Umvelt

For L it would normally be a cat or a dog, maybe sometimes a bird. Sometimes he tuned into the animal. Cats were usually flustered, and thinking either to avoid the person or wanting to be stroked. The colour would normally have been brownish or greyish, and then he would see that colour around him, and then choose another colour, which would typically have been green, tree leaves, and then there would be a green car, and so on. That reminded him of when he studied the Shona language, which had fewer words for colours than English, though they had extra words for brown and green animals and plants in nature. He supposed that this was natural language corresponding to natural perception. All the colour-names we had in English - yellows and reds and different shades - might be more suited for a production economy where  things were sold in different colours of a specified shade.

Each day, when you observe an animal or a bird, try to tune into its feelings and emotions. Pick out a colour from that creature, and try to be aware of the extra shades of that colour. Blink twice, turn away from the creature and look at another colour. For as long as you remember, observe this second colour and its shades.

T recalled an occasion when she heard the patter of clawed paws on the path and then saw a small dog running along ahead of its owners. The Challenge came to mind. The dog was black and white. It veered onto the grass heading for a tree, circled round it twice with what she considered a happy wagging tail, cocked its leg and wee'ed in what she considered was satisfaction, before it scuffed the grass with its hind legs and hurried on, with what she considered to be a delighted nose to the wind. She blinked twice, then looked around for a different colour and noticed the sandy yellow of a running track. Then she noticed a train in the distance with a sandy glow of dimly lit windows. After that she noticed flats with sandy yellow-lit rooms in the dusk. Another time, she saw a black crow high up gripping a black branch. Its emotions or feelings were hard to imagine, except for alert attention and watchfulness. She blinked twice, looked around for a different colour, white, and noticed that in the overcast sky. Her weakest link in the challenge, was to be aware of the extra shades of the chosen colour. She had not recalled or consciously done this. She became aware during the Challenge that the colours of the animals she was noticing were black, grey or white.

Responding to L, N said he wondered sometimes what came first? Did we observe different shades of different colours, because we had different words for them? He remembered that when he was in the textile trade, he used to love looking at the different colours and fabrics that were there. They used to make up swatches of different shades of colour for people who wanted to buy fabrics, and he had become very much aware of the different colours of blue, the different colours of red, different colours of yellow. It was interesting that the West had developed colour and observation of colour to a phenomenal extent, whereas in some areas we had not, for example the Eskimos had many more words for snow than we did. So it was interesting how language develops in ordered to assist us in having experiences and being able to differentiate in our experiences.

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

        

With acknowledgements to Harold Good
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Certain beings who were then enthused by this founded, in imitation of the followers of the said branch of painters, a similar society and the motto of their new movement was: ‘To-search-the-truth-in-the-shades-of-smells-obtained-between-the-moment-of-the-action-of-cold-at-freezing-and-the-moment-of-the-action-of-warmth-at-decomposition.’

Like the painters, they also then found between these said two definite smells about seven hundred very definite shades, which they employed in their elucidating experiments.

I do not know to what these two peculiar ‘movements’ then in Babylon would have led and where they would have ceased, if a newly appointed chief of the city, during the time we were there, had not begun prosecuting the followers of that second new ‘movement’ because with their already sufficiently keen sense of smell they had begun to notice and unwittingly to expose certain of his what are called ‘shady dealings,’ with the result that he used every possible means to suppress everything connected not only with that second new movement, but with the first as well.

N said it was interesting that Gurdjieff used the word smell, and its connection with corruption - the smell of corruption - that there was something they noticed, in behaviour or essence, which came across, which was not very conducive to them. There was a kind of connoisseurship of the differences that are there out in the world. What was the point of all of this? Did it enhance our lives? Were the distinctions important, of these different shades of feeling that we experienced? What was Gurdjieff trying to talk to us about here? T wondered if it was do with increasing intelligence, perception and observation, to know what was really happening, including the shady dealings, and that this increase in knowledge would attract the attention of the established people in power.