| Every morning, soon after rising, hum the mantra om for one minute. Afterward, make a written note of any effects it had on you, physically, emotionally and intellectually, trying to be as honest and brief as possible. |
First of all T had remembered Winnie the Pooh, doing the humming, because we were humming the om, which was a nice recollection. She had experienced the sound in her neck connect and travel by its resonance into her sternum, and the top of her belly, her stomach. It made her think that the food went in the mouth and then travelled down the connecting tube, the pipe, to the stomach, and that inspired the thought that we ate food for nourishment, and maybe sound was nourishment too, and she could produce it and nourish herself, but she rarely did. When she was talking to someone, the sound went out into the world, and she did not feel it or experience it for the resonance that it was, and perhaps she was not nourished by it as a consequence. The other question was, what might the sound be nourishing, and was that aspect of her starving on some level? All the words she uttered, she had been taught to say from an early age, like everybody, too early to choose what to learn, but an open vessel to fill with sounds, to communicate personal needs, etc. - being fed, watered, protected from harm. She had thought about the resonance. She was a musical instrument, which she did not play.
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.
... when at the beginning of the contemporary civilization certain beings there began to decipher them ‘from-a-bit-here-and-a-bit-there’ and realized that they could not sound or pronounce many of these definite letters, they then invented what is called a ‘written compromise.’
This mentioned written compromise was that instead of the signs or letters which they could not pronounce, although they understood the sense of this pronunciation, they decided to employ a slightly similar letter of their alphabet at the time, and in order that everybody should understand that it was not that letter but quite another, they always wrote by its side a letter of the ancient Romans, now existing but already meaningless, called in English ‘h’ and among the contemporary French ‘ahsh.’
From then on, all the other of your favorites began doing the same; they added to each of these suspicious letters this Roman ‘inheritance.’
When this written compromise was invented, they had about twenty-five of these suspicious ‘letters,’ but in the course of time, as their ableness to pronounce deteriorated with the increase of their wiseacring, the number of the letters they specially invented for such a ‘being-ableness’ diminished, and by the time the word artist was invented they had already only eight of these letters; and in front of this notorious ‘h,’ they wrote letters, partly ancient Greek and partly ancient Latin, which they indicated in the following way: ‘th,’ ‘ph,’ ‘gh,’ ‘ch,’ ‘sch,’ ‘kh,’ ‘dh,’ and ‘oh.’
L said that in English versions of the Old Testament, the Hebrew letter Chet (which had no equivalent in the English alphabet) was shown by following a C with an H, hence the spelling of Rachel. N said Gurdjieff was also saying that language had lost a lot of its connection with the meaningfulness of words. B thought that it was in the shift between the pronounciation and the written that something happened. T said that as soon as you wrote a sound, it just became a sign, not the thing itself. So the more it was written, the more it had to be learned from the writing and not from the making of the sound. Young children, who learnt language as soon as possible, were given the letters to look at. B said the word had three components, one was the written, one was the way it sounded, and the image of the thing it represented.
