L had received an email asking if he knew somebody of a particular name who had been at Cambridge at the same time, and was a musician and also a creator of cryptic crosswords. L had not known him, but used to know someone of the same surname who had a friend while at Oxford who was also a musician and an authority on creating puzzles. So there was a connection with the surname. A few days later, L had come across a saying from Malaysia: Where there are no eagles, the grasshopper will say "I am an eagle." The next day, a Facebook friend put up a big picture of an eagle. So there was a connection with the eagle, and there was also a link with the previous synchronicity, since the first name of the Facebook friend was also the name of L's friend who had been at Oxford. More recently, he had been talking about a visual metaphor. The next day, he looked up the name of an artist whom he knew 15 years before. She had done a painting of precisely that metaphor.
| Each day, look out for coincidences or synchronicities. Try to work out and write down what they might mean and what the connections are, as if it had happened in a sleeping dream. Even if you don't see a connection, if something happens to you, think about what it symbolises. When you see a connection, touch your head with your hand, as if to say, I got it! |
N had a friend who was studying literature, who told him about an essay she had to write on the Chartists and Thomas Carlyle, about which she unfortunately knew very little. N replied that he knew even less. About an hour later, he went into a secondhand bookshop in St John's Wood, and they had a book by Thomas Carlyle on the history of the Chartists, which he bought. It was such a rare book, you did not come across many books by Thomas Carlyle anymore.
T had been waiting for the car recovery service because of a punctured tyre. She had had to change plans and stay at home. So she got out the personal computer and was faced with a recovery window that asked her to restart or see advanced repair options. Or if you did not know which option was right for you, to contact someone you trusted to help. And she touched her head with her hand. Another case was on the seventh of October. Her phone had a display which showed her at what time the sun rises, and she noticed it was at 07:10. Also, she had noticed that the car tire had been punctured with a screw. She reflected that the best case scenario for the cause was carelessness by an inconsiderate workman in the road, and the worst case scenario was deliberate criminal behaviour for political or evil intent, or a prank. She concluded that there was a spectrum from carelessness to criminality. Later she was reading Beelzebub's Tales, and reached the part where Gurdjieff described the midwife as demonstrating criminal carelessness. She had never thought of criminality and carelessness together until this time, so that really struck her. Usually, during the month, the Challenge cropped up a few times, but this time it happened again and again, there were so many instances. That in itself was an interesting thing.
Responding to N, L said he found the incident about the book by Thomas Carlyle striking.
The reading then continued from Chapter 30 of Beelzebub's Tales.
And it was the basis because it appeared in the word by which the learned mysterists were designated and also in the word which stood for a personality invented by the ancient Greeks, with whose name, as I have already said, one of the schools-of-art then existing had been connected; and the result of this was that the mentioned representatives of this terrestrial art of that time, with their already now quite bobtailed reason, thought that it was nothing more than the word indicating ‘the-followers-of-this-historical-personality-Orpheus,’ and as many of them did not regard themselves as his followers, then instead of the mentioned word they just invented the word artist.
... and they wished and succeeded in substituting for the already long-existing definite expression ‘Orpheist’ the new word artist.
T noted that the word artist was derived from another word, Orpheist, rather than from something actual. N said that at that time an artist might have been more like a shaman character, who was almost able to go into the underworld and do things and create extraordinary situations. Maybe that reduced to becaming someone who was just an artist who could not do those things, but could do some pretty things. L thought Gurdjieff was talking about gradual decline in in the meaning of words. So the word artist came to mean less than what the word Orpheist used to mean. Even in ancient time, the meaning of the word had declined, and this had continued in our period, with changes in usage of the words artist, musician and composer. The previous day he had looked at a YouTube video while researching what was coming up at Alexandra Palace. They were advertising an event where a band called Bicep was going to perform. They performed a kind of trance music, which had absolutely no tune, but the YouTube video had thousands of comments and they were all saying it was a masterpiece. So they had changed the meaning of the words masterpiece, and music. Many of the comments said they would come back and listen to it week after week. Would they be as enraptured by a Bach fugue? N said this was a type of inflation. It happened to money, and also happened to words, language, and artistic endeavours, probably over the centuries. B said you needed to have a child to unravel it, to say the emperor was not wearing any clothes. It was about knowledge - people could be manipulated to believe anything. L said it was also about effort, because it took effort to appreciate classical music. It took no effort to sit down and hear a hypnotic beat, and very loud noise. B said that hypnosis also had a purpose of getting people into a particular state. T said it was called trance music. N said it was there to put you to sleep rather than wake you up.
