Arts and Craft

Reflections on the Challenge

When you encounter an intolerant conversation, act as devil's advocate and express a contrary view. Observe and be aware of your physical movements, emotions and resistance to doing so. Evaluate the reactions from others and the impact on your own experience.

• Experiences

  L had tried to do the challenge but found it difficult to take up a contrary view as he valued honesty. On one occasion, he was having a conversation with the staff behind the counter at a Turkish takeaway about the recent earthquakes. He asked after their families, and they were all upset about the news. He found he was only able to communicate with honesty and sincerity. He was unable to donate anything as since the pandemic he no longer carried change.

• Responses

  Responding to L, N said the question arose whether one's difficulty with this was due to a mechanical reality or a lack of free will. In other words, was one consistently honest in all situations or did honesty vary depending on the circumstances? This raised a deeper question about the nature of honesty and whether it was a fixed characteristic or a fluid quality that could be influenced by external factors. Lawyers often had to play the role of a contrarian and argue both sides of a case to anticipate and uncover potential arguments. People could become too emotional in arguments, which could interfere with the process of clear thinking, and he thought the Gurdjieff Work was about keeping different parts of ourselves separate and not letting emotions interfere with intellectual arguments. L agreed that taking a contrarian view in law was not about lying or being difficult, and rather a quest for the truth, as grandmasters pursued in chess.

Beelzebub’s Tales, Chapter 30 cont.

With acknowledgements to Harold Good

• Passage

  But if various women noticed that she had begun to manifest toward her children with a weakening of her maternal impulses, then under the same conditions those around her condemned her to go about everywhere, also for a definite term, with the left half of her face made up and painted white and red.

  And a woman who attempted to violate her chief what is called ‘wifely duty,’ that is who deceived or who only tried to deceive her legal husband or who attempted to destroy a new being conceived in her, was obliged by the same procedure to be always and everywhere, also for a definite term, made up and painted white and red, this time over the whole of her face...

• Discussion

  J said this was like what had happened to some women in France after World War 2.

  L asked if there was a symbolic part that was being overlooked. An earlier paragraph had spoken of a committee of seven women, and four parts of the head which might be shaven. As Gurdjieff often spoke of a sevenfold-sequence, perhaps there were psychological connotations.

• Passage

  You must know that those beings who are assumed to be the adepts of this contemporary art which is adorned with a false halo are not only put on their own level by the other three-brained beings there of the contemporary civilization, particularly during the several latter decades, and imitated by them in their exterior manifestations, but they are always and everywhere undeservingly encouraged and exalted by them; and in these contemporary representatives of art themselves, who really in point of their genuine essence are almost nonentities, there is formed of itself without any of their being-consciousness a false assurance that they are not like all the rest but, as they entitle themselves, of a ‘higher order,’...

  Just in regard to such unfortunate three-brained beings the surrounding abnormal conditions of ordinary being-existence are already so established that there are bound to be crystallized in their common presences and to become an inseparable part of their general psyche those of the consequences of the organ Kundabuffer which they now themselves call ‘swagger,’ ‘pride,’ ‘self-love,’ ‘vanity,’ ‘self-conceit,’ ‘self-enamoredness,’ ‘envy,’ ‘hate,’ ‘offensiveness,’ and so on and so forth.

• Discussion

  

  Cecilia Vicuña: Brain Forest Quipu

  L said the comments about contemporary art seemed very relevant to the present time. He had recently been to the Tate Mod to see the Cézanne exhibition. To get to it, everybody was forced to walk past a very tall exhibit, which had pride of place in the entrance hall, and was suspended from about 100 feet up in the ceiling. In contrast, at the entrance to the Cézanne exhibition, which was sublime and of the highest quality, there was a warning notice that it might disturb some people.