| 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.
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.
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