyle anymore.

T had been waiting for the car recovery service because of a punctured tyre. She had had to change plans and stay at home. So she got out the personal computer and was faced with a recovery window that asked her to restart or see advanced repair options. Or if you did not know which option was right for you, to contact someone you trusted to help. And she touched her head with her hand. Another case was on the seventh of October. Her phone had a display which showed her at what time the sun rises, and she noticed it was at 07:10. Also, she had noticed that the car tire had been punctured with a screw. She reflected that the best case scenario for the cause was carelessness by an inconsiderate workman in the road, and the worst case scenario was deliberate criminal behaviour for political or evil intent, or a prank. She concluded that there was a spectrum from carelessness to criminality. Later she was reading Beelzebub's Tales, and reached the part where Gurdjieff described the midwife as demonstrating criminal carelessness. She had never thought of criminality and carelessness together until this time, so that really struck her. Usually, during the month, the Challenge cropped up a few times, but this time it happened again and again, there were so many instances. That in itself was an interesting thing.

Responding to N, L said he found the incident about the book by Thomas Carlyle striking.

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

        

With acknowledgements to Harold Good
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And it was the basis because it appeared in the word by which the learned mysterists were designated and also in the word which stood for a personality invented by the ancient Greeks, with whose name, as I have already said, one of the schools-of-art then existing had been connected; and the result of this was that the mentioned representatives of this terrestrial art of that time, with their already now quite bobtailed reason, thought that it was nothing more than the word indicating ‘the-followers-of-this-historical-personality-Orpheus,’ and as many of them did not regard themselves as his followers, then instead of the mentioned word they just invented the word artist.

... and they wished and succeeded in substituting for the already long-existing definite expression ‘Orpheist’ the new word artist.

T noted that the word artist was derived from another word, Orpheist, rather than from something actual. N said that at that time an artist might have been more like a shaman character, who was almost able to go into the underworld and do things and create extraordinary situations. Maybe that reduced to becaming someone who was just an artist who could not do those things, but could do some pretty things. L thought Gurdjieff was talking about gradual decline in in the meaning of words. So the word artist came to mean less than what the word Orpheist used to mean. Even in ancient time, the meaning of the word had declined, and this had continued in our period, with changes in usage of the words artist, musician and composer.  The previous day he had looked at a YouTube video while researching what was coming up at Alexandra Palace. They were advertising an event where a band called Bicep was going to perform. They performed a kind of trance music, which had absolutely no tune, but the YouTube video had thousands of comments and they were all saying it was a masterpiece. So they had changed the meaning of the words masterpiece, and music. Many of the comments said they would come back and listen to it week after week. Would they be as enraptured by a Bach fugue? N said this was a type of inflation. It happened to money, and also happened to words, language, and artistic endeavours, probably over the centuries. B said you needed to have a child to unravel it, to say the emperor was not wearing any clothes. It was about knowledge - people could be manipulated to believe anything. L said it was also about effort, because it took effort to appreciate classical music. It took no effort to sit down and hear a hypnotic beat, and very loud noise. B said that hypnosis also had a purpose of getting people into a particular state. T said it was called trance music. N said it was there to put you to sleep rather than wake you up.

What's in a Name?

N found the om vibrated parts of his body that had not been vibrated before through sound, and the more he did it, the more vibratory and deeper the sound went into his whole body. Emotionally, he thought it was a stabilising thing to do. It had been a month of extraordinary news - the loss of the Queen who was such a symbol for this country. His feeling was that it was very useful to have a discipline like doing the om every morning, as it enabled him to become more stabilised.

Every morning, soon after rising, hum the mantra om for one minute. Afterward, make a written note of any effects it had on you, physically, emotionally and intellectually, trying to be as honest and brief as possible.

First of all T had remembered Winnie the Pooh, doing the humming, because we were humming the om, which was a nice recollection. She had experienced the sound in her neck connect and travel by its resonance into her sternum, and the top of her belly, her stomach. It made her think that the food went in the mouth and then travelled down the connecting tube, the pipe, to the stomach, and that inspired the thought that we ate food for nourishment, and maybe sound was nourishment too, and she could produce it and nourish herself, but she rarely did. When she was talking to someone, the sound went out into the world, and she did not feel it or experience it for the resonance that it was, and perhaps she was not nourished by it as a consequence. The other question was, what might the sound be nourishing, and was that aspect of her starving on some level? All the words she uttered, she had been taught to say from an early age, like everybody, too early to choose what to learn, but an open vessel to fill with sounds, to communicate personal needs, etc. - being fed, watered, protected from harm. She had thought about the resonance. She was a musical instrument, which she did not play.

During the period allocated to responses, nothing was said about specific instances of doing the challenge.

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

... when at the beginning of the contemporary civilization certain beings there began to decipher them ‘from-a-bit-here-and-a-bit-there’ and realized that they could not sound or pronounce many of these definite letters, they then invented what is called a ‘written compromise.’

This mentioned written compromise was that instead of the signs or letters which they could not pronounce, although they understood the sense of this pronunciation, they decided to employ a slightly similar letter of their alphabet at the time, and in order that everybody should understand that it was not that letter but quite another, they always wrote by its side a letter of the ancient Romans, now existing but already meaningless, called in English ‘h’ and among the contemporary French ‘ahsh.’

From then on, all the other of your favorites began doing the same; they added to each of these suspicious letters this Roman ‘inheritance.’

When this written compromise was invented, they had about twenty-five of these suspicious ‘letters,’ but in the course of time, as their ableness to pronounce deteriorated with the increase of their wiseacring, the number of the letters they specially invented for such a ‘being-ableness’ diminished, and by the time the word artist was invented they had already only eight of these letters; and in front of this notorious ‘h,’ they wrote letters, partly ancient Greek and partly ancient Latin, which they indicated in the following way: ‘th,’ ‘ph,’ ‘gh,’ ‘ch,’ ‘sch,’ ‘kh,’ ‘dh,’ and ‘oh.’

        

With acknowledgements to Harold Good
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L said that in English versions of the Old Testament, the Hebrew letter Chet (which had no equivalent in the English alphabet) was shown by following a C with an H, hence the spelling of Rachel. N said Gurdjieff was also saying that language had lost a lot of its connection with the meaningfulness of words. B thought that it was in the shift between the pronounciation and the written that something happened. T said that as soon as you wrote a sound, it just became a sign, not the thing itself. So the more it was written, the more it had to be learned from the writing and not from the making of the sound. Young children, who learnt language as soon as possible, were given the letters to look at. B said the word had three components, one was the written, one was the way it sounded, and the image of the thing it represented.

L said this was like Lacan's distinction between the real, the imaginary and the symbolic. N said it was interesting that in religion, there was the concept of holiness of some words. The word for the name of God was not meant to be casually uttered or written down, and was for use only in specific ceremonial contexts.

High Theatre

L had done the Challenge several times. Being a composer, he thought quite a lot about going from the fourth degree of the scale, whether back down or further up. It required extra effort going upward, as the distance was two semitones, whereas going down, it was only one, or half the effort. When he didn't follow through an intended action, he would remember to sing do-re-mi-fa and then fall back to mi, and that sometimes spurred him on to carry out his intention after all. He had noticed that music he heard while out and about, blaring from cars or from within houses, often did not get much beyond the do and the re, it was very repetitive. He had wondered if the influence of that music on the people who were absorbed in it might be not to do effort, not to try to do things. If the music was purely rhythmic, it was just do do do.

Once a day, observe when you consider doing something, but meet with resistance. At the moment of choice, if you don't put in the effort to do it, sing the first four notes of the scale, and then drop back to the third, do-re-mi-fa-mi. If you do put in the effort and accomplish the task, sing the first five notes of the scale, do-re-mi-fa-sol, going the whole hog, including the extra semitones. Either way, consider how the shape of the music affects you emotionally, and whether you might sing the shape before deciding, and whether that might influence the outcome.

What had been happening to T over the month was a third project, which had a deadline of two months, and she had realised that it was the one thing that she was using the do-re-mi for. It was usually at the end of the day, and she would do do-re-mi-fa-mi. She kept falling back, because she said to herself, I just can't do it today. I'll do it tomorrow. I haven't got the energy today. She realised that she had left it to the wire, and it was only two factors - the deadline and support from a couple of other people - which pushed her to go do-re-mi-fa-so. She observed that she did do-re-me-fa-me a lot.

During the period allocated to responses, nothing was said about specific instances of doing the challenge.

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

Initiating you now into the impressions, hidden from strangers and which became fixed in my common presence, and which were the result of my conscious perceptions during my last stay there in person on the surface of your planet concerning this contemporary art of theirs, my ‘I’ with an arisen and profound being-impulse of regret must now emphatically state that of all the fragments of knowledge already attained by the beings of the Babylonian civilization—which fragments, it must be allowed, also contained a great deal—absolutely nothing has reached the beings of contemporary civilization for the benefit of their ordinary being-existence, apart from a few ‘empty words’ without any inner content.

T said that at the time this book was written, about 50 years ago, artists were being taught, now that the camera had been invented, that they did not  have to do the work anymore, to observe and make make detailed drawings and paintings of what they saw, which, presumably, was objective art. She had been taught that the contemporary art was a release and a freedom from that. Gurdjieff's words were almost like a prophecy. He thought it was bad then, but what about now? How much worse could it get?

        

With acknowledgements to Harold Good
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And as regards this word art itself . . . this said word for some reason or other happening to please just this kind of three-brained being there, they began using it for their egoistic aims, and gradually made from it that very something which, although it continues to consist of, as it is said, ‘complete vacuity,’ yet has gradually collected about itself a fairylike exterior, which now ‘blinds’ every one of these favorites of yours who keeps his attention on it only a little longer than usual.

T said that current art had somehow got corrupted through egoistic aims and self aggrandisement. A word she heard again and again, when there were exhibitions, was showcasing, which was a ghastly word, and it was bigging it up. It was all about show rather than somebody coming along and meditating on a painting for an hour. N said that in his opinion there had clearly been quite a disintegration even from the period of the Renaissance to the later periods in art.

. . . A certain amount of information concerning the activity of the group of the mysterists, the learned members of the club of the Adherents-of-Legominism, also reached, as I have just told you, the beings of the contemporary epoch, who, wishing to imitate them also in this, began building for this purpose special halls which they also called ‘theaters.’

The three-brained beings of the contemporary civilization quite frequently assemble in considerable numbers in these theaters of theirs in order to observe and presumably to study the various prepared manifestations of their ‘actors,’ as they have quite recently begun to call them, just as the other learned members of the club of the Adherents-of-Legominism studied then in Babylon the reproductions of the learned beings of the group of the mysterists.

N said Gurdjieff was saying there was something going on now which represented something similar to what happened in Babylonian times. So he was not saying that all current artists were without any credibility. There was something that had still managed to come through.

Sounds Essential

B had noticed that mechanical voices like airplanes and motor bikes were continuous until you stopped them, compared with natural voices, like birds and humans, which were discontinuous, and always with interruptions. She wondered what the gap was. She noticed was that when she was very preoccupied, the human voice really bothered her and she wanted to push it away from her vicinity; it really interrupted. This made her think that in all the talking therapies and the Gurdjieff Work, the talking was an awakening factor, as you had to talk in order to interrupt. On one occasion someone had told her she was interrupting, which she was doing no more that usual, and thought the interruption had been in the person's mind.

Once a day, when you hear music, or sounds of nature, or mechanical sounds, change your posture to enhance the listening. Observe the kinds of feelings or memories that are evoked. For a while afterwards, act as if a different role, as if having changed costume.

For N, the most intense form of the Challenge was when he went to a play the previous evening called Folk at the Hampstead Theatre, which was about Cecil Sharp, who went around the country collecting folk songs. The play tried to communicate how there was a disconnection between the people he was dealing with, and the way he interpreted the songs and the kind of arrangements he made of them. There had been a lot of singing in this play, and N had found that if he changed his position, in moving forward a bit and listening really intently, then the emotional response he received from the performance was stronger.

L had observed that the emotional response to sounds he was hearing was often to do with sadness. After listening to sounds in nature, and giving his attention there, that was what he was left with, in the feeling centre.

Responding to L, N said that he also sometimes felt great sadness when he heard certain music, but he thought it depended to a certain extent on what the music churned up for you. However it would be very difficult to feel sad when listening to certain parts of Beethoven's seventh symphony, because it is just so joyful. He did not know whether the sadness experienced when listening to music was related to it, or whether there was something inherent in the whole situation of life, that life was a journey from birth to death, and inevitably the case, and therefore there was a sadness inherent in it.

Responidng to B, T said that for two centuries, the mechanical noises have been experienced by humans and all the rest of nature around the sounds. The mechanisms were not alive, but were making a noise. What B was saying resonated with her - she did not know what to make of it, but it seemed significant. B said the significance was in the gap, the interruptions, in human speech. She thought there was an inserted message, or somehow an interpretation. The silence was a kind of voice. If somebody was supposed to say something, and they didn't, then they were saying something. T said that when when the chirping, or the chatting, stops, there is space for another, a response. She had heard a lot of chirping and cheeping from the birds during the month, and the question that came to mind was, Why were they making sounds? What was the reason? She wanted to know the reason and there was no way she could find out by asking. B said that when there was a gap, the whole voice or noise became music in a way. T said thay were singing - for its own sake. They could make a noise, so they did!

Responding to what L had said about leaving behind the thinking centre and the moving centre, because of the profound silence of the place, which allowed the feeling centre to predominate, T said that there was perhaps some sort of communication happening between his silence and the silence of the place where he was, whether it was inside or outside. It was very rare to hear silence outside, but it could happen if it was very hot, but often the environment did have its noises. She was not sure where she was going with this, but what L was saying sounded quite profound.

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

        

With acknowledgements to Harold Good
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The learned musicians and singers then in the city of Babylon combined their melodies in such ways that the sequence of the vibrations ... should evoke it now in one brain, now in another, and now in the third; thus they also provided for the quality or, as they themselves would say, the numbers of the vibrations of the sounds which would affect one or another brain.

L said that Gurdjieff was refining what he said before from not just the effect of the sounds on a human being but on the three centres. B said that this was why music was healing, in a way, because it probably affected many brains. T said that the sequences were made by learned musicians and singers, so it was a deliberate attempt to bring about certain responses in the receivers.

... Even in me, a being cast, as they would say, in another mold, various being-impulses were engendered and were alternated with an unusual sequence.

It happened in this way because as the sounds of their melodies which they had combined in a definite sequence entered into my common presence, Djartklom proceeded in them, or as it is otherwise said, the sounds were ‘sorted out’ ... with the consequence that the associations proceeding in me in the three independent brains—though simultaneously and with an equal intensity of similar associations but differently natured series of impressions—engendered in my presence three quite different promptings.

For instance, the localization of my consciousness, or as your favorites would say my ‘thinking-center,’ engendered in my common presence, let us suppose, the impulse of joy; the second localization in me, or my ‘feeling-center,’ engendered the impulse called ‘sorrow’; and the localization of the body itself, or as once again your favorites would call it, my ‘moving-center,’ engendered the impulse of ‘religiousness.’

N said we were getting back to the concept of objective art here, which was definite intent by an artist which was received in the right way by the hearer or respondent. He points out that most art was not like that, so the effects were quite accidental. He puts objective art much higher than  subjective or non-objective art. T said he writes that it has an effect even on him, a being cast, as they would say, in another mold. This person was not even a different race, he was from a different planet, so that was quite a profound statement.

In Search of Memories Lost

J had experienced one particular little imbroglio in which he had listended closely to dubious propositions put forward by a council official. Each time, he asked them to explain further, they responded with an obvious evasion in another untrue statement.

Once a day when you talk with someone you know, notice your body posture and change it. Be receptive and ask exploratory questions without any assumptions, like What do you mean? and Can you expand on that? rather than telling them things. Observe what you are feeling when you ask the questions. Listen very, very carefully to the other person and seek to understand, as if it is a humble exploration of the wild. Afterwards, consider any wrong assumptions you made about the conversation.

L had been trying to improve his chess by doing chess problems, and one of the things you were advised to do if you failed to get the solution was to think afterwards what false assumptions you had made, and this had been part of the Challenge. He thought the same logic applied after every conversation with somebody. This was something B had stressed in the previous Meeting, that you had to be aware of your assumptions, and if your assumptions were wrong, then you failed to understand the situation that was going on. So it was very important to have this kind of post mortem after the event and reflect what assumptions were wrong about the situation, and how one could do it better next time. He had also found that changing the body posture while listening altered the quality of the listening, and made it more effective. The previous evening, he had gone to a house concert, and in the interval was chatting to a lady - he had listened to what she was saying very intently, and adjusted his posture, and she said something very interesting. They were talking about music, obviously, and she said she found that if she moved while listening to the music, she heard it differently, and better. He thought this was just like the Challenge. So physical movement did affect the quality of taking things in, and that reminded him a bit of the Gurdjieff Movements.

T had realised that there were five points to the Challenge, which was helpful in trying to write up her experience. The first one was when she remembered the Challenge. She was either sitting or standing. When sitting, she was aware that her legs were crossed or uncrossed, and she did the easiest thing and did the opposite each time, and when she was standing with feet together or apart, again, she did the opposite. For the second one, she noticed that her habitual way to show that she was listening was to intervene with a comment that showed she understood the point or affirmed what they were saying. She found it a struggle to ask them to expand on what they were saying or what they meant, because they were intent on telling her this story anyway, which had emotional content; she had to fight to find a gap. With the third one, when she did ask a question, she felt manipulative and ashamed, because she was thinking of something other than the actual conversation, and felt deceptive in the relationship. This bothered her as she felt she was partly play-acting and only partly sincere in asking about the content. Her usual sincerity felt partially obscured, which made her feel uncomfortable. With the fourth, they were almost immediately answering with more information when she did ask, and she was able to experience having asked and to see how they then took the reins and ran with the fresh angle.

N had found that when he started changing body posture, it would change his kind of reception of what people were saying. and also then have a feedback loop with how they would express themselves. He found that if he changed things, and showed more enthusiasm for what they were saying, then people would be much more flowing in what they said to him, whereas if he looked more severe or stern, they wouldn't say so much, and might actually block it at some level. He observed that when he was trying to reflect on what he was doing, he did not feel so guilty that he was acting, but felt that he was trying to see what it was inside of him that was giving out information to them, in terms of his body language, his posture or the expression on his face, He did not find it changed him internally in terms of feelings, because he took it as an experiment, rather than as anything else.

Responding to L's statement about the woman who found that music changed when she started to move, N said that if he started dancing to music, he heard it in a different way than if he just sat there passively receiving it.

Responding to T, J said this was the endemic problem with the challenges. The moment you were involved in reacting to someone with the idea of a challenge in mind, you were to some extent play acting and not concentrating fully on the situation at hand, introducing that element of falsity into your reactions. He had also been interested in N's analysis of how one could ramp up the reactions that one was showing someone in order to infuse them with more enthusiasm and an easier flow or the reverse, because that was a little bit like driving. He had never considered how he showed enthusiasm. There were obvious ways - inflexion of voice, expression of a long face. Was it to be supposed that we try and work out how to calibrate the degree of this, or should we continue to do it just as a normative daily exercise?

B thought this was completely wrong. It should come from yourself just to be authentic. What is important is what it provokes. It is not a social gathering, you want to get to the bottom of something. You want to know the response of the person rather than soothe them. Responding to T, B said that exploration was proactive, and not a passive thing. If you felt guilty about having a voice, how could you extract anything, or get more information? She was not disputing anything, but would have liked to move from the social demeanour into what we were discovering in the world. T said her work was always about listening and helping people expand and say more. She supposed that was the professional self. When she was in social situations, the professional self was taken away, and she noticed that she listened less. Maybe she listened too much in her work and wanted a break. B said she had experienced the same.

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

        

With acknowledgements to Harold Good
Watch this on YouTube

You must know that in the presences of the three-brained beings of the present time, as well as in the presences of every kind of three-brained being in general, every new impression is accumulated in all their three separate ‘brains’ in the order of what is called ‘kindredness,’ and afterwards they take part with the impressions already previously registered in the associations evoked in all these three separate brains by every new perception in accordance with and in dependence upon what are called the ‘gravity-center-impulses,’ present at the given moment in their whole presence.

B was reminded of Freud's theory of primary repression, in which new ideas gravitate to the centre of the repression where the old ideas are away from conscious awareness. N liked the way he talked about the kindredness, and how these impressions go into the three brains. So therefore, the associative link was very strong, because it was in all three centres.

... the common presence of each of your contemporary favorites during the process of his existence consists, as I have already told you, as it were, of three quite separate personalities—three personalities which have and can have nothing in common with each other, either in respect of the nature of their arising or in respect of their manifestations.

Hence it is that there just proceeds in them that particularity of their common presence which is that with one part of their essence they always intend to wish one thing; at the same time with another part they definitely wish something else; and thanks to the third part, they already do something quite the contrary.

In short, what happens in their psyche is just what our dear teacher Mullah Nassr Eddin defines by the word a ‘mix-up.’

T said she was experiencing this type of mix-up at the moment. At work her thinking centre wanted to try and keep up, her feeling centre wanted to do all sorts of things that were fun, and her moving centre wanted to rest. L thought Gurdjieff was saying two things. On the one hand, by intent and trying, that we could adopt a different persona, as in the example of these demonstrations that they were doing, even though it needed to be done in three centres which might all be pulling in different directions. However the corollary was that normally, that did not happen. People were being pulled in different directions, and what they did was largely a matter of chance, which meant that what happened in our lives was largely a matter of chance. We did not like that notion, because it was very ego-crushing to think that where we were, and what we did, was happenstance. So we prefered to believe it was through purpose and considered choices. It might well be that what everybody here and everywhere were doing was the consequence of pure chance, and the Gurdjieff Work, from that point of view, was trying to counter that, and enable people to decide where they were going and to go there.

... They also had it in view to implant these works of theirs in the customs of various peoples, calculating that these ‘melodies’ they created, passing from generation to generation, would reach men of remote generations who, having deciphered them, would discover the knowledge put into them and that had already been attained on the Earth, and would also use it for the benefit of their ordinary existence.

For your understanding of how the learned beings there of that group made their indications in the ‘musical’ and ‘vocal’ productions of theirs, I must first explain to you about certain special particularities of the perceptive organ of hearing in the common presences of every kind of being.

Among the number of these special particularities is the property called ‘Vibroechonitanko.’

You must know that those parts of the brains of beings which objective science calls ‘Hlodistomaticules,’ and certain of which on your planet the terrestrial ‘learned physicians’ call ‘nerve-brain-ganglia,’ are formed of what are called ‘Nirioonossian-crystallized-vibrations,’ which in general arise in the completed formation of every being as a result of the process of all kinds of perceptions of their organ of hearing; and later on, these Hlodistomaticules, functioning from the reaction upon them of similar but not yet crystallized vibrations, evoke in the corresponding region which is subject to the given brain, the said Vibroechonitanko or, as it is sometimes called, ‘remorse.’

B said this was associating the Vibroechonitanko , which alludes perhaps to vibrations, with remorse. L thought it was like empathy, tuning in the vibrations of somebody else, or being on the same wavelength. J asked if the implication was that there was a very specific message encoded in music and colour, or just a generalised impression to transmit to future times.

Vive la difference

N had encountered a huge, Arctic-looking dog that belonged to someone else in the office who would leave it off the leash, and it often wandered into N's room. He tried to understand it, but could not adjust to its experience of time. He had also met a tabby cat on one of his walks in Hampstead. He thought it might have smelt some sashimi that he had in his bag, as it jumped down from where it was, coming around to the bag. He tried to imitate it internally, but once again, could not get into its time consciousness at all.

Once a day, when you observe a creature, reflect on it, physically and emotionally imitating it in some way. Let your experience of time adjust to that of the creature. Consider the Bon Iver lyrics for Woods.

A quote by Jacques Derrida - To pretend, I actually do the thing: I have therefore only pretended to pretend. - 

had come to T's mind in connection with this Challenge, and she had taken it literally, and enacted it in the privacy of her own home.  On one occasion she was watching a cat. In her attempt at being a cat, she looked around the room, and her experience was different from usual. She lowered her head to the floor, to sniff along the wall and the floor and in the corners, and she noticed the dust, which was quite displeasing. She sat up and looked around to check there were no threats to her safety, and then she relaxed and cuffed her ear with her hand to clean it. Another time, T was watching a large bird. Although she could not imitate the flight, she imagined it. Alighting on the tip of a large umbrella in the garden, she looked this way and that to see what what was there. It was a large bird. It was a jay. It was beautiful. But she looked to see what was there. Was it moving? Was it edible? Was it a threat? She took off to land on a metal branch growing out of steps to a square cave. She looked around again, listening, watching. Anything moving? Anything edible? She took off and landed grasping with her feet on the strange round metal construction that human giants bounced up and down on. She looked down and up and around. Anything moving? Anything edible?

First of all, L thought it was partly about empathy, if we were to try and appreciate how an animal was feeling. He thought he had always had that because of being a lifelong vegetarian. He had experienced or considered the terror that the animal might have felt as it was being taken away to be to be slaughtered. So every time he chose what to eat, or saw people eating meat, then that might come to mind, but in terms of creatures passing by it was hard. It was often very small creatures. He had seen snails crossing the road, after the rain. They walked away from the garden wall towards the opposite edge of the pavement, and they were probably going to get trodden on by somebody, but they were on this urgent and very slow errand, riding away against this cold, hard surface. Another time there was a tiny mite he had rescued and put out of the window. It was very hard to think what was going through its mind and what it was experiencing. When he was on the Heath, or near trees, he would say the Bon Iver words. The mind was the problem, and somehow being in nature helped and made it a little bit slower.

Responding to N, T wondered what dogs made of rooms. When she had been thinking about the bird, it was alighting on everything that was manmade, and it could not find anything. So it went off to the trees to get some insects, but what did they make of it? The noises the dog in N's room made - what was happening? N said the dog had found some water, and then the owner came in and said: No, you can't come in here, and pulled him out again. N thought the dog had been offended by this lack of acceptance.

B recommended a Kurosawa film - Dersu Uzala - about a man who lived in nature. It was about instincts and being in tune.

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

        

With acknowledgements to Harold Good
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From that moment, the learned being who had spoken would become a physician, because he had chanced to call his chief the head physician of the city, while the second learned being whom the former had called a policeman would assume the role of a policeman. Two other participating learned beings were then immediately called from the other room by the one who assumed the role of policeman, and they assumed the roles of cobbler and soldier respectively. 

And these two latter learned beings assumed and had to manifest themselves in just those roles, namely, one in the role of a soldier and the other in the role of a cobbler, only because the first learned being, having himself in accordance with his Darthelhlustnian state assumed the role of a physician, had called them soldier and cobbler respectively. 

Well then, these three learned beings who were thus cast impromptu by the fourth learned being for fulfilling every kind of perception and manifestation, which had to flow by law, of types foreign to them ...

L said that this description of the person calling the policeman, and telling him to deal with the cobbler and the soldier, and those people having to take on the roles, as part of the structure of the event, was what we would now call performance art, where the people involved do not know what they are going to be doing, and have to take on the assigned roles, immediately, without any rehearsing for it.

Here it is very important to emphasize that then in Babylon the three-brained learned beings who belonged to the group of the mysterists did indeed reproduce in action amazingly well and accurately the subjective particularities of the perceptions and manifestations of various types foreign to them.

L said that what came to his mind in these descriptions was enacting the Stanislavski technique, in which the idea was that the person actually became the role. B said that was interesting, because we were all in a role somehow. L said that this meant we were not our real selves. Perhaps being so was impossible, but we could build towards it. When in society, we were told to be in roles. N said that part of the education that Gurdjieff was trying to teach us was having this flexibility, this adaptability, this ability to change roles and not necessarily be stuck in the particular role that life seemed to have handed out to us. L said this was very profound, as if we succeeded in the Gurdjieff Work and created our real role, then we would have failed, because we would be stuck in a new one. So there was no end to it.

A Twist in the Tale

N had come back from hospital with a whole host of pills that he had to take. He tried to think and reflect on the pills and the benefits they were giving to him, being grateful for the fact that such technologies now existed, and such pills existed, which would help him get better. He took it in a more emotional way, as he swallowed the pills, and reflected on the goodness and the benefit it would do for him. So he was trying to be more present to those pills, making it a more intentional process, not just simply gobbling them down as one had a tendency to do hoping that the instinctive body would react to them. After having had the pills, he finished up the experience with standing on one leg. He thought it was a good way of doing it, warming it up at some level for the reception of the benefits that the pills might give him.

Once a day, when you are about to do a habitual action that you normally do instinctively, slow down, and imbue it with a lot of emotion and appreciation, presence and import. Observe the different way in which you experience it. When you have finished, stand on one leg for a few moments.

For L it had been very mundane actions, and he had found that doing things slowly often improved the way they got done. On one occasion he had been washing up a dish too quickly, and some water splashed over the lip of the sink. Then he proceeded to wash up much more slowly, giving it attention and meaning, and that made for a much better experience. Also, he had found sweeping slowly to be quite therapeutic, and more effective if done slowly, too, because the dust flies less. There was the old Latin saying: Festina Lente (hasten slowly). If you did things slowly, sometimes you got more done and did it better. He had done the standing on one leg too. The Challenge had made him feel more awake, and things felt more meaningful and true. He thought that our society was quite a mercenary one where, if people thought time was money, they gave incentives to do things quickly, but sometimes that could have a sub-optimal result.

When T had slowed down her actions, it reminded her of slow motion in films, and she noticed detail that surprised her. When she was at the kitchen sink and reaching over to turn on the tap, there was a clear and perfect reflection in the surface of the water of the bowl. She would not have noticed that if she had been on her usual, rapid automatic. She was surprised at her usual speed in comparison, and it highlighted that the mechanistic style usually prevents the range of senses from registering; the usual speed gets the action done at the expense of experiencing life on on many levels. The slow motion became balletic, and the standing on one leg part of the slow dance. The slowing down - taking a tea towel from the hook or the kettle from the stove - enabled her imagination to come into play. So she was able to imagine that if her arm wasn't visible, then the tea towel or the kettle would look as if they were magically moving through the air by their own volition. It made her realise that if an observer was unable to see her physical manifestation, then it would be as as though the material objects had the capacity to move themselves through the air like birds, and it would seem balletic, like a cartoon or animation of a children's fairy story. She could see that the movement she brought to the otherwise stationary object was in itself a magical skill, and how she took for granted not only how she moved things and objects about, but also how she moved her own body about, like standing on one leg. The other thing that had happened was when she was doing the invidious computer work, and she had slowed that down too, and it was much more pleasurable.

Responding to T, J said that the moment you put a schedule into something, you had a deadline that would abstract some of the pleasure from doing whatever it was. If he was playing chess, and then suddenly played by a chess clock, he found that some leisure enjoyment from the whole experience was slightly cut short. This was a problem in the purpose, the set of mind. The atmosphere of wherever you were was undermined by a purpose in being in that place. For example, if you were a municipal inspector, you would not look at Hyde Park from the standpoint of the beauties of Rotten Row, you would look at it from the standpoint of how many trees you needed to plant. These things sat slightly at odds, you could not really do both at the same time fully. T replied that when she slowed down, she became all herself, and then somehow whatever she was involved with, became a relationship with the outside rather than something that she was doing to something else. N said that T's description of balletic movements and the slowing down process reminded him of Tai Chi, where the movements look very poetic, but there was more of an inner connection with the movements. So you were moving from a different place within yourself and within your body. 

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

        

With acknowledgements to Harold Good
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So, my boy, from the time when these favorites of yours completely ceased consciously to actualize in their common presences the ‘being-Partkdolg-duty,’ thanks only to the results of which what is called sane ‘comparative mentation’ as well as the possibility of conscious active manifestation can arise in beings from various associations, and from the time when their separate ‘brains,’ associating now quite independently, begin engendering in one and the same common presence three differently sourced being-impulses, they then, thanks to this, gradually, as it were, acquire in themselves three personalities, having nothing in common with each other, in respect of needs and interests.

J thought it was a large claim to say the manifestations had got nothing in common with each other. Was it not like, in a long winded way, Dr Johnson's refutation of the idea that a table was not solid by kicking it. On the level of kicking the table, he was perfectly right, it was solid, but at the level of quantum physics, there was fluid and nanomatter inside, so it was both things at the same time. He understood Gurdjieff him to be saying that there was this tripartite splitting up of everything you were doing for its purpose, and its inspiration and its manifestation. Everything was this. So these arguments that people had - is the table solid or not - were quite irrelevant. In one sense, it was solid, and in another sense, it was not. N thought Gurdjieff was also trying to represent the confusion that arises from us being three-brained beings, and the different manifestations that come from our nature, which trigger off different manifestations or associations, making it extremely difficult to see things as they are.

Gut Feeling

To help her be more specific, T had had to define awake as self-aware, and asleep as unaware of self. Then she had to define self, and all the terms were nebulous and vague. The instances when she recorded the challenge were when she was involved in routines in the home or at work, usually when she was in a rush. One of the instances was when she was clearing a room, and she was on automatic  - and that needed defining - and she put the air purifier in the wrong cupboard. On another occasion she put a tub of margarine in the cupboard and not the fridge. Each time, finding herself at the wrong location brought her to her senses, and she backtracked and corrected herself. Each time she had had her hands full, and her head was full of other thoughts. It was when she remembered the shock of the mistake that she remembered the challenge, and that was when she touched her head and said Got it! It felt disconnected, so being awake started to mean being aware of all and everything in the process of deliberate intended action.

Catch those moments during the month when you realise you have transitioned from being asleep to being awake. Observe how you feel about it, and try to recall what you were doing at the time of transition to sleep, and what it was that brought you back. When you remember, tap your head, as if to say, I've got it!

L had not noticed any particular pattern to becoming awake and going back to sleep. It had happened a few times naturally. He even wondered if it was a phenomenon in the brain, a chemical process that made us sometimes more aware, or sometimes less aware. It could also happen because of external events, too. A week before he had been waiting at a roundabout and someone drove into the back of his car. When something like that happens, you wake up psychologically, but even that might be because the body then produces adrenaline.

During the period allocated to responses, nothing was said about specific instances of doing the challenge.

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

        

With acknowledgements to Harold Good
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... yet those mysteries in the contents of which the learned members of the club of the Adherents-of-Legominism then intentionally placed varied knowledge, calculating that it would reach beings of very remote generations, have during recent times almost totally ceased to exist. 

These mysteries there incorporated in the process of their ordinary existence centuries earlier already began gradually to disappear soon after the Babylonian period. At first their place was taken by what are called their ‘Kesbaadji,’ or, as they are now called there on the continent Europe, ‘puppet shows’ (Petrushka); but, afterwards they were finally ousted by their still existing ‘theatrical-shows’ or ‘spectacles’ which are there now one of the forms of that said contemporary art of theirs which acts particularly perniciously in the process of the progressive ‘shrinking’ of their psyche. 

These ‘theatrical spectacles’ replaced the mysteries after the beings at the beginning of the contemporary civilization—to whom only ‘a-fifth-to-a-tenth’ was passed down of the information about how and what these said Babylonian learned mysterists had done—began to think of imitating them in this also and set about doing, as it were, the same. 

From that time on, the other beings there called these imitators of the mysterists, ‘players,’ ‘comedians,’ ‘actors,’ and, at the present time, they already call them ‘artists,’ of whom I may say very many have sprung up during recent times.

It seemed to J that what interested Gurdjieff here was the way that information and learning becomes, over time, more and more attenuated as it is passed down from generation to generation. T said Gurdjieff takes what we consider to be the high arts, and says that they are very, very diminished from what they originally were.

... As this said ‘currents-of-associative-movements’ does not proceed in the presences of the three-brained beings who have taken your fancy, as it generally proceeds in the presences of other three-brained beings, and as there were quite special reasons there for this, proper to them alone, I must therefore first of all explain it to you in rather more detail.

The process is the same as that which also proceeds in us, but it proceeds in us when we are intentionally resting to allow the whole functioning of our common presence freely to transform, without hindrance by our will, all the varieties of being-energy required for our all-round active existence, whereas in them  these said various being-energies can now arise only during their total inactivity, that is during what they call their ‘sleep,’ and then of course only ‘after-a-fashion.’ 

Owing to the fact that they, like every other three-brained being of the whole of our Great Universe, have three separate independent spiritualized parts, each of which has, as a central place for the concentration of all its functioning, a localization of its own which they themselves call a ‘brain,’ all the impressions in their common presences whether coming from without or arising from within are also perceived independently by each of these ‘brains’ of theirs, in accordance with the nature of these impressions; and afterwards, as it is also proper to proceed in the presences of every kind of being without distinction of brain-system, these impressions together with previous impressions compose the total and thanks to occasional shocks evoke in each of these separate ‘brains’ an independent association.

Regarding the mention of three separate independent spiritualized parts, which each have their own brain, L could see that the thinking part had its physical brain in the head. There was also a kind of brain in the gut - the stomach worked a bit like a brain. T said that science now recognised this and used the term "second brain" for the gut. B asked if this corresponded to the feeling centre. T said it did, and that the moving brain was the proprioceptor system. L said that this "brain" did not have a specific location in the body, and was linked to the nervous system. B distinguished two types of behaviour associated with the moving centre. The first purely instinctive, like responding to danger, and the second skilled learnt motion, like dancing. J said there was a different wakefulness state way back in time from our progenitors or ancestors. It gradually became part of our psychic hinterland, and we were not so conscious of it, and were on to a new wakefulness state; but the old knowledge, which at that time we acquired during wakefulness was now only really available to us in sleep.

Sincere Laughter

N said this kind of discipline about active listening was a very good one, because it made him not interrupt, but rather to let people finish exactly what they had to say before he came in. He also refrained from jumping in, leaving a few seconds after someone had finished speaking, in order to respond. He noticed also when he talked with them, if he looked into their eyes, he got a very strong connection at that stage, and people could sense it. It was an interesting result and it added to the quality of the communication, to the feeling about two people meeting on a human level rather than just talking in a utilitarian or practical way with each other. There was much more of a connection,  rather than just an ordinary communication. He had also opened his palms as suggested in the Challenge. He thought it was an interesting experiment in terms of how to be a better listener, and how to get more from his experiences of talking to other people, and being present in talking to other people. People felt they had been heard.

Every day, when you notice that you are talking at somebody, or being spoken at, engage with the person by talking with them or empathically listening. At the moment of engagement, open your palms. Consider whether you are taking on board the emotional quality of what is being said. Are you just wanting to jump in there and express your own opinion? Afterwards consider modifying your views and observe if you do so.

RM had been spending time with a new friend, and had talked a lot about listening. As soon as something he said triggered a thought in her mind, she would jump in quickly before he finished what he was saying, and he would close his hand tight. Over time, they got better and better at listening to each other. He had noticed that he himself would also jump in before she had finished speaking. He intended to continue working on this in the coming month, and hoped to become a much better listener.

L had usually forgotten about opening his palms, but he did often monitor his communication and try to listen with empathy, speak with empathy more, and that made the conversations much more meaningful - and more real. So that had enhanced his life, and he would keep doing it too. He had also observed, looking at interviews on television and online, that some hosts had the skill of empathising with the other person, whereas the others were talking at the interviewee. The ones who were purely listening produced a much better interview and product.

T had had one experience at work. There had been terrible noise from drilling, which she was not in a position to stop, and she became angry. Afterwards she spent a long time writing an email about it, trying to be restrained. While doing this, somebody burst into the room and was very apologetic. That was when she had remembered the challenge. She wanted to say how much she appreciated the apology, but could not get a word in, and at that point stopped trying. Then she remembered the rest of the Challenge, and wanted to open the palms. She tried three times, and just could not do it.

N asked T if she felt the apology she had received was genuine, and what her feelings were about receiving an apology in that way. T said that authenticity can sometimes be very hard to hear - it was full of emotion, and got mixed up with her emotions as well, because she was battling with feeling angry but appreciative at the same time.

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

        

With acknowledgements to Harold Good
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... each large or small part of the whole totality of the planetary body of a being has exactly proportionately increasing or diminishing dimensions in relation to his other parts.

For a clear understanding of what I have just said, the face of any three-brained being can serve as a good example.

The facial dimensions of every three-centered being in general, and also the facial dimensions of the three-centered beings of the planet Earth who have taken your fancy, are the result of the dimensions of seven different fundamental parts of the whole of his body, and the dimension of each separate part of the face is the result of seven different dimensions of the whole face.

RM said this meant to him that we had to look at the whole, not the part. Body language was so integrated with feelings. L was wondering if Gurdjieff was really serious about the seven-fold symmetry he specifically describes, or if it was just put it in the words of one of the characters of the book, because it was an appealing and seductive idea which might, however, be a Procrustean bed in which people tried to force everything to fit.

On Saturdays—the day-of-mysteries, or the day-of-the-theater—the demonstrations produced by learned members of this group were the most interesting, and, as it is said, the most ‘popular.’

I personally preferred these Saturdays to all the other days of the week and tried not to miss one of them; and I preferred them because the demonstrations arranged on those days by the learned beings of that group frequently provoked such spontaneous and sincere laughter among all the other terrestrial three-centered beings who were in the given section of the club, that I sometimes forgot among which three-centered beings I was, and that being-impulse manifested itself in me which is proper to arise only in one-natured beings like myself.

L said the text talked of being one-natured. That suggested some degree of attainment which most people did not get. So he might be three-brained but one-natured, particularly integrated, perhaps. T had picked up on the spontaneous and sincere laughter, which was about authenticity. Was it not being in the moment? L said that on Radio 4, you got the canned laughter which was not sincere, but in great comedy, you did get sincere laughter. Stand-up comedy was more likely to be sincere, because it was not entirely rehearsed, and was live. B asked what point Gurdjieff was trying to convey. L said Gurdjieff was describing experiences which come from somewhere very deep. So in terms of laughter, in English usage there was the phrase, belly laugh, indicating it came from the gut. So he was talking about experiences which came from somewhere deep inside our psyche, and which were not pre-planned or mediated through the superego. B cited the Ukrainian president, who used to be a comedian, and was in the middle of a tragedy - she was thinking about how to connect these things. L said we can think of comedy as waking people up. It makes us think again. An old friend from long ago had spoken of the image of God laughing, and that had always stayed with L. Laughter was also considered important in Hasidism. Maybe Gurdjieff was talking about sincere laughter as being a way of affecting personal change.