| 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.
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.
