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.