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.